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POPSNobel Peace Prize Winners Comment: absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself. Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world. Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace. The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s decision to “strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
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POPSGermany’s War of Words in Afghanistan It’s war taking place along the Hindu Kush, he explained to the minister. There are good and not-so-good reasons for the German government to shy away from using the word “war” in connection with the killing and dying German soldiers are doing in Afghanistan. It certainly can’t just be the accepted definition of war that is causing the government to so stubbornly reject the term. After all, war can " but doesn’t have to be " a conflict between countries. History tells us that there were innumerable other conflicts that have been referred to as wars. And the Americans have used the word for their operations in Afghanistan for some time. Shouldn’t the deciding factor be how the German soldiers define what they are experiencing? “If we were to talk about war, we would just be focusing on the military dimension,” says Jung to explain his linguistic choice. Apparently, the idea is to not encourage a military escalation with a verbal escalation.
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POPSCongo, Bongo and Dead Souls Never fails to sell newspapers, the propensity of the shadow to project itself onto suitable objects of externalisation. You don't need to be a Jungian to appreciate the conceptual difference between psychological pathology as a cause for the erotic satisfaction of souls thin as words on paper in the terminal death rattle of slaughter and hatred as the final attempt to feel, and the nature of war as lived through fully human experience. It's the former Fromm addresses in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the latter by those involved.
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