Human rights and justice

Wikipedia has much to offer under “aging”. Highly recommended are the 10 points by the world’s oldest living man, 114, Walter Breuning. However, older persons, like me at 86, know their own aging best. Less trouble with “oxidant stress” as a major cause, having used anti-oxidants based on blueberry skin – no chemicals – for decades. 20,000 blood stem cells renew my blood, but they are dying. Problematic. Rule no. 1: Keep mind and body active; maintain a good nutrition. Obvious to counteract aging. However, equally important: Rule no. 2: Be open to the positive sides and advantages of aging. Bertrand Russell’s “On Being 90” in the Observer dispenses with the disadvantages as obvious, in favor of his advantage: the overview. At the age of 5 he sat on the knee of a man who had fought Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The longer the lives we have lived, the...

Videoinspelning av Jan Öbergs föredrag i Stockholm februari 2017 Inspelningen är uppdelad i två delar: Del 1: Vittnesrapport från Aleppo 60 min. Del 2: Debatt och vägar till fred i Syrien 45 min. Bakgrund 10-14:e december 2016 vistades Jan Öberg i Aleppo. Med sin unika erfarenhet från staden ifrågasätter han den gängse massmediarapporteringen, argumenterar för ett nytt sätt att se på konflikter på och ger förslag till den nödvändiga fredsprocessen. Moderator Anders Björnsson, författare Datum Lördag 25 februari kl. 14-16, Bagarmossens Folkets Hus, Stockholm Arrangörer Föreningen Syriensolidaritet, Folket i Bild Kulturfront – Stockholmsavdelningen, FiB-juristerna m.fl. Jan Öberg rapporterar – Jag kunde fritt tala med vem jag ville, och fotografera som jag ville. Jag gick omkring utan säkerhet, polis eller annat skydd. Många tackade mig för att jag var i Aleppo vid befrielsen. – Förstörelsen av Aleppo är värre än jag någonsin trott – efter att ha sett Sarajevo, Mostar och...

By Jan Oberg Three perspectives on the Syrian conflict formation The Syrian conflict formation is hugely more complicated than we’ve been told by Western politicians (all mainstream in spite of democratic features) and mainstream/dependent media. To some there are only internal aspects and it’s called a civil war only. That’s a necessary but not sufficient aspect. The same goes for the only regional perspective focusing on e.g. the Israel-Palestine conflict, Iran’s, Saudi-Arabia’s, Turkey’s roles and policies. To others, everything can be explained from the point of view of Western interventionism/imperialism. That’s also a necessary but not sufficient aspect. To understand anything of the Syrian conflict formation – and there are very many layers, dimensions and participants over the last 100 years – we need all three basic approaches. But given that Westerners are likely to have been informed by Western media and politicians they are likely to grossly underestimate the...

have been seen here by well over 100.000 people around the world, exclusively by organic, non-paid online sharing. In addition they’ve been linked to and presented by media in the alternative press and social media in about 20 countries, sites such as Telesur, Heise/Telepolis and Pressenza literally reaching millions. I am proud of having helped bring out the story of these people unworthy, as it seems, of the attention of the West. Because they were the majority from Eastern Aleppo who were happy to be liberated and remained in what is now government-controlled areas. Keep focus on Aleppo – #keepfocusonaleppo Aleppo’s liberation was a local, national, regional and global event. Why? Because of Aleppo’s history, beauty, architecture and industrial importance (50% of Syria’s industrial capacity within the huge Sheikh Najjar Industrial City). Because, before the war, it had swelled from about 2 million to some 3 million people due to...

By Jan Oberg Jan Oberg’s comment on Chancellor Merkel’s speech at the Munich security conference where she mentioned the duty Europe has to receive refugees and also reiterated that Germany will do its best to increase its military budget to 2% of its GDP. Apart from this one can only get very sad and pessimistic when reading the comments underneath this sequence: Boundless hate against Merkel herself, racism, anti-Islam, anti-Semitism – and not one (of the first 70+ comments) on the issue of NATO, the risk of war or on what I brought up about the need for new, less militarist policies, less interventionism and better ways of handling the refugees. Anger and hatred just under the surface, brought out mostly anonymously. No reasoning, just smear. We still have a long long way to go in terms of public education… Here the short video comment on PressTV where you can...

What is the essence of democracy? “Rule with the consent of the ruled” implies two classes of people, Rulers and Ruled; concretely State and People, Statism. “Free and Fair Elections” implies voting for a Parliament; Parliamentarism. Together, a three-tier power structure State-Parliament-People; with People controlling Parliament, and Parliament controlling State. In 2016 some voting differed from what State-Parliament expected; leading to talk about elitist vs populist democracy – from statism and parliamentarism to peopleism. A crisis. And talk about post-democracy. Another answer about democratic essence is “one-tier self-ruling units”; no rulers vs ruled, and decisions are made by general assemblies for all. This is often referred to as Anarchism, “no structure”. A misnomer: there is no State and no Parliament, but many assemblies. A concrete interpretation would be Localism, the units being local authorities – LAs, municipalities; the assemblies being their municipal councils. A key dimension then becomes the level...

TFF’s first four photo series from Aleppo have been seen by 95,000 people so far and been featured in online magazines from Vietnam to California, among them a German site with a million visitors daily. Above is the fifth story. It’s about the terrible, systematic destruction of this UNESCO World Heritage site but also about an Aleppo businessman who turned his damaged factory into a school for 1500 children. It had been damaged by the Free Syrian Army and al-Nushra who looted it and then used it as HQ. It’s situated in the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City outside Aleppo that – before the militant/terrorist occupation – represented no less than 50% of Syria’s total industrial production. During two years, these children received no education. Now they do. And hope is slowly coming back. This photo story ends with some “civilisational questions” by Jan Oberg who also took the photos. This...

Comment by Jan Oberg on PressTV’s Top Five This is nothing new, the US has used it all the time. But isn’t it tragic that almost 70 years after torture was prohibited in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we see 141 countries still using torture – according to Amnesty International.


 Unique photos from Eastern Aleppo in Syria when it was finally liberated on December 11-12, 2016. 
 The people you see here have just come out to freedom from 4,5 years of the occupation by what can be called RIOTs – Rebels-Insurgents-Opposition-Terrorists – mostly the latter. 
 And most of them with some kind of support by NATO countries.  
 Western media, politics and humanitarian organisations focus on the victims from Eastern Aleppo who left to RIOT territories elsewhere, such as Idlib, after the liberation – family members and supporters of the occupiers.  
 That’s not the whole truth about Aleppo. 
 They conveniently ignore the thousands of other Aleppians: Those who were happy beyond words to see all of Aleppo back under the control of the Syrian government. 
 These are the people in this photo story. They are among the 13 million Syrians who, according to the UN in...

This New Year announces itself with bangs all over, not whimpers. Pope Francis made a tour d’horizon on all continents, strongly denouncing the violence in favor of his alternative: negotiation. Much violence is copycat or copyrat; violence being a la mode. Copying–aka learning–is not wrong. But it depends on what is copied. Here my 10-11 wishes: Wish no. 1: copying peace rather than violence, for instance from ASEAN and the Nordic Community, making peace self-reinforcing. Wish no. 2: reporting violence less prominently, more toward the end of newspapers-TV-radio news, and reporting peace upfront. Wish no. 3: understanding war better, not only how many killed but how many bereaved; understanding peace better as model for others. Wish no. 4: introducing Yin/Yang in Western thought: no totally good or bad humans or states around; they are all improvable mixtures. Wish no. 5: linking the good in ourselves to the good in others...

Of course you have seen media images of the destruction in Syria. But not these taken in mid-December when Eastern Aleppo was liberated. We live in a time when images – real and fake – influence perceptions more than ever. My photos are real. Documentary. They reflect my role as witness on the spot at a time when only a handful of Westerners were present. At a time, too, when all the mainstream media were conspicuously absent – as were the dual-purpose White Helmets who have delivered quite a few of the theatrical images from this war. As a conflict and peace researcher and photographer I take pride in using not only analytical texts but also the medium of photography. I am anyhow unable to describe just in words what I have seen. Thanks to modern technology the small, smart, independent and truthful of this world can compete, to some extent, with...

President-elect Donald Trump is about to make the American rich even richer with his plan to cut their taxes. A cause for shame. Nevertheless, the history of America is that poorer people have done better than is commonly thought over the last two centuries. Today they have indoor plumbing, heating, electricity, smallpox and tuberculosis-free lives, adequate nutrition, much lower child and maternal mortality, doubled life expectancy, increasingly sophisticated medical attention, the availability of contraception, secondary level schooling for their children and a shot at university, buses, trains and bicycles, much less racial prejudice, longer retirement, a rising quality of the goods they buy, better working conditions and the vote. Once these were luxuries that only the richer could experience. It has been shown by many studies that happiness increases fast as poorer people get better off but that beyond a certain point – an income of $15,000 per person per...