WikiNobel

Enemy of Ignorance

Most of you might have heard this news already, but in case you hadn’t, it looks like WikiLeaks has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

Now clearly this is both an honour and something of an indictment all at once.  You see, prior Nobel Peace Prize winners include such esteemed peace-mongers as Barak Obama (the guy who kept fighting Arabs and Persians where Dr. EvilBushitlerhaliburton left off), The IPCC and Al Gore (bringing peace to a thermometer near you!), The International Atomic Energy Agency (the guys who don’t know where any nuclear weapons are), Jimmy Carter (what did he actually do again??), The UN (ahh, ok), Yasser Arafat (terrorist), and The International Labour Organisation (yip, in 1969, presumably for pissing off capitalist pigs).

So one can easily be forgiven for treating the Nobel why-on-earth-do-we-care-about-it-so-much Peace Prize nominations with a generous dollop of scepticism.  However, in nominating and possibly awarding Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for the prize, these obscure Norwegian Nobel folk might just be about to make one large redemptive decision.

Ok, so the WikiLeaks nomination came from 26-year old Norwegian legislator Snorre Valen, of the Socialist Left Party.  And yes, Assange and Co. will probably be part of around 200 other nominees.  But let’s face it, Wiki will be a very compelling and strong candidate for the prize unless some heavyweight ‘powers that be’ ‘make sure’ it doesn’t happen.

But it should happen.  And why should WikiLeaks win the peace prize?

Here’s why.

As information becomes truly democratised, so people will increasingly see the rotten insides of the childish, wasteful, and meaningless geopolitical games politicians play.  That can lead to a truly peaceful revolution from the ground up as people say enough to funding wars, enough to funding star wars, and enough to funding ‘The Machine’.

That is why WikiLeaks is undoubtedly a force for peace and its nomination is great news.