Pell-mell Peace Nobel

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/13/2010



Pell-mell: jumbled, helter-skelter, confused; that’s what the Nobel Peace prize has become. A third party observer such as the India Daily perceived this so clearly when its correspondent filed a report in response to the nomination of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize with the headline, “Beijing denounces Nobel for Liu Xiaobo, after Obama, Gore, isn’t the Nobel Prize a joke?”

One definitely couldn’t get such a clear assessment of the Peace Prize from Western societies and media. I was almost ready to add the West’s minion states like the Philippines among those with the view skewed toward the West until the PeNoy government surprised us for once by doing the right thing, by joining the boycott of the Nobel Peace award to the questionable Liu Xiaobo.

From another third party point of view, Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo, comes this objective summary of Liu Xiaobo’s history: “Liu Xiaobo’s personal link with Norway started during his days as a visiting scholar to the University of Oslo in 1988... Back in those dark days of the Cold War, there weren’t many Chinese in Scandinavia, so Liu was a rare commodity — a scholar from Beijing who loathed Beijing. Whether Liu became a Nato asset is a matter of top-secret classification. Oslo’s repeated inquiries about him through two decades, the Western media’s patronage, and the Nobel selection over other Chinese dissidents indicate some sort of special bond. Whatever the hidden details of his foreign involvements, Liu’s Peace Prize is serving as the bugle call for Nato’s global crusade against so-called “tyranny.”

“The fact that an open warmonger heads the Nobel Peace Committee has completely discredited what was once the world’s most prestigious Peace Prize. That honor is now just another weapon in the arsenal of the Great Powers mobilizing to reassert their authority over their former colonial domain. The goal of the West is not democracy and human rights; what its leaders really desire is domination and warfare. The intentions are clear. Thus we must each prepare, in our different ways, for the coming bloodshed.”

The Indian and Japanese media can be relied on to be more level-headed about the issues given their experiences with Western imperialism and persistent nationalist pride, unlike many in Philippine media and human rights NGOs who genuflect before the journalism and human rights foundations as well as foreign funding agencies for their scholarships and whatnot.

This dubious award of the Nobel Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo was preceded by two of the same equally dubious awards to Obama in 2009, when the newly-elected US president had just taken steps to expand the American and Nato war in Afghanistan; and before that in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore for their advocacy of the “man-made global warming” theory and restrictions on industrialization, which have subsequently been put under serious disrepute by IPCC’s own admissions of prediction errors, precipitated by an e-mail scandal unearthed by an IPCC scientist (not by WikiLeaks) revealing climate date manipulation to suit global warming theories. But these are not the only controversies.

The 1973 award to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for the Vietnam peace talks compelled two Nobel Peace Prize panel members’ resignation; they could not agree on the nominees’ qualifications as men of peace. Kissinger is considered by many historians and students of the Vietnam War, and I among them, as a war criminal for the atrocities and murder of four million Vietnamese civilians committed by American forces under his policy direction.

A lesser known awardee in 2008 was former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari who executed the negotiations with Yugoslavia’s Milosevic that were so one-sided for the US and Nato that he was rewarded with a second assignment over Kosovo which ended with the latter’s declaration of independence. Gregory Elich of the Jasenovac Research Institute and adviser to the Korea Truth Commission says Ahtisaari’s Nobel was for services rendered.

In my political-economy classes at PUP up until 2005, I had always discussed the Nobel Peace Prize as a fraud and an instrument of cultural warfare to create icons favorable to Western purposes. I ask why, for example, the ultimate and historical paradigm of peace and peaceful struggle was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Isn’t Mahatma Gandhi the world’s undisputed premier exponent of peace? The Nobel Peace Prize had been given out nearly every year since 1901.

I explain to my students that Gandhi could never be a Nobel Peace laureate because he is an anti-imperialist icon. It’s about time all Filipinos learn this basic truth about the Nobel Peace Prize: It is intended mainly to promote the West’s ideal of the “peaceful” man who is on their side. Liu Xiaobo is on their side, yet there is more material on him on the Internet that the Peace Prize panel never touched on.

Whatever the real reason for the PeNoy government’s joining the boycott of the Liu peace award, even it was merely a right mistake taken to obfuscate a real rejection of US imposition on it, we anti-imperialist Filipinos welcome it. When I praised this apparently courageous act on my radio program last Friday night, a yellow butterfly (yes, this is true) fluttered from the window into the room where I was phone-patching. Was it a providential message that there is a hidden hope there somewhere? Wonders, accidents or not, may truly never cease.

(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m. on 1098AM; watch Politics Today with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on Global News Network, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit our blogs, http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com and http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com; P.S. – “10 Minutes Lights Out vs Power Plunderers,” 7 to 7:10 p.m., Monday nights)