January 2021

and onwards. The change comes as a result of certain social media trends and events that we do not want to be part of (see arguments below). We increasingly find Facebook, Twitter and Google a) politicising, b) part of a superficial culture bordering on the meaningless and c) an obstacle to genuine public education, freedom of speech and the global communication we have always cherished. Therefore, in the future:You will still see posts on Facebook and Twitter linking to our articles but only as window displays. We shall no longer participate in discussions there, only on our homepage, The Transnational, and under the articles. We reclaim the essentially important free global public debate outside – and independent of – the near-monopoly that Facebook and Twitter cynically created and claim copyright to. It’s only natural that the debates occur at the creator’s platform and remain there for people to see in the future. During 2021, we speed up...

By Jan Oberg January 13, 2021 Welcome to my worldmoires – a word I have invented for the occasion. It means writing about my life in the perspective of global affairs and trends that have influenced my work and myself since I was born in the middle of the preceding century.  And the occasion? I’m approaching the […]

Welcome to my worldmoires – a word I have invented for the occasion. It means writing about my life in the perspective of global affairs and trends that have influenced my work and myself since I was born in the middle of the preceding century.  And the occasion? I’m approaching the 50th anniversary of my work as a peace, conflict and future researcher.  The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, that my wife Christina and I have established turned 35 on January 1, 2021.  I hope you will find something of interest and follow the creation of the book – of which only the first small fraction is hereby launched. Now explore…

Albert Györgi’s sculpture, “Emptiness,” at Lake Geneva TFF Associate In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. —José Narosky War is hell, and today more than ever. Although high-tech weapons make it a videogame for some, those same weapons make it unbelievably destructive for everyone else. Whatever valor was once associated with hand-to-hand combat has long since disappeared due to gunpowder, and the massive slaughters of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to romanticize the death and misery war causes. Nonetheless it continues and we have learned, if not to accept it, to take it for granted. Obviously, not everyone loathes it. The U.S. economy would collapse without the obscene amount spent on the military-industrial complex, now well over $600 billion a year according to some calculations. It’s hard to rationalize such a sum without a war once in a while. That’s why the end of the Cold War...

Pankaj Mishra January 13, 2020 It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism. In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Jonathan Lear writes of the intellectual trauma of the Crow Indians. Forced to move in the mid-nineteenth century from a nomadic to a settled existence, they catastrophically lost not only their immemorial world but also “the conceptual resources” to understand their past and present. The problem for a Crow Indian, Lear writes, wasn’t just that “my way of life has come to an end.” It was that “I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world…. I have no idea what is going on.” It is no exaggeration to say that many in the Anglo-American intelligentsia today resemble the Crow Indians, after being successively blindsided by far-right insurgencies, an uncontainable pandemic, and political revolts by disenfranchised minorities. For nearly three decades...

Image credit: Pixabay Dr Andrew Glikson January 20, 2021 As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and nuclear wars fueled by warmongers and $trillion preparations by military-industrial complexes. Originally published at Countercurrents Between 1740 and 1897 some 230 wars and revolutions in Europe suggested war remained deeply ingrained in the human psyche and civilization. The question is whether the currently approaching catastrophes can be averted. No one wishes to believe in the projections made in the recent book ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, except that these projections, made by David Wallace-Wells, are disturbingly consistent with the current shift in state of the climate toward +4 degrees and even +6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as indicated by the current trends (Figure 1) and...

Photo credit: Poster art courtesy paceebene.org John Dear January 20, 2021 It was early 1968. Since the previous spring Martin Luther King, Jr. had been pursuing a course that for many was unthinkable. He had deliberately connected the dots between the movement for civil rights and the struggle to end the war in Vietnam, and had paid the price. He was roundly criticized by the Johnson administration and the media, as well as by people in his own movement. From the right he was attacked for having the gall to question US foreign policy. From the left he was lambasted for losing focus and not keeping his eyes on the prize. Originally published at Satyagrahafoundation He even got it from a childhood friend who stopped by the house one afternoon to vent. “Why are you speaking out against the Vietnam War?” he carped. King put aside his customary oratory. “When I speak about nonviolence,” he patiently explained, “I mean nonviolent all the way.” As David Garrow’s classic biography of King reports, [Bearing the Cross, New York: Harper Collins, 1986], King went on...

The TFF Global Conversion Campaign StatementPlease sign!Together with millions of voices, yours does make a difference. Please ask your friends to sign it too… In Danish here See also Jan Oberg’s Prime Minister speech on the Corona as a security policy crisis which was made in support of this campaign. Lund, Sweden – December 10, […]

SummaryOn top of all the global problems we must solve as soon as possible comes the Corona. This statement argues that the priorities of the world are – well, perverse; everything the UN does amounts to 3% of the global military expenditures.TFF’s Board suggests that all countries reduce their military by 50% immediately. That would save about US$ 1000 billion. And that that huge sum should be re-allocated to solve the problems we had and the socio-economic consequences of the Corona pandemic. That would also – finally – be a step to prove that governments are willing to implement a policy for true disarmament and move towards human and common security for the common good.In a civilised world, this should be common sense. If you do not want to read the whole argument, just scroll down and sign this statement. “We’ve likely only seen the beginnings of the worldwide economic...

“It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning. They shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid the general applause from all the wits who believe that it is a joke.” Søren Kierkegaard’s quote is the first thought that comes to mind while thinking of the developments on the global scene and simultaneously trying to figure out the place where the Macedonian part of the puzzle fits the best. Or maybe this thought is more appropriate to describe the current dilemma the majority is facing: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Let’s start with the alleged fascist attempt of coup d’état and/or terrorist...

China 1983 © Jan Oberg, Oberg PhotoGraphics Documentary with Lawrence Robert Kuhn January 6, 2021 When the history of the 21st century is to be written, there is no doubt that the story of China’s eradication of poverty – i.e. lifting about 700 million people out of it – will be seen as a milestone, a turning point for humanity. China’s poverty rate fell from 88 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms. On November 23rd 2020, China announced that it had eliminated absolute poverty nationwide by uplifting all of its citizens beyond its set ￥2,300 (CNY) per year, or less than a dollar per day poverty line. This result has been achieved within just four decades, after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared the...

U.S. Department of State/Chinese President Xi Delivers Remarks at a State Luncheon in His Honor at the State Department December 29, 2020 Richard Hanania Across the political spectrum, there is widespread agreement that America must get serious about the threat posed by China. As the Trump administration comes to a close, the State Department has just released a document called ‘The Elements of the China Challenge’. A distillation of conventional wisdom among national security experts and government officials, it argues that the U.S. needs a concerted effort to push back against Beijing. On its first page, the document tells us that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has triggered a new era of great-power competition.” If there was a major intellectual thread running through Trump’s foreign policy, or at least that of the people he appointed, it was that confronting China was the national security issue of our time. America during...