Edward Curtin July 19, 2023 Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world […]
Alex Lo & Daniel Bell June 24, 2023 “It’s quite clear from recent policies that the US aims to curb China’s economic development and encircle the country with military bases in unfriendly (from China’s viewpoint) countries. Such demonisation only reinforces repressive trends in China and benefits security-obsessed hardliners in China’s political system. That’s why “de-demonisation” can help […]
Hein Berdinesen May 10, 2023 A fundamental thesis in Hans Jonas’ The Imperative of Responsibility – In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1984) is that the golden promises of modern technology have turned into a threat, and that technology is inseparably linked with the threat. The thesis is a reminiscence of Heidegger’s diagnosis of […]
Christopher Quigley April 28, 2023 Very few people today know that between 1934 and 1961 the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote A Study of History describing the rise and fall of the 23 civilizations he had identified in human history. In contrast to Oswald Spengler, who thought that the rise and fall of civilizations was […]
© Oberg PhotoGraphics 2022 Hussein Askary April 27, 2023 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared in his “End of History and The Last Man,” published in 1992,that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era in 1991 marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, […]
Erni & Ola Friholt TFF Associates March 23, 2023 In 1904, in the run-up to World War I, with the Triple Alliance on one side and the Entente on the other, the Principal of the London School of Economics, Halford Mackinder, gave a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society. The title was ‘The Geographical Axis […]
Maria Popova December 20, 2022 “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of actuality.” The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and […]
Maria Popova November 28, 2022 “Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.” Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless […]
Gordon Dumoulin Jan Oberg Thore Vestby The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research Lund, Sweden • TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0)738 525200 • August 6, 2021 • © TFF 2021 Photo: Yiran Ding, Shanghai, Splash 丁亦然 Download and share this report as PDF Table of Content IntroductionThe China Cold War Agenda as […]
Edward Curtin June 9, 2022 “Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light.” Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body Being sick for the past few weeks has had its advantages. It has forced me to take a break from writing since I could not concentrate enough […]