No Peace Prize for Warmongers!
The award of the Peace Prize to coup plotter and Trump associate María Corina Machado, is the current bottom low in a series that began when Norway became a member of NATO.
If Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) had foreseen today’s militaristic Norway, the Peace Prize would have been awarded in a very different place than Oslo. Sweden was given the responsibility of awarding the science and literature prizes, but not the Peace Prize. This was because Nobel saw in Norway (which at the time was still in union with Sweden) a peaceful nation without great power interests. Sweden – which had historically been at war with all of its neighbours and kept Norway captive in a union – would not have had the same credibility as the guardian of the Peace Prize’s stated goal of contributing to military disarmament.
From pacifism to NATO policy
The five-person Nobel Committee is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The committee is said to be completely independent and shall not accept instructions or orders from anyone in connection with the assessment of the candidate proposals for laureates. However, it cannot be ignored that these members are politically appointed, following a recommendation from the Parliament's Election Committee. The Election Committee is composed in proportion to the size of the party groups. Since 1949, pro-NATO parties have enjoyed total dominance.
From the turn of the last century until the reconstruction period after World War II, the Nobel Committee, appointed by the Storting, more or less lived up to the task assigned to it by Alfred Nobel through his will.
Pacifist ideas had a strong foothold in the labour and lay movements at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1905, for example, the prize went to peace advocate Bertha von Suttner (who had also had a great personal influence on dynamite king Alfred Nobel) and in 1910 to the International Peace Bureau. One of the last expressions of reward for pacifism was when the Quakers received the Peace Prize in 1947.
Throughout this period, individuals who had contributed to disarmament work or conflict resolution, as well as humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, were prize winners. This line was to change when the United States unofficially took control of Norwegian foreign policy. After Norway participated in the founding of NATO in 1949, a pattern of peace prize awards emerged in line with the geopolitical interests of Western imperialism and the United States.
Aase Lionæs (Labour party) was elected to the Nobel Committee the same year (1949) and was the committee's chairwoman from 1969 to 1978. Martin Tranmæl, a central figure in convincing the Labour Party to support NATO membership, was also a committee member from 1949. Aase Lionæs was not only a staunch NATO supporter, she was also a fanatical Zionist and founder of Friends of Israel in the Norwegian Labour Movement, VINA in 1981. She also fostered peace prizes for both Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin during her period as committee chairwoman.
Marching with Marshall
The stamp of NATO on the Norwegian Nobel Committee and its practice for awarding the Peace Prize became particularly evident from 1953 onwards. That year, the laureate was General and Secretary of State George Marshall, the architect of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after the war.
This massive investment plan based on credit from the United States was far from being as peaceful as one might think. It was launched in 1947 in parallel with the Truman Doctrine of "containment of communism." The creation of NATO two years later represented the military arm while the Marshall Plan was the economic arm of this doctrine. The Nobel Committee thus embraced the doctrine that initiated the Cold War between East and West.
The main objectives of the plan were twofold: On the one hand, to avert social unrest and even greater support for the communist parties in Western Europe, which enjoyed great popularity after the struggle against fascism. On the other hand, to find outlets for the enormous post-war overcapacity in American manufacturing industry.
All countries that wanted to receive Marshall aid had to commit to introducing and implementing a market economy in accordance with American principles. The USSR and the Eastern European countries built their own planned economies and therefore rejected the plan. Norway accepted, despite the fact that the Gerhardsen Labour government initially opposed the plan when it was launched. Minister of Trade Erik Brofoss wanted strict state economic management that went far in the direction of a planned economy. His ideas were terminated due to the acceptance of Marshall aid.
During the Cold War, however, the Nobel Committee also did make attempts to do the opposite of what it does in 2025, namely to support détente and diplomacy. Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt received the prize in 1971 "for paving the way for a meaningful dialogue between East and West". Brandt wanted to break the ice between the Federal Republic (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and later also between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The Social Democrat Brandt had stayed in Norway as a refugee from the Nazis, and had high prestige in large sections of the Norwegian Labour Party. The German Bonn government managed to convince a skeptical Henry Kissinger that Die Ostpolitik did not pose any danger that West Germany would jeopardize NATO.
Without speculating on the underlying motives of Brandt and his government regarding a future German reunification, we can say for sure that he would not under any circumstances have received the Peace Prize today. The current NATO narrative is, as is well known, that any form of diplomacy and thaw between the East (i.e. Russia) and the West is unacceptable.
From one scandal to another
The designation of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the chief strategist behind America's brutal war against Vietnam, as the 1973 laureate was the work of committee chairman Aase Lionæs. The scandalous decision led to the resignation of two of the committee's members (the minority), something unheard of until then.
Foreign Minister Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam naturally refused to receive his "half" of the prize side by side with the mass murderer, not least because the bombs still were raining over Vietnam.
Other scandal-ridden awards were the prizes to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the former terrorist and Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, in 1978. The pretext was the Camp David Accords, in which Egypt sold out the Palestinians and normalized relations with Israel – in return for massive American money transfers that have continued to this day.
The awards to Lech Walesa (1983) and Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) – the latter “for his leading role in the radical changes in relations between East and West” – were blatant attempts to hasten the imminent collapse of NATO’s major rival, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
The tradition of rewarding political “dissidents”, completely disregarding whether they are advocates for peace or not, has gained more and more momentum. It began with Andrei Sakharov (1975) and continued with Lech Walesa (1983), the Dalai Lama (1989), Shirin Ebadi (2003), Liu Xiaobo (2010), Dimitrij Muratov (2021), Ales Bialatski (2022), Memorial (2022), Narges Mohammadi (2023) and eventually María Corina Machado (2025). These laureates are by no means all of the same reactionary kind. What they do have in common, though, is that they were or are enemies of regimes who are also declared enemies of NATO (Russia, China, Belarus, Iran, Venezuela).
For the Nobel Committee, it has been unimaginable to embrace dissidents in a NATO country, with one sole exception: Martin Luther King Jr. (1964). This is despite the fact that there have been numerous potential candidates fighting against fascism and oppression in, for example, Greece, Portugal and Turkey. When the Committee has not been able to avoid recognizing a people's liberation struggle, as in Vietnam, South Africa or Palestine, it has made sure to split the prize in order to pay tribute to the bloody oppressors on an equal footing. Nelson Mandela therefore had to share the prize with the apartheid regime's Fredrik Willem de Klerk, while Yasser Arafat had to share it with not just one, but two of the Zionist state's military leaders, Rabin and Peres.
Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, shortly after taking office as president. The award was based almost entirely on his campaign rhetoric, not on his actual peace efforts. NATO Secretary General Fogh Rasmussen, at the time, postulated Obama's "extraordinary efforts for international diplomacy and interaction between peoples."
At that time, the word diplomacy had not been removed from NATO's vocabulary, without it meaning much. This representative of "interaction between peoples" gave orders to drop American bombs on seven countries during his first six years as president.
When former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, in his capacity as Chairman of the Nobel Committee, presented the Peace Prize to the European Union in 2012, NATO's Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared: "NATO and the EU's common values are shaping the new Europe."
Admittedly, he was right. 23 years later, the EU and NATO's common values are expressed in hateful war rhetoric and extreme armament. This new Europe is in serious economic, political and social crisis.
From peace committee to war committee
From time to time the Nobel Committee and its changing members must find worthy recipients, so that the Peace Prize is not completely disgraced in world opinion. The Red Cross and various UN institutions, campaigns and organizations against nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and land mines, are such laureates. The most recent example is last year's award to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organization against nuclear weapons fronted by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
These awards are well-deserved. At the same time, they help to patch up the Nobel Committee's frayed international reputation. The many NATO-aligned awards may then in retrospect more easily be excused as unfortunate misjudgments.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has for years payed service to the geopolitical strategy of the US and NATO
However, anyone who follows the long thread from 1953 will see that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has for many years been a willing servant of the US, NATO and the West's geopolitical strategy. Coercive market democracy according to Western prescriptions, introduced with or without the use of violence and sanctions, is now the peace prescription par excellence. Such is the newspeech from the committee that is supposed to be the guardian of Nobel's wish for military disarmament and détente. Had the committee followed Donald Trump's order to give him the prize, the committee as well as the prize would have been scandalized forever. Instead, the Venezuelan protege of US imperialism in the form of coup queen María Corina Machado was chosen, in the hope that the world would be deceived.
The Nobel Committee hereby calls for military intervention in Venezuela - the exact opposite of Alfred Nobel's last wish that the peace prize should go to "the one who has worked the most or best for the brotherhood of peoples and abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as the formation and spread of peace congresses".
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Kristin Clemet and the rest of the Nobel Committee probably hope that the American aircraft carrier group off Trinidad and Tobago will wait until after December 10 before the first drones and missiles hurtle towards the Palacio Federal in Caracas. That could put a certain damper on the festivities in Oslo City Hall.
This article was originally published on the stoppnato.no website. English translation by Revolusjon.
