Our recipients inspire hope and offer solutions how we can still avoid the approaching points-of-no-return threatening our common future."
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Also below - Howard Zinn's comments on some American war monger who have won the Nobel prize.
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Also below - Howard Zinn's comments on some American war monger who have won the Nobel prize.
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The Right Livelihood Award
- Logo of the Right Livelihood Award
2009 Right Livelihood Award Laureates to be announced soon
The announcement of the 2009 Right Livelihood Award Recipients will take place on October 13th, 10.00 Stockholm time.
82 candidates from 46 countries were proposed for the Right Livelihood Awards this year, whereof 36 come from industrialized and 46 from "developing" countries.
It is the 30th announcement of the Awards.
Jakob von Uexkull, Founder and Chairman of the Award, said:"In 1980, it was not clear that this award would reach its 30th birthday. I am delighted that it has! Since then, the RLA has grown and so has its impact. But the global challenges we are facing have grown ever faster, so that this prize is today more needed than ever. Our recipients inspire hope and offer solutions how we can still avoid the approaching points-of-no-return threatening our common future."
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War and Peace Prizes
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/10-3
Published on Saturday, October 10, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
by Howard Zinn
I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.
Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.
Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines.
The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.
Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war, with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, is given a peace prize!
People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.
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