Archive 1986 – 2017

If a visitor from space were to read history books of human behaviour, they would certainly conclude that the answer is yes.  This is because history has largely been written as if it were the history of man, tending to move from battle to battle, because that’s what interested the authors. If, however, our visitors were to read the acclaimed Quaker sociologist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Elise Boulding, they would gain an entirely different picture.  In The Underside of History Boulding tells the other half of the story, as she traces the evolution of woman’s role from the Paleolithic to modern times. She demonstrates how very recent it is that women have begun to move from the ‘inner’ or domestic world to the ‘outer’ or political world. She considers that empowering women – to dismantle their history of being devalued and to reconstruct true equality between the sexes – will lay the...

Jan Öberg, TFF direktör 21.a mars, 2011 Här följer i telegramstil en kort uppräkning av motsägelser, dåraktiga antaganden och missriktad humanism. En likaledes kortfattad slutsats med förutsägelse följer efter uppräkningen. Jag kommer inom kort att utarbeta någonting kortfattat om vad som kunde och borde ha gjorts i stället för dessa fruktansvärda och kontraproduktiva bombningar. 1. Vi kan inte sammanträffa, tala och förhandla med en sådan!En lång rad av västvärldens ledare har sammanträffat med honom och sett honom som en allierad under de senaste åren. 2. Humanistiska argument och ädla motiv i stället för uttalade intressen och syften.Men överallt annars har västs länder följt sina nationella, strategiska och oljeintressen, en-två miljoner oskyldiga irakier dödades av västvärldens sanktioner och ockupation under åtta år. 3. Uttalanden om att vi inte kan bara stå och titta på när Gadaffi mördar sitt eget folk.Utan att visa upp ett enda bevis på massdödande, brott mot mänskligheten,...

March 20, 2009 Jan Oberg, Annette Schiffmann March 20 marks the 6th anniversary of the US-led invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq – coming upon 12 years of the most cruel sanctions history has witnessed. About 2 million innocent Iraqi citizens have died as a consequence of those Western policies. About 4 million out of 24 million are either displaced inside the country or refugees abroad. In a country where more than half the entire population is well under 20, hundreds of thousands are clinically traumatized. At the same time Western media – part of the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – give wide publicity to a BBC opinion poll that shows that “security” has improved in Iraq. It is going so well, isn’t it? The West has now – at what is likely to be only the beginning of worldwide economic breakdown and environmental decay – secured the majority of...

Jharkhand is one of the poorest states of India and has become a test for the ability of Indian democracy to serve the poor. Rich in minerals it remains grossly underdeveloped. The jungles of its many mountains are home to 7 million indigenous people who speak their tribal languages, worship the sun not Hindu gods, are rarely schooled and who live in dire poverty. Three generations ago these hunters and gatherers were forcibly settled, but agriculture was foreign to them. Perhaps it is not surprising that these people have produced Maoists guerrillas who have initiated a campaign of murdering middlemen and those government officials they suspect pocket development money allocated to their bailiwicks. A local Congress MP, Ms Rebelo Merbelo, told me that the main problem is severe unemployment. “And the money allocated to change the situation simply runs away. We have a poor, unstable, state government here and although...

In every conflict there are some local people who have the guts not to pick up a gun, but take the harder route of nonviolence to try and solve the problems their communities face. This unglamorous, unsung work at the grassroots is just beginning to be recognised as an essential component of any successful peace process. FIFTY PER CENT of ‘top down’ peace agreements do not stick. Why? Because they have been negotiated without the participation and understanding of all those involved in the conflict – the people on the ground. Governments are just beginning to learn that local people know what works best to prevent war – or stop war – in their own backyard.     Take Sami Velioglu for example. Sami is a British Iraqi who returned to his hometown of Kirkuk two months after the invasion. He was shocked to see people standing in line all day in...

Lund, Sweden Within a few days, Europe is host to the G20 in London, NATO’s 60th Anniversary in Strasbourg-Kehl and the Alliance of Civilizations in Istanbul. What shall we make out of these frantic travels,meetings and meticulously edited press conference sound bites by world leaders? Here is the firstof two dissident analyses. C5 – Five huge crises coming together The world is facing five hugely complex crises simultaneously: Economic (system breakdown).Environmental (global warming +).Cultural (intolerance, clash of religions, Western cultural dominance).Political (democratic deficits everywhere, lack of hope and political interest in media and amongyoung). Security (drug-like, ever increasing military expenditures to satisfy the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC yielding ever less human security). Five crises coming together = C 5. In this perspective, watching these leaders, Western ones in particular, deliver self-congratulatoryspeeches and answers to journalists on the outcomes of the G20 and the NATO Summits is almostunbearable. Apart from the reflective,...

by the greatest economist of all time, John Maynard Keynes. The mechanism for doing this is to expand the issue of what the IMF calls Special Drawing Rights, what Keynes considered to be “paper gold”. At Thursday’s summit of the G 20 in London this is one of the important items on the agenda. SDRs could be a major contribution to the world’s crisis of liquidity and lack of demand. Moreover, some members of the G 20 are going to support the revolutionary suggestion made earlier this month by Zhou Xiaochuan, the boss of China’s central bank, to use SDRs as a worldwide reserve currency to replace the Dollar and the Euro, at present the two most important world reserve currencies. What do the fairies have to do with it? SDR’s are created almost literally at the stroke of a pen – an accounting transaction within a ledger of accounts...

This April the US-American radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal will celebrate his 55th birthday – the 27th on death row. For 27 years he has been struggling to get the legal possibility to be able to prove his innocence.Amnesty International has dedicated one of their rare personal reports to his case in 2000, listing one hair-raising judical scandal after the next, and in consequence ending the repot with the strong demand for a new trial – a demand the organisation is emphazising to this day. The never-ending story is finally reaching the fringes of it’s end.As the very last legal possibility Abu-Jamal’s case is waiting at the US Supreme Court to be allowed to be heard. The prosecution, however, is not giving in and has demanded the re-installment of the death penalty, lifted in December 2001, and have Abu-Jamal executed without further legal examination. Please sign the new online petition to...

29 november, 2009 Replik till artikel om kriget i Afghanistan av Jens Orback, Generalsekreterare för Olof Palmes Internationella Center,Aftonbladet 11. november 2009 Efter massmordet den 11 september 2001 måste USA:s president (vem han än hade varit) för att överleva ta en fruktansvärd hämnd. De flesta av gärningsmännen, inklusive den förmodade ledaren, var saudiska och aktionen hade planerats i Tyskland, men inget av de länderna gick att bomba, så det blev Afghanistan som blev offret. USA utpekade Osama bin Laden som ledare och Afghanistan som hans tillhåll (dock utan att framlägga några bevis) och fick säkerhetsrådet med på en resolution som ställde krav på Afghanistan, men inte på någon resolution som bemyndigade krig. NATO:s medlemmar uttalade samstämmigt sitt stöd med hänvisning till NATO-stadgans paragraf 5 om att ett angrepp på en är ett angrepp på alla. USA hade två år tidigare vid angreppet på Jugoslavien lärt hur besvärligt det är att...

The Satyagraha Centenary: New Delhi, 29-30 January 2007 Today 59 years ago a bullet put an end to the physical life of that genius grown out of Indian soil. A spiritual earthquake shook us all. And far away from Birla Gardens, in Norway, a 17 year old boy, almost ignorant of Gandhi, was weeping, something he rarely did. The boy was me, and that was my spiritual birth. I became a Gandhi scholar, a peace researcher and peace worker, and the comments on our session’s topics is a mini-payback. Gandhi gave us that invaluable gift, satyagraha, to cling to satya. For Gandhi satya was an essence bridging the concepts of God, Love and Truth, uniting the spiritual, the emotional and the cognitive–not putting them in separate compartments as we do in the West, banning the first two from research and science. How can this guide us to the essence of...

Jan Oberg – TFF director and co-founder April 19, 2011 Part I It is a safe assumption that people in general neither like nor love war. They prefer peace, and major organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union state that their highest aim is world peace. There are distinguished prizes for peace, and peace people like M. K. Gandhi, Luther King Jr., Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela to name a few are revered by everyone. There is nothing similar for those who bomb, kill and rape. In consequence all wars and security and defence policies are legitimated by noble motives, among them the wish to maintain or create peace. In the recent case of Libya surprisingly few have protested compared with, say, the war on Iraq. From right to left, men and women, human rights and peace movements as well as scores of intellectuals have – admittedly...

With regard to the latest US presidential elections, like many times before, we as a public remain introvert and autistic in Macedonia. The only matters that Macedonians care about consist of the “name issue” (the dispute between Macedonia and Greece over the name), partisan and ethnic divides as well as European integrations. That is where our interest for the rest of the world ends. The presidential elections were followed as far as they concerned the White House’s attitude towards Macedonia. Quite typically for a weak state that turns away from its responsibility to face the ugly truth about its being accomplice in the worst war crimes Bush left behind as his legacy, Iraq for instance. Thus it’s hardly surprising that Macedonia has been spared the wave of Obamamania and the faith in the “new dawn”, which is expected to bless this sad and ugly world. Unlike in the rest of...