The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded its 2025 Peace Prize to the leader of Venezuela’s far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, an event that is as significant as it is sinister.
The award was announced on October 9 in Oslo, Norway, a country whose wealth, strategic role in NATO, and large military investments position it as a bulwark for imperialist interests in Europe and beyond.
The award provides a glaring demonstration of the hypocrisy of capitalist public opinion as it is marshaled behind another catastrophic imperialist intervention in Latin America.
There is nothing unprecedented about bestowing the peace prize upon far-right or blood-drenched figures. If “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” as American songwriter, satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer quipped in 1973, the award to Machado hammers another nail into its coffin.
In the years in between, the prize went to mass murderers and war criminals such as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the former Irgun terrorist responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, and Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was responsible for genocidal violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. Barack Obama received the award in 2009, on the eve of launching a major military surge in Afghanistan and as his government was unleashing a wave of drone assassinations. Then as now, the prize served not as a reward to peacemakers, but as a tool for anointing those favored by imperialism and to legitimize war.
Listening to her interview on NPR was kind of wild
She had nothing but praise for Trump and defended the decision to bomb the boats in the Caribbean. Then she made a bunch of proclamations about accepting US intervention for enforcing regime change, and then advocated for doing the same in Cuba and Nicaragua
Ive heard a few people ask if she’s a CIA asset, amd while I don’t think it’s appropriate to speculate, I can see why the question is asked. The American State Department has been trying to install western-backed regimes in central and south America since the cold war.
Part of the reason we even have narco states in the south is because of the decades long proxy battle happening there.
The Nobel prize has a weird amount of legitimacy for how often it backs western regime change