Snorting nitroglycerin?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has proved once again that politicians cannot be trusted to award the Peace Prize to a recipient who promotes the values Alfred Nobel laid down in his will.

… one part to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.

Earlier this week, they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to a Venezuelan despite veiled threats and irrational demands from U.S. President Donald Trump to be the default recipient. Trump, disingenuously, but more likely, falsely, claimed that he had stopped eight wars and was therefore eminently eligible.

In an absurd twist of irony, the Nobel Committee instead awarded the Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado, who is on record as repeatedly inviting Trump to invade Venezuela and even encouraged him to bomb boats off their coast, which were alleged to be trafficking narcotics. Needless to say, the U.S. Naval deployment in the Caribbean has failed to produce any evidence that the boats that they bombed, killing all occupants, were in fact involved in any form of trafficking.

Machado, much like former dubious recipients such as Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Mother Teresa, and Barack Obama, certainly did not embody the qualities and values that Alfred Nobel sought in winning laureates. Machado’s credibility was seriously questioned by fellow Venezuelans, Michelle Ellner, in this CodePink article and earlier this year by Simón Rodríguez in this article. Among the accusations levelled against her by Michelle Ellner are the following:

• She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
• She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
• She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
• She pushed for the U.S. sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class. 
• She helped construct the so-called “interim government”, a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
• She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defence.
• Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.

It would seem as if a precedent has been set to award next year’s Peace Prize to genocidal warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu, or maybe both Donald Trump and him. It’s the kind of dystopian shit that makes you wonder whether, as a friend of mine pointed out, the Peace Prize is to whitewash Nobel’s legacy of inventing dynamite, or whether the ceremonial annual award is a form of colonial whitewashing and gaslighting.

If either is not true, then one has to wonder whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee is snorting nitroglycerin. Will deserving recipients like activist Greta Thunberg or UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese ever find favour with an out-of-touch Nobel Committee?