pacifism

In his Nobel remarks of two weeks ago, U.S. President Barack Obama called for "the continued expansion of our moral imagination" in the cause of building a lasting peace in the world. Obama's words themselves, however, exhibited no such imagination. On the contrary, they outlined again the exhausted dismissals of nonviolence as the way to pursue peace. Nowhere was this more evident than in his assessment of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that African American Nobel laureate in whose debt Obama places himself.

On December 10, 2009, Barack Obama, the President of the United States, received the Nobel Peace Prize Award in Oslo, Norway. Obama received this award “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The nomination of Obama for a Nobel Peace Prize and its acceptance have been issues of much controversy due, in large part, for the short amount of time he has spent within the global political arena.