No discerning person should put much stock in the value of the Nobel Peace Prize, established by the will of an arms manufacturer.

The decision to award this year’s prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado reaffirms the accolade’s moral bankruptcy, with the Norwegian Nobel Committee carrying on the proud tradition of recognising the questionable achievements of war mongers and bigots.

“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help ‘liberate’ Venezuela with bombs under the banner of ‘freedom’”, wrote Michelle Ellner, a Latin America coordinator of the feminist anti-war organisation CODEPINK after news of Machado’s award broke.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) added, “Ms. Machado is a vocal supporter of Israel’s racist Likud Party and earlier this year she delivered remarks at a conference of European fascists, including Geert Wilders and Marie Le Pen, which openly called for a new Reconquista, referencing the ethnic cleansing of Spanish Muslims and Jews in the 1500s.”

Against the backdrop of the US empire’s villainous efforts to manufacture consent for invading Venezuela, one cannot help but wonder if the decision to award the peace prize to one of Yankee imperialism's most dedicated lackeys in Latin America was simply a face-saving way of giving the prize to its intended recipient, Donald Trump.

'Moral rot'

Whatever the reasons, the Nobel “Peace” Prize is yet another hegemonic institution that displays what human rights activist and former vice presidential candidate of the American Green Party, Ajamu Baraka, described as “the moral rot & irrelevancy of the West.”

That rot has been most visible in the latter’s two-year long support for "Israel’s" genocidal war on Gaza, currently interrupted by the tense implementation of a US-dictated “peace” plan, which CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin lambasted as a “blueprint for permanent occupation.”

After having honoured infamous war criminals like Henry Kissinger (whose foreign policy alone is responsible for millions of deaths) and “Drone Warrior-in-Chief” Barack Obama, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has once again managed to sully the sanctity of the concept of peace.

Equally controversial is its Swedish counterpart’s decision to award this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature to one Lázló Krasnahorkai of Hungary, whose “Zionism and anti-Arab racism have been documented on Hungarian podcasts and media outlets”, as Budapest-based independent scholar Anita Zsurzsán pointed out on X.

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In the context of an ongoing colonial genocide perpetrated by a western-backed European settler colony which, just hours into the Gaza ceasefire, bombed Lebanon, awarding both of the two non-science Nobel prizes to individuals who stand accused of anti-Arab bigotry shows just how tone-deaf the hallowed Nobel institution continues to be.

Denying genocide

Genocide denialism is an ideological thread that seems to run deep through the Nobel committees’ decision-making process.

In 2019, the Swedish Academy, which is responsible for selecting the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded it to Austrian writer Peter Handke, who is ill-famed for his ahistorical views on the Srebrenica genocide.

At the time, The Intercept found that in multiple books Handke had engaged in bothsidesism by stating that “all sides in the Bosnia war had prison camps of equivalent brutality” and had victim-blamed Bosnian Muslims for the massacres committed against them by Serb forces.

He had also described Serb bombings of Sarajevo as Bosnian false flag operations and “argued that the pictures of Muslim victims of ethnic cleansing had been staged by photojournalists.”

Replace "Bosnian” with “Palestinians”, “Serb” with “Israeli” and “Sarajevo” with “Gaza” and you will have a carbon copy of this current moment in time in which "Israel" commits a genocide and its western backers deny it with all tricks of the propaganda trade.

Consistently unconscionable

With Handke in mind, bothsidesism seems to be another discursive discipline in which revisionist Nobel laureates shine.

Baby boomer elder statesman Obama’s two cents on the Gaza ceasefire were widely criticised for “bothsidesing the perpetrators and victims of genocide,” as historian Zachary Foster put it.

Not to mention Obama’s rhetorical double standard of humanising Israelis while dehumanising Palestinians (“Israeli families” versus “Palestinian people”).

But what do you expect from a guy who, as Commander-In-Chief of a military that bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan in 2015, has gone down in history as perhaps the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to bomb another?

With this year’s unconscionable decisions to reward the twin evils of US imperialism and Zionism, the Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Swedish Academy at least have their finger on the pulse of these overtly colonial-racist and genocidal times.

Kudos for consistency!