A Nobel Prize winner in war uniform

DANIEL JADUE

When the Nobel Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado, it chose to call "peace" what, in the South, we know as intervention and tutelage. It awarded it to a person who for years has placed herself at the disposal of a foreign power to promote a coup d'état in her own country. Someone who has even called, even in international forums, for foreign military intervention in the genocidal State of Israel, and who, in the midst of the devastation of Gaza, defends the Zionist entity with the grammar of "self-defense."

At the same time, I dismiss Greta Thunberg, a woman who from a very young age showed more awareness than most of the leaders of what is known as the West, a young woman who, unlike Machado, has demanded a ceasefire and an end to the genocide. And although in this decision, the Committee has acted like a cast from the Theater of the Absurd, it must be recognized that the decision is much more than a mistake of casting: It's a profoundly political statement that ultimately burys the already questionable prestige of a prize that has been transformed into a symbolic instrument of global capital. The Nobel Prize acts as what it is: an apparatus of Atlantic hegemony that transforms the imperial order into a moral virtue.

This isn't the first time. Kissinger was previously crowned over the craters of Indochina and the victims of the military dictatorships he imposed on our America, and Obama before the drones and his infamous attempt to revive US intervention in Latin America. The pattern is consistent: rewarding the "peace" that administers barbarism, not the one that confronts it. Gramsci explained it bluntly: hegemony doesn't rule with bayonets alone; it rules with stories. And here the narrative is transparent: "democracy" is that which can be guaranteed by sanctions, blockades, and military threats; "peace" is the security of markets and transnational capital, not the right of peoples to self-determination and to live without sieges.

Machado, who has invoked the Inter-American Treaty on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (TIAR), "coalitions," "smart" sanctions, and all the paraphernalia of external coercion to obtain a government he will never obtain at the polls, embodies that peace in uniform. Fanon left the antidote written: the "civilizing mission" doesn't bring freedom; it brings subordination. Rewarding that script in Latin America is normalizing tutelage over the continent under the humanitarian euphemism. The fact that he also applauded Israel while the ICJ was issuing measures due to a plausible risk of genocide makes him obscene: it sanctifies the peace that excuses the siege, and silences those who call for arms embargoes and humanitarian corridors.

The comparison with Greta only sharpens the picture: on one side, an activist who denounces wars and climate change, two causes of hunger and mass displacement; on the other, a subordinate of imperialism who demands external force and supports a state that destroys hospitals, schools, and camps. If the Nobel laureate had to choose, he chose against peace. Marx and Engels had already provided the key: "Law is nothing but the will of the ruling class erected into law." Here, "peace" is the will of the powers erected into ceremony.

Let no one be fooled: the award is not just a symbolic gesture; it is politically driven. It strengthens the hard line of sanctions that starve populations, whitewashes commissioned intervention, and stigmatizes those who defend ceasefires, negotiation, and sovereignty. Samir Amin called this collective imperialism: a network of capital, governments, and media that divides spheres of influence and administers the law as it sees fit. Today, this network bites its tongue to avoid pronouncing "Gaza" and lavishes praise on those who legitimize exception as a method.

"And what do you propose?" the chorus of common sense will ask. What the word peace should always have meant: an immediate ceasefire where there are sieges; an arms embargo on those who violate IHL; the lifting of unilateral and illegal sanctions that punish peoples; political dialogue without a gun on the table; the restoration of sovereignty without guardians. And at home: holding a referendum on the use of the Armed Forces in foreign policy, prohibiting the export of arms to active conflicts, and dismantling the fetish of "humanitarian intervention" as a quick fix.

The Nobel Prize winner made a choice. We must also choose. Either we confuse peace with armed order, or we recover its plebeian meaning: bread, shelter, rights, and self-determination. Rosa Luxemburg left the compass: socialism or barbarism. In this edition, the Committee chose barbarism with tuxedoIt is time to build, without his blessing, the peace that is not needed. Marines ni lobbies to exist.

Daniel Jadue Jadue is a Chilean architect, sociologist, and politician of Palestinian descent, a member of the Communist Party of Chile.