WARMONGERING IN THE NOBEL PEACE

WARMONGERING IN THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE COMMITTEE

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs3138.html
A CubaNews translation by Mary Todd.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.


Since 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has been promoting the militaristic strategic agenda of its Chairman, Thorbjoem Jagland, of Norway, which explains its most recent proclamations.

This is what Yoichi Shimatsu, a Japanese specialist on renewable energy, says in an article that the pacifist organization Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space has circulated.  Shimatsu usually writes in European business publications and has been Editor of the Japan Times Weekly of Tokyo and a commentator on Beijing's Bon Ocean chain.

Thorbjoem Jagland has been Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and leader of the Storting (the Norwegian Parliament) and is now the Chairman of the European Council, a body that supported the European Union and NATO during the Cold War.  He is a veteran politician of the Norwegian Labor Party-which, according to Shimatsu, has adopted a position similar to that of Tony Blair, of the UK, as a promoter of the integration of the European Union in close alliance with Washington, to ensure powerful Western leadership in international affairs.

He joined NATO's Permanent Defense Committee and was an outstanding participant in its parliamentary conferences.  His political career has always been identified with that bellicose organization.

Even though Norway is a relatively small country, it plays an important military role because of its strategic location, near what used to be the base of the Soviet Arctic Fleet (now the North Sea Fleet), in Murmansk, on the Kola Peninsula.

Shimatsu reminded his readers that all Norwegian men are soldiers and are armed and that Norway's border with Russia in the Barents Sea was a front line during the Cold War.

At present, Norway is playing a key role in the contradictions that have arisen between the technologically developed and Third World countries: it has land troops in Afghanistan and ships that patrol the coasts of Somalia against the piracy in the region, takes part in the Pentagon's space race as a member of the antiballistic missile systems, and has the most advanced anti-submarine technology in the world.

Norway has more NATO troops per capita than any of the other 28 NATO member countries.

As spokesman for the NATO strategists, Jagland calls for the expansion of the western alliance in order to prevent the revival of Russia's and China's military potential and to hinder closer ties between those two countries, Brazil and India.  He feels that the challenge to the West has changed since the USSR's collapse: now, the potential enemy is the economic coalition known as BRIC-Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Shimatsu reported that, during a conference of European parliamentarians that was held last year, the current Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee stated crudely, "When we can't stop a tyranny, war begins.  This is why NATO is indispensable.  NATO is the only multilateral military organization that is rooted in international law.  It is an organization that the United Nations can use, when necessary, to halt a tyranny, as we did in the Balkans."

Jagland was referring, naturally, to the bombardments, invasion and occupation of the former Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s.

To sum up his idea, Jagland said something that is entirely incompatible with his position as Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee: "If, anywhere in the world, tyrants cannot be defeated by peaceful means, war is inevitable, and NATO will wage that war."

In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo, of China, said something just as scary: "We must speak out when others cannot do it.  China is rising, and we should have the right to criticize it, to help the forces that want China to be more democratic to advance."

Yoichi Shimatsu commented that the expression "help to advance" in the mouth of Jagland reminded him of the euphemisms in Japanese texts that spoke of "advances" by the Japanese troops in the territories of other countries in continental Asia and that it revealed a militaristic mentality.

According to the Japanese writer, by selecting Barack Obama and Liu Xiaobo as its most recent prize-winners, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee was promoting a strategic agenda that was in line with the political thinking of Thorbjoem Jagland, its Chairman since 2009-whom his adversaries in Norway refer to as "our own George W. Bush."

December 2010

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    WALTER LIPPMANN
    Los Angeles, California
    Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
    "Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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