The Nobel Prize to Trump: The Hypocrisy of Peace

Published at: 27/06/2025 05:00 PM

128 years ago, Alfred Nobel made clear in his will the will he believed would correct the course of humanity: “The Peace Prize must be awarded to the person who has worked more or better for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of existing armies and the celebration and promotion of peace processes”. This was reflected in his reaffirmation of his faith.

In 2003, journalist Ricardo Moreno published a report called The Other Side of Nobel Prizes in El País de España, where he explained that “when Alfred Nobel created the prizes that bear his name, he had already conquered immortality with the invention of dynamite, which revolutionized mining and construction of tunnels, but which also increased the deadly nature of weapons. Perhaps that is why the writer August Strindberg never won this award, who referred to his compatriot's money as 'the money of dynamite'”.

Faced with the comments of the intellectuals of the time, Nobel wanted to compensate for the damage that could be done with his discovery, by creating a special prize for those people or institutions that have carried out research, studies and discoveries of transcendence for humanity and that requires a selective and rigorous process.

However, the reputation of the Nobel Foundation has been tarnished by making investments and awarding prizes to people with a history of war recognized worldwide. The criticisms refer to “ethics”, due to obtaining profits from the sale of weapons, such as the Bofors factory, of which the Foundation is a shareholder and is accused of selling weapons to countries with regimes that violate human rights or that are in a war.

Moreno added that the Nobel Foundation earns money by selling weapons and at the same time it awards a Nobel Peace Prize, to which, in this regard, a spokesperson for the institution argued that “there is no contradiction in investing in arms industries and the defense of peace.”

In the same vein, in 2017 the organization Facing Finance and the German channel ZDF denounced the Nobel Foundation for investing in companies that manufacture nuclear weapons, an accusation that was admitted by the then director of the Foundation, Mr. Lars Heikensten. In that same year, the newspaper Swissinfo.ch (SWI) published a note in which the Norwegian association Future in our Hands accused the Nobel Foundation of having investments in funds present in the capital of companies involved in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and it was not denied by its director.

It is not surprising then that such recognition has been given to personalities who went down in history as promoters of wars, genocides and destruction, such as Theodore Roosevelt, George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, Lech Walesa, Oscar Arias , Mikhail Gorbachov , Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Juan Manuel Santos; whether US President Donald Trump, who is the supplier of arms to Ukraine, manages the decisions of the warlike nature of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and attacks nations such as Iran, in addition to selling to Israel the weapons it uses in the genocide against the Palestinian people.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team