It’s Impossible to Comprehend the Incomprehensible

In October 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to U.S. President Barack Obama, who had taken office in January of the same year. Here’s the explanation for why it was given: “For his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Obama promised to reject a unilateral foreign policy and spoke about how he would look after the interests of not just the U.S., but the entire world.

He lied.

To be fair, it must be said that neither Obama himself nor his administration liked the award. They disliked it so much that they reprimanded Norway’s ambassador to the United States. (The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded not by the Swedish Nobel Committee, but by the Norwegian.)

Here’s how Morten Wetland, Norway’s ambassador to the U.N., described it in an interview with France-Presse: “My most embarrassing day at the U.N., at the time when I was Norway’s ambassador there, was when Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was announced. Nobody was talking about it. My colleague in Washington received a reprimand from Obama’s chief of staff. The word ‘fawning’ was used.” In other words, U.S. President Barack Obama was not going to “reject a unilateral foreign policy” in the least, because a person who doesn’t think the U.S. is the primary country on the planet and doesn’t work only in its interests would never become its president. The Nobel Peace Committee made a mistake and now, five years later, it’s as clearly evident as ever.

Libya has disintegrated. Egypt, after two revolutions, is living under military control. Afghanistan has simply failed to build an independent state. Support for the “opposition” in Syria has led to a catastrophe in Iraq. And finally, the Nobel laureate’s biggest foreign policy achievement: a coup d’etat and civil war in one of Europe’s largest nations.

Things are difficult at this point for Barack Obama. Midterm congressional elections will be held in November, after which the 2016 presidential election will gradually begin to take shape. Obama has practically no time left to be of use to his party. His approval rating has been consistently falling for a few months now and as of today stands at 40 percent.

Americans don’t like what Israel is doing in Gaza with the open support of the Obama administration. Americans are alarmed by what is happening in Ferguson, where police are violently suppressing protests by blacks against the killing of a teenager by the police. Americans question the economic war against Russia and the peculiar silence over the Malaysian Boeing downed in Ukraine.

Americans feel ashamed before the whole world for the State Department’s daily briefings, where Jen Psaki and Marie Harf can never answer a single of journalist Matthew Lee’s simple questions. I’m not making this up. These are the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

And now, this too: A beautiful promo in which, against the background of a blue sky, a man in black cuts off the head of a man in orange. Prefacing this, the man in orange delivers a monologue, accusing America of all the evil in the world and ending with the words, “I wish I wasn’t American.”

The execution of journalist James Foley looks like the final nail in the coffin of Barack Obama’s presidency.

It has been a long time since an American has been beheaded before Americans’ very eyes. I remember, for example, what I felt when such a thing against Russians was shown on Russian TV: profound national humiliation. I imagine the Americans are feeling the same thing now. And I imagine the humiliation is comparable to what they felt on Sept. 11, 2001. In other words, nothing has changed. It’s all come back. For 13 years the country went somewhere, only to subsequently arrive at the same place it departed from.

Prior to Sept. 11, American intelligence agencies knew that a large-scale terrorist attack involving a civilian jet was being planned. But they couldn’t prevent it. The American intelligence agencies also knew the execution of a journalist was being planned, but they couldn’t save their citizen.

The intelligence agencies — listening in on everything and anything — are powerless in reality, despite all the billions. Despite the Patriot Act.

You can’t envy Barack Obama now—if, of course, for some reason you should make up your mind to envy him. But it’s no wonder Kozma Prutkov repeats the fundamental truth five times in “Fruits of Reflection”: “It’s impossible to comprehend the incomprehensible.” The United States has, of course, the world’s largest economy and the world’s most powerful army. And at present, the greater part of the world is looking on anxiously as the United States obliterates, one by one, everything that is not the United States. It succumbs to blackmail, introducing sanctions against one of the largest markets in the world.

But the world, like it or not, is nevertheless bigger than the United States; and one day the world will inevitably realize it. I’m not necessarily referring to those who, owing to their possession of nuclear weapons, don’t give a damn about the strength of any army.

Rather, I’m simply referring to how the United States is overstraining itself trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. A solitary knife in the hands of a man in black against the background of a blue sky might serve as the detonator of this overstraining.