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THE ASTONISHING LIST OF WARMONGERS GIVEN THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
SATIRICAL SONGWRITER TOM LEHRER said that “satire was dead” after the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Henry Kissinger in 1973.
To honor the great Mr Lehrer (and because I am a bit of a wacko), I decided to deliver the story of the dark side of the “peace” prize as a written report AND as an attached satirical song. Read on. Or just click the video.
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MR KISSINGER
As Tom Lehrer noted, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 to Henry Kissinger was a key moment in the global loss of trust in the award.
Why? Because the US started the Vietnam war unnecessarily (US foreign policy says Asians cannot chose to be socialist or communist on pain of death) and then, after years of needless loss of lives, tried to end it with Kissinger claiming to have negotiated a ceasefire.
While that was top of the news cycle, Kissinger greenlit the US military to secretly carpet-bomb Cambodia, causing a huge spike in deaths.
This was ignored by the Norwegians. They knew a rich man was actively killing poor Asians but gave him the peace prize anyway.
The world was as horrified as Lehrer.
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MR PERES
Israel’s leader Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with two others) in 1994 for, er, bringing peace to the Middle East.
Yeeessss. We can all see how that turned out.
At the time, the wider world was in agreement that the worst possible thing that could happen was the proliferation of nuclear weapons in that part of the world. Shimon Peres presided over a secret program to build those exact weapons in that exact spot.
From 1994 onwards, Israel built up its secret arsenal. But western politicians and journalists continuously told the world that Iran – not Israel, but Iran – was “two weeks away” from having nuclear weapons.
Incredibly, they are STILL SAYING THE SAME THING TODAY.
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MR OBAMA
Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009—a surprise to the man himself, no less than to the world.
Pretty much everyone said he “seemed so nice” but Obama presided over a massive rise of drone warfare, filling the skies over Afghanistan with remote control killers, and brutalizing warfare forever. Many innocents were killed.
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THE EUROPEAN UNION
The European Union was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, for managing to have got through 60 years without having been part of a war.
This was shortly before the EU began plotting with Washington DC to scrap the Minsk accords and other pledges that retained Ukraine as a peaceful buffer between the EU/ NATO and Russia.
As many experts in the west and the east have agreed, that made war in Ukraine inevitable.
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MR AHMED
The Nobel Peace Prize was given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2019 for bringing peace to his country. Needless to say, this was followed by years of wars and thousands of deaths.
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MS MACHADO
Maria Corina Machado was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 after calling for the United States to invade her country, promising US corporations they could profit from its oil.
After the US military murdered their way into Venezuela’s presidential quarters and abducted the President and his wife, Ms Machado gave the prize to Donald Trump.
A pair of peaceniks, apparently.
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A NEW PRIZE
So what now? Many people much smarter than I am say the Peace Prize cannot be salvaged: its credibility cannot recover from such a long line of fiascos, crowned by the Machado-Trump debacle.
In which case, it is up to the rest of us, the citizens of the world, to honor people who really do oppose war and who actually do work towards peace. There are many.
- Francesca Albanese is a hero to many people.
- Same for the amazing group known as Codepink, including Medea, Jodie and the team.
- China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has done some amazing work in the reconciliation space too, and it appears that Pakistan is now working as peacemakers too.
- On the institute level, great pro-peace efforts have been made by the Responsible Statecraft team in the US, the Schiller Institute in Germany, and other think tanks.
- And of course there’s the independent journalism movement, from Brian Berletic to Max Blumenthal and many others, you know who you are.
We’ll win in the end.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
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