Media

File photo. A portrait of China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China © AFP / Wang Zhao Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 Chinese- and Russian-funded journalism is ‘disinformation,’ but when Washington spends millions on ‘independent’ news outlets and buying journalists to get favourable coverage of its policies, it’s called ‘spreading information.’ The US Senate last week passed a bumper anti-China bill titled the S.1169 – Strategic Competition Act of 2021  Backed by Chuck Schumer (Dem, New York) as one of his biggest priorities since becoming the Majority leader, the 270+ page document contains scores of recommendations and provisions on formalizing America’s “geopolitical competition” against Beijing, including in the fields of military, diplomacy, technology, trade and more. There’s little question it will be passed into law, having already cleared the Senate and with the anti-Chinese sentiment in Washington being routinely bipartisan.  Originally published at rt.com The bill also notably pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in various...

En kritisk analys av en rapport från Newlines Institute och Raoul Wallenberg Center Gordon Dumoulin, Jan Oberg och Thore Vestby Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och Framtidsforskning, TFF, Lund, Sverige TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0) 738 525200 Översättning av engelska utgåvan: Rolf Nilsson Den 5. maj, 2021 Den 8 mars 2021 publicerade Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy i Washington en rapport, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights i Montreal. Den säger att ”Denna rapport är den första oberoende experttillämpningen av folkmordskonventionen från 1948 för den pågående behandlingen av uigurerna i Kina. Det genomfördes av Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, som svar på framväxande redogörelser för allvarliga och systematiska grymheter i Xinjiang-provinsen, särskilt riktade mot uigurerna, en etnisk minoritet, för att fastställa...

Photo credit: off-guardian.org Edward Curtin April 22 2021 The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings.  Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent. Originally published by off-guardian.org They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and...

Statement of concern – concerning the OPCW – Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons‘ – investigation of alleged chemical weapons use in Douma, Syria in early April 2018. Here NBC News’ coverage of the alleged attack and President Trump’s decision to strike in response to it. We wish to express our deep concern over the protracted controversy and political fall-out surrounding the OPCW and its investigation of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, on 7 April 2018. Since the publication by the OPCW of its final report in March 2019, a series of worrying developments has raised serious and substantial concerns with respect to the conduct of that investigation. These developments include instances in which OPCW inspectors involved with the investigation have identified major procedural and scientific irregularities, the leaking of a significant quantity of corroborating documents, and damning statements provided to UN Security Council meetings. It...

TFF Associate and friend over decades, Richard Falk, last year turned 90. Read more about him here – and use the search engine to find lots of his writings. The latest we’ve published is on championing lost causes... Eric Walberg March 10, 2021 Writing this memoir has been as much about discovering my story, that is, myself as it is about telling it. That’s Falk’s version of Socrates’ ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ Or should I say, Forrest Gump’s? Falk’s life reads like a storybook, starting with meeting Supreme Court judges with his father at age 9 in 1939, making friends with Claudette Colbert, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liz Taylor (long story) at age 15, befriending and befoeing many of the dramatis personae of the Cold War throughout his long and productive life, finally landing on the shores of democratic socialism as the US charges towards the (literal) finish line. Falk came...

NEW Jan Oberg March 1, 2021 On February 23, I was asked by Iran’s PressTV to comment on Ayatollah Khamenei’s statement about the JCPOA and European leaders. I did that together with political commentator Shabbir Razvi in London. Just click on this link and you’ll be able to watch it. It is on a video platform called Urmedium. It is Iranian because Google-owned YouTube some time ago decided to prevent PressTV – a sort of BBC of Iran – from showing its program and interviews there. Nothing should surprise us anymore…

and onwards. The change comes as a result of certain social media trends and events that we do not want to be part of (see arguments below). We increasingly find Facebook, Twitter and Google a) politicising, b) part of a superficial culture bordering on the meaningless and c) an obstacle to genuine public education, freedom of speech and the global communication we have always cherished. Therefore, in the future:You will still see posts on Facebook and Twitter linking to our articles but only as window displays. We shall no longer participate in discussions there, only on our homepage, The Transnational, and under the articles. We reclaim the essentially important free global public debate outside – and independent of – the near-monopoly that Facebook and Twitter cynically created and claim copyright to. It’s only natural that the debates occur at the creator’s platform and remain there for people to see in the future. During 2021, we speed up...

Welcome to my worldmoires – a word I have invented for the occasion. It means writing about my life in the perspective of global affairs and trends that have influenced my work and myself since I was born in the middle of the preceding century.  And the occasion? I’m approaching the 50th anniversary of my work as a peace, conflict and future researcher.  The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, that my wife Christina and I have established turned 35 on January 1, 2021.  I hope you will find something of interest and follow the creation of the book – of which only the first small fraction is hereby launched. Now explore…

China 1983 © Jan Oberg, Oberg PhotoGraphics Documentary with Lawrence Robert Kuhn January 6, 2021 When the history of the 21st century is to be written, there is no doubt that the story of China’s eradication of poverty – i.e. lifting about 700 million people out of it – will be seen as a milestone, a turning point for humanity. China’s poverty rate fell from 88 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms. On November 23rd 2020, China announced that it had eliminated absolute poverty nationwide by uplifting all of its citizens beyond its set ￥2,300 (CNY) per year, or less than a dollar per day poverty line. This result has been achieved within just four decades, after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared the...

Many have considered the New York Times one of the finest pieces of journalism anywhere. In 1971, it had the courage to publish The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg which revealed how the US, in reality, conducted its war on Vietnam – i.e. to serve in the role of being a critic of powers that be and revealing lies and things never told in public. When I was younger, the NYT and the International Herald Tribune, were treasures if you wanted to know about the world. I remember buying the Sunday edition when visiting New York. There were many sections and I could do with less, but it the main ones offered page after page of high-quality reading – the biggest ever published on a Sunday weighing over 5 kilos and counting 1600+ pages. Not a newspaper like any other – no, in a class of its own. More abut...

By Regan Durkin The Global Press Coalition for Peace, GPCP, in Washington kindly turned to me and asked me to speak with them for a longer podcast. GPCP is a rather young but very innovative civil society organization that focuses on how the media deal with conflicts, war and peace – and how it can be done better. I warmly recommend that you visit and look around. Their focus is so very important. I was very grateful for being given this opportunity since its podcasts seem to have a rather wide audience in the United States in particular. The conversation was initiated and the podcast recorded by Regan Durkin and the whole thing was a very pleasant experience. Here is how she has introduced me on their homepage: “Join us as we discuss with Dr. Jan Oberg, Founder of The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research, diving into the...

Karel Van Wolferen November 17th, 2020 In a famous exchange between a high official at the court of George W. Bush and journalist Ron Susskind, the official – later acknowledged to have been Karl Rove – takes the journalist to task for working in “the reality-based community.” He defined that as believing “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Rove then asserted that this was no longer the way in which the world worked. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NYTimes Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004). Originally posted on Karel...