There was no point to adding that and just inflames people’s frustrations over a situation that isn’t improving. I enjoy many of the topics on this site but please.. advocating for one moment the idea that palestinians are the terrorists and thus implying that hebrews are just innocent chosen ones of god is stupid, and has no place here.

Of course, Britain had the run of the whole of Ireland during the intense and extensive submarine war of 1914-18. It didn’t do much good for the Lusitania whose passengers, both living and dead, my grandmother as a young woman saw being brought ashore in Cóbh.

One u-boat did show up off Ventry in Dingle Bay in October 1939 and shuttled ashore 30 Greek seamen whom it rescued from a freighter it had torpedoed. It was itself subsequently depth-charged off Shetland by, ironically, the HMS Kelly. Louis Mountbatten, the Commander, ordered the enemy crew, who had all safely abandoned ship, to be brought on board in chivalrous recognition of their treatment of the foundered Greeks.

BTW, it was the RAF’s Air-Sea Rescue Service that covered the whole Irish coast in the post-war era up till only a couple of years ago, and did heroic work in a most courageous and selfless fashion, saving many lives. The Irish and, of course, the foreign seamen rescued and, many of them, rushed to hospital owe them an especial debt.

On the subject of Sweden’s iron ore, Ireland, as you say, maintained a strict neutrality and had no commercial dealings at all with Germany. This neutrality was not so “studious”, however, as to prevent Irish citizens from joining the various branches of Britain’s armed forces. Some fifty thousand did so during the war. And many thousands more worked in the war industry in Britain.

You mock my “rage” with your pious solicitude but mislocate its cause. Ilya Somin in an attempt to rehabilitate the absurdity of Obama’s award chose to smear a very great man, “not a bad person” in your cockamamie scheme of things. Like many a lawyer pleading a poor cause, he overplayed his hand with mention of MacBride. You supported him in his silliness and with a zeal he himself chose not to display. Your national identity is of course not relevant except as a polemical aside. You choose to mention it ever and always because, like most on the losing side of an argument, you find a nice fillet of red herring takes the edge off eating crow. Your desperate dragging of “Nazi agents” into the issue triggers Godwin’s Law and allows me to declare outright victory.

My “rage” abates. I survey the field. Nary a foe standing, be they American, British or, like Dev during the “Emergency”, coyly non-alligned. I nominate myself for the Nobel, y’know, Peace Prize. But, wait! What’s this? I am an Irish Republican and, in the nature of things, identify with “The Organization”. No, not that, not “The Organization”! I am rejected out of hand. The lesson has been learned. Outraged tut-tutting and anguished wringing of hands must at all costs be avoided, especially from American law professors and the indefatigably anonymized in Dublin. My crest falls with an unbecoming clatter on the worn lino of the safe house in Leitrim I now cower within. My “rage” returns but now redoubled, quadrupled, no, octupled, indeed upled beyond all hope of measurement. I seethe, I rend… Hang on, my wife is calling. Breakfast’s on the table. Oh well, at least I didn’t mention the Nazis…Oops!

I did not try to apologize for the pro-Treaty forces here (quite obviously none of them deserves a Peace Nobel), just to point out that a non-violent solution was possible within the confines of the Free State, as the peaceful victory of Éamon De Valera’s republican Fianna Fáil in the thirties clearly showed.

Seán MacBride did help to build Saor Éire in 1932, but he had not resigned from the IRA at that time. He even became chief of staff of the IRA for a short period of time when Moss Twomey was arrested in 1936, which he certainly wouldn’t have had he not identified with the organization. Even after his resignation from the IRA he maintained some of the IRA’s contacts with Nazi secret agents.

That doesn’t make him a bad person, overall. But it does call into question his qualification for a, y’know, Peace Prize.

lukas: I am not American, why would you assume I was? I live in the fair city of Dublin.There is no doubt that the British behaved atrociously in Ireland, their prototypical colony. But does that excuse the Irish Civil War, a war fought against the elected government of Ireland whose death toll exceeded that of the war for independence? Does it excuse the post-war IRA terror? At the very latest, the 1932 elections should have made it clear that working with the Free State, not against it, was the way forward.

I assume Ilya Somin is American and it was he who made the initial slur. Though you reside in Dublin, you do not say you’re Irish. From your silence one is free to infer that you are not. Your command of English points to a native speaker. There are no grounds for your indignation if I assume you to be a Britisher in one guise or other.

There is no excuse for any war except the reasons for which it is fought. One’s attitude to a war is determined by one’s attitude to why it was fought.

The British Government before Partition was similarly elected and sat in Parliament with 105 Irish MP, a gross over-representation, most of whom were Nationalist. Yet, you imply, the War of Independence was just because the British “behaved atrociously”. But only, you will admit, because the Irish refused to be quiescent. The Free State Government behaved more atrociously, ordering at cabinet level the execution by firing squad of 77 anti-Treaty prisoners of war, with not even the cloak of due process to cover their moral nakedness. The British would have balked at quasi-legal barbarism of this magnitude.

This of course is why the death-toll during the Civil War was higher than that of the War of Independence: the British were brutal but were constrained by world opinion and a decency which their populace expected them to at least pay some service to. Cosgrave, Mulcahy, De Blaghd, O’Higgins and the rest could operate free from such considerations and did so with no compunction. It is little wonder that the Free Staters formed the backbone of the Blue Shirts as Ireland’s contribution to the European Fascist rainbow in the 30s.

By the 1932 election, Seán MacBride had resigned from the IRA and was forming Saor Éire, a non-physical force Republican party. What happened subsequent to MacBride’s leaving the IRA is irrelevant to the slur of terrorist with which Ilya Somin smears him. No serious student of the Irish Civil War ever regarded the Anti-Treaty side as terrorists with the exception of those few Imperial apologists who view the IRA from 1918 onwards as such. They at least have consistency, if little else, on their side. The Civil War was tragic but as inevitable a result of the morally vacuous Anglo-Irish Treaty as Hitler’s rise and WW II were the fruits of the Treaty of Versailles to which the self-same British were eager signatories.

In the HBO mini-series “John Adams” Ben Franklin tells Congress that the British Crown, if given a choice between doing what is right and what is not right, invariably chooses the latter. If we could have dug him up at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and revivified him with one of his kites in a thunderstorm, he would not have found any reason to revise his opinion.

Irish men have shed much blood in the twentieth century for the cause of Freedom and all of it, every drop, flows through the Palace of Westminster before entering the ocean of misery which the inhabitants of that place have squeezed out of my country. If we are are to be terrorists, then so are they because it is they and they alone who have made us so.

But, I forget myself! They were, are, and no doubt always shall be, an “elected” government. I’m sure the young men dragged to their deaths down Co. Cork boreens tied to the back of the military’s Crossley tenders consoled themselves with fond thoughts of the “electedness” of those who paid the driver to stamp on the pedal.

Bah, sir. Go bother someone who doesn’t know the bloody score with your ill-informed casuistry.

There is no doubt that the British behaved atrociously in Ireland, their prototypical colony. But does that excuse the Irish Civil War, a war fought against the elected government of Ireland whose death toll exceeded that of the war for independence? Does it excuse the post-war IRA terror? At the very latest, the 1932 elections should have made it clear that working with the Free State, not against it, was the way forward.

epluribus says:

Arafat didn’t win the prize because he was a terrorist. He won because he tried to reach peace with Rabin and Peres, despite the fact that he was a terrorist.

He pretended to reach peace, as a cover for continuing terrorism.

Sean McBride was a terrorist once, but he appears to have genuinely renounced terrorism, several decades before he received the Peace Prize.

lukas:
The Free State wasn’t exactly an English occupier, now was it?

The Free State Army was made up of the Pro-Treaty IRA and a Civil War broke out between them and their IRA comrades who opposed accepting the Treaty. It started when the FSA bombarded the IRA quartered in the Four Courts in Dublin with howitzers supplied by the ever kindly and solicitous British. The Free State troops had been terrorists when in the IRA but now, having acceded to British wishes, were by the ineffable power of London’s sanction, transformed each one into veritable Warriors of All That Is Good!!!

I truly wish that Ilya and lukas and the rest of the casually righteous would inform themselves about how the British behaved themselves during the War of Independence – let’s forget about the 750 years since the Anglo-Norman invasion – particularly the Black and Tans, the Auxiliaries and the Scottish regiments, the latter aflame with pure sectarian bigotry.

The ‘Tans burned down the City of Cork, where I now sit writing this, and a British murder squad, complete with blackened faces, shot dead Tomás MacCurtain, the city’s democratically elected Lord Mayor, in the dead of night on the landing of his stairs in his pajamas before his terrified wife and children – all within less than a mile from where I was born and bred.

Yes, he was also OC of one of Cork’s IRA battalions and he had a uniform to prove it and that was why he was the democratically elected Lord Mayor of a city which was the cockpit of the war to end British rule. We had, you know, tried politics – John Redmond, Charles Stuart Parnell and Daniel O’Connell spring to mind. As the American revolutionaries found, petitions to the Crown, absent firearms and men willing to use them against the mightiest military power then existing, are simply exercises in calligraphy.

I understand the ill-will of some British towards us as we bet them and bet them well when they were still in their pomp.

Americans of such a disposition mystify me. Their own country fought an earlier bloody war against the same all-powerful enemy though with far less provocation and a far mightier body of water separating them from the foe and his enduring malice. Were the American revolutionaries also “terrorists” or is that opprobrium reserved merely for the Irish among them?

Dee: Any prize awarded to Jimma Carter, Yasir Arafat, Al Gore & Barack Hussein Obama can have no redemption. It is not worth having and the Norwegians should just discontinue it and hang their heads in shame.

Any self-respecting proponent of human rights and basic standards of honesty and forthrightness would decline accepting this farce of an award.

Just to be clear, while a Bush selection would be justifiable in a way the Obama selection was not, it would not be justified. The potential exists for it, in a couple decades, if the chips fall well for him (extremely well, on second thought, given the political hole he’s starting from) — just as they might well do for Obama — but right now Bush would be a bad choice just as Obama was, if less emphatically so and if for entirely different reasons.

Your concern for Havel’s reputation confirms my personal feeling toward the prize, developed over the last 30 years: the poor quality of winners has detracted from the prestige of the prize rather than enhanced the reputations of winners. And this is not caused by only the worst winners. Al Gore and Jimmy Carter probably rate somewhere in the middle, but Gore was chosen for his AGW scam and Carter has revealed himself to be an unrepentant antisemite in the years following the rapprochement he brokered between Egypt and Israel. Most Norwegians, sad to say, agree with both of them. The worst Peace Prize winners get attention, but the average winners are pretty bad as well, and the criteria for winning seem to have nothing to do with achieving world peace.

It’s a real shame Cory Aquino didn’t get the opportunity to receive the prize before dying. It’s not everyday that someone leads a peaceful revolt against dictatorship, rewrites the Constitution from scratch giving herself less power in the process, faces down six different coup attempts from within the armed forces (one of which was put down with the help of the American fighter jets which patrolled the skies over Manila, preventing the coup plotters from using air power), and then peacefully passes power onto her successor and returns to private life.

Did he ever repent?

Neither one of them a true Scotsman.

The IRA was just a part of the long history of Irish rebellions for freedom that began in the 1500s against their English occupiers.

The Free State wasn’t exactly an English occupier, now was it?

Not that there was anything wrong with that. The IRA was just a part of the long history of Irish rebellions for freedom that began in the 1500s against their English occupiers. Civilian loyalists supporting the occupier have always been targeted during such wars, as no doubt it happened during our Revolution.

You didn’t just say that Kissinger is not right wing. You also implied that he is irrelevant. [Something to the effect of "He's been out of the picture forever and I only hear about him when lefties bring him up."]

Strict says:
Oh, and at that Kissinger speech, someone asked him what the Bush administration planned on doing. He replied something like “oh, WE have a plan.” So do you think he and Bush sat down together and hashed out a plan together — or that he sat down with Bush and told Bush what to do? What’s more likely?

I just said that Kissinger was not a conservative and have been making the point over and over again on this forum that neither was Bush. “Compassionate conservatism” was his term for liberal-lite, a philosophy he shared with the candidate your media picked for the Republicans to run in 2009.

If you want to use the term “right-wing” then at least understand that not everyone in the Republican Party is “right-wing”. You can have the country clubbers and RINOs on your team if you wish.

Interesting, I saw Kissinger speak soon after the 9/11 attacks. He seemed to be VERY relevant then, especially considering he was appointed by President George W. Bush to head the 9/11 Commission, and he was also an advisor to Bush on other warfare and foreign policy issues.

Of course, if you want to argue that he has been irrelevant for decades, go ahead. Or if you want to argue that after 9/11, Bush’s go-to man for policy advice was a non-conservative, non-right wing man, that’s fine. But unless you back it up, it’s baseless assertion.

Strict says:
He’s (Kissinger) a nasty man. I’m not sure why he’s such a darling of the right wing.

More left wing mythology. I hadn’t thought about, heard about, or heard from Kissinger in decades, until he was brought up in this thread. He, like Nixon, was not a conservative (which is what the “right wing” is composed of) but since you hate them both, they must be ours, eh?

Somin: “Still, one could argue that Obama was a worthy winner based on the implicit standards established by prior awards.”

By that standard we are all worthy.

He’s a nasty man. I’m not sure why he’s such a darling of the right wing.

Exactly for the reasons he’s nasty–East Timor, Chile, Bangladesh, Argentina, etc.

They aren’t just “back.” They are seizing vast swaths of land in Pakistan, threatening to overthrow the Pakistani government. The Taliban poses a much greater threat now than it did in Dec. 2001 – it actually has a chance of gaining control of nuclear weapons now.

He’s a nasty man. I’m not sure why he’s such a darling of the right wing.

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote but I would say this: overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and giving the people in Afghanistan and Iraq the chance to create peaceful democratic government (whether they will succeed or not in the long run is still unknown) was good thing even if the people who award the Nobel Peace Prize Committee don’t agree.

I agree, up to a point. Overthrowing Saddam was, in my opinion, a good thing. If that’s all Bush did, I would applaud him, but he stayed in Iraq way too long, spent way too much money, and lost way too many lives. Overthrowing the Taliban was good, but it was just temporary. They are back again and fighting even harder. The problem with these things, even if they are good, is that they aren’t making peace. Now I agree that war is sometimes the only answer–but it isn’t peace, at least not if you reject Orwell’s Newspeak.

Thorley Winston says:
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote but I would say this: overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and giving the people in Afghanistan and Iraq the chance to create peaceful democratic government (whether they will succeed or not in the long run is still unknown) was good thing even if the people who award the Nobel Peace Prize Committee don’t agree.

I agree that was a good thing, but supposedly, we didn’t go there to “democratize” anything, it just happened to be a byproduct of our WOT (and being fed up with the UN’s endless toothless “resolutions”). If that was the stuff of Peace Prizes, Obama should invade China, Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and most of the other hundred fifty or so religious and political totalitarian/dictatorships tomorrow, and guarantee himself the PP in perpetuity. While in the long run, since democracies don’t seem to invade each other at all, it might be the best thing to do to eliminate war, it hardly seems a “peaceful” enough path to inspire others in a good way.

Although ridding the planet of the Religion of Leftism should certainly qualify one for the Perpetual Peace Price, if only that were possible.

Kissinger’s entire career should perclude any award to him.

But any fault, if fault there be here, is not Obama’s. He didn’t “claim” the prize; it was awarded to him by others.

Cheers,

A horrible taint.