"I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace." --Howard Zinn
I'm with Zinn; he's rarely wrong when it comes to our imperial empire and the destructiveness it entails.
The best that can be said for Obama's getting the Nobel peace prize, yes, named after the guy who invented TNT and made a fortune from it, is, that it's a strategic move-- it will inspire Obama to think peace. But he has a heavy load on his plate, the empire comes with a lot of baggage: fighting resource wars in the middle east and elsewhere, keeping the Chinese, Russians and Muslims at bay, supporting Israel and its nuclear arsenal and attacking Iran for trying to achieve the same. And on and on. Empire ,it turns out , isn't easy, the Pentagon and Wall Street are voracious and Nobel must be laughing in his grave, the bomb man, who passes his baton to Obama , the empire man.
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