Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

A peace Nobel Price for Obama

Hypocrisy in the service of imperialism

 

Last 10th October it transpired in the news that the Alfred Nobel Institute had awarded the Peace Prize 2009 to the President of the USA, Barack Obama. The news caused a certain amount of astonishment in the international press. There were roughly three kinds of reactions to it.

 

“Obama’s friends”

In the first place there was the inevitable and extensive choir of praises and congratulations coming from “Obama’s friends”. There was nothing unexpected about the statement by the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy; that of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero; the prime minister of Germany, Angela Merkel or the Secretaries of the OAS, Jose Miguel Inzulza and of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Anders Fogh Rasmunsen. Neither was it surprising that the President of Brazil, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva said, “the Prize is in good hands”. After all, there is no coincidence about the fact that Lula was presented by Obama as “his man” in Latin America. The Argentine Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the Chilean Presidents followed suit.  The old Cuban leaders, Fidel Castro asserted that the fact that the prize was awarded to the American President was “a positive measure” which he chose to regard as “criticism for the genocidal policy followed by quite a few presidents of that country”. That means that Obama was expected not to follow it.

 

A “premature” prize?

Other statements, such as the one by the Argentine Adolfo Perez Esquivel (Peace Nobel Prize in 1980) and the American cinema director, Michael Moore were issued in a more critical attitude towards Obama and his “contradictions”. That is why they regarded the prize as “premature” for the winner had to be given time to prove whether he is or is not worthy of this accolade. In the best of the cases, this is one of those “hopeful criticisms” that open the leeway that Obama may contribute to the “world peace” effectively and, furthermore, they wish it to be so.

 

Total hypocrisy

Finally, there are those who – like the IWL-FI – we were shocked to learn the news and regard it a deep hypocrisy on behalf of the Nobel Institute in the service of the interest of imperialism. If the prizes for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry did stimulate efforts and headway  in the insight of these branches of science, Peace Prize has always been a “political” prize which, as a rule accompanies the “waves” of imperialist, even if at times it went to figures more to the “left” to help bestow more prestige and encourage this policy. That is why it is not the first time that the Institute awards the prize to American presidents or former presidents: in 1906 it went to Theodore Roosevelt; in 2002 to former president Jimmy Carter and in 2007 to former vice-president Al Gore. This “political” hypocrisy is maintained even now. In the first place, Obama is the president of the USA, that is to say, the boss of the main imperialist power. Consequently, he is responsible for the exploitation of and looting on the wealth of a great part of the planet and as counterpart, for the increasing poverty, hunger and illnesses in the world affecting thousand of millions of people. It is structural form of violence the same as – or worse than – the one that is exerted through repression or military actions which are the consequence of that structural scenery, for they surface as an imperialist response in defence of their interests to the reaction of peoples against their terrible situation.

 

A pacifist?

It is equally a hypocrisy to rewards a man who keeps thousands of soldiers occupying Iraq, who has doubled the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan, who is unconditional ally of the racist and genocidal state of Israel against the Palestinian people, he man who promotes the camouflaged occupation of Haiti, disguised as a “peace mission” of the UN. It is important to ponder about the situation of Afghanistan, which has already been dubbed as the “Obama war” because of the military efforts that the president of the USA  is making to make it move. Recently, an attack of the NATO forces quite deliberately caused hundreds of casualties among Afghan civilian population following a method that constantly accrues as the course of the war becomes more and more difficult. In this case Obama is directly the main culprit of the massacres, the atrocities and the destruction that the troops under his command commit in those countries, especially against civilians. And yet, according to the Nobel Institute, Obama is a real pacifist.

 

Nuclear hypocrisy

One of the reasons quoted for the granting of the prizes makes this hypocrisy even worse. According to its Chairman, the Norwegian, Thorbjoern Jagland, “The Nobel Committee hay paid great attention to the vision and the vision and the efforts that Obama has made in the quest for a world without nuclear weapons.” More likely than not he is referring to the pressures and threat that USA and the “international community” have been launching against North Korea to make it eliminate their small nuclear arsenal. As well as against Iran to prevent it from developing the technology necessary to develop it. Let us see. At present, the countries that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are imperialist powers. USA, England and France) and former workers’ states now associated to imperialism (Russia and China). Recently, these were joined by some allies of imperialism (Israel, India and Pakistan). Only North Korea fails to fit in that picture.. Obama’s policy, which the Nobel Committee presents as an “world without nuclear weapons” has nothing to do with pacifism. Actually, it means that imperialism and its allies will keep their arsenals but will prevent other countries from having them or developing them. Let us remember that, so far, USA has been the only country to use them in their attack against Japan in 1945. That means that it is, on the one hand, a defence of the current repressive monopoly as well as a menace against the nations it represents and, on the other hand, the prohibition of defence of other countries, some of which, e.g. Iran, may feel threatened by attacks from Israel or even USA.

 

The real reasons for the prize

Other reasons pointed out to as justifying the prize being awarded the way it was have been “the efforts mad by the President of the USA to change the international diplomatic atmosphere. Even if the hypocritical slant of the whole affair as such is still visibly there, some of the real reasons begin to surface. It is quite true that Obama represented a change in the political tactics that American imperialism is resorting to now in order to tackle the problems of the world situation. There has been a change from Bush’s “aggressive unilateralism to Obama’s “multilateralism with consensus”. That means amplification of diplomatic activity within the scope of taking decisions so as to “convince” and reach “consensus” for policies in the service of imperialism at a time when things cannot be merely imposed by force. But this is not the produce of Obama’s “pacifism” or his “virtues” but the outcome of the fact that imperialism must face the consequences of the defeat of Bush’s policies (war on terrorism and the new American age) in Iraq, Venezuela, Afghanistan and other regions – caused by the response given by the mass movement. At the same time, they also have to cope with the social situation derived from the worst capitalist economic crisis since 1929. The failure of Bush’s policy and the social risks that the economic crisis  force imperialism to adjust their policy of dealing with this new situation and to “diminish losses” and so guarantee the looting of the wealth of the world, especially the strategic raw material, especially oil and minerals, to use them in their own benefit.

Obama and Bush defend the same imperialist interest. But the conditions in which Obama has to do so are different and he must adapt himself to that. Even Bush himself had already been forced to begin this adjustment, but the current president expresses this change much more clearly. It is a change that now poses a new equilibrium between negotiations and military policy and threats so as to reach the imperialist objectives, It is the carrot (negotiations) now that is in the centre  while the “big stick” is used as an auxiliary factor. That is why at present it is the diplomatic scope, the negotiations and the consensus that loom so large. This is the real meaning of the “pacifism”. In ancient history , the kind of stability that the Roman Empire imposed to protect its interests was called “pax romana”. This means that Obama is not seeking real world peace but a “pax romana”. On the other hand, by launching Obama to the Presidency of the USA, imperialism not only expressed a different tactic but also an important change in the man character. Replacing the hateful Bush by the charming Obama, they seek to deceive the toiling masses of the world (and so far they have been successful at that) making them believe that  the new president is “humane and sensitive” to the needs of the people. By awarding the prize to Obama, the Nobel Institute is trying to contribute, like and extra official agency of imperialism, to increase his prestige making him look like somebody whose policy whose policy is already advancing towards achieving “the peace of the world”.

 

How to achieve peace?

It is a totally legitimate aspiration of most of the nations that there should be “peace in the world”, that is to say, that there should be no more wars and destruction, that there should be tolerance among the different racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, etc. components. But this will not be possible in a world totally dominated by imperialist capitalism structured politically and economically in the service of a handful of enterprises and tycoon of the world. It is a system that not only spawns the structural violence of poverty, the violence that represses popular struggles resorting to genocides and wars, but it also exacerbates the differences between peoples so as to use them in their won benefit.
There will be no real peace in the world unless this cruel and inhuman system is destroyed and, essentially, unless the main boss of it all, American imperialism and its agents are fought down. There will be no real peace in the world unless we fight against the hypocritically pacifist policy wielded by Obama in defence of imperialism. That is why we wish to give vent to our indignation at the award of this prize . At the same time we warn the peoples of the world not to believe in this hypocritical campaign proclaiming that their policy is of peace. There will only be peace in the world when this system is replaced by  another: more just and humane, socialism, where the wealth produced is assigned to satisfy the needs of the entire population and not the privileges of just a few. That is why the struggle for the socialist revolution is also the struggle for peace. It is the only real struggle for peace.

Check out our other content

Check out other tags:

Most Popular Articles