The writing was on the wall in 2008 when, immediately after Barack Obama’s historic presidential election win, before the first black president in American history had even lifted a finger, the Norwegian Nobel Committee had awarded Barack the Nobel Peace Prize.
For what purpose? “Hope”, one supposes. Leave it to the colonial mindset to simultaneously condescend to the black community while signaling to the world that their new president was perhaps even more of an asset to the American empire than the long list of Caucasians who preceded him.
As time passed, this signal found validation in how much better at this than his peers Obama was. A cool, liberal cat he was, allowing white liberal elites to erase their historical guilt by exhibiting just the right amount of ‘blackness’ to America’s most ardent black-youth-witnessing street crossers.
Cultural and oratorial genius, Barack Obama succeeded in gaslighting an entire generation of Gen Xers and millennials that he was ‘their guy’, as he continued to bail out Wall Street even after the 2008 financial crisis, filling up his own cabinet with City Bank and Goldman Sachs executives.
And that was just the beginning for this Nobel Peace Laureate. He expanded the surveillance state, murdered countless civilians through invested drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan, left Guantanamo Bay open, ousted Gaddafi and turned Libya into modern-day slave trade-hub, expanded drilling, and fracking. Along with the catastrophic list of failures and broken promises to long to be encapsulated, and, worst of all, he had concocted the perfect mixture of billionaire donor class capitulation and identity politics to allow for the revolutionary ascension of a certain Donald J Trump to the throne.
Now a millionaire (not prior to presidency), Barack Obama currently resides in Martha’s Vineyards, one of the nation’s most elite neighbourhoods, occasionally produces a movie for Netflix, and rubs shoulders with Forbes billionaires in his free time.
The all-encompassing disappointment and betrayal that Obama represents as a singular entity is almost unfathomable, and one could very easily get lost in its relentless prevalence in contemporary culture and history. But we have more ‘peace’ propaganda to cover, more ignoble behaviour from the Nobel Committee to help us contextualise this year’s Venezuelan winner of the prize.
First and foremost, the most controversial. A veritable warmonger who continued the Vietnam war for two years after winning the prize for a peace deal, Henry Kissinger remains one of the empire’s most prominent (and most blatant) neocons. He was instrumental in America’s morally bankrupt foreign policy towards South America, supporting dictatorship after dictatorship, mass murderer after murderer, and using torture-friendly despots to ensure democracy remained the stuff of myth and legend south of the American border.
Honestly, why wouldn’t the current US president also think that the Peace Prize was his for the taking? Did not a certain ousted dictator think the same in 2017, when another Peace Laureate revealed herself to be a supporter of genocide and ethnic cleansing, right across these familiar Bangladeshi borders?
The list goes on. Malala Yousafzai, the aforementioned Aung San Suu Kyi, Israeli prime minister Rabin and Zionist terror artist Menachem Begin, the European Union and its consolidation of colonial powers, puritan Mother Teresa, and American presidents Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt by their very nature war criminals, every single one, due to their expansion of the empire and war efforts and eventually their continued support for the genocidal state of Israel whose campaign began more than 70 years ago.
You would be forgiven for momentarily being under the impression a Venezuelan pick would be a defiant anti-Trump choice on the surface. But it is, in fact, such an explicitly US-approved choice that its blatant adherence to US interests while the White House pretends to be upset about Trump not being the recipient brought back memories of NATO Chief Mark Rutte’s monicker for Trump.
The 2025 ‘Peace’ Candidate Maria Corina Machado’s career reads like it is the demon-spawn, ideological love-child of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli war criminal-cum-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. American-funded Zionist acting as primary opposition to the current Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, whose ouster Washington has been salivating over for years.
One need only spare a perfunctory glance at Trump’s Peace Plan to understand how inherent supremacism is to the ethos of Western governments, continuing to function with its imperialist priorities at the forefront, but with better and subtler ways of exercising dominance over countries they themselves have depleted.
Peace is anathema to Western governments, so incorporated is the military-industrial complex to its survival, leaving wars and genocides and massive multinational financial aid and loan distributors as permanent features of resource extraction from the ‘Third World’.
In Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal’s words: “Giving the Nobel to Machado is a green light for regime change war on Venezuela, and then Cuba.” The Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize and its Committee – the members of which should not have the audacity to claim any moral, political, or intellectual authority over anything, let alone be the arbiters of ‘peace’– was, is, and forever will remain an imperialist tool to impose soft power tactics globally, similar to USAID and the IMF.
We need to be better than these pathetic attempts by the West at designating themselves as having universal jurisdiction over what we consider to be the truth, to continue function as the decision-makers, the gate-keepers to all great privileges awaiting us across the borders of Europe, if only we could behave a bit more ‘civilised’, condemn Hamas and October 7 a bit more, pretend Israel has a right to exist, etc., etc.
It is about time that the Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize and its committee were permanently retired, executed, and buried as an institution, with leftover bits displayed in the occasional museum alongside other Western-curated propaganda tools, such as The New York Times and CNN.
I’m opposed to the death penalty on principle – but, in this case, I’m willing to make an exception.
The writer is a journalist
