Machado gives Nobel peace prize medal to Trump

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7y14ypg2qo

by spwa4 • 6 months ago

30 26 6 months ago

tehjoker2• 6 months ago

It is said that Trump did not give her dominion over Venezuela because he was miffed over her getting the Peace Prize and not him. She's a fascist by the way.

IAmBroom• 6 months ago

She's a fascist

Citation?

spwa4• 6 months ago

Supposedly the current government are communists. That's what Chavez promised and Maduro was his right hand man.

Of course in practice the current government ... let's call them "billionnaire communists". They defend, in words, the principles of global socialism, and in deeds they defend their own wallets.

tokai• 6 months ago

On wikipedia her political views are describe by multiple sources as:

she was viewed as a radical, far-right politician, too extreme even for her own party coalition
most radical wing of the right
the most radical wing of the political right
maintained an extreme right-wing stance

It's rare that anyone picks the fascist label themselves so its hard to pin on anyone. But I guess it could be said in the slur sense of the term.

nikolay2• 6 months ago

No. She is just literally nobody in Venezuela.

tehjoker2• 6 months ago

That’s true too.

hungryhobbit• 6 months ago

Of course she did. Her interest is in helping her country (in her terms at least), not vanity awards.

If flattering a superpower by giving them a meaningless statue can help her do that ... why wouldn't she?

ceuk2• 6 months ago

Come on, you know exactly why: integrity.

I really don't care about any of this but I don't see the need to play ignorant as to why many people might understandably find what she did distasteful.

palmotea3• 6 months ago

> If flattering a superpower by giving them a meaningless statue can help her do that ... why wouldn't she?
Come on, you know exactly why: integrity.
I really don't care about any of this but I don't see the need to play ignorant as to why many people might understandably find what she did distasteful.

Please go into more detail what you mean by "integrity." Because, that can mean a lot of different things, and what I think you mean sounds like a priority inversion.

If a Venezuelan giving the stupid hunk of metal away could help Venezuela, who cares about how some Norwegian committee and its fans feel about it? They're comfortable and unimportant.

latexr2• 6 months ago

But will it help her do that, or did she just increase Trump’s self-assuredness while accomplishing absolutely nothing of worth? There was no agreement stipulated that we know of, so why would he do something in return for her now?

nh23423fefe• 6 months ago

or did she just increase Trump’s self-assuredness

imagining that matters.

nikolay2• 6 months ago

Well, at least she admitted she didn't deserve the Peace Prize, since she's been advocating war! Yet, "Two wrongs don't make a right!"

noncoml• 6 months ago

If I were on the Nobel Prize committee, I’d feel deeply ashamed seeing the prize reduced to a kind of political currency. It’s meant to recognize extraordinary contributions to humanity, not to be leveraged as a gesture or bargaining chip in political theater.

latexr2• 6 months ago

I much prefer The Guardian’s coverage. It includes the organiser’s answer and examples of other situations where the medal was given away.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/maria-corina-m...

Earlier in the day the Nobel organizers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot.”
(…)
Earlier this week, the organisers of the Nobel peace prize announced the award could not be “shared or transferred” after Machado told Fox News she wished to “share” it with Trump. “The decision is final and stands for all time,” they said.

That one links to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/11/nobel-institut...

Back to the original:

Machado is not the first Nobel laureate to divest themselves of the award.
After winning the 1954 Nobel prize in literature, Ernest Hemingway entrusted his medal to the Catholic Church in Cuba – where it was briefly stolen from a sanctuary in 1986 before Raúl Castro ordered its return.
In 2022, the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his medal to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees. Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 Nobel prize for physics, sold his after it had spent 20 years “sitting on a shelf somewhere”.
Machado appears to be the first person to give away her medal for such explicitly political reasons, although in 1943 the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun gifted his decoration to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, as a sign of his admiration for the Nazis.

eesmith• 6 months ago

Then there's James Watson who was given a Nobel prize medal twice. First by the Nobel Committee, and second by Alisher Usmanov, who had purchased the medal at an auction in order to give it back to Watson, who had put it up for auction.

piva00• 6 months ago

Just to note that the Peace Prize committee is a completely different one than the other prizes.

The five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament while the Swedish Nobel Committee is composed of institutions proposing laureates and a larger body of experts to choose the recipients. The Norwegian part does both: selecting candidates and choosing the winner.

I think it's important to know so the Peace Prize process doesn't diminish the achievements of the other prizes.

Henry fucking Kissinger got a Peace Prize...

d3rockk• 6 months ago

Thank you for reminding me about the Nobel War Prize.

It's a shame that history has repeated itself here, political satire has yet again become obsolete.

thunderbong• 6 months ago

Actual title -

Machado vows to lead Venezuela 'when right time comes'

Per HN Guidelines [0]

Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mdhb• 6 months ago

The title accurately describes what happened without any sense of editorial sensationalism. The title doesn’t match word for word with what the original had but that’s not even close to the same thing you’re complaining about.

kleene_op• 6 months ago

First the fact that she received the price when a ton of people where far more deserving of it in terms of raw achievements toward peace. Then the fact that she would sell the price and what it represents for a slim (read inexistent)k shot at being instated as the president of Venezuella, where I read that the majority of people have a very unfavorable opinion of her. And finally the fact that she would sell away the Peace price to Donald Trump, the very same person considering invading Greenland for aura farming purposes!

I think they have to shut down the Noble peace price at this point, there's no recovering from such an embarrassing turn of events.

rsynnott• 6 months ago

I... don't think that's how any of this works.

Machado gives Nobel peace prize medal to Trump

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