Peace

Before ISIS The beheading of American and British journalists who were being held hostage by ISIS creates a truly horrifying spectacle, and quite understandably mobilizes the political will to destroy the political actor who so shocks and frightens the Western sensibility, which is far from being free from responsibility for such lurid incidents. Never in modern times has there been a clearer example of violence begetting violence. And we need to ask ‘to what end?’ Political leaders in the West are remarkably silent and dishonest about what it is that they wish to achieve in this region beset since 2011 by a quite terrifying outbreak of political extremism, whether from above as in the cases of Syria, Egypt, and Israel or from below as with ISIS and al-Nusra. It is difficult to recall that at the start of 2011, just three years ago, progressive voices around the world were inspired...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Despite Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and Southern Sudan the world is a lot more peaceful than it was at the end of the Cold War and shows no sign of returning to the bad old days when there were some 25 wars going on every year. Now it is down to about a dozen. The task today is to keep that number going down – a difficult job when the outbreak of conflict in Syria, Libya and Ukraine have turned the graph upwards a few notches for the first time. Protagonists in political quarrels tend to push the non-violent activists to one side – as they have done in Syria, Libya, Gaza and Ukraine. This is not a good tactic as these situations have clearly shown. In Syria whole parts of cities have been reduced to rubble. Likewise in Gaza. In Ukraine this is starting to happen....

President Obama’s speech last night This speech is a record low in terms of moral and intellectual analysis: What it boils down to is war – i.e. killing every single ISIS person anywhere, people who he compares to cancer cells. The war on terror has always been about killing terrorists but you can not kill an ism – terrorism. To do something about the causes that compel people to become terrorists would be much more efficient. The President has said repeatedly that a lasting solution is political, not military. The speech, however, is exclusively military – not a word of political, psychological or other insights: No, we kill people because we think it is wrong to kill people… The speech can be seen as a proof of how utterly misguided the U.S. response to 9/11 was – had it been more intelligence and less revenge-oriented, there would neither have been...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> September 2nd 2014 Violence should have had its day. Look at its non-achievements: The US/British/French invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The upheavals of the “Arab Spring”. And now Ukraine. Will we ever learn its limitations? In Iraq outsiders’ violence overthrew the dictator Saddam Hussein who for all his faults provided stability, safety on the streets, food, a falling infant mortality rate and universal health services. What did it substitute beside the worthwhile job of killing off Saddam? Mayhem, tens of thousands of deaths of innocents, fear of the street, shortages of food, upheavals in the health services and schools. And an ongoing instability, not least the opening given to ISIS. In Libya,

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Lund, Sweden September 3, 2014 – 11:30 CET. As announced just a few minutes ago, the Ukrainian and Russian president have agreed to what the first reports call a permanent ceasefire in Eastern Ukraine. That’s indeed the best piece of news from that region. It places the NATO Summit in Wales this Thursday and Friday in a new light. The ceasefire must be solidified However, an agreement over a phone is only a beginning; the devil is in the details. Secondly, there is no mention – yet – of the East Ukrainian fighters are on board this agreement. Time for UN peacekeeping Third, a credible ceasefire should be monitored by neutral observers and competent people. The only ones who can do that is the UN peace-keepers – perhaps with some staff also from Russia and Ukraine.

TFF PressInfo 273 /10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Lund, Sweden August 22, 2014 We are drifting towards a new Cold War. The reason isn’t substance because there is no reason we should not be able to live in peace in Europe – if we want and educated ourselves in handling problems. No, the reason is the woefully incompetent way in which politicians and media focus on violence and ignore the underlying conflict and civil means – yes yes, of course there are exceptions. Escalation doesn’t create peace Here is just one example – NATO S-G Anders Fogh Rasmussen and NATO’s supreme commander General Breedlove (funny name given his anything but loving views coming rather from a Strangelove …) in the Wall Street Journal. They tell you about all the escalation they have already done

Kuala Lumpur, International Islamic University of Malaysia, 19 Aug 2014 Nothing good. But let us have a look at it in the standard peace studies way: Diagnosis – analyzing, Prognosis – forecasting, and Therapy – remedies, even solutions. “Israel-Palestine” is the discourse Tel Aviv-Washington prefers. They have all the strong cards: overwhelming military power, political veto in the United Nations Security Council, the economic upper hand in interlocking economies – not just oil cash from Saudi Arabia-Qatar–and the idea of working for a solution with Washington as “mediator” – only the U.S. can bring the two together, gently or roughly–toward a sustainable peace. A great distance from reality is needed to believe in that spin. USA and Israel are interlocked by a much deeper tie

Vi lever i en interessant tid. Og den er ikke kedelig. Mange faste forestillinger ændrer sig. Det slår mig, at EU politikere og ditto amerikanske ved meget lidt om både Rusland og verden. Som EU borger kan jeg med beklagelse konstatere, at EU ikke har nogen politik i forhold til Rusland. Og højstemt forargelse og at snakke amerikanerne efter munden tæller ikke som en egentlig politik. Hvilke forestillinger har EU politikerne haft om slutspillet i Ukraine? Hvilke forestillinger har de haft om virkningerne af sanktionerne? Hvilken viden og forståelse af hvilket land Rusland er, har de samme politikere haft? Det er som om dæmonisering af Putin har gjort det ud for en politik. Jeg opfordrer ikke her til at man skal elske Putin. Men jeg opfordrer for det første til at finde ud af, hvad man ønsker med Rusland og for den sags skyld også med Ukraine. For det andet,...

Lund, Sweden August 15, 2014 Like so many, like millions, this author’s heart is bleeding for the killed and bereaved in Gaza – so disturbingly similar to the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and Warsaw 1944. With Arab and Western governments doing nothing; like the Red Army in 1944. But the latter was heading for Berlin. And the West uses Ukraine as a distraction, trying to hit Moscow. Like Rabbi Michael Lerner, my non-Jewish heart is also bleeding for Judaism and the Israel that could have been. The present regime is a traitor to both, driving into the abyss. Yet they have parliamentary and democratic, voter, support? Except that parliaments are not infallible, democracies can be wrong; even more so if the people think they have a divine mandate. England, the mother of parliaments, once thought it had; colonized 25% of the world and is now hanging on to the “united...

The two giants did something unusual for Western thinkers: they were very holistic. Nothing less than the whole society and the world, and much more than the economy, for Marx; nothing less than the whole body-mind complex, with excursions into culture, for Freud. Equally unusual: they were very dialectical. There were forces and counter-forces. Means vs modes of production for Marx, simplified to Capital vs Labor; Super-ego vs Id, values from the outside vs drives from the inside for Freud. For Marx the dialectic was inside Structure–of Culture and Nature there was little–for Freud between Culture and Nature–of Structure there was little. Holism and dialectics are the pillars of daoist thought, giving rise to a dynamic theory of organic systems like societies and humans. Calling the forces yin and yang, over time they will both be vexing and, waning, the dominant will recede and the dominated will grow. In this...

Keynote, 25th International Peace Research Association (IPRA) Conference Istanbul, 11-14 August 2014 We have come of age, at 50; and I am the only surviving founder from 1964 in London, capital of a foggy island in the North Sea. Now we meet in the sunny capital of another empire; bridging three continents. One cloned itself all over; the other was more an Islamic umma, a community of togetherness-and-sharing, with millet islands of tolerance. And now: the superb IPRA program. Uniting for peace. But we differ, disagree? Incredible how far we can come if we identify and focus on the good and the positive in Kiev, Donetsk and Moscow, or husband and wife in broken marriages rather than what is wrong, and build new relations on that. Peace is a relation, not attributes of the parties. So also for conferences: focus on the best in paper, praise it; not on the...

Quality research leads to better predictions One criteria of quality research is that it predicts the future better than incompetent research. Because TFF is independent of governments and coroporations it doesn’t have to take political considerations or exclude certain theories, concepts or values. This free research enabled it over the years to make fairly precise predictions about for instance former Yugoslavia, the Iraq war and East-West relations. In 1998 – 16 years ago – we warned that NATO’s expansion would lead to future problems with Russia. Read it here. NATO should never have been expanded We backed this prediction up with 46 arguments and argued that so many other things would be wiser than containing Russia from the Baltic republics to Georgia – a strategy pursued by Bill Clinton in contravention of all promises given to the Soviet Union/Russia at the end of the Cold War about ten years earlier....