Turning Away from Big Brother

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http://watchingamerica.com/News/225591/turning-away-from-big-brother/

Turning Away from Big Brother
der Tagesspiegel, Germany
By Stephan-Andreas Casdorff
Translated By Ron Argentati
5 November 2013
Edited by Bora Mici

The time has come to confront the United States with our values and standards. To do that via the Snowden case, however, would diminish Germany. The emancipation from "Big Brother" Obama should come about in some other fashion.

In awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, the awards committee wrote, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.” The award went on to say he was chosen for the prize because of his extraordinary efforts to strengthen the idea that dialogue and negotiations should be the preferred instruments between nations. That was four years ago and exactly five years since he became president.

And what became of that hope? A chaotic U.S. budget policy has frightened the world, along with the dangers of an ultralax monetary policy; we can add to that the unmanned drone war, Guantanamo and, now, a looming break in German-American friendship.

The Nobel citation continues, “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.”