How the Nobel 'Peace Prize' helped propel Washington's war drive in Venezuela
Soon after the pro-US, pro-Israel Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 10 October 2025, the Trump administration began boldly to increase its covert and open military aggression against Venezuela.
Within a few days, US President Donald Trump ordered the CIA to engage in covert operations in the country. Later in October, reports indicated that US warships were being deployed to the Caribbean near Venezuela.
By 13 November, Trump was briefed on military options. More recently, the US has renewed its push for regime change - designating the "non-existent" Cartel de los Soles a "terrorist" organisation and claiming it is headed by senior government officials, deploying an aircraft carrier to the region and launching a "new phase" of operations against Venezuela's government, including extrajudicial killings.
A coincidence? Perhaps, or perhaps not.
The present Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolas Maduro since 2013, has long resisted US imperial designs on its vast natural resources. It has likewise denounced Washington's regional interventions, condemned Israel's genocide in Gaza and aligned itself with the global front opposing western militarism.
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Consider, then, the figure the Nobel Committee chose to honour.
One might assume that a politician who champions European fascism and genocidal Zionism would make the Norwegian Nobel Committee think twice before awarding her the coveted Peace Prize, for which Trump, championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also campaigned as yet another purveyor of hatred and warmongering.
But that supposition would be wrong - for that is precisely what they did.
Machado is a Venezuelan politician deeply committed to European fascism, an ardent genocidal Zionist and a cheerleader for Trump's reconquest of Latin America.
For this constellation of stellar qualifications, the elders of the European tribal elites, representing Swedish and Norwegian vintage claims to global attention, have awarded her this international recognition.
Machado is a Venezuelan politician deeply committed to European fascism, an ardent genocidal Zionist and a cheerleader for Trump's reconquest of Latin America
A vociferous propagandist for Israel, supporting the settler colony in its murderous campaign against Palestinians, and leading a movement to invite the US and Israel to attack her own homeland and seize its resources, Machado is also reported to be a virulent Islamophobe, as genocidal Zionists tend to be.
The trouble with giving the Nobel to these so-called opposition figures is that, by virtue of this recognition, they lose credibility within their own constituencies.
This was evident in the cases of two leading Iranian expat human rights advocates, Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi, who were indeed relevant and influential forces for change before they received such gaudy honours, and have since become mouthpieces for the most reactionary imperial forces against their own homeland.
What sort of "force for good" is that?
This does not mean that regimes from Russia to China to Iran to Venezuela are God's gift to humanity. Of course, their corruption and tyranny generate horrors of their own. But what purpose do these awards serve other than to radically discredit those who receive them and turn them into stooges of the West?
By what authority?
The Nobel Committee's decision to honour Machado raises far larger questions, and not only about the so-called "Peace Prize".
A prize that has been given to war criminals like Henry Kissinger but not to legendary non-violent revolutionary leaders like Mahatma Gandhi lost its credibility long before it became a function of US imperialism and militarism.
One needs to go upstream from this particular obscenity of the Nobel Committee and look at its history to ask whether the world should any longer pay the slightest attention to its decisions, except as a barometer of not what is best but what is pathologically worse on our fragile earth.
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As it stands, the Nobel Prize in just about any field is a useless, if not scandalous, recognition that gives a tiny European enclave the delusion that it globally matters.
It does not.
It is long past time to stop pretending it does, only to be repeatedly disappointed. The entire Nobel Prize spectacle is integral to manufacturing a moral and scientific authority for Europe that it categorically lacks.
Who, and by what authority, decided that a small clique of outdated European elites should tell the whole world what matters in science, ideas, or in the protection of basic human rights?
They are not qualified.
No one should pay attention to their racist, white supremacist, self-indulgent delusions of grandeur, imagining themselves the epicentre of the universe.
The people behind these prizes include the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in physics, chemistry and economics; the Karolinska Institutet in physiology or medicine; the Swedish Academy in literature; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee in peace.
These all sound official and grand, but their long record of scandalous decisions has stripped them of credibility.
In 1918, they gave the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Fritz Haber, whose expertise lay in the invention of poison gas. In 1926, they awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine to the Danish physician Johannes Fibiger for discovering a cancer that did not exist. In 1949, they gave Antonio Egas Moniz the same prize for inventing the lobotomy.
In 2008, Harald zur Hausen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a drug funded by the Swedish company AstraZeneca by a committee that included two people from... AstraZeneca.
The list is endless. Is it surprising then that, when they gave the literature prize to Jean-Paul Sartre, he told them to take a hike?
Consider the origin of these awards. They are based on the will of Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896 but was shaken years earlier when a premature obituary, published after his brother's death in 1888, described him as a "merchant of death" for his inventions, prompting him to seek a more positive legacy.
What was his legacy? He made a fortune from inventions like dynamite. We are being hoodwinked.
Dismantle the idea
The world must dismantle the Nobel Prize.
It has long lost any meaning, and its many choices in both literature and peace are utter inanities.
The Nobel Prize is a European institution serving western global hegemony while feigning universal significance. That pretence must be denied.
Consider the literary giants they never recognised: Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen. Instead, think of the laureates they did choose, including Israeli war criminal Menachem Begin, responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, and the notorious Islamophobe Aung San Suu Kyi.
The issue, however, is not just this dubious cast of characters. It is the fundamental flaw of all European institutions that feign global relevance.
These outdated institutions must be categorically discredited and abandoned as a measure of anything, not even in the fields of science and technology that they recognised - and have now brought us to the brink of extinction with the rise of artificial intelligence capable of controlling human destiny.
The world must be spared from these inane awards so that a radical epistemic shift can occur in how humanity confronts the calamities the Nobel Prize has long recognised and rewarded.
No alternative prize
There is no alternative award to be launched in Egypt, India, China, Iran or Mexico.
Our entire humanity has become like that flotilla of courageous souls daring the elements at the mercy of the European thugs ruling the Israeli garrison state.
There is nothing about our world to be celebrated, prized or awarded. Nothing.
Look at Gaza: that is the sum total of our humanity, its science and technology, its humanism and its call for peace. What is there to be prized or awarded? Nothing. Put an end to this European tribal spectacle.
Any institution like the Norwegian Nobel Committee that grants the Peace Prize while disregarding these realities remains true to its founder's name and reputation as a merchant of death.
As such, it is a provincial European affair, and the rest of the world, at the mercy of western savagery now manifested in Israel, has no reason to heed its pronouncements, particularly on matters of "peace" or even science.
The entire Nobel spectacle is a scientific, cultural and humanitarian camouflage for sustaining the status quo amid unrelenting barbarism, which, in fact, calls into question the validity of the very machinery that enables the Nobel Prize to award anyone anything in this system.
The world is in a deep moral and existential crisis. The Nobel Prize is not a remedy to this crisis; it is a symptom of it. Let us stop giving each other awards. Instead, let us take the time to mourn all those innocent lives perished in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere as western militarism widens its reach, now bearing down on Venezuela.
No one has any moral authority to bestow any honour until we are done mourning and reconfiguring what on earth we are doing in this world.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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