Washed Hands, Bloody Laurels! From Pilate to Peace Prizes: The Global Theatre of Guilt

By Sewasew Teklemariam Ethiopian Tribune Columnist
“In just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars… This includes Egypt and Ethiopia.”
President Donald Trump, UN General Assembly, 23 September 2025
And thus, the theatre began. Trump, ever the maestro of self-mythology, took to the UN stage not with policy, but with performance. Ethiopia and Egypt, two nations locked in a hydropolitical staring contest over the Grand Renaissance Dam, were suddenly cast as war-torn lovers reconciled by the benevolent hand of the American president. Never mind that no formal war existed. Never mind that the only thing truly brokered was a photo op. The applause was tepid. The fact-checkers were not.
This was not diplomacy. It was pantomime. And the Nobel Peace Prize, dangling like a carrot dipped in dynamite, was the unspoken prize behind the performance. Trump’s inclusion of Ethiopia and Egypt was not about resolution. It was about arithmetic. Seven wars ended, seven medals deserved. Oslo or bust.
But let us rewind the reel. Long before Trump’s peace parade, there was Pontius Pilate, the Roman bureaucrat who washed his hands before the crowd, disclaiming responsibility for the crucifixion of a man he knew to be innocent. It was the original act of moral theatre: a ritual of guilt avoidance dressed up as virtue. Fast forward to the 19th century, and we meet Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, profited handsomely from arms manufacturing, and then, upon reading a premature obituary branding him “The Merchant of Death”, decided to fund a prize for peace. Atonement, it seems, is best served with a trust fund.
Both men were architects of consequence. Both tried to launder legacy through symbolism. Pilate gave us the basin. Nobel gave us the medal. And both left behind a paradox: violence repackaged as virtue.
The Nobel Peace Prize, once a beacon of moral clarity, now flickers under the weight of contradiction. It has been awarded to drone commanders, genocide apologists, and war architects, often not for what they’ve done, but for what they promise to do. Barack Obama received it in 2009 for “his vision,” before expanding drone warfare and overseeing the collapse of Libya. Aung San Suu Kyi won it for nonviolent resistance, then presided over the silence of Rohingya genocide. Henry Kissinger, architect of coups and carpet bombings, took it home in 1973. And Abiy Ahmed, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, was awarded the prize in 2019 for brokering peace with Eritrea, only to plunge his own country into a brutal civil war, marked by mass atrocities, media blackouts, and humanitarian collapse.
The prize has become a moral IOU, handed out in advance of accountability. It is not a reward for peace, it is a bet against future violence. And more often than not, it loses.
Trump’s UN speech was not a diplomatic report, it was a campaign monologue. By listing Ethiopia and Egypt among his “seven wars ended,” he positioned himself as a global peacemaker, despite the absence of actual war. Ethiopia and Egypt, meanwhile, played along. Why? Ethiopia faces scrutiny over internal repression, ethnic cleansing, and the silencing of journalists. Egypt seeks distraction from economic collapse and authoritarian drift. A peace declaration however hollow offers moral cover and diplomatic leverage. It was not a treaty. It was a press release.
Today’s rulers are not content with power. They crave absolution. They broker ceasefires, commission memoirs, and fund museums. They hug former enemies for the cameras, then jail journalists in the dark. They speak of unity while silencing dissent. They are Pilate with a PR team. They are Nobel with a drone fleet. And the Peace Prize? It becomes a stage prop, used to sanitise legacies while bodies pile beneath the podium.
In a quiet café in Addis Ababa, beneath the flickering light of a power outage and the hum of surveillance drones, an Ethiopian intellectual, once a government advisor, now a dissident theologian, offered a blistering reflection on the Nobel Peace Prize and its recipient. “Abiy Ahmed, always the centre of attention, should offer his Nobel to Donald Trump. Let him wear it like a crown ‘Greatest Leader of Our Planet.’ It suits the theatre. It suits the lie.” He paused, sipping bitter buna, then continued: “As for Abiy, he should take a puritan stance. Tell his African compatriots: ‘I was wrong. I took a prize born of dynamite and death. A guilt-washing Ponzi scheme crafted by Alfred Nobel the Merchant of Death himself.’”
His voice cracked not with weakness, but with grief. “What did I gain from this prize? Nothing but the corpses of my fellow citizens. As a Protestant, I now declare: I no longer wish to associate with such laurels. It brought me grief. It brought me curse. I am a soldier of Christ. I should not be filled by the dark side’s prizes, nor sell my soul or my people, to the meat grinders of our time.”
This testimony is not just personal, it is prophetic. It reframes the Nobel not as a reward, but as a burden. A symbol of complicity. A talisman of grief. In the diaspora, we echo this lament. We see the Peace Prize not as a beacon, but as a mirror, reflecting the blood beneath the handshake, the silence beneath the speech.
And let us end, not with a whisper but with a siren. In the latest dispatch from the theatre of absurdity, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, speaking on Judge Napolitano’s Judging Freedom, warns that Donald Trump has abandoned the peace process between Russia and Ukraine. The negotiations, once touted as a diplomatic triumph, have been dropped like a hot dossier. The result? A chilling forecast: three million Ukrainians could perish in a nuclear strike. Not metaphorically. Not hypothetically. Literally, vaporised in the name of geopolitical brinkmanship and legacy laundering.
This is not peace. This is apocalypse with a press kit. And all of it, somehow, loops back to the cursed laurels of Alfred Nobel. The Merchant of Death, whose dynamite funded a prize that now decorates warmongers and strongmen. The Nobel Peace Prize, once a symbol of hope, now risks becoming a death certificate for diplomacy. A talisman of hubris. A planetary curse.
So let us be clear. If the planet ceases to exist, it will not be because peace failed. It will be because peace was performed, on podiums, in press releases, and in Oslo ballrooms, while the real work of justice was buried beneath the rubble.
We do not need more prizes. We need repentance. We need reckoning. And we need to stop mistaking washed hands for clean hearts.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Ethiopian Tribune
Source:
Scott Ritter: How Close Is Doomsday? – Judge Napolitano, Judging Freedom