Wangari Maathai, this year’s Nobel peace prize winner, stated a couple of months ago that HIV/AIDS was created in a Western laboratory to control the African population.
Clever girl. Will you join me in a huzzah for this great choice for recipient of a Nobel prize?
Yeah, they should have never gave her that Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Oh wait, her prize was for Peace. What does what she thinks about AIDS (or colonizing Mars or Linux vs Windows) have to do with her getting a prize on an completely unrelated subject?
But I agree with milroyj that giving a Peace prize to someone for aiding the poor and planting trees seems a bit of a stretch. Didn’t anybody resolve any conflicts this year? Maybe not, I guess.
Sometimes the cause of peace is best furthered by seeing that people’s basic needs are met, rather than through strength of arms or even diplomacy. If people are desperate, it’s hard to negotiate them into passivity.
My goodness, I freaked when I read this thread title. This year’s Nobel winner for phisiology or medicine works in the same building as I do, as do a number of AIDS researchers, and I was thinking I had missed some serious weirdness…
However, the fact that the Peace prize winner doesn’t have a firm grasp on medical realities doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve recognition in her own domain.
Hardly. The best way to eliminate war is to address the conditions that lead to war – and when you look at the major contributors to unrest in Kenya and surrounding countries, government failure to meet the basic needs of the populace are right at the top. Look at the last few violent confrontations in the news and you will see that control of limited fertile ground is often at the heart of it.
Maathai’s approach was revolutionary because rather than convincing people to take up arms to overthrow a corrupt and neglectful government, which is the usual method, instead she encouraged them to take direct action to meet their own needs. Not just planting trees, but creating fertile ground through composting, developing solar and wind-powered electricity for remote areas, creating agricultural jobs for men and women, etc.
These are all things which help to obviate the need (and there is a need, otherwise) for bloody conflict.
Stupid (although widespread) myths about the origin of HIV aside, she’s up there with Gandhi for countering brutal oppression with peaceful strategems. She deserved the Peace Prize – and you know she’s not going to be buying any gold bathtubs with it.
Exactly. I was listening to the radio to hear this announcement and my reaction was just like Mil’s. But, NPR had some great commentary and they explained how this prize was very symbolic because it represented many scholarly opinions about what you just posted.
It was “Ayds”, and I doubt there was any reason to fire anybody, since it was called “Ayds” before the disease was named. My Mom used the stuff in the 1970’s.
Kudos to her for fostering a spirit of independence and “can-do attitude” via a promotion of disciplined organic farming methods.
As for her AIDS-related aluminium haberdashery, while it is clearly a few aquifers short of an effective irrigation infrastructure, at least she is convinging Africans that AIDS is a physical disease, which can be prevented by physical measures such as condoms. If what it takes to get Africans to beat the disease is an imagined human enemy rather than an imagined supernatural one, so be it.