Nobel Prize Part of West's Propaganda Fog

The U.S. imperialists attacked the North African state of Libya in order to seize the oil-rich country and establish a military beachhead inside the region. Thousands have died in the imperialist war., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Nobel Prize part of West’s propaganda fog

October 29, 2013 Opinion & Analysis
Finian Cunningham

THE Nobel Peace Prize should be renamed the Nobel Propaganda Prize, after this year’s ever-so contrived award to the UN-approved chemical weapons team sent to disarm Syria.Other dubious winners of the “illustrious” prize include the accused war criminal, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who oversaw the genocidal carpet-bombing of Indochina during the 1970s

More recently, another accused war criminal, US President Barack Obama, is among the honorees of the award despite his ongoing use of assassination and murderous aggression in multiple countries, including Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.

A Norwegian-based committee of seemingly Scandinavian neutrality makes the award every year as it has done for more than a century ever since 1901.

The prize was the creation of Alfred Nobel, a major armaments manufacturer. That in itself speaks volumes on the institution’s contradictory nature.

Last year, the winner of the Nobel Prize was yet another disgrace to morals and common sense in the form of the European Union.
How can a bloc of governments be remotely considered peaceful when it is wiping out basic social welfare for millions of its citizens in the service of criminal banks and elite private wealth?

Or when it is lifting a weapons embargo on extremists running amok in Syria? Or colluding in the enforcement of crippling economic sanctions on Iran — based on nuclear calumnies cooked up by Western military intelligence — sanctions that are killing women and children from the lack of basic imported medicines?

While there have been a few deserving winners of the Nobel Peace Prize down through the years, nevertheless it is best to treat this institution with scepticism, if not derision.

The meritorious aspects of the award can serve to give credence to the dubious and deplorable associates. In that way, it is more Propaganda Prize than Peace Prize.

This year’s recipient, the inspection team belonging to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, only begun their work last week to dismantle stockpiles in Syria.

This is part of the arrangement that Russia proposed last month to avert an illegal war of aggression being planned by the Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama.

The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has fully signed up to the disarmament process. However, it is precocious, to say the least, to award the OPCW with the Nobel prize, just like it was for the Oslo-based committee to give the award to Obama in 2009, only within months of his first election and before he went on to prove himself one of America’s most warmongering presidents since World War II.

How do we know that the OPCW will be effective in disarming the chemical weapons of the Western-backed mercenary groups fighting to overthrow the Assad government?

How do we know that the OPCW will not mischievously misuse its remit and Nobel Laureate status to advance the Western propaganda narrative against the Syrian government?

The awarding of a peace prize based on no track record conjures suspicion that the institution and its benign connotations are being used to inculcate a reprehensible political agenda.

The same insidious propaganda formula of supposed virtue concealing vice can also be seen in the report this week by the New York-based Human Rights Watch group on massacres carried out by foreign-backed militants in Syria.

That report accuses up to 20 Al Qaeda-linked groups, including Al Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Shams, of killing scores of civilians in Syria’s western Latakia Province during early August.

Such apparently damning testimony from a Western human rights organization may seem like a positive development. But, as with the Nobel Peace Prize, there is a very real danger that the HRW report is merely acting as a whitewash of Western government crimes.

For a start, the HRW report claims that it has found the “first evidence of crimes against humanity by opposition forces”. That infers that previous atrocities are attributable to the Syrian government forces. This is simply false. Many reliable sources have found that most, if not all, major massacres in villages and towns across Syria over the past two and half years have been committed by the anti-government mercenary groups.

Western media and human rights groups, including HRW and Amnesty International, have deliberately or incompetently mis-attributed those crimes to Syrian government forces, which then serve to bestow a false moral authority on Western governments for their illicit interference in Syria.

Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime.