Screencaps from MIT and Democracy Now
By Situation Theatre 15/3/2019
16-year-old girl says Nobel Peace Prize nomination diminishes her activism.
1973 Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger, also the U.S. Secretary of State responsible for the deaths of up to a million Indochinese, has called the nomination of teen climate activist Greta Thunberg ‘shameful’.
Kissinger’s Peace Prize recognised his achievements with napalm during the Vietnam War but failed to acknowledge his important contribution to overthrowing Chile’s Salvador Allende in September 1973 and the subsequent sixteen years of torture and killings under Augusto Pinochet. Although the Nobel Prize pre-dated his approval of Suharto’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, which ultimately killed 30% of the Timorese population, the Nobel Committee did overlook his earlier work supporting the genocidal massacres of at least 200,000 Bangladeshis in 1971.
In response to the announcement of Thunberg’s nomination, Mr Kissinger said, "There I was working my guts out for years to set fire to several countries and now this little girl might win for a few months of wagging school? Spare me.”
The three Norwegian lawmakers who nominated Ms Thunberg have argued that setting fire to a global movement which ultimately could save billions of animal and human lives around the world is also worthy of acknowledgement.