War’s Worst Enemy
Published in Gandul
(Romania) on 10 October 2009
by Cristian Tudor Popescu (link to original)
First of all, before any other comments, I want to say I am happy that Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. After being elected by the Americans, through this prize, Obama is getting closer to what he has been for me from the very beginning: the president of Earth, and therefore, my president, the only one I admire and respect. War and Peace. What is the worst enemy the war has? Is it peace? I believe there are types of “cold peace” that are far more strenuous than war. In order to stably counter war, peace should, at least in theory, be founded on reason and most of all on the human being. The war’s worst enemy is, in fact, humanist rationalism. If our way of thinking was rational and we could get beyond race, sex, religion or politics and place the human being at the very top of our intellectual constructions, then war would never exist. As Isaac Asimov wrote in the “Foundation,” “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
Obama loomed into history as a character of the “Asimovian” cycle. In the midst of planetary peevishness outlined by bloody and damaging conflicts, caused mainly by Bush’s America, Obama refused to address the reptilian brain, refused to address our lowest innate reflexes, as most politicians do. He spoke like a true intellectual, one with common sense and honest intentions, addressing everything that is noble and good in a man. Moreover, in a very short time, he managed to transform the “ambiance” of international diplomacy, steering it towards dialogue and mutual tolerance. He released the pressure in seriously malformed relations between the USA and the Islamic world. He brought about the abandonment of the American anti-rocket shield in South-Eastern Europe. After Condoleezza Rice, who is intelligent but without personality, praised the idea of the USA being the only nuclear force of the world, Barack Obama pleaded with the U.N. for a world without nuclear weapons. He put aside the presumptuous speech written for the representative of the world’s one and only superpower and instead gave the United States a new place at a civilized discussion panel. Obama’s America may very well be reborn as “the good soft superpower” and end up again “in the hearts of the people of the world,” as Sarkozy said.
Some of my fellow nationals are kidding themselves that, through the success of Herta Müller, Romania also was awarded a Nobel Prize. Ok, let’s say things were like that, that we were indeed good enough to deserve the Nobel Prize for literature. But the Nobel Peace Prize, on the other hand, I do not believe it will ever reach these places. Unless, of course, they invent the Nobel Prize for government rows.
Obama loomed into history as a character of the “Asimovian” cycle. In the midst of planetary peevishness outlined by bloody and damaging conflicts, caused mainly by Bush’s America, Obama refused to address the reptilian brain, refused to address our lowest innate reflexes, as most politicians do. He spoke like a true intellectual, one with common sense and honest intentions, addressing everything that is noble and good in a man. Moreover, in a very short time, he managed to transform the “ambiance” of international diplomacy, steering it towards dialogue and mutual tolerance. He released the pressure in seriously malformed relations between the USA and the Islamic world. He brought about the abandonment of the American anti-rocket shield in South-Eastern Europe. After Condoleezza Rice, who is intelligent but without personality, praised the idea of the USA being the only nuclear force of the world, Barack Obama pleaded with the U.N. for a world without nuclear weapons. He put aside the presumptuous speech written for the representative of the world’s one and only superpower and instead gave the United States a new place at a civilized discussion panel. Obama’s America may very well be reborn as “the good soft superpower” and end up again “in the hearts of the people of the world,” as Sarkozy said.
Some of my fellow nationals are kidding themselves that, through the success of Herta Müller, Romania also was awarded a Nobel Prize. Ok, let’s say things were like that, that we were indeed good enough to deserve the Nobel Prize for literature. But the Nobel Peace Prize, on the other hand, I do not believe it will ever reach these places. Unless, of course, they invent the Nobel Prize for government rows.