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LONDON – Winston Churchill who invented the phrase “Iron Curtain” did not dream up the term “Cold War”. That- La Guerra Fria- was coined by thirteenth century Spaniards to describe their uneasy coexistence with Muslims in the Mediterranean. This is perhaps the time to bring it back into its correct historical usage. For there can be no doubt that if Saudi Arabia goes ahead with its apparent decision to ask the U.S. to close down its important military base in Saudi Arabia, many Americans will conclude that a Cold War of sorts between the U.S. and the Islamic world will have begun. Everyone knows that removing America’s military presence from the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia has been Osama bin Laden’s number one demand. In meeting it America, however brave a face it puts on it, will feel deep inside itself that its 50-year long relatively benign relationship with the oil...

My President, Right or Wrong On the catastrophic fallibility of U.S. presidents and their men Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers By Daniel Ellsberg Commenting on public disclosure of The Pentagon Papers, the official government history which documents the pervasive lying and misjudgement that characterized the United States’ conduct of its war against Vietnam, White House chief-of-staff R.J. Haldeman paraphrased a colleague’s assessment of the political implications: “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.”...

New York Times December 7, 2001 As the Afghan war enters into what may be its final days, and the international community begins discussing its next steps, Americans will be learning more about the warrior people known to the British as Pathans, and more correctly nowadays as Pashtuns. Most of the Taliban were Pashtun – as is the new interim leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, to whom Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, has ceded power. The Pashtuns number upwards of 20 million, and their squat stony villages straddle the Durand Line that nominally demarcates Pakistan from Afghanistan, where Pashtuns form the largest ethnic group. These are the fighters who inspired reams of fearful and admiring verse from Rudyard Kipling, the sharpshooters blessed with perfect sight who picked off the soldiers of the British Raj. But the Pashtuns also produced one of the most remarkable pacifist movements of the 20th...

LONDON – The media has paid for its mistake of believing in George Bush’s war against the Taliban. At the end of the day it is pretty clear that in the supposed objective of the war, the hunting down of Osama bin Laden, the trail has gone cold. The scorecard of deaths reveals that not only have more civilian Afghanis died than Americans in the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, but the number of journalists killed in action was eight times the total of American soldiers. Yet by and large the Western media have swallowed the White House hype wholesale. Not only was it generally considered a just and necessary war, they devoted all their considerable resources – and more, even to the point of financial exhaustion and the exploitation of the very lives of their reporters – to covering it in excruciating detail. War, sure enough, provides the journalistic...

Fostering Hope for Humanity’s Future Choose Peace. Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age By Daisaku Ikeda and David Krieger In their new book, Choose Hope, two men with far-ranging visions for humanity’s future David Krieger and Daisaku Ikeda illuminate ways for people everywhere to take part in the creation of a better world a world of peace and universal prosperity, with liberty and justice for all. Ikeda, a leader of the Soka Gakkai movement in Japan, points out that many people today have lost confidence in their power to bring about constructive changes. He emphasizes the importance of getting people to have a renewed sense of their abilities to have constructive impacts in many fields.  Krieger, the founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, shares Ikeda’s belief that people everywhere need to see the reasons for genuine hope to become fully aware of the strength they...

War is a force that gives us meaning By Chris Hedges Public Affairs, Oxford, 2002 This is the Kon Tiki of anti-war polemics. Gripping, thrilling, learned and impossible to put down, Chris Hedges, a star New York Times war correspondent, describes war, killing and the sadism and seduction that goes with it in the most extraordinary flowing prose, carrying the reader through the waves and storms of often complex argument to show that there must be another way at looking at irresolvable disputes, the nationalistic need for drama , and the all too human fear of the other side. In his time in the field Hedges too has felt the lure and addiction of war. Here he throws it off, challenging every presumption in its favour, every excuse to pursue it yet, rather amazingly, remaining in the end unconvinced of the need to be a pacifist, just a hater of...

Effekten er stor, fred kan vindes uden vold Jeg støtter TFF, fordi jeg har stor tillid til Jan Øberg, som jeg første gang hørte om i en radioudsendelse for cirka fire år siden. Hans udtalelser og holdninger gik rennt ind hos mig. Det giver så meget mening, og sikken et kæmpearbejde, han gør. Derfor glæder det mig, hver gang jeg modtager en nyhedsmal om nye tiltag og artikler, at se hvor mange mennesker, der efterhånden har fulgt op på Jan Øbergs initiativ. Jeg er sikker på, at effekten er stor, og jeg tror på, at freden kan vindes uden vold. Med vold er det umuligt.Kirsten Fauken Talerør for dem der lider Etablissementets politiske korrekthed og selvgodhed lever i værste velgående – i al ubemærkethed. Her er det ok. at gå i krig mod Irak uden FN-mandat og at ignorere FN´s påtale af Israels gentagne overskridelser at menneskerettighederne. Den globale klassedeling lever de militærindustrielle firmaer af. Det uafhængige TFF...

LONDON – Washington and its closest allies- at least those who try to put themselves in Washington’s shoes- now realize they are beleaguered by the Pandora’s Box of nuclear and missile proliferation and that they have no adequate policy to deal with them. Their moral authority is all but used up, just when they need it most, to deal with Iraq first and now North Korea. George Bush must be wishing he were Lula in Brazil- cancel the order for new military jets, tell the nation the money is going to relieve poverty and meanwhile use the credibility earned to keep the Brazilian economy on a responsible course, even though that will incur quite a bit of belt-tightening for everybody. Lula, a week into office, must be already set to win re-election. But what equivalent moral authority does George Bush have in order to win over the hearts and minds...

The turning of a year is always a good time to take stock of where we are and to look for lessons of the past that may guide us into the future. Here are a few thoughts as we enter this New Year. We share a single, beautiful Earth, the only place we know of in the universe that supports the miracle of life. We are one people, one great humanity, capable of cooperating to turn this planet into a paradise for all. We may have different histories, but we share a common future. We will rise or fall together.  By the greed and lack of care and vision that is integral to our current economic system, we are poisoning our Earth, destroying other species at a prodigious rate, and foreclosing possibilities for future generations of humans, including our own children and grandchildren.  We have penetrated the power of the...

LONDON – A reader of a column of mine published at Christmas on the social consequences of abandoned street children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new bin Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established societies, was mistaken. “Osama bin Laden’s anger did not develop out of poverty,” she argued, “but out of a middle class malaise”. Of course. And so did Che Guevara’s and Stokely Carmichael’s and that of Marx and Lenin. But this does not exclude the undisputable, well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be educated; the shock troops often come from the underclass. Besides, humanity has never confronted before 100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without parents....

Thirty policemen, armed to the teeth, arrested Gandhi on the 4th of May 1930 when he extracted salt in the village of Karadhi, near Dandi. He was taken to Yeravda Prison in Poona. It was not the last time he was thrown into jail in this part of India. Between 1917 and 1932, Mumbai/Bombay and Poona (a 4 hours train journey inland) were important places in Gandhi’s long struggle for peace (including Ahmedabad). In Poona he was also imprisoned in the Aga Khan palace, since he had returned empty-handed from the negotiations in London and on New Year’s Eve 1931-32 initiated a non-violence action for Independence. At midnight, between the 3rd and 4th January, he was arrested on the roof (where he was sleeping) of his house in Mumbai, which is now a beautiful Gandhi museum – “Mani Bhavan” – at No. 19 Liburnum Road. In Mumbai he learned how...

“It is good that Gandhi was shot…” – Hindutva The bus ride from Bombay to Ahmedabad, also called ” India’s Manchester”, takes 17 hours. My neighbour for the trip is a businessman who deals in gold and famous Hyderabad pearls. That is to say the pearls originally came from Basra, Iraq, but with Saddam and everything happening there, they are now said to come from China. “India’s latest budget is really good for us business people, but otherwise politicians have just managed to ruin this country. Corruption and shit everywhere. Just look at the streets, this bus, or the schools”. The young energetic capitalist goes on: “You know, what we need is a revolution! You can’t keep a country together where everyone only thinks about themselves. We can’t be independent unless we start acting like a community. We are also far too many. The Chinese left us behind long ago”....