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Trump and the Nobel Prize: history suggests it’s not that crazy (Left-wing Canadian reporter)
iPolitics ^ | May 6, 2018 | Paul Koring

Posted on 05/06/2018 12:53:41 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

Donald Trump and the tainted Nobel Peace Prize jury deserve each other.

So just go ahead and award the President the sullied prize. After all it was created by Alfred Nobel, the international arms merchant keen to recast his blood-stained legacy after pocketing a fortune making mass killing far more cost-efficient.

And Trump, unlike some of the warmongers, racists, handmaidens to genocide, and terrorists already among the pantheon of winners, might actually have a credible claim to it.

At least 18 slavish Republican Congressmen and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in are already on record saying Trump deserves the award. At Trump rallies, the faithful chant: “No-bel, No-bel.”

Suspend credulity for a moment.

Let’s assume that in his quiet, reflective, pre-dawn moments, the President isn’t angrily thumbing vile falsehoods and bellicose taunts to inflame his Twitter horde while watching Fox & Friends. Rather suppose Trump is re-reading his well-thumbed copy of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy in which the brilliant Italian political theorist muses about the merits of feigning insanity to unnerve an enemy.

Sometimes it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness,” wrote Machiavelli, best known for the The Prince, a useful handbook for tyrants.

Richard Nixon insisted he was unaware of Machiavelli but came to the same realpolitik conclusion. “I call it the Madman Theory,” he confided to his chief of staff Bob Haldeman. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything … (so backchannel to Hanoi that Nixon’s inner circle can’t restrain him when he’s angry) and he has his hand on the nuclear button.”

Maybe, just maybe, Trump isn’t just a self-absorbed, petulant, bully but cunningly crazy like a fox.

Or perhaps it is Kim Jong-un, the murderous cherub, who read The Prince while studying incognito at finishing school in Switzerland and — like his father and grandfather before him — is cunningly outsmarting yet another American president.

Either way, the Norwegian jury should make Trump and his 30-something North Korean adversary joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a no-lose proposition.

If the improbable pair (‘Dotard’ and ‘Little Rocket Man’ as they cooingly called each other prior to becoming strange bedfellows for peace) actually achieve a historic breakthrough then it will be HUGELY deserved. And the Nobel jury will be collateral beneficiaries for prescience.

After all, none of the nations that have defied international law and secretly developed nuclear weapons; India (with Canada’s negligent help) Israel, Pakistan and now, and most dangerously, North Korea, has ever relinquished those weapons of Armageddon.

Pyongyang’s neo-Stalinist dynasty has outsmarted three successive U.S. Presidents while promising to do so: •Bill Clinton boasted of the “good deal” he made by offering $4-billion worth of reactors to North Korea in return for a (soon-to-be-broken) Pyongyang promise to give up its nuclear weapons program. •George W. Bush put North Korea on his ‘Axis of Evil” list but instead waged war on Iraq which no longer had a ‘weapons of mass destruction’ program, nuclear or otherwise. So North Korea exploded its first nuke in 2007 on Bush’s watch. A year later, seeking to salvage another failing deal, Bush rewarded North Korea by removing the thuggish regime from the list of terrorist-sponsoring states. •Barack Obama’s softly-softly approach worked no better.

Despite the Nobel jury’s gushing reasoning that Obama deserved the prize (only months after taking office) for his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons,” Trump’s predecessor was as ineffective in dealing with North Korea as he was with Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. Pyongyang exploded its second through fifth nuclear test on Obama’s watch, including the first warhead-sized test and the first hydrogen bomb.

Meanwhile, Obama (who admits he had ‘no idea’ why the Nobel committee gave him the Peace Prize) was making both the Bush wars, the ‘bad’ one in Iraq and the ‘good’ one in Afghanistan worse. The U.S.-led air war that toppled Gadhafi left Libya in violent chaos that continues today while Obama’s flip-flop over Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad gassing his own people undermined American credibility.

So perhaps what was really needed was tweeted threats of “fire and fury” and Trump’s swaggering claims that his nuclear button is the biggest ever. Maybe it cowed Kim Jong-un into launching a charm offensive to be followed by the world’s first unilateral, nuclear disarmament.

If the prospect of winning the discredited bauble encourages them, so much the better. If not, giving the unlikely pair the Nobel peace prize can’t hurt. After all, both would slip easily into the cloaks of hypocrisy worn so well by many previous honorees.

Woodrow Wilson, the 1919 winner, was an extreme racist — even by the standards of his time — and avowed support of the Klu Klux Klan and re-segregating America.

Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State snagged the Peace Prize in 1945 for his role in setting up the United Nations but should be better remembered as a key player in keeping 950 Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis out of the United States in 1939.

The 1973 winner, Henry Kissinger, was orchestrating the illegal bombing of Cambodia while cutting a ceasefire deal with co-winner Le Duc Tho who had the decency to refuse the award as the killing raged on in Southeast Asia.

And most recently, Aung San Suu Kyi, the secular saint whose quiet pro-democracy defiance earned her international acclaim, the peace prize in 1991, and, led eventually, to the pinnacle of elected power in Myanmar. Once there, her deafening and complicit silence while hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingya were driven from their homes, in a deliberate campaign of murder, rape, pillage and destruction amounting to the worst genocide since Rwanda in 1993 suggested she deserves a summons from the international criminal court in the Hague rather than the honour from Oslo.

Trumpiteers should be careful what they wish for.


TOPICS: Heated Discussion
KEYWORDS: china; history; japan; korea; maga; mediawingofthednc; nixon; nobelpeaceprize; partisanmediashills; paulkoring; presstitutes; pyongyang; republicofkorea; russia; smearmachine; trump
Paul Koring has covered international affairs, including conflicts and crises from the Cold War to Afghanistan, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Paul's award-winning reporting has ranged from Prague’s Velvet Revolution to the gassing of the Kurds in Iraq and detainee-abuse in Afghanistan. He was a foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail for more than 25 years and won the Michener Award for public service journalism for his work on detainee torture and abuse in Afghanistan in 2007. He nominated for another Michener in 2009 for his investigation in Ottawa’s unlawful imposition of forced exile on a Canadian citizen. He is also a winner of Amnesty International’s award for human-rights journalism and The Globe’s Richard Doyle award for reporting. Prior to joining The Globe, he was posted to New York and London for Canadian Press.
1 posted on 05/06/2018 12:53:41 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

But he won’t bother mentioning about how both Wilson and Hull were Democrats.


2 posted on 05/06/2018 12:55:27 PM PDT by OttawaFreeper ("The Gardens was founded by men-sportsmen-who fought for their country" Conn Smythe, 1966)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Frankly in recent times we have seen that this award is nothing but a hollow attempt at giving legitimacy to to an organization. I think it would be an insult our president to give him the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize itself is peace as our great president said


3 posted on 05/06/2018 1:01:27 PM PDT by connyankee (#covfefe lives!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Those grapes are probably sour anyway.


4 posted on 05/06/2018 1:02:51 PM PDT by bray (Pray for President Trump)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Key korig - substitute “obozo” for Trump and “being 1./2 black” for everything having to do with building the peace between the Koreas and a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.

That was what you wrote when obozo won it, right? Same cynicism and derision, right?

Giving the prize to Trump won’t elevate it — it became crap when it went to arafat and then crap in the outhouse when it was given to obozo.

But it would be damn funny if Trump gets it. Just tro see the left go all “Scanners.”


5 posted on 05/06/2018 1:05:28 PM PDT by freedumb2003 (robert mueller is an unguided missile)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Crapola from shrank vegetarian brain.


6 posted on 05/06/2018 1:06:00 PM PDT by Leo Carpathian (FReeeeepeesssssed)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
If something big happens in Korea (far,*far* from certain) DJT absolutely *would not* get a Prize.Kim Jong Psychopath and the President of the ROK would...and we shouldn't be surprised if Osama Obama would as well.

DJT always will be a dangerous psychopath in the eyes of those,worldwide,whose opinions "matter".

7 posted on 05/06/2018 1:06:48 PM PDT by Gay State Conservative (You Say "White Privilege"...I Say "Protestant Work Ethic")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Crazy?

How about the clown who got the prize when he had done nothing. Literally nothing to earn it

THAT was crazy.


8 posted on 05/06/2018 1:06:53 PM PDT by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either satire or opinion. Or both.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Woodrow Wilson, the 1919 winner, was an extreme racist — even by the standards of his time — and avowed support of the Klu Klux Klan and re-segregating America.

A Proud Democrat supporting the Democrat Party, why is this controversial??


9 posted on 05/06/2018 1:18:57 PM PDT by eyeamok
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

The Nobel Peace Prize went to Arafat, a terrorist, who then went back to waging war.

Obama got one for not being Bush, then waged war on Syria. And paid Iran whether or not it stopped building nukes.

Trump is trying to get the U.S. out of being world police and actually got North Korea to stop acting so bullish. Whether they do anything or not is irrelevant, because the peaceful show is still progress. And ending the flood of money to nations whether or not they stop building weapons and funding terrorism slows them down.


10 posted on 05/06/2018 1:22:57 PM PDT by tbw2
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

We are getting ahead of ourselves with this meaningless nobel
peace prize stuff. Only folks talking about it are the media for its meaningless narrative. Why not bring it up after the meetings because we do not know yet if this is the same old NORK gimme stuff playbook.Trump will know whether he has to turn up the sanctions heat after the meeting


11 posted on 05/06/2018 2:01:28 PM PDT by chuckee
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To: chuckee

“It’s not that crazy”

Left wing moron. Obongo got one for ..well nothing actually. Trump is within a hair of bringing peace to a region and its border line crazy huh? Well F-U.


12 posted on 05/06/2018 2:05:08 PM PDT by gibsonguy
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
"Donald Trump and the tainted Nobel Peace Prize jury deserve each other. "

Wow, this guy starts out with a douchebag attitude immediately

13 posted on 05/06/2018 4:25:35 PM PDT by Smedley (It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Doesn’t get any more tainted than by being awarded to Obama for “having potential”....


14 posted on 05/07/2018 3:09:16 AM PDT by trebb (I stopped picking on the mentally ill hypocrites who pose as conservatives...mostly ;-})
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