November 2001

LONDON – There are no points awarded for having seen this truck coming down the road. I first wrote about the likelihood of a group with no address getting its hands on a nuclear weapon in my column in the International Herald Tribune in 1975. Likewise, those liberals who worried out loud for years about Afghanistan first being armed and then left to rot by the West or pointed out the dangers of letting the structures of the Soviet Union collapse without sufficient economic aid to ease the transition in a sensible and organised way, have gained precious little kudos with public opinion at large. We are compelled to stand aside whilst the hardliners call the shots. If they go wrong and provoke a coup d’etat in Saudi Arabia or cause Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to fall into the wrong hands or leave a residue of Arab hatred far deeper than...

LONDON – Gung-ho about the fall of Kabul, but wary about the political morass that now confronts it, the U.S. has thrown the ball to the United Nations, an organisation not normally held in high regard in Washington but, as on past occasions, a useful refuge in times of grave crisis. Yet if history is any guide, a wave of amnesia about the value of the UN will fall over Washington as soon as the matter in hand has been dealt with. It has long been so. In 1954 there was the incident of the capture of seventeen U.S. airmen over China. Just as in the later Iranian hostage taking-taking, American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was asked to intervene and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou En-lai. It took six months...

World Statistics The Global Humanitarian Crisis Here follow some facts from United Nations Development Report/UNICEF 1997 and WHO 1998 selected by Manufacturing Dissent. $40 BILLION A YEAR $ 40 billion a year is estimated to be the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health carefor all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all, and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year–or less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. SOME STATISTICS -1.3 billion people in the world today (1,300 million, or 1,300,000,000people) struggle to survive on $1/day. -3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on $2/day. -2 billion have no access to power (electrical). -The net worth of 10 billionaires, ten human beings, is greater than the combined national income of the forty-eight...

London – Can the spirit of the successful achievement of the Putin-Bush meeting now be carried over into Russia’s relationship with Europe? In many ways it is easier for the U.S. to make a big peace with Russia than it is for Europe. There has never been any territorial issue between the two, apart from the quiet selling of Alaska to the U.S. in 1867. Despite all the tension of the Cold War it remains true that neither Russia nor the U.S. lost a soldier to the other side in combat. Yet for Europe the memories of war with Russia and Russian occupation run deep. Is it at last possible, ten years after the fall of communism, for contemporary Europe to finally respond to Mikhail Gorbachev’s plea to build a “common European house”? This is Europe’s call. America will want to be privy to the content of the discussions, but...

Åter till PressInfo 138 Problemställning och syfte Allt fler ungdomar i vårt land, liksom i många andra länder, lever i vardagen med mer än en kultur. En femtedel av eleverna i den svenska skolan är antingen själva födda i ett annat land eller har minst en förälder med utländsk bakgrund. För många av dessa barn och ungdomar har därför inte samhällets dominerande kultur funnits med från början av deras liv. Bekantskapen med majoritetskulturen inleds inte sällan i samband med skolstarten. Skolgången innebär då inte bara tillägnandet av de kunskaper och färdigheter som läroplanen föreskriver, utan också en annan kultur och ofta ett främmande språk. En process, som kommer att prägla även andra av livets områden, tar sin början. Mitt syfte med denna avhandling är att försöka komma åt hur denna process ser ut. Jag gör detta genom att beskriva ungdomarnas möte med det nya samhället och hur vägarna in i...

Back to PressInfo 138 Problems and purposes Ever more youth in Sweden, as well as in other countries, live their everyday lives with more than one culture. A fifth of the pupils in Swedish schools are either born outside Sweden or have at least one parent with a non-Swedish background. For many of those children and youth, the dominant culture has not been an integral part of their lives since they were born. Most often, they have acquainted themselves with the majority culture and the prevalent language when they enter primary school. This is when a process begins that influences even other aspects of their lives. My aim with this dissertation is to try to understand this process. I do so by describing the encounter of the youth with the new society and how the roads into it are created in individual cases. The emphasis is on how they think...

Advancing human security and controlling terrorism By Michael Renner  and Dick Bell, Worldwatch Institute What do you think of this advice from a senior U.S. military officer and statesman about how the people of the United States should deal with a part of the world torn by war, poverty, disease, and hunger: “…it is of vast importance that our people reach some general understanding of what the complications really are,rather than react from a passion or a prejudice or an emotion of the moment….It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading, or listening, or even seeing photographs or motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.” The speaker was General George C. Marshall, outlining the Marshall Plan in an address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. Surveying the wrecked economies...

LONDON – Primitive man, like other animals, followed his instincts and killed his enemy as swiftly as the job could be done. Archaeologists who have dug up prehistoric skeletons have found no evidence of torture. Even human sacrifices were made without prolonged suffering. Torture, the systematized use of violence to inflict the maximum amount of pain in order to extract information, to break resistance or simply to intimidate, is a product of civilization. But to reintroduce it now would be one of the greatest setbacks for civilisation imaginable. Before the American authorities rush into it with the righteousness that comes from a conviction that they might be extracting information that could forestall a terrorist nuclear attack on Manhattan they would do well to ponder the course the debate on torture has taken over the three and a half millennia of Western civilization. It has been abolished for good reason. Both...