Understanding The Modern Usage Of “Peace” Is Such Phrases As The Nobel Peace Prize

By Case Wagenvoord

12 October, 2009

The Nobel committee awards Obama its peace prize and the reaction is a collective, “WTF!” The guy’s managing two wars and is getting ready to ramp up one war, spread it to another country, and the committee calls this peace?

Here again, Obama is benefiting from comparison with GWB. The Bush administration was to peace what Jack the Ripper was to feminism.

However, there’s another dynamic at work here. Compared to other winners, Obama is a milquetoast. He’s fallen far short of the body count amassed by previous winners, Woodrow Wilson and Henry Kissinger. (Tom Lehrer declared political satire dead the day they awarded Hank the prize.)

Much of the fuss over Obama being awarded the prize arises from a misunderstanding of what “peace” means. Its meaning has evolved over the years, and it has lost its touchy-feely quality. In its modern usage, it means much more than the absence of conflict and violence. In other words, today’s Nobel Peace Prize is not your great-grandfather’s Nobel Peace Prize.

By the dawning of the twentieth century, peace had come to mean industrial peace, i.e., market stability. If millions had to be slaughtered to attain this stability that was simply the price you paid. And the leader who slaughtered the most to attain this stability was the leader awarded the Peace Prize because he had facilitated a return to market stability.

By the twenty-first century, the definition of peace had taken another twist. It now meant corporate peace. Corporate peace is all about policy. It is the alignment of the world order with the goals and objectives of the reigning corporate power, in this case the United States.

The problem faced by the contemporary world is not rogue states; it’s rogue policies. Saddam’s sin was not his supposed links with al Qaeda; it was his decision to stop denominating oil sales in dollars. World pace depends on a faithful adherence to corporate policy. Saddam failed to follow policy. We couldn’t fire him, so we had to kill him and trash his country.

The Taliban failed to follow corporate policy by refusing to allow the Great White Power to run a pipeline across its real estate. So, we had to kick some ass to get the country into proper alignment with our corporate policies.

Under this definition, war is peace in the making, which is why a corporate leader engaged murder and mayhem in order to implement a corporate policy is indeed worthy of the prize.

If anything, the Nobel Committee is going soft.. They really should have waited a year or two until Obama had racked up a decent body count before awarding him the prize. I believe the minimum requirement is six figures.

But again, in vaudeville a mediocre act shines when it follows a terrible act.

In those years in which there is no major peace campaign in the hopper, the committee gives a nod to the touchy-feely by awarding the prize to Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu or Medecine Sans Frontieres.

But peace is its true calling.

Case Wagenvoord blogs at http://belacquajones.blogspot.com and welcomes comments at Wagenvoord@msn.com.