June 2025

David Swanson World BEYOND War,TFF Associate June 17, 2025 For years, World BEYOND War and other peace groups from around the world had been attending peace conferences in Cuba. When I visited Cuba this past January it was with a visa for that purpose. I published here the remarks I made at the conference. We shouted as loudly as we could about January’s conference in websites, social media, emails, and media interviews. The notion that there could be anything wrong with it — or that some institution could punish us for it — never entered our minds. Legally, you’re allowed to go to a peace conference in Cuba. Nobody has so much as hinted that I’ve done anything illegal. But on Thursday June 5th I got a bunch of letters in the mail telling me that on Monday June 9th the U.S. bank accounts of World BEYOND War and the private accounts of...

The Gaza People’s Tribunal, at the end of its first public assembly in Sarajevo, issued a Declaration that expresses our commitment to peace and justice for the Palestinian people in their struggle to realize their basic rights, above all their inalienable right to self-determination. We are inviting like-minded friends to read and endorse the Sarajevo Declaration and to share the link with others who might join our solidarity initiative at this critical time. Here is the link to Change.org where you can find the full text of the Declaration and endorser information.

Jan Oberg June 19, 2025 Does she think we are idiots? Does Denmark’s foreign policy establishment? I am a Danish citizen, and this fraudulent speech with a gross lie through omission is morally and politically unacceptable. H. E. Ambassador, Christina Markus Lassen, spoke at the UN Security Council’s urgent meeting caused by Israel’s attack on Iran. Read her short – shocking – speech here. She is an experienced Danish diplomat, partly educated in the US (of course), and has been her country’s ambassador to Syria, where she collaborated with the US (the famous Mr Ford!), France, and the UK to shape a “Western approach” – to changing the government of Bashar al-Assad, one must assume. Perversely as hard to believe, she does not mention that Israel has attacked Iran! No, she starts with the US/Israeli mantra – they are both major nuclear powers, of course – that Iran shall never...

Johan Galtung (1930-2024)TFF Associate 1985 to his death June 18, 2025 Johan Galtung wrote this article in 2010, the original here. It is remarkable, bordering on the prophetic, that Galtung already suggested – in section 4 below – what closely resembles China’s and President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was launched in 2013. 1. East Asia With the current regionalization of the world where and even the biggest states will find their place, an East Asian Community of the two Chinas, the two Koreas and the three Japans (with the Ryu Kyu Islands–Okinawa–and an Ainu region both at high autonomy levels), is inevitable.  The European Community-Union got started around steel and coal, ESC; how about starting with the tricky issues, like right now Diaoyu, of the islet clusters and their economic zones in the East Asian Sea?  An East Asian Sea Authority could declare joint sovereignty, and go beyond joint...

We’ve seen it repeatedly: You invent a pretext based on deliberate lies, fake news, exaggerations or a false flag operation which serves to construct a story that country or leader X is a threat to “us” which legitimates that we do a ‘preemptive’ strike against that – obviously invented – threat to eliminate it. Mainstream media’s task is to propagate the ploy, not to ask questions or reveal the lie. Take Serbia’s ‘genocide’ in Kosovo, Afghanistan’s responsibility for 9/11, Saddam’s possession of nukes in Iraq, Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrians, Gaddafi’s ‘mass murder’ in Bengazi, Russia’s planning to occupy and administer not only Ukraine but also a series of European countries thereafter, Hamas’ attack on Israel – that Israel knew everything about before it happened – and now you have the blatant lie about Iran’s being just about to become a nuclear weapons power. Basic facts about...

With a few words about the US’ domestic authoritarianism and NATO’s reckless expansion and re-armament where everything else but that is needed. George Orwell’s prophetic book, 1984, was written in 1948 and was published on 9 June 1949. So, today is the 76th anniversary of the publication of that important and prophetic book. The book centres on the consequences of the decline of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people’s behaviour within society. The book was influenced by totalitarianism under Stalin and censorship and propaganda under the Nazis. The book is not about any particular society but refers to any society that falls under the influence of those oppressive policies. The book is basically about the power of propaganda and indoctrination employed in the service of authoritarian rulers and regimes. Orwell warned us that the manipulation of the public in the service of autocracies did...

War-preparation and militarism are now the main factors that keep the West together, and will make it fall faster. The Western world has lost its consciousness, perception, and instruments of conflict analysis, resolution, peace-making, and reconciliation. They’ve been squeezed out by militarism’s kakistocrats – a political science term that means government by “the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.” Consequently, there is now a risk of more than 50% that a major war will happen in Europe. I’ve been observing silently for weeks and months now how geopolitical experts – also very qualified ones – and people who comment independently as well as in the mainstream media and many others have worked on the tacit, implicit assumption that President Trump would help create peace in Ukraine; they seem to believe that what we have witnessed has anything to do with knowledge-based, professional peace-making or would have even the slightest...