The campaign to nominate Kim Jong-un for a Nobel Peace Prize
Students of the Baekdu Praise Committee staged a welcoming march for Kim Jong-un in Seoul, on December 23, 2018. (Image courtesy of News1)
Until the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat was nominated for and then shockingly awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, to the eternal infamy of the Nobel Committee, the most absurd nominations for the award were those made in for Adolf Hitler in 1939 and for Joseph Stalin in 1948.
For some reason, however, their fellow tyrant and mass murderer Mao Zedong was overlooked for that honor, and since the Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown only a few years after its inception, Pol Pot’s foremost defender in the West, Noam Chomsky, never had an opportunity to nominate him.
Looking more closely, we might say that Hitler’s nomination didn’t really count, since it was proposed by the anti-Nazi Swedish parliamentarian Erik Brandt to mock the German dictator, as a form of ironical protest.
The nomination of Stalin, however, was serious. Its author was a Czech intellectual the year of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia.
Stalin didn’t win, but he established his Stalin Peace Prize (renamed the Lenin Peace Prize after his death) which was awarded to various pro-Stalin communists and other far-left figures around the world. This latter group included two Stalin fans who supported North Korea during the Korean War, Paul Robeson, an American, and Briton Monica Felton.
A high-ranking North Korean official and former Soviet intelligence agent, Pak Chong-ae, was also a recipient, although she was eventually purged by Kim Il-sung in the mid-1960s.
Not to be outdone, the North Korean regime established its own award for foreigners in 1993. The International Kim Il-sung Prize was given to leading promoters of the Kim dynasty cult. One winner of was Kim Jong-il, although some suspect that a little nepotism and unfair influence may have been involved in that choice.
Several Korean Americans known for their support of the North Korean regime and promotion of the Kim dynasty cult have been honored for their propaganda work in the U.S. These include: Roh Kil-nam, the late founding editor of the hardcore pro-North and racist group and website Minjok Tongshin; his longtime rival Yoon Kil-sang, the former head of the equally pro-North and racist group and website Korean American National Coordinating Council (KANCC); the current KANCC leader and Juche ideology expert Kim Hyun-hwan; and their fellow North Korean agent of influence and rabidly antisemitic pro-North activist Chung Ki-yeol. All have been awarded medals for their loyalty to the North, either as award prizes or in the form of honorary doctorates.
Perhaps an even greater honor, from their perspective, was that some of these figures were granted audiences with Kim Il-sung, the idol of their fervent devotion.
As appalling as it may seem, even if not very surprising, pro-North Korean activists in the ROK and the U.S. have recently initiated a campaign to support the nomination of Kim Jong-un for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2018, the founder and leader of the pro-North front group Women Cross DMZ posted on social media that both North Korea and South Korea should get the Nobel, but it is unclear if she thought up this idea herself or if it was suggested to her by comrades at the North Korean Mission to the United Nations in New York.
The editor of the far-left magazine The Nation went even further, urging that the Nobel be given to Kim Jong-un, Moon Jae-in, and Women Cross DMZ.
As for the North Koreans, Radio Free Asia reported in 2019 that the North’s propagandists were telling their people that Kim was a front-runner for the Nobel. Officials reportedly claimed Western media were mentioning Kim as a potential winner. However, the propagandists did not apparently explain any details about the Nobel to their audiences, who likely had little or no knowledge of its nature or significance.
More recently, last May, other pro-North Korean individuals in the U.S. and the ROK renewed the campaign. According to the report on the ROK-based hardcore pro-North Korean, rabidly anti-American website Jaju Sibo, which also features racist and antisemitic content, a South Korean university student who had completely his military service, Baek Ryung, proposed that North Korea deserved to be given a Nobel because it was an important force for peace in the world.
Young Mr. Baek added that he hoped that if the North got the award, that would help to dispel some of the negative perceptions people have about it, like the allegedly false information that causes people to misunderstand its apparently peaceful nature.
Baek also called for an end to U.S.-ROK joint military exercises and demanded the U.S. stop what he claimed was interference in ROK domestic affairs and its alleged efforts to prevent North-South reconciliation and peace.
To support his contention that the North had been exceedingly patient and forbearing in contrast to the ROK, he quoted a legislator of the South Korean Democratic Party of Korea and a far-left YouTube show host who had expressed that same view. He even set up a Facebook account and a response page for people to join his campaign. His views about the admirable patience and forbearance of the North are shared not only by left-wing politicians and pundits, but also apparently by President Lee Jae-myung himself, who in excusing a North Korean missile test, said in October of 2025 that Kim Jong-un had been exceedingly patient with the ROK.
In late 2025, having become somewhat of a star among extreme-left forces due to his publicity stunt regarding the Nobel, Baek was a speaker at rallies held by the notoriously anti-U.S. and North Korea-sympathizing “Candlelight Action Movement,” where he called for increased struggle against the U.S.
He is the leader of a group called the Student Sit-in Group for Self-Reliance and Independence, which holds protests in front of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. At one such protest, he and his comrades put on a little street theater performance, in which they sang their so-called “Song for the Withdrawal of U.S. Forces in Korea,” which is certainly not a K-Pop tune, but might easily top the charts in Pyongyang.
At another rally against what he called American “gangsters,” Baek declared “We must teach the U.S. a lesson,” and “We will make the United States kneel before the dignity of the sovereign people.” While he claims that North Korea is misunderstood and being unfairly demonized, Baek’s worldview, and with where his sympathies lay, are clear for all to see.
Upon learning of Baek’s proposal, pro-North activists in the U.S. heartily endorsed it, but with one slight modification. Hardcore pro-North Korean activist Lee Heung-no of the Washington, D.C. area, who is a columnist for the Minjok Tongshin and Korean American National Coordinating Council sites, wrote an article posted by Minjok Tongshin and Jaju Sibo last May in which he suggested that the Nobel be awarded not to North Korea as a nation, but rather to Kim Jong-un as an individual.
Comrade Lee is a strong supporter of Russia and Putin’s war against Ukraine. He previously lived in the USSR where he worked for the Soviet government, but now lives in the U.S. He wrote that Kim deserved the award not only for promoting peace on the Korean peninsula, but also for his dispatch of troops to defend Russia from the “aggression” of Ukraine.
“I think it would be good for North Korea to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but it would be even better if North Korea’s head of state, Chairman Kim Jong-un, received the Nobel Peace Prize,” he wrote. The director of a Korean American entity called the “Citizens’ School” in the Washington, D.C. area, Lee has been a leading pro-North activist there for many years, serving as an official of the local branches of the (formerly named) 6.15 Committee and the Korean American National Coordinating Council.
His mindset is clearly demonstrated by his articles for Minjok Tonghin and Jaju Sibo, in which he has written that President Trump is “like a bloodless, tearless Jewish money lender,” and that the ROK’s first President Syngman Rhee was a “traitor” who “enjoyed the world with Western women.”
Lee is a friend and supporter of Michael Jang (Chang Min-ho), the Korean American convicted in the ROK for his role in the North Korean “Ilshimhoe” spy ring.
Although the campaign to nominate Kim Jong-un for the Nobel Peace Prize is obviously preposterous, it is what one might expect to hear from the delusional extremists of the pro-North movement in the ROK and the U.S.
As for Lee Heung-no, there is one accusation he made in a 2015 article which hopefully does have some merit to it. In it, Lee complained to his comrades that a certain researcher by the name of Lawrence Peck was doing serious harm to the pro-North movement by exposing pro-North groups and activists in the U.S.
He was particularly angry that Lawrence Peck had revealed the collaboration between Women Cross DMZ leader Christine Ahn and North Korean intelligence agents, and he believed that it was shameful and scandalous that nothing could be done to stop the damaging work of Mr. Peck.
His accusations and concerns, hopefully accurate, are an honor almost as great as the Nobel Prize.
Lawrence Peck is a correspondent for NK Insider based in Seoul and Los Angeles. Having intensively researched and closely monitored the activities of pro-North Korea and other extremist groups and activists in the U.S. for over 25 years, he has been recognized in the U.S. and Korea as one of the leading American authorities on such topics, and has lectured, written extensively and been interviewed on such topics in the U.S. and Korea. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Juris Doctor degree from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. He previously worked in Korea for several of the largest Korean business groups in the fields of intellectual property licensing and international business development. He also serves as an advisor to the North Korea Freedom Coalition of the U.S. Lawrence may be reached at the email address: lawrence.nkinsider@gmail.com
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