Conflict – violence and war

• 1 NATO is not going to let Ukraine in as a full member. Probably never. All the statements about getting it in and its rightful place in NATO is sugar-coating. NATO cannot say that but knows now that its ill-considered promise in 2008 to make Ukraine a member is as dead as the promises made to Gorbachev that the alliance would not expand one inch. All the NATO words about military packages, G7 security assistance, reform path to be drawn up but no timetable, the new NATO-Ukraine Council with so-called ’equals,’ long-term commitments, etc. – all were words of cruel diplomacy serving to soothe a very disappointed Zelensky. • 2 The Ukrainian president will also have understood by now that the US has achieved what it wants: Economic deals with Ukraine about its resources, huge debts and a very high price to be paid by Ukraine and European NATO...

“Long before Trump and “deep state” became an expression, I produced one ginormous investigation — Top Secret America — for the Washington Post and I wrote a nasty book — American Coup — about the creeping fascism of homeland security.” William M. Arkin June 5, 2023 (When I wrote this open letter in January 2019, decrying NBC and the news media’s singular focus on Trump and their subsequent cheerleading for the state of perpetual war, I didn’t think that much would change, and indeed it hasn’t. When the letter went viral (thanks to Glenn Greenwald), all the news media could talk about was my attack on the news media, missing the basic point that we’d built a system of subservience and even subordination to the war machine, one that the news media fed. I wrote: “NBC and much of the rest of the news media has somehow become a defender...

Jan Oberg May 29, 2023 We’re delighted to announce that Kristin Christman has accepted TFF’s invitation to join us as TFF Associate. Read about Kristin in my article from March this year. Head over to her excellent YouTube Channel – and subscribe! – and then visit Countercurrents, which publishes all Christman’s articles as well as the texts she reads in her videos. Here is the latest – an 8-part critical/devastating analysis of the US National Defence Strategy 2022. We love Kristin’s passionate, unique and super-knowledgeable work for a better world and look forward to much synergy and cooperation with her in the years to come. We’re both struggling to prepare for the renaissance of peace that we believe will come when the US empire has declined further and we live in a more just, balanced and multipolar world – a humanity and peace-ruled international order…

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 inevitable, Toynbee maintained that the fate of civilizations is determined by their response to the challenges facing them. In fact the unifying theme throughout the book is challenge and response. One of the ground-breaking discoveries by Toynbee is the fact that there have been so many highly developed civilizations. Understandably in the West, our history lessons focus on our own civilization with its roots in Greek and Roman cultures, but in addition, there have been Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Islamic, Sumerian and Orthodox civilizations, to name but a few. According to Toynbee, civilizations start to decay...

Toynbee and Ikeda “Another Way of Seeing Things”, is a short film based on an essay by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda – a TFF Associate for more than 20 years – in which, along with a friend and close colleague/collaborator Arnold Toynbee, he challenges media stereotyping and how this can give rise to prejudice and barriers between people of different nationalities and religions. Toynbee – one of the greatest and most respected macro-historians ever – went to a conflict zone and gave an account different from the black-and-white media narrative of the time and was then forced from his academic position. This was more than 100 years ago. That the media convey one-sided, politically correct views or outright lies is nothing new – perhaps what is new today is the uniformity, the intensity and the frequency with which it is done. This is a beautiful and moving rendition of the...

John Mearsheimer April 1, 2023 No introduction is needed. Professor Mearsheimer is a leading scholar of the realist school and, with his texts and lectures, has made himself a major source of an enlightened understanding of the conflicts that blew up in the proxy war now being fought out so tragically and cynically in Ukraine. Indeed, he is also a brilliant pedagogical lecturer who needs neither manuscript nor notes. The quality of content and form, therefore, speaks volumes about what a good intellectual is – contrasting the de-intellectualised field of international politics and much of the study of it. Jan Oberg, editor The author Click on his name above, and you get to his rich personal homepage.

Jan Oberg March 21, 2023 Letter from a soul-sister stranger for peace One autumn day in 2022, a mail winged into TFF’s inbox from a woman in the United States. Here first some excerpts; the first sentence reveals a sense of being in a larger world. ” I hope you’re feeling all right, even though it’s difficult to feel that way now. I’d like to send you this letter that I’m sending to as many people that I can think of. Given the urgency of the international situation I figure it’s no time to be shy. Here it is! Hardly a soul responds to me, but I was hoping maybe you would. Peace will never arrive if people are not able to listen to the other side’s perspective. Peace will never arrive if people on one side of conflict tell half-truths and lies to paint the other side as only...

Image by Loco Steve on Flickr Tony Robinson March 1, 2023 In Europe, North America and a few other countries that feed themselves with information from the western media, it can have escaped no one’s attention that we are actually on the march towards World War III. The similarities with the 1930s are terrifying: Yes, all the ingredients are here for the outbreak of an all-out world war from which human civilisation will not survive. At this critical juncture in human history, we find the “peace” movement in the west to be totally fragmented and unable to give a clear and unified response. In the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, millions of people around the world marched against a war that they understood would never affect them personally because it was too far away geographically. Now when we are on the brink of a war that will...

Beyond Russia, NATO/EU policies will prove morally wrong, unrealistic, dangerous and self-destructive. Jan Oberg February 23, 2023 Introduction: 1 year of violence on top of 30 years of conflict: Too much wrong thinking The world’s focus is on the war. On February 24, it is one year since Russia launched its so-called special military operation. Much more important is to focus on the underlying conflicts – because there exists no war or other violence without root causes. The focus on war, by definition, won’t lead to a solution or wider, sustainable peace – like feeling the pain in a patient without diagnosing where it comes from can never lead to healing. Unless you ask: What is the problem, the conflict, that stands between the conflicting parties – NATO and Russia – it will end with escalation until one of the sides feel that the nuclear button is the only way...

Jan Oberg February 20, 2023 This comment was written and video created for and published by China Daily on February 20, 2023. The daily also used it for a special feature with three experts, which you may read here. It has also been published by The Citizen in India. Whatever other reasons that a war is raging in Ukraine, one major reason is that we live in times characterised by the increasingly dangerous – perhaps fatal – combination of intellectual-moral disarmament and military re-armament. Militarism is now the main factor holding the West NATO/EU world together. It’s a religion and NATO its church. In different ways, militarists argue that their side was historically innocent and are justified to do what they do now; NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg even states that NATO is not a party to the conflict. Secondly, they argue that they must win, meaning others must lose. The latter...

Image from searchwizards This rather long text was written on the invitation of the distinguished “China Investment” magazine, which is sponsored by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. In spite of its name, it has consistently asked me to write on subjects that are not often connected with economics in general and investment issues in particular. I find that – much broader – approach to economics very interesting, and I am very pleased to cooperate with such broad-minded people. Here is the original version – a cover story – in both English and Chinese Introduction – The enigma of good things Like many other positive things in this world, there is little research available on what trust is and how it works. Human beings study war and other violence much more than nonviolence and peace; evil more than goodness; aggression more than forgiveness and reconciliation. It is quite strange because...

The Danish foreign, defence and the prime minister is greeted by President Zelensky (right) Jan Oberg February 2, 2023 In Danish here The West/NATO has always lacked a long-term strategy. After all, it was militarily, economically and politically superior and could impose its will. Didn’t have to think. Hoping Ukraine would join NATO without fuss was hubris-ridden wishful thinking, and stupid to boot, in that it’s been convincingly documented that Russia’s leaders, from Gorbachev to Putin for the past 30 years, have said that NATO expansion was: a) a clear violation of the promises made by all important Western leaders to Gorbachev – and it’s true; b) a humiliation and counterproductive if you want common security; and c) that if it could be no other way, then Ukraine would be Russia’s definitive red line. No one listened. Because, as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen so aptly put it:...