Covidistan State Media is the Worst

State Broadcaster ORF also ‘Reported’ on Time’s Person of the Year, but they somehow managed to be even more moronic than Eichenwald

While some may consider the brief post from earlier today about Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ silly, or even tabloid stuff, here’s why it isn’t (while it’s still idiotic to even waste time on it).

Covidistan State Broadcaster ORF was all over it, and in the most moronic way imaginable:

Yes, they mentioned some of the more deplorable comments Musk had made over the years, but for whatever reason, ORF managed to cite Sen. Elisabeth Warren, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and Kurt Eichenwald on this. Still, the most stupid part may actually be the anodyne comment at the bottom of ORF’s short piece.

Time has chosen the Person [sic] of the Year since 1927. The title goes to people who most influenced news during the year. Last year, the title went to current U.S. President Joe Biden and his veep Kamala Harris.

Displaying a stunning ignorance of history, and Austria’s contribution to the Hitler’s Germany to name just the most obvious aspects, to say nothing about Vienna’s very own attempts at ‘Austrofascism’ from 1933-38 (in cahoots with Mussolini’s Italy), there is no mention of any of this. One would be forgiven for thinking that statements such as these may be, you know, anathema in Austria, of all places, but what shall I say?

One more aspect to mention: I don’t mean to be unfair to Covidistan (the country formerly known as Austria), for there are plenty of other despicable people on Time’s list, ranging from, say, better people such as Mohammed Mossadegh (1951) to the Hungarian Freedom Fighter (1956), Martin Luther King (1963) to Lech Walesa (1981).

Truth be told, there’s also a number of less-than-splendid awardees, such as Richard Nixon (1971, 1972) and Henry Kissinger (jointly with Nixon in 1972), Corazon Aquino (1986), Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr (1998, even though I find that one super-weird), George W. Bush (2004), Vladimir Putin (2007), and Mark Zuckerberg (2010).

Compared to especially that less-than-savoury list, Musk certainly doesn’t seem like the worst choice at-all, isn’t it?

Also, it’s not ‘just’ Time’s ‘Person of the Year’

As an aside, there appears to be an oddly elevated level of synchronicity of some of the more questionable winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. While the foundation has received its original endowment thanks to Alfred Nobel’s invention of, and subsequent remorse for, dynamite, here too we can observe this curious mixing of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people:

Without question, numerous laureates have risen to the ideals espoused by its founder, and among them we find courageous and impressive personalities such as Jean Henri Dunant (founder of the Red Cross), Bertha von Suttner (suffragette and anti-war activist before WW1), Carl von Ossietzky (anti-war activist in Nazi Germany), Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. At times, though, there were also decisions that were quite certainly not done in the spirit of Nobel. Still, the criteria according to which the prize is ultimately awarded remain a secret.

Among those ‘lesser’ people who received this prize may count, in no particular order, Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Henry Kissinger (1973, whose co-awardee Le Duc Tho declined the ‘honour’), Anwar al-Sadat and Menachem Begin (1978, with the latter a renowned and infamous terrorist in the 1940s), and Barack Obama (2009), who spent most of his speech talking about US exceptionalism in warfare.

To wrap this up: in 1938, with Time having already declared Hitler their ‘Man of the Year’, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee was actually discussing either Mahatma Gandhi or—Hitler as laureates, on which Tariq Ali wrote (in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9 Dec. 2002, p. 15):

The decision was too difficult for the mandarins, and the prize eventually went to the International Nansen Aid for Refugees and Stateless Persons. Hitler’s nomination may seem shocking today, but at the time many in the West considered the German Führer a bulwark against Bolshevism…

In 1938, Time magazine had named Adolf Hitler ‘Man of the Year’ and wrote many positive things about him…the committee then concluded that if Hitler was not acceptable, neither would be Gandhi.

Nuff’ said about that.