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Nobel Hypocrisy - by Stephen Lendman
Alfred Nobel was a wealthy nineteenth century Swedish-born chemist, engineer, inventor of dynamite, armaments manufacturer and war profiteer who remade his image late in life by establishing the awarding of prizes in his name that includes the one for peace. This most noted award was inspired by his one-time secretary and peace activist, Bertha von Suttner, who was nominated four times and became the first of only 12 women to be honored.
Since it was established in 1901, the Peace Prize was awarded to 95 individuals and 20 organizations. Some recipients were worthy like Martin Luther King, Jane Addams and Albert Schweitzer but too many were not including this year's honoree. Al Gore joins a long list of past "ignoble" recipients like warrior presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and supporter of rogue regimes Jimmy Carter. He's also among the likes of genocidists Henry Kissinger and three former Israeli prime ministers - Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin - along with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who never met a US-led war he didn't love and support. So much for promoting peace and what this award is supposed to signify. More on this below.
Almost anyone can be nominated for the prize and look who were but didn't get it - Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and more recently George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Rush Limbaugh laughably. In contrast, one of the most notable symbols of non-violence in the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi, was nominated four times but never won. More recently, anti-war activist Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, now known as Voices for Creative Nonviolence, got three nominations but was passed over each time for less deserving candidates. Her "reward" instead was to be sentenced in 2004 to three months in federal prison for crossing the line into Fort Benning, Georgia in protest against the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation that's commonly called "the school of assassins."
Peace Prize Awards to War Criminals
Henry Kissinger was likely the most noted war criminal ever to win the Nobel Prize (in 1973 with Vietnam's Le Duc Tho who declined his award saying there was no peace in his country). The sheer scope of his crimes is breathtaking:
-- three to four million Southeast Asian deaths in the Vietnam war,
-- the bloody overthrow of a democratic government in Chile and support for Latin American dictators,
-- backed Surharto's takeover of West Papua and his invasion of East Timor killing hundreds of thousands,
-- supported the Khmer Rouge early on and its reign of terror rise to power,
-- backed Pakistan's "delicacy and tact" in overthrowing Bangladesh's democratically elected government causing a half million deaths, and much more around the world as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the world body he represented won their award in 2001 "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world." It wasn't for what Annan did in his various UN roles. Early on, he had a position in the Secretariat's services department in New York. He then got subordinate responsibility for the Middle East and Africa in the "special political affairs" department. There his support for Washington's call for troops to be sent to Somalia in the early 1990s helped put him in charge of all peacekeeping operations in February, 1993. In that role, he prevented measures from being taken to stop the impending Rwanda slaughter he was warned about in advance that caused around 800,000 deaths on his watch. He also kept the Security Council uninformed of what was coming.
At the behest of then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright and without consulting Secretary-General Boutras-Boutras-Ghali, Annan sided with the Clinton administration's authorization of NATO to illegally bomb Serb positions in Bosnia in 1995. It got him the Secretary-General's job in January, 1997 in which one observer noted he "courted the wrath of the developing world by rejecting anticolonialism in favor of moral principles cherished in the West."
Kofi Annan's Nobel award is a testimony to hypocrisy for a man whose ten years as Secretary-General failed to fulfill the mandate he was sworn to uphold: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice....equal rights of men and women (in all nations and respect for) international law (and) social progress....to ensure....armed force shall not be used."
During his ten year tenure in the top UN job, Annan:
-- supported Iraqi economic sanctions that caused around 1.5 million deaths including over one million children under age five;
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I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
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