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1. Humiliation and the Human Condition: Mapping a Minefield Evelin Gerda Lindner, forthcoming in Human Rights Review in October 2000 A major cause of socio-political violence is the social process of humiliation, whose main elements are closely related to central aspects of the cultural repertoire of complex societies. This paper presents a theory of humiliation, showing that the capacity to humiliate and be humiliated are aspects of a dense web of ‘hot’ filaments wired into the tissue of culture, giving it a potentially explosive character that is too little recognised. This paper probes this dense web and explores how it acquired its present character. It is shown that our conceptualisation of humiliation has changed as our sense of human dignity has grown. Humiliation should be understood as not simply an extreme or marginal condition but a central feature of the social order. Viewed within this broader context, the elements that...

LONDON – “It was a famous victory” of large proportions – of that there can be no doubt. President Bill Clinton’s announcement that he was not going to be rushed into implementing a national anti-ballistic missile defence drew not only plaudits from Russia and China which were threatened by it, but from India, Britain and Germany, among many others, all of whom thought from their differing perspectives that it would upset the balance of power in pursuit of a purpose that was at best unproved, at worst ill-thought out and which had all the ingredients of a nasty back-fire when there were other ways of reaching the same end. One last word should be added before the issue leaves the front pages and awaits resurrection, hopefully in new form, under a new president- there is nothing wrong with anti-missile defence, if nuclear disarmament is moving apace. If nuclear weapons were reduced...

Bakgrundsorientering för departementets nya Beredningsgrupp UD använde fyra kriterier vid fördelningen till svenska organisationer. Men kan de förklara varför andra fick och TFF åkte ut? Stiftelsens internationella stödkampanj och appell har vid början av september resulterat i 1136 personliga brev, kommentarer och namnteckningar från en bred krets i 62 länder. Om man bortser ifrån uppskattande kommentarer om TFF är den mest frekventa kommentaren att människor inte finner beslutet om slopande av organisationsbidrag till TFF förenligt med den bild de hade av Sverige och av svensk utrikespolitik. Analysen har skickats utrikesminister Anna Lindh och Beredningsgruppen tillsammans med vår ansökan om bidrag för år 2001. Se också vår analys av vem det är som känner TFF är viktig och se de underbara ord om vårt arbete från runt om i världen. 1. UTGÅNGSPUNKTER Den Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och Framtidsforskning, TFF, i Lund har sedan 1991 haft förmånen att få organisationsbidrag ifrån UD, till en...

What people around the world wrote to and about TFF 1136 letters, comments and signature by September 12 – and more come in every day! From people of all walks of life in 62 countries. We did not know that we had SO MANY friends. More than one-third chose to not only write their name in support of TFF but also add very warm, sometimes strong, appreciaiton of our work. You may find your own words here. We are overwhelmed. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. All messages were copied and sent on September 14 to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, HE Anna Lindh and to the Ministry’s preparatory committee which recommends which organisations to give organisztional support. Please see also the analysis of the worldwide constituencies and our analysis in Swedish of the Ministry’s decision. The Swedish government shoul be proud to support TFF and its efforts to a...

LONDON – It seems a strange time to organize a millennium meeting of the world’s heads of government at the UN this week. What are they supposed to do? What are they supposed to say? Is anything new afoot? (Indeed one could ask, in all seriousness, are there enough toilets for them all with their mammoth entourages?) Isn’t it the same old dreary UN that everyone loves to use as a punch-bag and which they occasionally run to when they are in trouble? The millennium changes nothing- eight months on that is very clear. The thing that could give the UN a jolt, a charge, that would give it a chance of re-capturing its old idealism is not a poorly prepared meeting of bosses, nor is it a new Secretary General. It would be for the world’s only superpower to take it seriously. Not only does the U.S. need to pay...

Pyongyang, August 2000 – PeaceBoat, a Japanese NGO of which Japan can be very proud, just concluded its voyage No. 3 to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), with more than 200 participants. I conducted workshops on reconciliation and had the occasion to have dialogues with a number of well placed DPRK officials. My focus was on how North Korea sees the damage/suffering caused by Japanese imperialism, what kind of compensation they seek, and what they mean by “real apology”. Some of the answers are well known, others are not; for completeness they are all included. They mention six forms of damage/suffering: one million killed/tortured (also hibakusha); six million forced into war service including 200,000 comfort women; economic looting; cultural treasures seized or destroyed; the zainichi situation in Japan; and Japanese responsibility for the division of Korea between the USA and the Soviet Union, as a Japanese colony. Compensation according...

COPENHAGEN- Who can get excited about a bridge? But if it were just a bridge it would have been built a long time ago. This bridge that links northern Europe with the Scandinavian land mass is a political statement, almost as powerful, if not quite, as the creation of the Euro, the single currency, to the south. Indeed, a Scandinavian decision to accede to membership of the Euro should by rights follow as a logical next step. That both Denmark, which votes on the issue next month and Sweden, the two mother countries of the bridge, have serious reservations about joining the Euro is, in modern dress, the debate they had about building the bridge, a debate that consumed over a century of argument and discussion. But the bridge is now there, opened last month, a graceful object crossing 17 kilometers of the sound that adjoins the Baltic sea. The Danish...

LONDON – Finally, the Swiss banks are off the hook on the Holocaust. Their offerof a $b1.25 settlement with Holocaust survivors and their heirs has been accepted by an American court. Yet, as the judge observed, the banks fought all the way. At the outset the banks said there were only 8,000 accounts with links to Holocaust victims. The truer figure turned out to be over 50,000. Fifty-five years after the liberation of the concentration camps Germany still stands out head and shoulders above the other countries that collaborated with Hitler as the one that made the earliest and swiftest attempt at restitution. And 55 years later it is still Austria, Hitler’s birthplace, that has done the least to square the past. It still half believes- or at least it gives the appearance that half the country believes- that Austria was Hitler’s victim rather than his willing ally. One case now...

LONDON – Remember the summer of ’98? In the sweltering, torpid heat of a Roman august, charged with exhaust fumes, the international community gave its overwhelming approval to the establishment of an International Criminal Court that will enable those accused of “crimes against humanity” to be tried and, if convicted, sentenced. Only seven nations opposed or abstained from the motion, including Israel, China, India and the U.S.A. where the Pentagon had successfully waged bureaucratic guerrilla war to undermine the initially sympathetic stance of President Bill Clinton. Two years on we can now see what an epochal event that was. In a the stroke of 120 pens it changed the climate on political thuggery. After numerous half-starts and false starts ever since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials that convicted the war criminals of the Second World War, the world at last had agreed en masse a common set of understandings and a...

Mission To mobilize and train an international nonviolent, standing peace force. The Peace Force will be sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to struggle nonviolently, enter into dialogue, and seek peaceful resolution. Endorsed by: His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)Oscar Arias (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Former President of Costa Rica)Mairead Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from Northern Ireland)Jose Ramos Horta (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from East Timor)Ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury (Ambassador to the UN from Bangladesh)International Fellowship of ReconciliationHague Appeal for PeaceRecommended by the Peoples Millennium Forum at the United Nations, May 2000 “There is an important need to pursue this ideal on a truly global basis, from our deep commitment to inter-dependence and universal responsibility. I wish your efforts every success.His Holiness the Dalai Lama “This is an idea that is...

Reflections on the Support Campaign in the year 2000 The campaign starts The TFF Support Appeal The ministry gives 4 reasons why TFF were crossed out TFF’s presence on Internet The Ministry’s decision helped us gain many new supporters In which countries does TFF have a constituency? Some observations What kinds of people support TFF? TFF’s three main constituencies Which organizations do TFF supporters work with? This analysis was copied and sent on September 14 to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, HE Anna Lindh and to the Ministry’s preparatory committee which recommends which organisations to give organisztional support. See also the Swedish analysis of the Ministry’s decision and the selection of what people write to us from around the world The Ministry made a decision… The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm decided to cancel the organizational support for TFF for the year 2000. The foundation had benefitted from this annual grant, amounting...

LONDON – George W. Bush and his Republican praetorian guard of hard-liners (many of whom, for no other reason than cowardice, ducked the call to duty in Vietnam) have put Al Gore needlessly on the defensive on the issue of national missile defense. Their intent, by hook or by crook, is to make Mr Gore look weak on defense, even if it means unilaterally abrogating a solemn international treaty with Russia and risking driving emerging Russia back into its Cold War bunker. Missile defence is predicated on the increasingly nonsensical notion that a “rogue state” (though these words are no longer politically correct, according to no less an authority than Madeleine Albright) will fire nuclear tipped missiles into Alaska and even northern California and seize a political advantage that its suitcase nuclear bomb deposited in a left-luggage locker in New York’s Grand Central Station could not. No wonder that even...