*‘They Make War and Call it Peace’: The Shame of Obama’s Nobel Prize

Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant:  ‘They make solitude [desert] and call it peace’.  So wrote the Roman historian Caius Tacitus almost 2,000 years ago.  The text from which this quote is drawn deserves a bit more scrutiny:  “Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominis imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant”, says Tacitus (Life of Agricola 30), which has generally been rendered as follows:     ‘To robbery, slaughter and rapaciousness [rapere] they give the false name of empire; where they make a solitude they call it peace.’  Tacitus was describing the conduct of the Romans, to whom the “further limits of Britain” had been thrown open.  By solitude, Tacitus meant a ‘desert’; they laid waste to a place and so rendered it a place of solitude [solitudinem].  Somehow, reading Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered today in Oslo, Tacitus’s text comes to mind.

When nearly two months ago the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the conferral of the peace prize upon Obama, one wondered what Obama had done to deserve the honor, or what qualifications the Committee’s members had to bestow the prize upon Obama – or indeed anyone else.  Both questions are easily answered.  The Norwegians know something about salmon and lingon berries, and they should content themselves with that knowledge, and leave judgments about international governance and peace-making to others.  (The results of their previous efforts to ‘broker peace’, to use the debased jargon of realpolitik, are there to be seen in Sri Lanka.)  As for Obama’s qualifications, many people are persuaded, and who knows Obama himself among them, that his (supposed) repudiation of the policies of his predecessor in the White House has alone made him an eminently worthwhile candidate for unusual and great honors.  Quite tickled pink with the idea of his rock star charm, Obama even made a flying visit to Denmark to help in Chicago’s bid to stage the Olympics, only to receive a rude shock when Chicago was thrown out of the final round of competition with the lowest number of votes.  Once Obama had been so slighted, it may be argued, something had to be done to assuage his wounds.  And the Nobel Peace Prize is certainly there for the taking.

Many of the left objected, as indeed they should have, to the conferral of the Nobel Peace Prize upon Barack Obama, who is a wartime President of the United States.  Obama had, in October, already ruled out immediate withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan and was even contemplating an increased American military presence in Afghanistan, a step that has now become official policy.  His administration has retained the previous administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition and has, again in keeping with the trend established by his predecessor, blocked attempts to release photographs and other evidence of abuse from Abu Ghraib.  The objection that a wartime President should not be conferred the Nobel Peace Prize is an entirely legitimate one, but one that is futile.  Others may occasionally forget that the President of the United States is also, in title and in fact, the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, but Obama’s acceptance speech today does not shy from this fact.  As Commander-in-Chief, Nobel Laureate Barack Obama presides over a military establishment with a budget that dwarfs the military expenditures of every other country.  In 2008, the Stockholm Peace Research Institute has reported, the United States spent $607 billion on its armed forces, accounting for 41.5% of the world’s military expenditures.  By comparison, China spent $85 billion, France $66 billion, Britain $65 billion, Russia $59 billion, and India $30 billion.  Whatever else the US might be, it is, and has been for some time, a war-making machine.  That is the most fundamental and ineradicable part of its identity.  War is an American addiction, and Obama is no freer of that addiction than any other power-monger in American history. Unfortunately, Obama is not merely the victim of that addiction; he is today charged with peddling that addiction – arms sales of the most advanced weaponry also fall under his jurisdiction, for example — with palpable consequences for the rest of the world.

Thus, in accepting the Nobel Prize, Obama had to engage in some exercise of sophistry.  He perforce had to begin with reflection that, even as he receives the award, he has authorized the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Obama has mastered the art of appearing ‘noble’, in pursuit of higher truths – in his Nobel speech, this manifests partly as repeated invocations to Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  (Thankfully, Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, a matter of much regret to many well intentioned but hopelessly confused Indians who puzzle over his omission.)  Obama might have ruminated over the fact that the same Martin Luther King, only a year before his death, unhesitatingly described the United States ‘as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world’.  Independent-minded as he is or claims to be, Obama can rightfully claim that he can pick and choose what he likes from his alleged mentors.  As for Gandhi, that man seems to have an inescapable presence in Obama’s life, popping out of the bottle like some genie every now and then.   A few weeks ago, I wrote on this blog about how Obama, when asked by a schoolgirl who he would like to have had as his dinner guest, had identified Gandhi.  And, now, in his Nobel speech, here is Gandhi again:  “The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.”  How Obama loves that man!

Augustine and the church fathers authored the doctrine of ‘the just war’, and Obama’s fond enunciation of this tenet — with which Jesus’s name should not be associated — of the Christian faith will be celebrated by some as a reflection of his ‘principled’ stand on the question of war.  One thought that the distinction between the ‘bad war’ (Iraq) and the ‘good war’ (Afghanistan) had been buried by intelligent minds, but Obama has just breathed new life into this sterile, not to mention stupid, distinction.  The usual platitudes about the presence of evil in this world, and the pain he feels at sending young men and women into the killing fields aside, I could not but notice the sleight of hand with which he dispatched the idea of nonviolent resistance, which Obama otherwise claims to champion, into oblivion.  “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies”, said Obama; “Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”  I’m not aware that an international nonviolent movement was even remotely contemplated, much less brought into existence, but it has become an article of unquestioned faith to argue that Gandhian-style nonviolent resistance would not have survived a minute against Nazi Germany.  Still, supposing that Obama is right in rehearsing this cliché, what is striking is that he should have used the most extreme example of the exercise of violence, namely totalitarian Nazi Germany, to support his call for war in Afghanistan.  So is Afghanistan an instance of the unmitigated evil that men can do?  And if al-Qaeda and Afghanistan – notice, too, the easy and implicit pairing of the two – are reminiscent of the days of Hitler, surely this is a ‘just war’?

The avid lovers of Foucault, and the myriad other postmodernists and poststructuralists, should all be on notice, if they were not previously, that in Obama we have the latest instantiation of the view that, in our progressive times, we shall be killed by kindness.

*Obama, Gandhi, and a Few Morsels of Food: Part I, On the Ideal Dinner Guest

Earlier this month, as Barack Obama prepared to deliver a national address to school-children, conservative politicians, radio talk-show hosts, and many ordinary citizens went on the offensive at the thought that the President was proposing to indoctrinate young minds with communist ideology.  School boards were instructed in a number of states that parents who wished to spare their wards the ordeal of being addressed by a sitting President of the United States could withdraw their children for the day from school or at least from a live viewing of Obama’s address.  Indeed, the White House even made the speech available to schools before it was broadcast, lest anyone should have occasion to accuse the President of secretly hoisting dirty or radical ideas upon the young.  (No lesser a person than Socrates, let us recall, was compelled to consume poison after he was found guilty of leading the young astray.)  As it transpires, Obama gave a harmless little speech, venturing forth, as he often does, to inspire the nation’s youth with sunny thoughts about the virtues of schooling, the gains to be wrought from hard work, the importance of education in shaping a bright future, learning from one’s failures, and the desirability of dreaming.   This talk should be described as an improvement of sorts upon the efforts of his predecessor who, at a commencement address, I think at his alma mater Yale, lovingly described how he had managed to secure the Presidency of the United States even as a ‘C’ student in his undergraduate days.  (And then we’ve been told that in banana republics high elected offices are for sale, when not appropriated at the barrel of a gun.)  We might say that Obama’s speech is in a similar mold, if more elevated in style, substance, and elegance of delivery:  dream the best dreams, and they may well come true.  The road to the White House is less crooked than is imagined.

Leaving aside for the present the question of whether there is anything more than a liberal bone in Obama’s body, and the even more interesting question as to why this kind of political comedy is peculiar to the United States, there is a little detail about his visit with 32 ninth-graders at Wakefield High School in Arlington before his address that demands attention.  One girl by the name of Lily posed this question to the President: “And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”  The room shook with genial laughter.  “Well, you know, dead or alive, that’s a pretty big list,” Obama replied to more mirth making. “You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine.”  Had Obama said Marx, Mao, or Che – let us stick with the dead, with known ‘revolutionary’ figures, and with those who are of foreign vintage – there would have been an uproar, to say the least.   But Gandhi:  isn’t he the harmless little chap, Jesus-like, who spoke about turning the other cheek, and giving away the cloak (not that Gandhi owned one)?  So, though Gandhi has his detractors, as I recall from some of the vitriolic reviews of the hagiographic film by Attenborough that appeared in late 1982, for the most part he is viewed as the champion of non-violence, the apostle of peace, the messenger of love, and so on – pick your favorite cliché.  In the received version of what Gandhi wrought, he used non-violence successfully against the somewhat gentlemanly British, who having failed to hold on to their colonies on the east coast of America moved on to India.  (And, here’s a small history lesson from a history professor, all this is captured in the figure of Lord Cornwallis, who disgraced himself by conceding defeat to George Washington – see the painting by John Trumbull, ‘Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown’, 1797 — and was at once sent to India to lord it over the natives, which Cornwallis proceeded to do with a reckless piece of legislation called the ‘Permanent Settlement.’)  If Obama had picked a somewhat unusual figure as his ideal dinner guest, at least he had picked a charming if somewhat quixotic world historical figure.

In a later blog, I shall turn my attention to the idea of Gandhi as one of Obama’s heroes.  For now, let us try to digest the idea of Obama dining with Gandhi.  What would the evening have looked like?   Obama himself elaborated on the possibilities:  “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn’t eat a lot.”  Indeed, Gandhi ate very little, often nothing more than small raw or boiled vegetables, a small bowl of curds or yogurt, and, apparently, quite a few nuts.  It is the nuts, which are not the poor man’s food, that might have prompted Gandhi’s close friend, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, to quip, “It costs a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”  Had Obama wanted to make his audience go nuts with laughter, he could have cited Naidu, but among the hordes of his advisors there is evidently no Gandhi specialist.  Now let us continue with Obama, who immediately added the following:  “But he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King, so if it hadn’t been for the nonviolent movement in India, you might not have seen the same nonviolent movement for civil rights here in the United States. He inspired César Chávez”, the last a reference to the eminent Chicano political activist and labor union leader.  So Gandhi ate very little, “but he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in.”   Obama’s use of “but” is, to put it gently, bizarre:  the supposition is that though Gandhi ate very little, it is still possible to be inspired by him.  Perhaps, in a land where food is plenty, one has to be a huge or at least generous consumer of food to be taken seriously?

The next course of the dinner — Part II of ‘Obama, Gandhi, and a Few Morsels of Food’ — to follow tomorrow.