Despite
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for promoting democratic rights and fighting dictatorship, receiving the award despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated statements he deserved it.
That’s a silly addition. Repeated statements that one deserves the Nobel Peace Prize do not make it surprising that someone else won it. Rather the contrary. If they want to mention the fact that Trump has been, grotesquely, demanding the prize like a toddler demanding more cookie, they should say, in a new sentence, something along the lines of “this will piss off Trump, because he’s been shouting that he should win it for years.”
Anyway. They didn’t obey his ridiculous demands.
Machado, a 58-year-old industrial engineer who lives in hiding, was blocked in 2024 by Venezuela’s courts from running for president and thus challenging President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013.
Trump would love to do that, you know. What Maduro did, not what Machado did.
“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation.
We may need them in the US in the near future.
I am looking forward to hearing the squealings & whinings from DJT & his gang of ghouls (well, actually I’m not — the squealings and whinings they indulge in are invariably predictable & boring) . The Nobel committee’s choice of a Venezuelan woman who leads the opposition party in Venezuela (at a time when Trump is illegally murdering people in the seas off Venezuela on the grounds that they are drug-smugglers, while refusing to provide any evidence that they are in fact drug-smugglers, and then posting triumphant & disgusting videos of these small boats and their crews being blown up on “Truth Social”) is a clear middle finger to Trump — but then, if Trump & his lot dislike the present Venezuelan regime so much, they should be welcoming the Nobel committee’s support of its opposition.
On the one hand it’s a relief that he didn’t get it, on the other hand it shouldn’t be a relief since it shouldn’t be something to worry about in the first place. In a sane world the prospect of an authoritarian kleptocrat receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for staging a violent insurrection to overturn an election, deploying armed forces against his own people, blowing up Venezuelans in mid ocean, or sending them to gulags in El Salvador without a trial wouldn’t even be a possibility worth taking seriously. Then again, in a sane world the prospect of him even being a candidate for the presidency, let alone winning an election, let alone winning twice (!) wouldn’t be a possibility worth taking seriously either, so…