Absurd Nobel decision
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama is arguably one of the most absurd decisions the Nobel committee has ever made. Highly patronizing, it will be received with incredulity around the world. In fact, there’s rarely been an award that has been so obviously partisan and political in its intention.
The award is apparently an encouragement to the US’ first black president and a way of expressing hopes that there will be a new direction in Washington’s policy.
However, all of this undermines the point of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama has only been in office since the beginning of the year and while his foreign peace aims are noble, his achievements are rather few. He has done nothing in the Middle East and nothing to improve relations with Russia.
In his own homeland he has actually undermined peace by becoming the most pro-abortion president ever elected. Former Nobel winner Mother Teresa once said that “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.”
To award a prize simply on hope suggests a naivete and a blindness that will only damage the value of the prize.
TOM RICHARDSON
London, England
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama had no “surprise” value whatsoever. The award has been corrupted by the political left for decades now.
The awarding of the prize to Obama is directly related to the extreme statist ambitions of Obama’s administration combined with the statist bias of the Kool-Aid Prize committee. Rehearsing the scandalous history of the “prize” in full would be more tedious than a simple link to the Wikipedia entry.
I merely suggest that the Taipei Times either ignore future Nobel Kool-Aid Prize awards, or relegate such stories to minor columns, as the prize (along with its sister the Nobel Prize for Literature) has been so degraded over the years, and particularly with this latest award, that it is clearly nothing more than a badge of ultra-coolness for the statist left to pin upon their heroes.
Peace can only emerge from justice, and achieving justice is extremely difficult, so much so that in the Middle East it can appear impossible at times. The Nobel Peace Prize has nothing to do with this most daunting area of human endeavor. Everyone should just quit acting like it does.
MICHAEL FAGAN
Tainan
Silence on ‘compatriots’
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) delegation of athletes at the Deaflympics last month did not attend the opening ceremony on Sept. 5, but part of the team did show up for the closing ceremony two weeks later, in full view of the public and on TV.
In an unusual move, the PRC team did not carry the Chinese flag upon entering the stadium during the closing ceremony, but instead held up a long red banner with white simplified Chinese characters that read “Go, Taiwanese compatriots in the disaster zone.”
While the thought may have been sincere and heartfelt, wishing a speedy recovery to victims of Typoon Morakot in the southern part of this country — which the PRC team was visiting as foreign guests — it was at the same time a strange sight to see the PRC banner calling their Taiwanese hosts at this international event “compatriots.”
Compatriots means people from the same country. How on earth could the PRC team have the chutzpah to unfurl such a propagandistic banner in a foreign country? And how did they get away with it, with virtually no criticism from anyone in Taiwan, certainly not anyone in the government or the ruling party and not even anyone in the opposition party?
It is hard to imagine this Alice in Wonderland behavior happening in any other country. Writing the term “compatriot” on that banner meant that the PRC team was saying that Taiwan is part of communist China. It is the height of arrogance to unfurl such an untrue phrase in a foreign country where the PRC team are guests of the Taiwanese.
Taiwanese are not “compatriots” to the communist Chinese in the PRC.
The Americans and the British are not compatriots, even though we have many things in common in our inherited cultures, nor are Canadians and Americans compatriots in any sense of the word. We are friends, but we are not compatriots.
Brits, Canadians, Americans, Australians and New Zealanders all live in separate countries. They are not compatriots. For the PRC team to unfurl its banner in public at the Deaflympics calling their Taiwanese hosts “compatriots” was blatant propaganda.
Did anyone in Taiwan complain about this? Or was this kind of rude and impolite linguistic behavior on the part of the visiting PRC team just accepted by the Taiwanese public as par for the course, business as usual? I did not see any news reports complaining about the banner insult.
DAN BLOOM
Chiayi
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