Oslo’s Comedy Committee

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” —American satirist Tom Lehrer. This year, more so than any other since starting this blog, I wish I were a faster writer. I’ve been engrossed in the Gaza “ceasefire deal” for the past week, which Israel has already broken, and moreover, as I’ve teased before, working on a book- length piece on US imperialism has preoccupied most of my year. And that is in addition to a couple more articles planned for later this year. Yet it is precisely the roiling and relentless nature of the 2025 news cycle that motivates me to cover some of its more insidious stories that are otherwise lost in the sludge of mind-numbing headlines. Two weeks ago, on October 10, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded arguably the most prestigious peace prize in the world to María Corina Machado, an opposition figure to Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The committee effectively stuck its nose in Venezuelan politics and didn’t bother with the usual pretenses of rewarding peace. Machado isn’t special in her opposition to Maduro—his regime has plenty of genuine opposition from the Left. To the extent that Maduro is praised by the Left internationally, it’s mostly because he represents a bulwark against US imperial designs in the region. But, as historian Greg Grandin recently pointed out, the prize didn’t go to Isabel Mejias, the head of La Araña Feminista (the Feminist Spider), a group of socialist- feminist collectives opposed to Maduro; nor did it go to Anna Rosa Torres, a socialist opposed to Maduro. Instead, the Nobel Committee made a very specific statement by supporting Machado, who can most generously be described as a right-wing US puppet. In 2002, she supported the failed coup d’état against Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chávez, and she has since supported US violence, sanctions, and attempts at regime change in Venezuela. The methods haven’t changed much since Washington more or less perfected the playbook for regime change in Latin America, and has since used those strategies all over the world. For this reason, historian Greg Grandin referred to the region as the Empire’s Workshop—“the place where the United States elaborated tactics of extraterritorial administration and acquired its conception of itself as an empire like no other before it.” One of the most successful CIA coups took place in Chile. The first step of the plan, Nixon famously explained, was to “make the economy scream.” In 2017, the US imposed devastating sanctions on Venezuela. A report published in July 2024 by the Washington Post found that “Sanctions on Venezuela … contributed to an economic contraction roughly three times as large as that caused by the Great Depression in the United States.” As is always the case with sanctions, they hurt only the poorest people while the richer classes (i.e., the political classes) easily weather the storm. These suffocating sanctions had the desired effect. In March of 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a reporter: “The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour. I talked with our senior person on the ground there in Venezuela last night at 7:00 or 8:00 last night. You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from.” Ironically enough, many Venezuelans immigrated to the US, fleeing from the economic assault, only to be deported to a Salvadoran concentration camp by Trump 2.0. Not only did María Corina Machado enthusiastically support these sanctions, but implored the US to go further and militarily invade Venezuela—clearly a shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has called for the privatization of Venezuela’s oil companies, her political hero is Margaret Thatcher, and she supports Donald Trump and Javier Milei, Argentina’s president. Milei is a self-described anarcho-capitalist and since getting elected has ruined the Argentinian economy in such spectacular fashion that the US recently spent $40 billion to bail out his economy. However, Machado has denied being right-wing, since she claims the terms “right- wing” and “left-wing” are Marxist inventions. They actually stem from the French Revolution, but who cares about such details? Certainly not the Nobel Committee. If you genetically engineered a lab-grown CIA asset, it would not be as perfect a Western puppet as María Corina Machado. Polling from Venezuela is clear: whatever divided feelings people have about Maduro or various opposition leaders, nobody wants US intervention. Even Maduro’s critics, like economist Luis Vicente León, president of a Venezuelan polling firm, acknowledge this truism: “Our survey is conclusive,” he once told Primera Página, “only three percent of the Venezuelan population would support a military intervention. That is to say, no one.” And yet, the United States has frequently sought to overthrow Venezuela’s government. In fact, it has meddled in the country since it gained independence from Spain. Venezuelan statesman Simón Bolívar, known as El Libertador, who led Venezuela and neighboring countries in their wars of independence from the Spanish Empire, already saw the writing on the wall shortly afterward. He wrote in 1829, one year before his death from tuberculosis at age 47: “The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” Leaving aside the broader history of US interventions in both Venezuela and Latin America (a topic explored in more detail in my aforementioned pending piece on US imperialism, which will hopefully be completed next year), and restricting ourselves solely to recent years, US officials have been outrageously unashamed about their actions. In 2019, for instance, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just nakedly revealed the US had attempted a coup in Venezuela. He complained that Trump was too incompetent to pull it off. (Note, Murphy uses the word democracy as the usual shorthand for subservient to the US.) “It’s been a case study in diplomatic malpractice,” he wrote. “The winning play was right in front of us … Juan Guaido stood ready to capitalize and restore democracy to the nation.” But then, “Trump and his Latin America hawks got itchy. He recognized Guaido as the leader of the nation, thinking that would propel Venezuelans (and Maduro-friendly military leaders) to Guaido’s side. In fact, the opposite happened. … Trump helped Maduro rally the military and much of the country against America and cast Guaido as a US pawn.” In the next paragraph, Murphy basically admits that Juan Guaido was in fact a US pawn: “Then, it got real embarrassing. In April 2019, we tried to organize a kind of coup, but it became a debacle. Everyone who told us they’d rally to Guaido got cold feet and the plan failed publicly and spectacularly, making America look foolish and weak. Since then, it’s been a running comedy of errors. … After a year and a half, Maduro is stronger, American influence is weaker, and there is no viable path to restore democracy in Venezuela.” The real scandal, according to the Western media, was not that a US senator admitted to orchestrating “a kind of coup” but that Trump was too incompetent to manage the Empire. Even now, Murphy’s admission is scarcely mentioned or condemned. What if Caracas officials admitted to trying to organize “a kind of coup” in Washington? Imagine the response. The media reacted with similar connivance to Machado being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I watched some of the coverage from CNN and CBS News (which is now under the strict leadership of Bari Weiss, who is more reptile than human, but that’s a story for another time) and the coverage was predictable, if still sickening. She was praised to the rafters for her tireless and fearless efforts to bring “democracy” to Venezuela. In announcing the award, Jørgen Frydnes hailed Machado as “a brave and committed champion of peace” and “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst growing darkness. … She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.” To be clear, Machado’s openly stated plan to attain power is by using the force of the US military. So coups are democracy, war is peace, ignorance is strength, and Orwell is rolling over in his grave. Ultimately, the problem with the Norwegian Nobel Committee is institutional. The prizes were created by Alfred Nobel, a chemist whose biggest success was inventing dynamite. Worried that death and destruction would be his legacy, he drafted a will to ensure his sizable fortune would be, annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. Five prizes: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. In 1968, another prize was established for the field of economics. From there, an obvious question arises: who will decide the winners? Alfred Nobel specified the institutions in his will. The physics and chemistry prizes, for instance, are awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the prizes for physiological or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The peace prize, meanwhile, isn’t decided by scholars but rather politicians. Nobel said the Norwegian legislature should establish the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the prize. Therefore, the committee has always had an elitist—should I say, bourgeois—slant to its nominees. In 1935, for instance, one of the considered candidates was Benito Mussolini, the same year he invaded Ethiopia. He probably didn’t win on account of all the political terror, murder, and repression his regime plagued Italy with, but Il Duce was praised at the time by liberal bourgeois capitalists for crushing the Italian labor movement. For example, to give you a taste of this attitude, in Britain, the birthplace of modern liberalism, the governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, criticized fascism for “eliminating … anything in the way of otherness” and “opposition in any form,” but praised the Fascists for creating “order out of chaos over the last few years: something of the kind was no doubt needed if the pendulum was not to swing too far in quite the other direction. The Duce was the right man at a critical moment.” Accordingly, British and American capitalists began investing their money in Italy now that the threat posed by unions and left-wing parties was defeated. (Famously, Hitler was also nominated in 1939 but that wasn’t merely as scandalous as it sounds: one member nominated him as a sarcastic rebuttal, a protest, to Nevil Chamberlain being nominated.) Perhaps the most controversial winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was Henry Kissinger, who famously ordered the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos, making the latter the most heavily bombed country per capita in human history. That’s of course ignoring his role in the Vietnam War, which Americans are still loathed to admit was a barbaric and indefensible war of aggression. Kissinger was awarded the prize in 1973 for the so-called Paris Peace Accords, which accomplished very little. The United States would continue fighting until their defeat in Saigon, 1975. Furthermore, the Nixon campaign undermined these same accords in 1968 to prolong the conflict, because Nixon was campaigning against the war. The Nobel Committee also awarded the prize to Kissinger’s counterpart, Le Duc Tho, but he rejected the prize. According to the BBC, he did it “without explanation.” You can either believe the BBC or his letter to the Nobel Committee: Since the signing of the Paris agreement, the United States and the Saigon administration continue in grave violation of a number of key clauses of this agreement. The Saigon administration, aided and encouraged by the United States, continues its acts of war. Peace has not yet really been established in South Vietnam. In these circumstances it is impossible for me to accept the 1973 Nobel Prize for Peace which the committee has bestowed on me. Once the Paris accord on Vietnam is respected, the arms are silenced and a real peace is established in South Vietnam, I will be able to consider accepting this prize. With my thanks to the Nobel Prize Committee please accept, madame, my sincere respects. “The Nobel Peace Prize Committee put the aggressor and the victim of aggression on the same par,” he later told journalists. “That was a blunder.” Awarding it to Obama in 2009 was another such blunder. While campaigning he had called the Iraq War a “mistake” and a “dumb war.” That earned him a Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything, nine months into his presidency. In his acceptance speech, Obama announced that he would be a wartime president after all, keeping his troops in the Middle East, because “negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” A pro-war acceptance speech for a peace prize. Another blunder happened in 1994 when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres were awarded the prize alongside Yasser Arafat for the so-called Oslo Peace Accords, which Israel undermined before the ink was dry. When María Corina Machado won the Nobel Prize earlier this month, she dedicated it to Donald Trump “for his decisive support for our cause.” The support she mentions are the US terrorist attacks against Venezuelan civilian vessels in international waters. The first was carried out last month, on September 1, when the US military struck a speedboat with eleven people on board. Some survived the first strike, but were subsequently murdered by a second missile. The US government is using the “War on Terror” logic, labeling their victims as “unlawful combatants.” Due to Bush and Obama’s legwork, the executive branch of the government (i.e., the White House) already gave itself the power to designate any organization a terrorist group; to claim, without providing evidence, that anybody is a member of such a group; and finally, to kill any member it claims belongs to that group, without trial. The Trump administration claims the eleven people were drug smugglers—which isn’t, nor should it be, punishable by death—despite the fact that drug smugglers wouldn’t cram eleven people in a small speedboat; they’d stuff the vessel full of drugs. Moreover, according to US and international law (pause for laughter because no one seemingly cares about that) people are innocent until proven guilty. Your Honor, you don’t understand, I stabbed my neighbor because I considered him an unlawful combatant! Trump posted footage of the strike to social media, bragging about the massacre. US state-media questioned neither the legality nor morality of the strikes—of course the Empire has a divine, inalienable right to slaughter whatever group of people it deems unworthy of life, such is the necropolitics of empires—instead CNN brought on a dissident Venezuelan journalist to call Maduro “not a legitimate president,” and Venezuela a “rogue nation.” (Noam Chomsky once remarked that “any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media.”) Then, the US began its largest military buildup in South America in about three decades. Eight ships in total were sent near Venezuela, including three destroyers, naturally armed to the teeth, and Marine Expeditionary Units carrying four thousand troops. Last August, the State Department increased its reward for any information that would lead to the capture of Maduro to $50 million. The strikes also continued as Trump, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, kept triumphantly posting them on social media. As of writing, at least 32 people have been killed in eight strikes—though the number of victims on the third strike on a Colombian fishing vessel remains unknown. Besides the anti-Maduro rhetoric from US officials intensifying, Trump ended diplomatic talks with Venezuela and recently, according to the New York Times, authorized the CIA to carry out “lethal” covert operations inside Venezuela. Explaining his rationale for unleashing the CIA, he told reporters: “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control.” Basically, Trump is looking to orchestrate terrorist attacks inside of Venezuela. Enthusiastically cheerleading all of this is María Corina Machado, this year’s Nobel “Peace” Prize winner. Illegal wars, extrajudicial killings, and missile strikes on civilian fishing boats. Tom Lehrer was right, it is beyond parody. The Norwegian Nobel Committee proved once again what a sad joke they really are.