Millions around the world reacted in “shock and awe” when the envelope containing the name of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize was finally read this past week: “…and the winner is… The European Union!!…”
How can you award of a Peace Prize – of all things! – to an entity that systematically supports the economic and social destruction of Greece; imposes extreme hardship on Spaniards and Italians whilst it supports greedy mega-bankers; has an undemocratically elected president (Herman van Rompuy) and, through its NATO war machine, continues bombing and destroying Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and is now poised for unilateral attack against Syria and Iran? Indeed, “Peace” should be made of sterner stuff!!
And yet, when you consider the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s track record over the past fifty years or so, this year’s “peace” prize should come as no surprise.
The “Peace People” that got the Peace Prize in the past
No, it´s not (just) a tongue-twister; rather it’s a quick reminder of some of the unlikeliest recipients benefited by the Nobel Committee’s coveted prize in the past.
When instituting the Peace Prize back in 1901, Alfred Nobel indicated in his will that it should be awarded to the person who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
OK, some recipients of the past were well chosen: Albert Schweitzer (1952), Georges Pire (1958), the International Red Cross (1963), Martin Luther King (1964), Mother Theresa (1979), Nelson Mandela (1983) and Doctors Without Frontiers (1999). However, most others really leave us wondering as we stroll back through history’s Memory Lane:
“Peace” Murderers
Take for example the 2009 prize given to Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States; butcher of Libya; destroyer of Syria; supporter of Israel’s destruction of Palestine; outright liar who promised a balanced US policy in the Middle East in his famous 2009 Cairo University only to later unleash engineered insurrection and civil war throughout the region – aka as “Arab Spring” – Obama named key usury megabank officers from Goldman Sachs, CitiCorp and others to “run the economy”, all against the interests of US and global populations.
2002 – Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the US, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”. And yet, Carter was co-founder with David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger of the Trilateral Commission, a key Global Power Master geopolitical planning center geared at imposing world government on mankind, like it or not. Carter’s administration from 1977 to 1981 represented an almost complete handover of the US to the Trilateral Commission, whose members included not just the president himself, but also the vice-president, secretaries of state, treasury, defense, undersecretaries, key ambassadorships and military commands.
2001 – the UN and Kofi Annan “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world”[ You’ve gotta be kidding!! The UN is the most hypocritical, lob-sided and unfair international mastodon of modern times. It has been all but unable not only to prevent wars, but has actually sanctioned and promoted horrendous attacks like the NATO invasions and destructions of Iraq in 2003, the bombing to smithereens of Libya in 2011 and its full support to the UK and US colonial attacks on South American during the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War against Argentina.
1990 – Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He may have helped to bring down the Communist Block and the Berlin Wall, but only to deliver the great nations of the former USSR and Eastern Europe to the malicious devastation wrought by mega-banker and mafia depredation, that slumped that region into a decade of horrendous hardship and death. Thanks to Gorbachev, Russia had to suffer a decade of Boris Yeltsin’s misgovernment until, thankfully, Vladimir Putin took the helm – for the better of Russia and the world – putting internal mafia leaders and external imperialist hegemons in their places. Today, Russians are so “fond” of Gorbachev that he had to set up his Rockefeller-backed Gorbachev Foundation in… Massachusetts, USA!! By the way, one of his Foundation’s board members is former CIA Director (and Council on Foreign Reations/Trilateral Commission member) John Deutch. Clear enough?
1978 – Menachem Begin… This one’s really spooky… A “peace prize” to a violent ultra-fundamentalist guerrilla leader, who led the terrorist group Irgun Zvai Leumi in the forties and was responsible for thousands of deaths and terror attacks on Palestinians so that they would give up their homeland to European Zionist Zealots! Begin is best remembered for the terror bombing of the King David Hotel housing the British Palestine Authority in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing almost a hundred…
1973 – Henry A. Kissinger – Very well known here in South America as “Mr. Condor Plan” for his unflinching promotion and support of US-backed, trained and financed military regimes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay during the cold-war seventies. Those were the years when US foreign policy used right-wing military traitors in its “War on Communism”. The dead can be counted by the hundreds of thousands… “Democracy made in USA” had not yet become an issue for the US
“Peace” Politics
When not awarding the Peace Prize to war lords, war mongers, terrorists and assassins, the Nobel Committee has awarded it to support very explicit political objectives where Global Power Elite interests have had an axe to grind:
2007 – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore Jr. “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. This has turned out to be a scientific exaggeration, if not a flagrant, obscene lie. Global Warming – as explained in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning Disney-like farce – serves to promote the World Government paradigms of “mankind coming together” to “fight global warming” under a “common global authority”, led of course by the most contaminating superpower of all, the United States and its preferred allies.
1989 – The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) – This award forms part of the Global Power Master’s permanent pressure against China, as is also the case with the 2010 prize to Liu Xiaobo, for his “long struggle for basic human rights in China”.
1986 – Elie Wiesel – “Chairman of “The President’s Commission on the Holocaust”. Wiesel can best be described as “Mr. Holocaust”. He has been a key promoter of the use and abuse of Jewish suffering during World War Two, turning it into “The Holocaust Industry” as US Jewish NYU political science professor Norman Finkelstein aptly describes in his book published in 2000 by the same name. Wiesel’s politicizing of “The Holocaust” (which he turned into a veritable Zionist marketing Registered Trademark) has been wielded as a key political instrument and weapon of blackmail, to wrench money out of all sorts of pockets – whether the global Jewish Diaspora, German corporations, Swiss Banks, the US, UK or EU governments – and to justify each and all Israeli acts of genocide in Palestine and elsewhere.
1983 – Lech Walesa – Through the “Solidarity Movement” in Poland, he was instrumental in helping Poland spearhead the fall of the former Communist bloc in a complex push-pull operation that included the Vatican and its then popular Polish Pope John Paul II.
1980 – Adolfo Pérez Esquivel – “Human rights leader; founded non-violent human rights organizations to fight the military junta that was ruling his country (Argentina).” A non-descript Argentinian who came in very handy at a time when the US had decided to get rid of Argentina’s military junta of General Jorge Videla, even though the US had originally helped it illegally usurp power in 1976 through Henry Kissinger’s Condor Plan. The “winds of democracy made in USA” were starting to blow…
Let’s go back to 2012’s prize. We learn that the unanimous decision to give the prize to the EU was made by a five-person panel chaired by Thorbjoern Jagland, the Council of Europe’s Secretary-General and a strong advocate of the EU in Norway, a country that twice – in 1972 and 1994 – voted against EU membership. So… “Red Alert for Norway”, I’d say.
The excuse for this latest prize? “The EU helped transform Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace.” Maybe Nobel Committee members should start reading the writing on the wall in the streets of Athens, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Milan, Paris, London, Dublin….
Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina. www.asalbuchi.com.ar
