2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and George W. Bush (left); 2025 US Peace Prize winner Gerry Condon receives award from Michael Knox (right). Photo: Eric Draper/White House/file photo and Roger Harris/file photo.
By Roger D. Harris – Nov 29, 2025
The Nobel Peace Prize was established in 1901. In the decades that followed, Mahatma Gandhi emerged as the international symbol of world peace for resistance to the dominant imperialism of his time—the British Empire. He was never recognized by the Nobel Committee.
The Nobel Committee has honored figures ranging from the admirable Martin Luther King Jr. to the war criminal Henry Kissinger. Barack Obama received the prize after less than nine months in office, a “premature canonization” for not being George W. Bush. He then used his acceptance speech to justify US military invention. Obama went on to kill 324 civilians by drone strikes, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, and to declare Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US, thus setting the stage for Trump’s current offensive against Caracas.
The Nobel Committee is appointed by the Norwegian government. In 1949, Norway became a founding member of NATO, which functions as the Praetorian Guard for the now dominant imperialist power—the US.
Related to Norway’s NATO membership is its relationship to Israel. Although domestic law currently prohibits direct export of weapons to Israel, Oslo indirectly channels support via NATO supply chains. Norway exports dual-use components for Israeli weapons systems via third-party contractors and regularly allows US military equipment to be transited on its territory.
We are currently in the Age of Trump, where genocide in Gaza is unapologetically livestreamed. The Nobel Committee could have awarded the 2025 prize to Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, but the optics would have been too blatant. Instead, they selected a photogenic longtime war monger and coup collaborator, a full-throated proponent of violence, an habitual liar, a Trump sycophant, and an ardent Zionist.
That laureate is Venezuelan ultra-right politician María Corina Machado. As an added bonus for Washington, her award boosts the escalating US war against Venezuela. Marco Rubio, a senior US government official and key architect of the regime-change crusade, campaigned for her with the Nobel Committee.
In striking contrast, the US Peace Prize—an arguably more honorable honor than the Nobel—was awarded on November 23 to Gerry Condon, a Veterans for Peace former president and current board member. He accepted the award “on behalf of many wonderful activists who work for peace and solidarity with people around the globe.”
Michael Knox, chair of the US Peace Memorial Foundation, presented the award. Since 2009, its honorees have included Christine Ahn, Ajamu Baraka, David Swanson, Ann Wright, Veterans For Peace, Kathy Kelly, CODEPINK, Chelsea Manning, Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, and Cindy Sheehan.
In contrast to the Nobel Committee, the US Peace Memorial Foundation only honors those who work to end war and militarism. By celebrating antiwar activists and their achievements, the foundation seeks to foster an “evolutionary shift” in the US political consciousness—one that inspires more people to oppose war and speak out publicly for peace.
Unlike Machado, a scion of one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families, Condon comes from a working-class background. Like many such youths, he joined the US Army and was accepted into the Special Forces (aka Green Berets). During training, he heard firsthand accounts of atrocities in Vietnam from returning GIs. Questioning whether that war had anything to do with democracy, he refused orders and was court-marshalled.
Escaping to Canada and then Sweden, Condon went on to become a lifelong leader in the resistance to US imperial wars. Among many other activities, he worked with the Golden Rule peace boat, which has sailed over 20,000 miles in the past decade promoting a world free of nuclear weapons. (See the US Peace Registry his full peace activism dossier.)
Condon was the featured guest on what was billed as a “No War on Venezuela” indoor rally. It was one of over a hundred such actions held in the US and abroad protesting Washington’s gunboat imperialism in the Caribbean and now extending to an assault on the entire hemisphere. The domestic analogues are federal troops and ICE agents terrorizing people on US streets.
The keynote speaker at the event was international human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik. He is currently representing Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his family, and interior minister contesting their placement on the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list, as US violence against Venezuela spills over to the eastern Pacific. Kovalik is also representing the family of a Colombian fisherman allegedly murdered on the high seas in that offensive.
The event took place at the ornate Veterans War Memorial Building in San Francisco. Kovalik commented on a stained glass window in the building depicting the emblem of the veterans of the Spanish-American War. That conflict in 1898, he noted, is considered the first imperialist war. The insignia chillingly portrays two US soldiers standing over a completely naked woman on her knees. Besides the symbolic female figure, the emblem sports the names of the war spoils: Cuba, Philippines, and Puerto Rico.
Fast forward to the present, and the US is embarking on yet another imperial incursion into the Caribbean and beyond with Venezuela as the primary target. Venezuela, Kovalik explained, represents the hope of an alternative world order. That is precisely why Washington targets it.
RDH/OT
Roger D. Harris
Roger D. Harris lives in California and is with the anti-imperialist human rights organization Task Force on the Americas, the Venezuela Solidarity Network, the US Peace Council, and the Marxist Forum. He writes regularly on Latin American and the Caribbean with a special emphasis on Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
