Sure.

2008 Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio makes big news yesterday by suggesting that blogs could have stopped Hitler. In his Nobel lecture to the Swedish Academy, the author said an earlier introduction of information technology could even have prevented World War II.

Here's some bits from the AP file:

"Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded — ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said.

Clezio noted that access to computers remains a luxury to many in the developing world and said eradicating hunger and illiteracy remain the "two great urgent tasks" of humankind.

"Literacy and the struggle against hunger are connected, closely interdependent," he said. "One cannot succeed without the other. Both of them require, indeed urge, us to act."

Le Clezio called on publishers to make books available to a broader public in developing countries and to publish more material in lesser-known languages.

"In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury," Le Clezio said.

He will receive the Nobel Prize in literature at a ceremony on Wednesday. The medicine, chemistry, physics and economics prizes are also handed out in Stockholm, while the Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway.

This guy is an optimist. On the whole, we haven't exactly been harnessing the beast to better humanity. But more literacy - I can get behind that.

Clezio, the author which bloggers argued was too obscure to deserve the prize. These were mainly Americans, embittered that they are no longer shoe-ins for the prize:

The award came wrapped in a fog of literary pettiness and backbiting brewed up last month by Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee for Literature, who told the Associated Press that American literature is "too isolated, too insular," Americ an publishers "don't translate enough," and American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

Better luck next year, John Updike. Maybe another time, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo. The last American to win the li terature prize was Toni Morrison in 1993, and the Nobel committee appeared to be signaling that this hiatus was no accident.

Above: Le Clezio and his wife in 1940