Archive 1986 – 2017

Shanghai, Kinas största stad med över 20 miljoner invånare, är världens åttonde största megastad. Här lever man efter förre partiordförande Deng Xiaopings slagord. Det syns, Shanghai är en stad där pengar och profit påtaglig präglar stadsbildens superlativer, störst, högst, bäst, vackrast. Från Jin Mao-tornets 88:e våning ser vi ut över stan. Där reser sig Oriental Pearl TV-tornet, 468 meter högt. En bit bort rinner den breda Huangpu-floden och på dess andra sida ligger The Bund, den koloniala paradgatan. Jin Mao-skyskrapan, 420 meter och världens femte högsta skyskrapa, är utformad av ett amerikanskt arkitektkontor utifrån den klassiska kinesiska pagodens former och lyckotalet åtta, som står för framgång och rikedom i kinesisk mytologi. Det är ingen tillfällighet att olympiaden i Beijing invigs den 8/8 2008. Två år senare står Shanghai som värd för världsutställningen 2010, som kommer att bli ett minst lika spektakulärt arrangemang. Jin Mao är ett kontorshus för Ministeriet för...

My summary of 35 years of thinking and practising February 14, 2007 Jan Oberg Individuals as well as societies need many things but two are basic and universal. Development means ongoing maturation, higher levels of living and being, satisfaction of micro/basic needs (e.g. food and water), meso/higher needs (e.g. community, dignity, psycho-social health) and macro/supreme needs (e.g. spirituality, love, self-and other-realization, universal community). Some, like Abraham Maslow, argue that human and social needs are organized hierarchically; while water and food may well be considered basic, human beings in severe crisis have delivered evidence throughout history that higher non-material needs and levels of being helped them survive, such as faith in God, in fellow human beings. Art history is filled with personalities whose “lower” needs were not met while they gifted the world with their own sublime expressions. Security or safety is the other basic element. Existentially it means confidence that there is something...

Vicky Rossi: Having just spent a wonderful 2 weeks in India with you and an enlightened group of internationals on the Gandhi Legacy Tour (1), I was wondering when you first decided to lead such a trip and what your primary motivation was. Arun Gandhi: I have been involved with people from Europe and other parts of the world for quite some time now and I have always felt that people need to know each other better. We tend to live in our own isolated worlds without knowing much about one another. This means we form all kinds of stereotypes and misunderstandings, which lead to conflicts in the world. I have always thought that if we can somehow bring people together and let them get to know each other, then we will be able to break down the barriers that exist and build bridges instead. For a long time I...

January 26, 2007 Hans-Christoph von Sponeck In the early nineties, people hoped for the irrevocable end to fear and the great peace dividend. Those governing limit themselves to fighting symptoms. The causes of terror are not a theme for them.Freedom from fear and freedom from distress are the fundamentals of human security. The United Nations emphasized this when the Cold War allegedly ended. Freedom from distress should be gained with freedom from fear. The goal was to overcome malnutrition, sicknesses, poor education and inequality.Since then, globalization has advanced rapidly. However, only a minority of the world’s population has benefited. The far greater part of humanity must struggle at the lower end of the quadrant for sheer physical survival, often without success, with less than one Euro per day per person.The reality of life’s opportunities distributed crassly differently cannot be hidden any longer. The rice farmers in Bangladesh, the shepherds in...

An amazing and important commentary appeared in the January 4, 2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal, co-authored by four high-level architects of the Cold War: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn. The article, entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” was amazing not so much for what it proposed, but for who was making the proposal. The four prominent former US officials reviewed current nuclear dangers and called for US leadership to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons. Their argument was as follows: 1. Reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective. 2. Terrorist groups are outside the bounds of deterrence strategy. 3. We are entering a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, disorienting and costly than was Cold War deterrence. 4. New nuclear weapons states lack the safeguarding and control experiences learned by the US and USSR during...

Three reports at the turn of the year

Jonathan Power LONDON – President Dmitry Medvedev is too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but if he’d talk to some of the oldies around like Georgi Arbatov, he’d learn how close a call it was. If President John F. Kennedy hadn’t surrounded himself with very cool and level headed people like his Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, there could have been nuclear war. No wonder that Arbatov, a former foreign affairs advisor to Soviet leaders from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, calls for Russia to shame the U.S. into disarmament by unilaterally cutting its own rocket force. Presidential aspirant John McCain is old enough to remember. Presumably this had something to do with his call last week for the U.S. to start talking to the Russians again about reducing their massive inventories of nuclear weapons. Yet by the light of fellow conservatives, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Paul Nitze and other prominent...

Jonathan Power LONDON – Osama bin Laden has made Al Qaeda’s position crystal clear in his latest tape released on May 16th. He said the fight for the Palestinian cause is the most important factor driving Al Qaeda’s war with the West and that was the primary reason for $9/11$. It sounds topical enough given the amount of attention that Washington is presently giving the Israel/Palestinian peace quest. But in truth bin Laden may well be behind the curve. A two state solution can no longer be a viable political goal, because: a) in terms of the demographics a Muslim majority in Israeli-controlled territory is less than a decade a way, b) the Israelis have effectively created a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians. To all intents and purposes it imitates the South Africa of apartheid days, a unitary state with a minority group attempting to rule by oppression...

Om Afghanistan Af Ulla Fasting,TFF Ven og medlem af Det Radikale Venstre Læs også Ulla Fastings “Indtryk fra Afghanistan” Dag 1 Afghanistan ved en ny tids begyndelse I denne uge tager vi til Afghanistan, som jeg har besøgt to gange i sommer og hvor jeg samtidig læste Khaled Hosseinis bog* om sin barndoms Afghanistan. En barndom, hvor drengen Amir vinder den store drageturnering og sin fars anerkendelse, men samtidig svigter sin bedste ven Hassan. Det er dette svigt og vejen til soning, bogen handler om, men den fortæller også om det Afghanistan, som var før den russiske besættelse og før Taleban kom til magten.Det er det Afghanistan, som i dag skyder op hist og her og som mange afghanere forsøger at bygge en fremtid på. Bogen er god at have med sig, for i manges bevidsthed er Afghanistan kun det 6. fattigste land i verden, talebansk mørke, kvinder i burka,...

Af Ulla FastingTFF Ven og medlem af det Radikale Venstre Læs også Ulla Fastings fortælling i Danmarks RadiosVed Dagens Begyndelse Jeg er netop kommet hjem fra min anden rejse til Afghanistan. Første gang var besøget først og fremmest privat med ophold i Kabul, men jeg fik samtidig en invitation til at undervise jordemoderstuderende i Herat for Dansk Afghanistan Komité (DAC). Anden gang var jeg to uger i Herat og et par dage i Kabul for DAC for at interviewe kvinder fra de forskellige kvindeorganisationer om deres arbejde og for at se på sundhedsvæsnet, – hospitaler, sundhedscentre, mobile sundhedsteam og sygeplejerskeuddannelsen. Jeg rejste på egen hånd, men var i Herat altid ledsaget af tolken og kørte med chauffør i en af DAC’s biler. I Kabul kørte jeg alene rundt, men med taxa fra et sikkerhedsclearet taxafirma. I Herat færdedes jeg frit sammen med andre DAC-medarbejdere i byen, når vi skulle handle...

LONDON – After the downs of 2006 surely 2007 can only be up? Don’t be so sure but there is one thing we can all do to save the planet from mankind’s excess – a little more walking. In the days when the International Herald Tribune was on the Rue de Berri, off the Champs Elysees, I would often walk there from my pension in the Marais, three or so miles down the Seine. It is quite remarkable that one can conveniently traverse the length of one of the world’s major cities without having to leave a towpath or back alley, except for the last 500-yard dash up from the river. The same is true in London. Setting off from the hotel on the edge of Kensington Gardens where the guerrilla chiefs of the patriotic Front stayed during the London constitutional conference on Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, it was possible to...

LONDON – The horror of Sudan was on the front page three times last week. The extraordinary economic progress made by Africa, and many other parts of the Third World, as recorded and analysed in a new World Bank report released last Thursday, was mentioned a bare once in a shortish item on the business page. This paper was no different from all the others. This is how news editors are trained to work – don’t report the trains that arrive on time, and feign ignorance about those that arrive early. Only the ones that are late or, better still, crash, are worthy of note. According to the Bank, the developing countries are now in “the driving seat” of the world economy, with GNP growth reaching an average of 7% this year. (Average means, unless we forget, that if the statistical standard variation is normal half are above the mean.) Although the...