Why not a Nobel for Western dissidents?

[Magda Hassan]

Why not a Nobel for Western dissidents?

by danps

Sat Oct 16, 2010 at 03:47:35 AM PDT

The Nobel Peace prize has been awarded for many different people and for many different reasons, but there appears to be one area the committee is reluctant to go.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.


No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
In recent years the Nobel committee has been willing to wade into controversies. A couple of years ago it awarded its economic prize to Paul Krugman, in what appeared to be a swipe at a sitting president and the still (inexplicably) dominant Chicago school of economics. Their selection reverberated politically as well; witness the various freakouts among conservative observers and commentators.
This year Nobel awarded the economics prize to Peter Diamond, thus making Richard Shelby look like a dumb hillbilly. By highlighting reflexive Republican opposition (one might say America has been Gop-blocked) the selection puts conservatives on the defensive. Considering the damage their royalist economic policies have wrought, this is a very good thing.
Their science awards have been political too. The 2007 award was another direct challenge to the American right, which even now continues to pretend the issue does not even exist. Considering the resolute ignorance of modern conservatives, awarding a science prize at all may be provocative.
That is what makes its Peace Prize awards somewhat curious. I remember reading years ago (I don't remember the source) that it might be awarded to political leaders or activists just about anywhere, but only non-Western dissidents could win. Looking at the list from the past thirty years or so that certainly seems to hold up. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama and Oscar Arias Sánchez all have won for raising their voices against local governments, but no one in the West has.
In the same way some people were greatly agitated by calling those displaced by hurricane Katrina "refugees," there may be a reluctance to refer to dissidents in our backyard. Such people only exist in other cultures, where foreign regimes use heavy handed tactics to suppress dissent. But the fact is, we stifle those we don't want to hear, too. We do it with more subtlety - nothing as gauche as house arrest or imprisonment, thank you - but we unquestionably find ways to ostracize those who tell us things we do not want to hear.
One example of a Western dissident is Scott Ritter. Back when America's leaders were nearly trembling with excitement at the prospect of launching a war of aggression, Ritter was one of a handful of well-placed voices raising legitimate questions. He consistently pointed out that Iraq most likely did not have WMD. For his efforts he was mercilessly attacked, made the target of a smear campaign and sneeringly mocked as suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Washington political and media elites turned on him, launching all manner of character assassination but never taking on the substance of his arguments.
It worked. He was (and remains) marginalized. For all the static Paul Krugman has gotten in challenging Milton Friedman's acolytes, how much worse was it for Ritter? How much higher were the stakes, more uniform the opposition and more coordinated the attacks? By October 2002 Ritter had been making the argument for months that "we cannot go to war on guesswork, hypothesis and speculation." How much would it have legitimized him to have won the Nobel Peace prize at that crucial moment?
Liu Xiaobo's recent win of the prize brought this back to mind, because it looks somewhat timid. Right now America is engaged in a hot war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. People are getting killed there on a daily basis. Is there anyone trying to bring that war to an end? Someone being targeted by a smear campaign? Whose critics are not engaging on the facts? Who maybe could use the shot in the arm of good PR that a Nobel would bring? Of course there is: Julian Assange. His posting of video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007 gave the world an unvarnished look at what happens when America's war machine goes wrong. Then he followed up with a massive document dump from Afghanistan. By the end of summer there was a precipitous drop in support for the war.
WikiLeaks seems partially responsible for that. Awarding the Nobel to Assange would certainly be controversial, but the committee has not shied from that elsewhere. If not Assange then some other thorn in the side of America's war cheerleaders. It would probably not be any more welcome than Xiaobo's win was to China, but isn't that kind of the point? It seems that in this one area the committee has a blind spot, one that mitigates the good it can do. It has the reputation to be able to withstand some hostility from presumed allies. It would be nice to see them risk a little bit of that.
http://www.congressmatters.com/storyonly...dissidents

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=21512

A Military Mentality: Nobel's Pro-Military Agenda and the Future World Order

by Yoichi Shimatsu

The emerging connections between NATO and America’s East Asian allies are starting to reveal the New Strategic Concept: the coming naval encirclement of China and Russia. With ground troops on bases in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, the circle is closing. The world is plunging into the Second Cold War.

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.

In its most recent selections of peace laureates Barack Obama and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has been pushing the strategic agenda of its chairman since 2009. Outside of European policy circles, Thorbjoern Jagland has no celebrity status, yet he is among the most powerful figures influencing the future global order.

The veteran Norwegian Labour Party politician has taken a stance similar to that of Britain’s Tony Blair in support of European Union integration and a strong alliance with Washington to ensure Western leadership in international affairs. He has served as Norway’s prime minister, foreign minister, speaker of the parliament known as the Storting, and current chairman of the Council of Europe, a body that backed the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during the Cold War.

His political career has been defined by his close relationship with NATO. He sat on the Norwegian government’s standing committee on defense and was a key player in NATO parliamentary conferences.

On his home turf, Labour is the party of choice for the Norwegian officer corps. Despite its relatively small size, Norway is a significant military player due to its strategic location near the former Soviet Arctic Fleet base at Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. Throughout the Cold War, the Norwegians—every male citizen is a soldier and has a rifle—were the front line on the Russian border.

A Military Mentality

That vanguard role continues today, with Norwegian troops on the ground in Afghanistan, its naval vessels curbing piracy off Somalia, Pentagon anti-ballistic missile systems and anti-satellite technology waging the struggle for outer space, and the world’s most advanced anti-submarine technology. Norway has the highest per-capita troop deployment among NATO’s 28-member states.

The challenge for the West has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a new potential enemy taking shape in an economic coalition known as the BRICs — Brazil, Russia, India and, most feared of all, China. Jagland, as a public voice for NATO strategists, is calling on an enlarged Western alliance to stand down the resurgence of military powers China and Russia and disrupt their ever-closer relationships with Brazil and India.

At a NATO-sponsored conference of European parliamentarians last year, Jagland spoke tough words: “When we are not able to stop tyranny, war starts. This is why NATO is indispensable. NATO is the only multilateral military organization rooted in international law. It is an organization that the U.N. can use when necessary — to stop tyranny, like we did in the Balkans.” His reference was to the NATO bombing campaign, invasion and occupation of the now-terminated Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s.

To summarize his message: If, anywhere in the world, tyrants cannot be overthrown by peaceful means, war is inevitable — and NATO will wage that war.

These are chilling words coming from the chairman of the Nobel Peace Committee. Jagland later said on announcing the peace prize for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo: “We have to speak when others cannot speak. As China is rising, we should have the right to criticize. We want to advance those forces that want China to become more democratic.”

A term like “advance those forces” is eerily similar to the euphemisms in Japanese textbooks that describe “advances” into foreign territory on continental Asia. It reflects a militaristic mindset.

The New Global Order

At the 2009 NATO conference, Jagland dropped a hint of what was to come: “We must build alliances and adapt to new realities. [We must] understand and debate how democratic rights can be upheld in the 21st century. How freedom can be assured. What kind of alliances we need to that end. And we need a New Strategic Concept.”

Among his political foes in Norway, Jagland is called “our own George Bush Jr.” It’s good joke, but not when considering the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or while Jagland, with this latest Nobel Peace prize, has just precipitated a damaging diplomatic crisis between the West and China. The controversy will only worsen when the Nobel medallions are given out in December.

The Nobel scandal has already scuttled the Norwegian oil firm Statoil’s plans to sell Beijing the Peregrino oil field offshore of Brazil — the first real blow against the BRIC coalition. Politicians and businessmen who are eager about emerging international trade opportunities are simply naive about geopolitics. Once again, the civilians have been outflanked by the military.

NATO’s Asian Allies

Meanwhile, Jagland’s colleagues among the Norwegian defense forces have recently initiated military-technology deals with South Korea and Japan at a time of regional tensions with China. The conservative government of President Lee Myung-bak is pursuing a crash program to build a new generation of Sejong-class KDX-3 destroyers. In the wake of the past summer’s South Korean ship-sinking crisis, Seoul is putting renewed emphasis on anti-submarine warfare.

Norwegian shipbuilders, including the Kongsberg Group, are the world leader in sonar and electronic warfare systems. The Norwegian Nansen-class of anti-submarine destroyers is top of the line. The Royal Navy of Norway has decades of real-life experience at chasing Soviet, now Russian, U-boats. The military ties between Oslo and Seoul go back to the Korean War, when Norway sent a military medical unit as an ally.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, the Japanese defense industry recently hosted a high-level Norwegian military delegation. Among the topics of discussion was the growing naval threat of China and the need for NATO and the US-Japan security alliance to cooperate to defend the new Arctic Sea passage. As global warming melts the polar ice cap, the waters north of Russia can be navigated.

The emerging connections between NATO and America’s East Asian allies are starting to reveal the New Strategic Concept: the coming naval encirclement of China and Russia. With ground troops on bases in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, the circle is closing. The world is plunging into the Second Cold War.

The Peace Laureate

How does an obscure dissident sitting in a Chinese prison figure into this grand plan for global conflict? Liu Xiaobo’s personal link with Norway started during his days as a visiting scholar to the University of Oslo in 1988. At that moment, the Soviet Union was in a deep crisis of disintegration. NATO strategists were anxious about the prospect of Moscow being saved in the nick of time by its onetime friend and ally, China. Faxes out of the Chinese Embassy in Moscow were of utmost concern, but were indecipherable, being written in Chinese.

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.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo, is a Hong Kong–based writer on renewable energy for European business publications and news commentator for the Bon Ocean Network (BON) in Beijing.

[Christer Forslund]

From: Behind the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
by Thierry Meyssan, 19 October 2009
http://www.voltairenet.org/article162559.html#nh2After the inference in the Kenyan elections 2007, by Senator Obama, as participant in a secret inter-agency (CIA-NED-USAID-NSA), Madeleine Albright, as NDI President (the branch of the National Endowment for Democracy that specializes in handling left-wing parties) and John McCain, as chairman of the IRI (the branch of the National Endowment for Democracy that specializes in handling right-wing parties) - resulting in sectarian violence, deaths, displacements and lost jobs - the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights stepped in. The board of this respected NGO was newly chaired by the former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland. Breaking with the Center’s traditional impartiality, he sent two mediators on site, whose expenses were entirely footed by Madeleine Albright’s NDI (that is to say ultimately out of the U.S. Department of State’s budget).

On September 29, Thorbjørn Jagland was elected Secretary General of the Council of Europe following a behind-the-scenes agreement between Washington and Moscow [Although the United States are not a member of the Council of Europe, they have great influence. Moscow did not particularly support Jagland, but wanted to stop the Polish candidate Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.]. This called for a favor in return. Although membership of the Nobel Committee is incompatible with a major executive political position, Jagland did not resign. He argued that the law strictly prohibits the combination with a ministerial office but says nothing about the Council of Europe. He then returned to Oslo on October 2. The same day, the Committee appointed President Obama for the 2009 Peace prize.

Vice-President of Socialist International, Thorbjørn Jagland is a strong supporter of NATO and of Norway joining the European Union. He associates with elite globalists and participated in the work of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. His political record has been marred by several corruption scandals involving his entourage, including his friend and Planning Minister Terje Roed Larsen (the current UN Special Coordinator for peace negotiations in the Middle East).