US right-winger Anne Applebaum gets award despite appalling record and accusations of being a mouthpiece for US and UK imperialism
Right-wing author and journalist Anne Applebaum has been awarded the annual Peace Prize of the German Publishing Association, an award touted and praised by the German ambassadors to the US and UK, who claimed she ‘always spoke out in defense of freedom and peace – and derided by many who know her record.
In 2002, Applebaum – who has also written for an array of UK right-wing rags – wrote a piece calling for the targeted murder of Palestinian journalists because of their effectiveness in reporting Israel’s violence toward Palestinians and the number of people it kills daily:
Since then Applebaum, who has churned out a string of anti-Russian or pro-Ukrainian books and articles, worked at the right-wing ‘Legatum Institute’ and served as an ‘adjunct fellow’ at the right-wing, neocon think-tank ‘The American Enterprise Institute’, which issues an annual award named after Irving Kristol, who joined the AEI after the so-called ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ at which he worked was exposed as being founded and funded by the CIA.
Applebaum is currently on the board of the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’, an organisation widely recognised (and even obliquely admitted by its founder) to be another CIA ‘cutout’:
She has also admitted hosting a number of far-right and antisemitic figures at the mansion she shared in Poland with her husband, pro-Ukrainian Polish government minister Radosław Sikorski – who once tweeted (then deleted) ‘Thank you America’ for the attack that destroyed the Nordstream gas pipelines – though she later claimed that “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party”.
Applebaum has also been accused of serving as a member of an ‘Inner Cluster Cell’ linked to British intelligence and the disgraced ‘Integrity Initiative’:
The reaction to the German award was scathing. Among the hundreds of negative comments, writer Alex Jordan linked to his May tweet in which she sent him an ‘unhinged’ email accusing him of ‘using the bodies of dead Ukrainians’ after he pointed out that a peace deal is the best hope of ending Ukraine’s war with Russia:
Others linked to Applebaum’s murderous comments about journalists or pointed out the Orwellian nature of the prize:
Others were more pithy:
As Orwell foresaw in his book 1984, in the eyes of the Establishment truth is lies and war is peace.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Israel has murdered at least 108 journalists in Gaza since 7 October – and many more before that – in many cases, targeting their families in bombing attacks as well as the journalists themselves.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.