FLASH
Shkruar nga Fulvio Scaglione
From Trump to Putin, hypocrisy and farce with the Nobel...
There are many ways, more or less original and effective, to measure the quality of the time we live in. The British magazine 'The Economist', for example, has for years measured inflation and purchasing power in different countries by analyzing the price of a McDonald's Big Mac.
In Washington, the "Pentagon Pizza Meter" is used to measure the level of military alert at the Pentagon, with the belief that the increase in fast food orders for the office indicates the scale of the crisis.
And, in their own way, perhaps less serious but undoubtedly more significant, nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize also serve as an indicator of the times.
This is not to say that the prize has not had worthy winners. We all remember Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, or organizations like the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Doctors Without Borders. But, equally well, we also remember names that did not deserve it. Like US President Theodore Roosevelt, honored in 1906, a fanatical instigator of the war against Spain in Cuba, who founded a special battalion and spoke of Native Americans with the words: “I do not think that the good Indians are only the dead, but nine out of ten are like that.” His foreign policy? It was called the “big stick policy,” especially in Latin America. Or Barack Obama, the newly elected president, who received the prize without doing anything for peace, only to start several wars later. Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres are other dubious examples. And meanwhile Mahatma Gandhi, nominated several times, never won. Even in 1948, when he was assassinated, the prize was not awarded "due to a lack of worthy living candidates."
But the Nobel Peace Prize has always been like that. But the nominations speak volumes about the moment we are in. And this moment is bleak. Two Israeli professors, Shalom Sadik and Amos Azaria, have nominated Daniella Weiss, director of the settler movement “Nachala”, known as the “mother of the settlers”. The daughter of two members of the terrorist group Lehi (Stern Gang), responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, Daniella has been the head of an illegal settlement in the West Bank for 11 years and has been arrested several times for attacking Israeli police. In 2024, Canada sanctioned her for violence against Palestinians, while in 2025 the same action was taken by the United Kingdom.
A few weeks later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, happy with American support for his war on Iran, came up with another proposal: the Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump. Fantastic. Trump, in 2018, rejected the nuclear deal with Iran, signed in 2015, and in 2025 ordered bombings of Iran, which he himself had pushed into a nuclear arms race, even though he knew it had neither bombs nor enough uranium to build them. And then, he gave Israel tons of bombs to continue its offensive against the Palestinians. Small details, right?
And, because every tragedy has its dose of farce, someone is becoming funny in Italy too. Fosco Giannini, former senator of Rifondazione Comunista and today leader of the Rinascita Comunista movement, has nominated for the Nobel... Vladimir Putin. Yes, the very one who, before destroying Chechnya, said: "We will follow you even to the toilet". And then Ukraine? Well, let's not analyze too much...
In the spirit of the times and the lack of shame, I am also submitting a candidacy. I have no formal right, but I believe I have the right name: Mohammed al-Sharaa, once known as Al-Jolani, today the interim president of Syria. Yes, he was an associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS and then of Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda. But now, with the support of Erdogan and Turkey, he has taken over part of Syria, wears a suit and is liked by everyone. I am sure that someone will also call this one a “man of peace”.
If you've managed to read this far, and you've understood that it's not a joke, that these candidacies are real, and that if these are the contenders for the Nobel Peace Prize, then we really do live in dirty times... you're absolutely right. / Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "Inside Over"
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