blessed is the colt peacemaker


Yesterday, in an article for Crikey, I commented on (what seemed to me) an astonishing suggestion in Time magazine that the Nobel Peace Prize should have been awarded to nuclear weapons. Let me repeat. A. Peace. Prize. For. Nuclear. Fucking. Weapons. Today, I discover in the New York Times that Thomas Friedman thinks that the prize should have been accepted on behalf of the US military, including those occupying Iraq (where more than a million people have been killed) and Afghanistan (where 1500 civilians died last year). What remains to be said anymore? Roll out the next column: freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength, etc, etc.

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland.

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  1. and didn’t obama say ‘i accept this on behalf of the promise of america to rebuild a better world’ or some such rubbish? i think he was secretly quite mortified to be receiving it though. dude’s not stupid. he would be able to see how crazy it is…

  2. Some people actually seriously believe it. My grandfather used to say that without Nuclear weapons more people whould’ve died or worse, we’d be speaking Japanese.

    Fucking unbelievable. Proves how worthless to Nobel Prize is anyway.

  3. What about the irony of a peace prize being generated from Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune from inventing dynamite and weapon manufacture. I wonder how many lives he was responsible for ‘saving.’

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