And the Nobel goes to…

“We gotta get the job down there, and that requires us to have enough troops to not just air raiding villages and killing civilians” (Barack Obama, Nobel Prize for Peace winner and US president)

In order to preserve the leftovers of my personal freedom from democracy’s feast I promised myself to try as much as possible to keep a middle lane in everything.

However, not dealing with ideal situations or living in Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis I will not always have the luxury to pose as the undecided voter. I am aware that sometimes I will be forced to radically choose. To go for black or for white. Depleted by its illusionary aura of hues and variations, life is basically a cumulus of dichotomies: pleasure or pain, love or hate, happiness or sadness, “goodthink and crimethink”. War or peace. None of these can coexist, and one always excludes the other.

Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel for Peace. I like Obama and if I were an American I would have voted for him. However, regardless of his impeccable speech (in which he ironically used the word “war” 50 times, “wars” 9 times and “peace” only 31 times) held in Oslo the other day, Obama is a man at war. He has just sent over 40,000 troops in Afghanistan. Now, it could be that I play stupid, but when was the last time the president of a country that holds a war on two fronts, and decides to increase the number of troops, was awarded for peace?

I have nothing against Obama. Or war, as a matter of fact. As it is true, harsh times require harsh measure and evil, as Obama said, does exist. The end "excuses" the means, said Machiavelli and Obama completed “War (…) was simply a fact”. “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is recognition of history”…. “war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings”.

What I however reproach the Swedish Academy is their humble bow trying to compensate the feeble EU involvement in the Middle East armed conflict by awarding Obama. For peace. I had a déjà vu when Hale Berry was awarded the Oscar. Do we have to excuse ourselves to the US, like the Film Academy excused to the blacks by awarding Berry? Was her role in Monsters Ball the best performance? Is Obama the most peaceful man on earth?

Well, in this case, maybe we start a long line of world wide apologies: Church to the Christians, Crusaders to the Muslims, Germans to the Jews, Turks to the Armenians, and gay bashers to the gays.

Let alone the absolute premiere of the event itself, I couldn’t help wondering about the honesty of this award. How much do we really believe Obama deserved the Nobel for peace? Excellent orator and charming man. Yet, Peace?

As Dalai Lama said the award was "a little early". Could this bitterish reply be due to Obama’s refusal to meet with Lama in October this year, just because he wanted to keep China happy? If it isn’t politics interesting.

While Obama was charming the world with his well articulated speech, calling “Not only scientists and environmental activists for action on climate change, but also military leaders”, at Copenhagen, the US envoy, Todd Stern, a Harvard shark with a serpent tongue, forged under the Clinton administration, used his lawyer argumentation saying “We are certainly not going to become part of the Kyoto Protocol, so that’s not on the table. If you mean basically taking the Kyoto Protocol and putting a new title on it, we’re not going to do that either.”

What is wrong with this equation? Pretty much everything.

Even if the climate change reports presented at Copenhagen conference show that this decade is the warmest in the past 160 years, the US continue to reject the idea of signing the Kyoto Protocol, discarding the dead cat in China’s courtyard. China, on the other hand, points at the US and EU, claiming they must be the ones to present deeper cuts of GHG. According to a preliminary estimate by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the largest national producer of CO2 emissions since 2006 has been China with an estimated annual production of about 6200 megatonnes. China is followed by the United States with about 5,800 megatonnes. Here are our two champions. Give them a big round of applause.

If the egos debate wouldn’t affect us all, most probably it would have been fun to watch. But it is not. It is tragic.

Patrick J. Michael, the famous sceptic climatologist who claimed until recently that climate changes are not catastrophic but even beneficial allegedly said “this is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud”. With all due respect for skepticism, you must at least wonder why would anyone conspire to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change, when those changes are visible? You don’t have to be a genius to notice the lack of snow and some 15C during December in a country which had 20 years ago four seasons and -20C in winter. The climate change sceptics are simply not in denial but plain idiots.

Reverting to Obama’s acceptance speech “For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want”. Well, maybe it is time US free themselves from the want of Middle East oil. That is a pretty ironic claim coming from a country like the US. Obama’s Epicurean proposal matches like oil with water exactly in countries where both war and famine prevail. To ask to those people to free from want, before they have achieved the level of want, is both condescending and shameful.

No, I don’t have to be politically correct. I won that right fair and square. Political correctness it is just another name for false decency, a concept concocted by the spin doctors in order to get a few extra votes from the minorities.

Funny how the Leader of the Free world can take a prize for peace and speak of freedom in the same time the US restrained the freedom and personal rights for the higher purpose of national safety and security and still operates under the rendition law in which “rendered suspects are denied due process because they are arrested without charges, deprived of legal counsel, and illegally transferred to third world country with the intent and purpose of facilitating torture and other interrogation measures which would be illegal in the USA”.

Could be a silly question, but shouldn’t you free yourselves before you free the world?

Obama also added “I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war”.

And this is the man who was awarded for peace.