There has been much controversy
swirling around president Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, which I wont bore
my readers by recapping. Basically the well intentioned criticism -- we
can discount the ill intentioned -- boils down to, "why so soon, he
hasn't done anything yet". They are all missing the point.
First,
we should take a step back from the prize... it is very much a creature
of the moment it is given. It is not some sort of universal "Mount
Rushmore" of the good and the great: Mahatma Gandhi never received it
and Henry Kissinger (a war criminal) and Menachem Begin and Yasser
Arafat (terrorists) did.
So the Nobel Peace Prize is not like being made a Saint in the Catholic Church and getting your own office in heaven.
What the prize does is to send a message.
If you look at the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded since 2001 you can see a pattern:
- 2001 - United Nations, Kofi Annan
- 2003 - Shirin Ebadi(first Muslim woman to win the prize)
- 2004 - Wangari Maathai (African woman ecologist)
- 2005 - International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei
- 2006 - Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank (micro-credit)
- 2007 - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore
- 2008 - Martti Ahtisaari (UN diplomat and peacemaker)
The thread running though it all being, "the Nobel Committee abjures George Walker Bush and all his works".
So, Bush has gone, you say, why give the award to Obama so soon?
Bush is gone, but not what he did.
George W. Bush pulled the mask off the United States of America and
Barack Obama is putting the mask back in place and that is why he has
been given the prize.
What do I mean by "mask"?
Well, for anyone who has been reading Noam Chomsky for some time and
paying attention, or who has recently read Naomi Klein's dot-connecting
masterpiece, "The Shock Doctrine", it is no surprise to see the USA
portrayed as a "rogue state": it has acted as one for decades.
In short: behind its mask of benevolent defender of democracy and human
rights, the USA had been attacking and invading other countries and
torturing people for a long, long, time.
But for much of the western world this was an "inconvenient truth"...
unthinkable, bad for business and bad for morale, something not
mentioned in polite, moderate-centrist, company.
From the vantage of international law, the USA is "like unto a whited
sepulcher", which, to quote the King James Bible's protagonist, "indeed
appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and
of all uncleanness".
What changed?
Bush made Noam Chomsky a main-stream, best-selling author.
In the year 2001 destiny crossed 9-11 with George W. Bush and Bush in
all his arrogant, incompetent, ignorant, meanness ripped off America's
mask and kicked the top off the sepulcher and what was behind the mask
was too ugly for the world to face every day on the news and all the
maggots that came crawling out of the sepulcher stank unbearably.
And then the economy collapsed.
What Madelene Albright called "the indispensable nation" turned out to
be "the unspeakable nation" and the corner stone of the world system
turned out to be a grave stone... and no alternative is sight.
Well, you say, Iraq and Afghanistan are still at war and the USA is
still killing civilians; Guantanamo and Bagram prisons are still in
business, the international currency of reference, the US dollar,
appears headed for collapse, even golden California is bankrupt. What
has changed?
The magic of Obama has put the mask back on.
Air Wick has been hung in the sepulcher and Glade has been sprayed.
And all in only nine months.
However, the powerful forces that lay behind that which we chose to
call "Bush" are mobilizing the AstroTurf of birthers and teabaggers and
yet unknown McVeighs and Oswalds conspire against this mild attempt,
this pretense of normalcy, and so the horrid face behind the benign
mask is reappearing at the edges... and downwind the sepulcher still
has quite a breath on it.
So the Nobel Committee is rushing to do its part in propping up the idea of an imagined return to a pre-Bush America: A
certain idea of the civilized world.
If, in the future, having replaced the mask and chased the worms back
into the sepulcher, President Obama actually manages to change some of
the underlying reality itself, he will rank up there with M. K. Gandhi
and require no further prize, for then
he will be able to hand out the peace prizes, not a roomful of Norwegians.