we don't do body counts
Wednesday, 7 October 2009: 8th anniversary of the first airstrikes in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Friday, 9 October 2009: Obama awarded Nobel peace prize.
''I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance, involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table.''
Barach Obama, 2008
"Please don't bomb Iran, and try not to kill so many Afghans, OK?"
Nobel peace prize committee, 2009
(I think they told Martin Luther King and that broad under house arrest in Burma the same thing when they got their Nobel peace prizes.)
Labels: blah-blah-blah..., commerce, corruption, Obama-ism, progress-as-a-conceit
posted by Jonathan Versen @ 9:21 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I suppose it’s only fitting that the peace candidate gets the peace prize. He’s in good company with Kissinger. I admit my first reaction was surprise and indignation but now it seems to fit in with all the other hypocrisy quite nicely. We live in a new reality now, forever altered by the last two decades of god-awful leadership provided by both parties. I’ve heard people defend O’Bama (He’s really Irish) by saying you’d have to be crazy to run for president as if the people who run for that lofty office are really sacrificing all to perform their civic duty. I agree with the crazy part for these people are clearly quite crazy in certain areas but I have my own ideas as to their motives. You get to play Emperor of the Empire for a few years then you go on the lecture circuit giving speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars each time you speak. And it won’t be long before you really rake in the big bucks. Then maybe you write a book and sail off into the sunset with a golden parachute. It’s not such a bad deal. So you leave a swath of carnage along the way, broken people, broken lives, a desolate landscape pocked with land mines and unexploded ordinance that pollutes and keeps killing for years. Even the depleted uranium used for ammunition by U.S. forces is deadly in itself eventually ending up in the water supply and getting in the food chain. But none of that matters because as an ex-president you are a great and important man to be admired and revered publically and in history books. Yes, it must be all quite grand.
Yeah, Naomi Klein says this cheapens it even more. Can we take action to make sure his prize is revoked at all? I'm all for giving it to Chomsky.
Hi Rob & Jenny,
Maybe the joke's on us at this point if we decide to continue to take it so seriously.
If the prize is for what you're going to do as much or even more than being for what you have done, it would've made at least as much sense to give it to Ariel Sharon. As far as I know he's still alive(a key stipulation), and if he's still in his medically-induced coma he's unlikely to kill anybody in the years to come.
C’mon Jonathan, who could take this seriously? Seriously though your point is quite perceptive because the joke is on us or on the public in general because it helps people to accept the status quo of government saying one thing and doing another, to accept the blatant hypocrisy of the government as normal. When peace prizes are given to war criminals it makes a sick joke out everything and points to how low western culture has fallen as a whole.
For me, Obama being awarded the peace prize encapsulates Obama’s relationship to his supporters who have been throwing largely undeserved laurels in his direction and in the process overlooking much.
Post a Comment
<< Home