The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today.
No, The Don didn't get it. Someone
deserving did. María Corina Machado. A real leader of the Venezuelan
people, the one Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro blocked from running for
president.
Maduro did the same thing in Venezuela’s
most recent election as Trump did in the 2020 US elections, except Maduro was
successful at it. He refused to leave office even though he lost fair and
square to Edmundo González, the democratic candidate whom Machado backed. It’s
actually remarkable that Trump and Maduro aren’t friendly fellow-tyrants, since
they have so much in common. Certainly as much as Trump and Putin do. They just
wrap themselves in different flags. But both pretend to be democratic and
populist when they are, in fact, self-serving autocrats.
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| María Corina Machado |
Machado received the Nobel Peace Prize “for
her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and
for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to
democracy.”
In a world where a fervent belief in fighting
for democracy and individual rights is too often seen as “old-fashioned and naïve”,
the members of the Nobel Committee did themselves proud by honoring a fighter
for freedom and democratic government—for which neither Maduro nor Trump has
any use. The Nobel Committee hasn’t always done so—like when they gave a Peace
Prize to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who was directly
responsible for some of the worst atrocities ever committed in Southeast Asia.
But in this case, they got it right.
Had the committee awarded the prize to
Trump—who has been lobbying furiously for it since he returned to office, but
for no particularly good reason—while he is carrying out illegal acts of war
against a sovereign nation, and committing summary executions in the Caribbean
without proof, cause, due process or credible threat, it would have been a
travesty beyond all comprehension.
Yesterday, while María Carina Machado
was receiving her well-deserved Nobel Prize, Donald Trump was throwing a
tantrum and seizing a Venezuelan oil tanker in the Caribbean. It was a move so
incomprehensible that it left political and diplomatic observers with their
mouths hanging open. No amount of MAGA spin could explain or justify it. It was
an act of piracy, pure and simple, carried out in the name of the United States
of America, which has become whatever the madman in charge says it is.
You can read about Peace-Prize winner María
Corina Machado at the link below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nobel_Peace_Prize
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