“Giving Obama nobel peace prize of course resembles giving GWB a nobel prize of war, but you Yankees can take this as a prize to you all” -Yankee doodles boodle noodle

When concepts and realities are turned upside down,

When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction.

When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavor,

When the killing of civilians is upheld as “collateral damage”,

When those who resist the US-NATO led invasion of their homeland are categorized as “insurgents” or “terrorists”.

When preemptive nuclear war is upheld as self defense.

When advanced torture and “interrogation” techniques are routinely used to “protect peacekeeping operations”,

When tactical nuclear weapons are heralded by the Pentagon as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”

When three quarters of US personal federal income tax revenues are allocated to financing what is euphemistically referred to as “national defense”

When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,

When the Lie becomes the Truth.

Feh. These people also gave a prize to the man who authorised the carpet-bombing of Cambodia.

As for Mother Theresa: There’s a curiously quantitative idea if sin – that a litre of “sin” is cancelled out by a litre of “grace”. Certain things – taking communion, doing penance, etc create grace. As does, of course, bodily suffering – hence the Opus Dei “mortifications” and so on. The sufferings of Christ and the various saints produced a lot of grace. They’ve effectively got access to a vat of it at the Vatican, and that’s how they were able to grant “indulgences” back in the day – siphoning off some of that grace to cancel out your sins. For a fee.

Mother Theresa, I rather gathered, was basically farming the poor for the “grace” that suffering produces, much like ants farm aphids for sugar. Every indian destitute that dies in filth from lack of medical care generates so many milliliters of grace, and she got a percentage. Hopefully enough to score a nice upgrade to the mansion waiting for her in heaven.

You got to keep your eye on the big picture, after all.

I didn’t know that about Mother Teresa. I can’t believe she was a fraud!

Actually, Mother Teresa did more to increase misery and sorrow in India, an extremely poor and overcrowded country, than many others who tried to do so intentionally. Giving her any recognition for doing good work is misguided at best. She cynically manipulated a gullible public to further he own aim — the elevation of her order and (as it turned out later) to somehow get herself to believe in the doctrine that she found incredible.

Christopher Hitchens, among others, has been exposing the Mother Teresa phenomenon for decades. Quote from one of Hitchens’ debates:

“What’s motherly about her? Hideous virgin and fraud, and fanatic and fundamentalist, shriveled old bat. [She was] as far from the nature of motherhood as a woman could decently get. . . We have to have the fortitude to say… to those who are afflicted, to those who are poor, to those who really are suffering, we should say honestly that those who offer them false consolation are not there friends. Who doesn’t know by now that the cure for poverty is not charity in Calcutta. Who doesn’t know that? Why did we decide to forget what we learnt over the generations that charity is an insult to the poor and a way of prolonging poverty; that Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor, she was a friend of poverty. That there is only one cure for poverty, and that is, by the way, the liberation of women. And which works every time and against which all religions have set its face every time. And against which Mother Teresa has spent a lifetime campaigning, to ensure that misery and poverty and dirt and disease and ignorance would be continued so that there would be ever more people to testify to the Catholic faith.”

Hitchens is accurate in his description of Teresa being a fraud. It has recently been revealed that she did not believe in the tripe she was peddling pretty much all her life. She did not have faith in her god. This did not come as a surprise to me because I had concluded that she was a supremely shrewed, cunning, and intelligent person. The way she manipulated the press, the way she used the high-ranking politicians (and the way she allowed herself to be used by them in turn), the way she rubbed shoulders with convicted frauds as long as they enriched her order, the way she handed out indulgences to mass murderers — it all indicated that she was nobody’s fool and she could not have possibly believed in the simple-minded nonsense that the Catholic church expects its flock to believe.

But apparently she wanted to believe in that vile nonsense. And being unable to believe, she was a tortured soul. Perhaps there is some justice in the world after all: at least she suffered a bit. Not a whole lot compared to the suffering that she inflicted by her evil machinations but still suffered. There is no hell but perhaps she did inhabit a bit of hell on earth. Unfortunately though, it is possible that if she had not been so tortured by her lack of faith, perhaps she would have been a little less merciless in her actions. A good person does not even unintentionally harm innocent humans. The evil she represents is absolute because she knowingly increased suffering and pain.

If she had toiled in obscurity whatever her motivation, if she was just another misguided monkey trying to save fish, if she had been just one more missionary hell-bent on converting the heathens — I would not waste my breath on her. But she was celebrated by the powers of the Western world, and celebrated by the morons in the Indian press, awarded all kinds of honors by the stupid Indian government, and finally given a state funeral. The louder these powers speak about her holiness, the more the general population gets brainwashed into believing a falsehood. So I consider it my duty to expose the evil she embodied.

In my opinion (really, this is nothing more than that) a Peace Nobel is not quite the same as a Physics Nobel. It should be given to outstanding individuals who serve as role models to all humanity.

My problem with politicians is that the Nobel prize is more often than not used as a political tool, as (probably) in the present case, and thus is just a part of a complicated political game, instead of being a way to encourage outstanding individuals.

As for Obama, this is completely absurd. Explaining the prize by the (questionable) assumption that he has given hope to many people is basically commending him for his skills as an orator. Ok, so the man knows how to give a good speech. How is this connected to the World Peace?

By the way, the deadline for submission of candidates for the prize was somewhere in February, few weeks after Obama actually became president.

However, the Peace Prize, unlike the other Nobel prizes, is not just about achievements but about how stated intentions by the right people can change perception and thus, sometimes, make the goals even possible or easier to achieve. In Obama’s case, as I understand it, it is, among other reasons, about his often repeated declared intent, even before his presidency, to use diplomacy in areas the US has, over the last eight years or so at least, openly renounced as an useful tool.

Whether anyone agrees with the criteria that the committee uses is of course a matter of individual opinion. However, when one looks at Obama’s award in the context of some previous awards, while it may be a surprise, the committee hasn’t done anything particularly outrageous according to their selection criteria.

If Obama fails it is because we have failed. And that is why this is such an important symbol of a shared responsibility in shaping humanity’s collective future.

Si se puede!

I actually wrote Higgs’ vice Higg’s. And, in fact, he me told that he does own three of them. He keeps them in his car, which does reduce its gas mileage considerably.