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When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2025 Peace Prize to the US-sponsored Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Western newspapers chorused their approval. They called her a “beacon of democracy,” a “symbol of peaceful resistance.”
But beneath the chorus of moral self-congratulation lies a century-long truth: the Nobel Peace Prize has never been a neutral honor. It has functioned as an ideological weapon — a ceremonial tool for legitimizing imperialism, sanctifying its agents, and discrediting those who resist it.
The contamination began early. In 1953, the Committee granted the Peace Prize to General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff turned Secretary of State, for the so-called Marshall Plan. The official story described it as a benevolent act of reconstruction — the United States rebuilding a devastated Europe out of generosity.
In reality, the Marshall Plan was an act of economic warfare: a massive transfer of capital designed to cement Western Europe’s dependence on American finance, resurrect capitalism under U.S. supervision, and isolate the socialist bloc. It was the first major offensive of the Cold War, a mechanism for preventing communist influence in France, Italy, and beyond, while tying Europe’s industrial base to Washington’s dictates.
By awarding Marshall the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee sanctified the economic arm of imperialism. A general whose strategy turned Europe into a capitalist protectorate was recast as a humanist visionary. The Prize, from that moment forward, ceased to represent peace; it became an instrument for decorating imperial conquest.
If Marshall’s award was cynical, the 1973 Prize to Henry Kissinger was obscene. As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Kissinger orchestrated some of the bloodiest crimes of the 20th century: the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; the U.S.-backed coup in Chile that installed Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship; the slaughter in Indonesia and East Timor; the subversion of African liberation movements; and the support of genocidal regimes from Pakistan to Argentina.
That such a man was declared a champion of peace reveals the Nobel Committee’s true purpose. Kissinger’s award was not a recognition of diplomacy — it was an act of moral laundering. The Committee provided imperialism with absolution, rewriting mass murder as negotiation, and transforming a war criminal into a statesman. Lê Đức Thọ, his Vietnamese co-recipient, refused the Prize in disgust — an act of integrity that exposed the entire charade.
To this day, the 1973 award stands as one of the most grotesque examples of moral inversion in modern political history — the Peace Prize as a bloodstained trophy of imperial victory.
Two years later, the Nobel Committee found another useful icon in Andrei Sakharov. Once a Soviet physicist, Sakharov was elevated by Western media into a prophet of human rights — but only because his dissent served imperial interests. His critique of the Soviet Union was seized upon by the capitalist world as proof that socialism itself was tyranny.
The West did not honor Sakharov because he opposed repression — it honored him because he rejected socialism. His elevation to sainthood provided moral cover for imperialism’s global violence: for the napalm dropped on Vietnam, the coups in Latin America, the massacres in Indonesia. The Nobel Committee’s embrace of Sakharov was not about liberty; it was about weaponizing dissent. He was made into the spiritual figurehead of anti-communism — a living demonstration that betrayal of socialism could be the shortest route to Western canonization.
The same logic guided the Nobel Committee when it crowned Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Western elites hailed him as the man who brought “peace” by ending the Cold War. But Gorbachev’s true historical role was to dismantle the world’s first socialist state and to open its territory to capitalist plunder.
Under the banner of perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev disarmed the Soviet working class, dismantled collective property, and delivered the USSR to the oligarchs and Western financiers. The so-called “peace” he achieved was in fact the peace of submission — the silence of a defeated revolution. By rewarding him, the Nobel Committee celebrated the greatest geopolitical triumph of imperialism since 1945: the destruction of the socialist camp. Gorbachev’s medal was not for saving humanity from conflict, but for ensuring capitalism’s unchallenged dominion.
In 1983, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Lech Wałęsa, leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland. Western commentators portrayed him as a humble labor hero confronting "communist tyranny". Yet the Solidarity leadership, heavily financed and directed by the CIA, the Vatican, and Western intelligence networks, became a battering ram against socialism.
Wałęsa’s politics were not proletarian internationalism but clerical nationalism; his rise signaled not workers’ liberation but their enlistment in the anti-communist crusade. The Nobel Prize to Wałęsa, like that to Sakharov, was an ideological intervention — a message to Eastern Europe’s working class that their path to dignity lay not in socialism’s renewal but in its destruction. His later years as a neoliberal politician confirmed the point: he had been a vehicle for imperial restoration, not workers’ emancipation.
When Barack Obama received the Peace Prize in 2009, the farce was complete. He had barely taken office, yet the Nobel Committee declared him the embodiment of hope. Soon after, his administration expanded drone warfare, destroyed Libya under the pretext of humanitarian intervention, and armed reactionary proxies across the Middle East. Obama’s Nobel was a prophylactic — moral cover for the continuity of imperial warfare under liberal rhetoric.
Even more telling was the 2007 award to Al Gore, presented for his environmental activism. The Committee lauded him for raising awareness of climate change — conveniently forgetting that, as U.S. Vice President, Gore was directly complicit in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the destruction of a sovereign state in the Balkans. The man who once justified “humanitarian war” from the podium of the Pentagon was repackaged as a savior of the planet. His Prize marked the ecological turn of imperial ideology: capitalism’s devastation of the earth dressed up as a crusade to save it.
In 2012, the Committee reached new levels of absurdity by awarding the Peace Prize to the European Union. This was not a person but an imperialist institution — one responsible for the immiseration of millions through austerity, for fortifying racist border regimes, and for waging economic war on the global periphery. The EU’s “peace” was the peace of bankers and bureaucrats: the discipline of debt, the silence of unemployment, the quiet of migrants’ graves in the Mediterranean.
To award the EU was to canonize capitalism itself — to present the machinery of exploitation as a humanitarian achievement. It was a hymn to imperial order, not peace.
Across these cases, the function of the Nobel Peace Prize becomes unmistakable. It is not a recognition of conscience, but a mechanism of imperial propaganda. It rewards those who oppose revolution but never capitalism; those who serve the global hierarchy while speaking the language of virtue. It rehabilitates war criminals, elevates collaborators, and co-opts dissenters whose opposition remains safe for imperialism’s agenda.
Through these carefully curated icons, the Nobel Committee defines peace as submission — the orderly maintenance of capitalist domination. The Prize transforms imperialism’s violence into morality and its accomplices into saints.
The 2025 award to María Corina Machado continues this tradition seamlessly. A fervent ally of Washington and the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, Machado has been an active participant in attempts to overthrow the Bolivarian government through sanctions, coups, and foreign interference. To present such a figure as a champion of peace is an insult to the Venezuelan people and to the very concept of national sovereignty.
Her Nobel Prize is not about democracy. It is about imperialism reasserting its ideological dominion over Latin America. The Committee’s message is clear: those who serve imperial interests will be canonized; those who resist will be demonized. The Bolivarian process that began with Chavez, with all its merits and flaws, is to be delegitimized — not with bombs this time, but with medals.
The Nobel Peace Prize is not an instrument of peace but of class power. It belongs to the ideological superstructure of imperialism — to the network of institutions that manufacture consent for exploitation and war. It tells the world that peace is what imperialism decides it to be: the quiet of subjugated nations, the silence of crushed revolutions, the order of markets and monopolies.
But real peace — the peace of liberation — cannot be bestowed by imperialism. It will be forged in struggle: in the defiance of workers, peasants, and nations that refuse to kneel before the capitalist order.
In the vast majority of cases, the Nobel Peace Prize rewards those who reconcile with imperialism. History will reward those who overthrow it.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
