You decide. (via Normblog, who has more patience to analyze this reactionary blather than I do)
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Maguire was born January 27, 1945, which means that she’s not sixty yet, so it’s unlikely that it’s senility.
Couldn’t it just be hatred of Israel? Isn’t that a prerequisite for the Nobel Peace Prize? I thought it was.
maguire’s CV is quite impressive http://www.peacepeople.com/MaireadCMaguire.htm She has probably,like many such,got out of her depth.But why specifically Israeli nuclear weapons?
Well. Perhaps, it’s because they say these things because they’re not in these situation? Still, this is an incredibly dumb thing to say. Why doesn’t she castigate Iran, for instance?
Maybe its just flawed thinking. Winning a Nobel Peace prize doesn’t necessitate that you can make a balanced analogy…or was that a metaphor…maybe Roger can tell us.
I guess she’s trying to imply that Nuclear weapons are instruments of genocide perfected. But that is, at best, an oversimplication of both Nuclear Armament issues and the history of the holocaust as well as genocide in general.
f
Peter:
The reason she singles out Israel is because it ties into the lefts mantra of Zionism equals racism, of the canard that the US and Israel are the two most dangerous governments in the world. Now I could be wrong and possibly she always mentions the death camps when she talks about nuclear weapons and if I am wrong then I would apologize but her comments seem to dovetail into the euro-left’s continued demonization of Israel. The test would be to ask her whether Irans attempt to develop nukes is equal to the nazi gas chambers. This would be the true test of her thoughts.
Once I heard a German sigh at such ravings and say “The people who say these things, they never knew the Nazis.”
The desire to assimilate Auschwitz to Hiroshima is antisemitism, even if unintended. For the liberal utopians, the bomb, whose spread constitutes the impossibility of surviving a total war, is the symbol of an age when we must reject our violent past and build the new order of love and peace. But while the bomb would presumably have been dropped on Germany if developed earlier, the Holocaust is the unwanted reminder that we are driven by resentments against particular groups and individuals. The obvious need to forego total war is certainly not a sign or guarantee that we can build a utopian order without conflict. The Jew who was the obstacle at the start of the utopian idea of building an earthly Kingdom of God around a universal Christianity, the Jew who reminds us of our resentful humanity and is honest enough not to pretend we can ever over come it – favoring a realistic approach to restraining his enemies – remains the supposed obstacle. The idea that one can speak of gas chambers as just another weapon, forgetting that gas chambers have only been constructed once in history for the express purpose of eliminating entire groups of people – with one group in particular constituting the primary and necessary desire to initiate the project – is sickening. The Nobel peace prize is becoming a real joke.
The last year when the Nobel Peace prize conceivably had meaning was 1993.
KevinP
Maguire is conversent with neither Death Camps nor nuclear weapons,she is a perfect example of the Peter Principle at work.
Seems to me that this is a case of what Natalie Solent has called “object fetishism”…the belief that goodness or evil lies in objects themselves rather than the way those objects are used. She was talking about the British school that wants to ban pencil sharpeners because a student took one apart and used the razor to hurt somebody..similarly, the person cited above sees the evil as being associated with the nuclear weapon itself rather than the manner in which that device is being used…apparently, aggressive war and defensive use are equivalent in this person’s mind.
(Natalie’s site is nataliesolent.blogspot.com)
“When I think about nuclear weapons, I’ve been to Auschwitz concentration camp…”
Funny, when I think about leftists, I’ve been to Cambodia…
I disagree. It never had meaning. The Nobel peace prize, along with those for literature (and, I often suspect, economics) is a joke.
I attribute this to runaway salinity. She and the Nobel selection committee have been drinking too much salt water, and they now cannot string rational thought together. (This is different from insanity, where the cause is less obviously known)
Everyone knows that Israels’ nuclear arms are analogous to DYNAMITE, not gas chambers, for the former sale of dynamite to blow things up is what now pays for ridiculous Nobel Prize awards.
A gas chamber, on the other hand, is analogous to runaway salinity, which is how one kills all the fish in an aquarium (I have firsthand experience here), just as the Nazis tried to kill all the Jews.
Rich:
I attribute this to runaway salinity.
Yes, the only hope for the Nobel committee is a global warming-induced change in the salinity of the Skagerrak.
“When I think about nuclear weapons, I’ve been to Auschwitz concentration camp…”
Wow, sounds like she’s just as worthy of the Nobel for Literature!