Nonviolence

“][/caption] In spring 2011 I was invited by then Danish foreign minister, Villy Søvndal, to be a keynote speaker at a conference in Copenhagen arranged by the ministry and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) with experts, then UN mediator Kofi Annan’s adviser, scholars, diplomats and, most importantly, a number of Syrian (opposition) politicians and civil society representatives. The minister left the conference when he had opened it and, like most politicians today, obviously did not give priority to listen to the input of this high-level group present in the conference room. I made these major points, trying to be as educative as I possibly could: 1) Look at conflicts as if they are problems to be solved – adhere to the peace research concept of the ABC conflict triangle and study A for Attitudes, B for Behaviour and C for the Contradiction/conflict that stands between people. (Cf. Johan...


 
 I’m writing to you from war-torn Syria where the suffering of the people is beyond comprehension, heart-breaking. 
 The war in and on Syria has been started in spring 2011 – the underlying conflicts much much earlier. 
 What our media have shown us is snipers, bombings, killings, ruins, dead bodies and press conferences with Western politicians. 
 But did you “see” the underlying conflicts? 
 Get an understanding of what the problems standing between the parties are? 

Did you get the impression that weapons is the only thing “they” understand? 
 Did you feel hopeless about it all? Confused? Depressed because of all the human suffering? 
 That peace is impossible? 
 If so it’s because we are missing a huge part of the picture. We need something else. 
 We need to switch from – repetitive and depressive – war and violence reporting to conflict and...

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...

The National Society of High School Scholars, Claes Nobel World Betterment Award The Carter Center I am very grateful for the 2016 Claes Nobel World Betterment Award – Claes being the great grandnephew of Alfred – and to the NSHSS-National Society for High School Scholars, here at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Let me start by praising you for your dedication to Education, focusing on the high school–in the middle, after K and grade school, before college and graduate school–on teachers and students, learning and doing research, treating them with respect, bestowing dignity. Society has institutions, like Family, Work and Economy. Sports get too much attention, Education too little. Politics is about leading and being led, Military is about killing not to be killed. These two get you into trouble. I have heard this afternoon much about leading, leaders, led. Führer and Duce are German and Italian for leader, “duce”...

Ole Petter Ottersen and you can write him at rektor@uio.no These two experts on warfare and interventionism will – Orwellian style – speak about “The United States and World Peace After The Presidential Election”. This is the country that, since 1980, has intervened violently in Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosova/Serbia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, i.e. 14 Muslim countries. It has some 630 base facilities in 130+ countries. It has its US Special Forces (SOF) in 133 countries. It has used nuclear weapons without apology and owns the second largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. The US stands for about 40% of the world’s military expenditures, is the world’s leading arms exporter and has killed more people than anybody else since 1945. It’s the master of (imprecise) drone strikes. It presently supports Saudi Arabia’s bestial war on Yemen and conducts a military build-up in Asia and the Pacific...

Participant on board Zaytoouna-Oliva boat A few weeks ago, the US Government agreed to give Israel $38 billion dollars, the largest military funding package the U.S. has given any Nation. This $38 billion in military and other type of Aid, will be used to imprison the Palestinians of Gaza, and continue Israel’s military occupation, and imposition of an apartheid state, upon the Palestinian people. This money will be used in the training fields of Israeli military which are in Gaza, where military experiments are done, using US military weaponry, by the Israeli Occupation Forces. The U.S. military and Government is complicit in the crimes against the people of Gaza and the Palestinian occupied territory by the use of military hardware given by USA and the training that the Israelis give USA and USA gives to them. It is also estimated that some 70% of European humanitarian aid to Palestine ends...

Hindu University, FL USA Gandhi was born 2 October 1869, was killed 30 January 1948 by a Pune brahmin, Godse. I was a 17 years old boy in Norway who cried when hearing the news. Something unheard of had happened. But I did not know why I cried, and wanted to know more. Who was Gandhi? So I became a Gandhi scholar as assistant and co-author to the late Arne Næss in his seminal work of extracting from Gandhi’s works and words his Gandhi’s Political Ethics as a norm-system.[i] The image of the India I love is the image of Gandhi. I know perfectly well that there are other Indias. And Ashis Nandy sensitized me to why the court proceedings against Godse were kept secret: because his arguments were that Gandhi stood in the way of the modern India the government wanted, with industrialization, booming cities, growth, trade, a strong...

On UN Day and his own 86th birthday The last one hundred years life expectancy has increased by about 25%-from near 80 to near 100-in some countries. But, instead of increasing playful childhood, education, work and retirement by 25%, the age of retirement has moved much less than the age at death. That deprives masses of older people with experience and wisdom of productive work, of being useful, meeting others constructively; reducing them to being playful–bridge or golf as case may be–and just keeping alive. Homo sapiens as homo ludens not homo faber. Longer, but emptier lives. A crime against humanity if there ever was any. However, with two clear remedies: continue working self-employed with pension as salary, or find meaning in dedication to something beyond oneself, some cause, volunteer work. That should be planned well in advance before entering a “career” that peaks before, or at, retirement; the rest...

“War is illegal and immoral, it has to end and it can be ended.’ Speech at the international meeting “Thirst For Peace”, Assisi September 18-20, 2016. Promoted by Community of Sant Egidio and Diocese of Assisi and Franciso Families. Dear Friends, I am happy to be here at this International Meeting and I would like to thank our hosts, for their invitation to attend. I have always been inspired by the lives of St. Francis and St. Clare, whom I believe are Icons of Christian Gospel Peace and Nonviolence. Francis the man of action, steeped in empathy and love for all, and Clare a woman of prayer, whose love of God led her into the depth of mysticism and peace. Francis and Clare lived in a time of violence and war, yet they choose to live the nonkilling/nonviolence of Jesus. Francis as a youth fighting in his local military, knew...

Journalists, physicians and mediators have one thing in common: they are expected to ask questions. Having worked as a journalist for some time for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, having a medical family background, and having worked nearly 60 years as a mediator, my obvious conclusion has been for journalists to ask the kind of questions mediators ask, like: • What does the Middle East look like where you would like to live? • What is the situation right now? • Was there a good time, what went wrong, what could have been done? • What is the worst that happened, and the worst that could happen? Journalists should not mediate – they are not trained for that. But they could make the world more ready for mediation, also by readers-listeners-viewers. People will answer, and give interesting answers. Of decision-makers journalists could also ask questions like:… Continue reading here…

Immanuel Wallerstein is unique. Nobody else has presented such a coherent theory of what he calls the modern world-system, from “the long 16th century” up till today; essentially capitalist. There are ups and downs during those four centuries. He is very much at home in the economic Kondratiev cycles–A for up, B for down, but not that much down–and in the political-military hegemonic cycles of the would-be hegemons in the same period. Read Immanuel Wallerstein and become wiser. He warns against the Global Right “Lampedusa tactic” of “changing things so that they remain the same”. And insists on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for the Global Left–but sees the French Revolution more as normalizing change than as people’s sovereignty. Like faith in the middle classes: they are actually helping the Global Right, when in minority they are enlarged by the majority working classes, when in majority they neglect the working class...