EU Commission president Barroso (ex-communist turned social democrat), EU Council president Herman ‘Damp Rag’ van Rompuy, and Martin Schulz, socialist president of the European parliament.
acting-man.com / By Pater Tenebrarum / December 10, 2012
EU Apparatchiks Go To Collect Peace Prize
The moment is approaching: representatives of the EU are going to Oslo to collect this year’s Peace Prize for the organization. The prize committee’s idea sometimes seems to be to award prizes in order to shame their recipients into certain courses of action – often to little avail.
Take for instance the stunning win of the same trophy by Barrack Obama shortly after he was elected president for the first time. What had he done for peace up until that point? Just about everyone was scratching his head in wonderment. Obviously the prize was given to him in order to entice him to put an end to Bush’s wars. In part it appears to have worked, but it also ‘worked’ in what one might term unexpected ways. The freshly-baked ambassador of peace decided to simply take his remnant wars off the radar screen, by engaging in the infamous – but rarely publicly discussed – drone war.
Now, it is certainly true that Europe’s nations have evolved quite a bit from the forever warring lot they once used to be. This has probably much to do with the shock delivered by modern armaments in the two world wars last century. How often can one afford to spread death and misery on the scale of these modern-day wars? It just isn’t feasible anymore. It is of course possible that we are too cynical, but we don’t quite believe that human nature has changed all that much. Peace is of course the father of prosperity, which in turn provides an added incentive to keep the peace. However, in the euro area of today, we can see how resentment, xenophobia and radical political ideologies are merely slumbering below the thin veneer of civilization. Wherever prosperity seems under threat, political radicals have suddenly found that they enjoy an astonishing degree of popular support.
So we suspect that once again, the Nobel prize committee has an agenda, one we actually support: it is to try to remind Europe of how much peace is worth. Maybe that will help its leaders to avoid one or another mistake as things progress from here.
Unfortunately, the upper echelons of the EU immediately started skirmishing when the announcement came. Who would go to collect the prize and hold the acceptance speech?
Moreover, not everyone is convinced that one of the biggest weapons producing regions in the world deserves to receive a prize that was originally intended for those working for disarmament.
