The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan far right politician Maria Corina Machado has been met with scorn and derision as a travesty by multiple writers and commentators. Machado, a ultrarightist agitator for the Venezuelan oligarchy, is anything but a peace activist.

Aligning with the policy goals of the Trump administration, she has consistently supported the violent overthrow of the Bolivarian revolution in her home nation. Her record as an advocate for violence and a coup plotter is clear for all to see.

Strongly supporting the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Machado has welcomed Israel’s attack on Gaza, and expressing her solidarity with the Israeli military as a joint civilisational struggle against Islam. It may initially appear unusual that an extreme right winger from Venezuela would openly link up with the Israeli government, but dig a little deeper and we can observe an ideological connection.

The European far right, with whom Netanyahu’s political bloc is aligned, conceives of Islam as a major threat – the ‘infidels’ – who must be expunged from Western nations. Obsessed with reliving and revisiting the Reconquista – the 15th century European Christian struggle to physically expel the Muslim population from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain/Portugal) – views Europe as under siege from Islamic infiltration today. Machado, a representative of the Venezuelan ultraright, sees herself as part of this inter-civilisational conflict.

That is enough about Machado – you may read the evaluation of her Nobel peace prize award from commentators more knowledgeable than myself. What we should focus on now is the deliberate cultivation of celebrity dissidents, advocates of US regime change wars who grace our television screens, have access to the major corporate media, and whose opinions we are supposed to take seriously.

Machado is only one example of a carefully cultivated regime change asset, provided credibility in our corporate media, and whose function is to soften up public opinion for a barbaric US regime change war. Spokespersons for imperial power, these celebrity dissidents become a familiar fixture, setting the terms of how we understand overseas wars.

When their perspective closely aligns the goals of the Pentagon and US State Department, they are welcomed as agents of change, no matter how remote their ideas are from reality. The Nobel peace prize is looking less like a reward for services to peace, and more as a reward for subservience to US foreign policy objectives.

What do I have mind when I talk about celebrity dissidents? I have written about ultranationalist Israeli politician and ex-Soviet dissenter Natan Sharansky before. Today, let’s explore a similar dissident turned regime change spokesperson – Garry Kasparov.

Famous the world over as a chess champion, which he undoubtedly is, he gained a new generation of fans as the grand chess master defeated by Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer in 1997. Computer algorithms, through sheer processing power, finally out-calculated Kasparov over multiple chess games.

That was not the end of Kasparov, by no means. Born Garik Kimovich Weinstein in 1963 in then Soviet Azerbaijan, he is Armenian on his mother’s side. Taking up chess from an early age, chess was and still is a national sport in former Soviet republics.

From an early age, Kasparov adopted a stridently pro-US imperialist outlook, courtesy of his conservative parents. He admitted, many years later, that he was named after former US President Harry Truman, whom his parents admired. Truman was responsible for the saturation bombing of North Korea, which cost millions of lives and decimated the country’s infrastructure. Admiring the Korean War was only the first US imperial war of which Kasparov would approve.

As chairperson of the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), and vice president of the World Liberty Congress, he has vociferously advocated for US invasions of Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela – nations which, despite the nature of their politically differing governments, are all targets of US hostility, sanctions and cultural warfare.

These groups, while officially classified as nongovernmental organisations, receive copious amounts of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a think tank well known for its links to the CIA. The NED is a soft power instrument for US imperial objectives. The World Liberty Congress and RDI have US military generals and former intelligence operatives on their boards of directors. It is easy to be a dissident when you have the financial and media backing of powerful organisations.

Kasparov reminds me of another chess champion, the late Bobby Fischer. The latter, after a successful career in chess, sank into the cesspit of conspiracy theories. Fischer was rightly ostracised for his bizarre beliefs. Kasparov has certainly promoted his fair share of bizarre conspiracy theories, such as the New Chronology.

Believers of this particular flavour of eccentricity claim that the Middle Ages never happened, that Ancient Greece and Rome only ended a few hundred years ago, and that Jesus actually lived in the 12th century. Kasparov is free to believe whatever he likes, but far from being ostracised like Fischer, he continues to have access to international media platforms.

Kasparov is absolutely certain that Russia’s 2022 invasion of eastern Ukraine constitutes genocide. He has repeated this claim ad nauseam in his multiple media interviews. If that is the case, he has demonstrated a glaring hypocrisy – failing to similarly denounce the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as amounting to genocide. Increasing numbers of international observers and groups, including Physicians for Human Rights, have explicitly stated that Israel is guilty of genocide.

The plight of the Palestinians is of no interest to a regime change operative such as Kasparov. Deploying the term genocide in a cynical, emotionally manipulative way to further US imperial interests is his only concern.

Exposing the agenda of celebrity dissidents helps us to avoid falling into their political cesspit. Kasparov has built a financially lucrative career as a paid propagandist for an imperial regime; so did Julius Streicher.