Talking about Winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace....

In an instructive article about the Iranian nuclear programme, Gordon Prather writes in "Anti-War":

...new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy...still considers the U.S.-Iranian "stand-off" the world's "greatest crisis," confronting the world with "a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

To which Nobel Laureate ElBaradei responded "I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons."

And do not forget: had Iraq had nuclear weapons, had they been real and discovered, the party would have been over much too soon for Mr. Bush. Much better for him to create a genocidal mess, from which legions of "terrorists", willing to fight the Western oppressor, are bound to emerge. War is the health of the state.

If a country is deemed vulnerable enough, the West will act as if the Mafia killing a number of American citizens were a valid occasion to bomb and conquer Italy.

Why should the West say "No" to that? Do we have principles? We sure do not. We have something better: democracy, polls, political correctness, a deluge of disinformation provided by media that take their pride from the same belief in totalitarian privileges that makes the government appear far more important and, in truth, powerful than it ought to be.

As for the media, in a conversation with me, a spokesman of the ZDF (one of the two premier, effectively state-run TV-channels in Germany) recently defended the compulsory fees exacted from German TV-owners (to finance the state-run channels) by explaining that the ZDF was needed to bestow a crucial sense of identity and harmony upon the Germans. I watched him throughout his working day, a man harassed by the clash of his arrogant calling and the exigencies of a rush-business, and I understood that people like him are open to virtually any kind of manipulation in the pursuit of the daily contributions they add to the manipulation of the public.

As for the genocide going on in Iraq, the American President reckoned: "my" soldiers are too weak (i.e. too patriotic and too dependent otherwise) to resist their abuse in a damnable war, and Iraq is too weak to make military victory and domination an uncertain proposition.

For more, see my posts:

October: [37] News from Absurdistan - Once Respected Institutions...
September: [20] News from Absurdistan - It Has Nothing To Do with Oil