Peace philosophy

s who used dogs against the civil rights protestors and cracked heads. It reminds me too of 1968 when the Soviet Union sent its tanks into Prague to overthrow a reforming (but still communist) government only to meet defiance from large sections of the population. On both occasions the brutality was met not with petrol-bombs and stones but with non-violence and passive obstruction. It worked. Stones and fire-bombs would have been counterproductive. The combined strength of the troops of the Soviet Union and its allies was 500,000. For six days the Czech people met their invaders as fellow communists face to face, sometimes arguing with them, sometimes scorning them, always resisting them and refusing too obey their orders. The reaction was totally spontaneous. The improvised radio broadcasts during the first hours of the invasion simply told the populace not to use force and to keep calm. Slogans were painted on...

March 26, 2010, and July 3, 2019 Why Johan Galtung (born 1930) decided to devote his life to waging peace through research and action. Galtung who is one of the world’s most prolific and innovative social scientists – for instance, the author of more than 160 books and a global lecturer, mediator and professor – has been a TFF Associate since 1986 and has been published hundreds of times at TFF’s old and present site. He is also one of my two mentors in peace research – the other being Håkan Wiberg – says TFF director and co-founder, Jan Oberg.

By Dr. Lawrence Wittner June 5, 2019 In late April, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that, in 2018, world military expenditures rose to a record $1.82 trillion. The biggest military spender by far was the United States, which increased its military budget by nearly 5 percent to $649 billion (36 percent of the global total). But most other nations also joined the race for bigger and better ways to destroy one another through war. Originally publishes on Counterpunch.org on May 29th, 2019 here This situation represents a double tragedy. First, in a world bristling with weapons of vast destructive power, it threatens the annihilation of the human race. Second, as vast resources are poured into war and preparations for it, a host of other problems―poverty, environmental catastrophe, access to education and healthcare, and more―fail to be adequately addressed. But these circumstances can be changed, as shown by...

Peace can never be achieved this way a) The issue is about peace, not only nuclear weapons. The US has not been willing to sign a peace agreement after all these years. After some kind of peace process and treaty has been achieved, you can turn to the specific issue of nuclear weapons. b) Making peace takes time, thorough preparations, lots of different expertise, long consultations and only face-to-face meetings when all are sure that, when the parties finally meet at top level, some kind of deal will be signed. c) This would have been an issue for the UN if it were respected and used fairly by member states around the world. Naive and egotist people believe they can do miracles without the institutions of the international system. Probably Trump and Kim are in the same category believing that they are all capable and great guys of history (worthy...

– Martin Luther King Day Since The Transnational is also a public education site, we believe a handy, comprehensive guide to materials about Martin Luther King, Jr. should be found here: For his indisputable greatness as a human being, thinker and activist and for you to see just how far today’s United States of America is from its basic ideals, ideals that he stated so clearly and convincingly. Such ideals must never be allowed to die, neither be turned into lifeless traditions over time that are only paid lip service to at memorial occasions. Martin Luther King, Jr. has a series of messages for today’s world – and inspires anyone who wants to bring about change towards peace. We are particularly fascinated by his elaborations of the concept of The Beloved Community. And we’ve published two other guides earlier: Michel Chossudovsky, TFF Associate, Global Research Guide to Martin Luther King,...

The icon’s legacy is no longer secure, but he anticipated much about our current political moment By Pankaj Mishra January 11, 2019 In 2015, in South Africa, where Mohandas Gandhi lived from 1893 to 1914, a statue of him was defaced by protesters. The following year, the University of Ghana agreed to remove Gandhi’s statue from its campus, after an online campaign with the (misspelled) hashtag #Ghandimustfall charged the Indian leader with racism against black Africans. Compared with other recent targets of political iconoclasts—stalwarts of the Confederacy and Cecil Rhodes—Gandhi seems an unlikely symbol of racial arrogance. Nelson Mandela claimed that Gandhi’s tactics offered “the best hope for future race relations”; Martin Luther King, Jr., held Gandhi up as a model; decades before that, black activists such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Benjamin Mays were enthralled by the phenomenon of an Indian leading people of color in the campaign...

Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70. All reason to celebrate. Without the norms embedded in this extremely important document, humankind would be much worse off. Because normativity is important even though it is only words. It enables us to make those who violate human rights accountable. And that is, in general terms, an extremely important aspect of the UN and its Charter. So too the norm expressed in its Article 1 – that peace shall be established by peaceful means and only when all such means have been tried an found in vain, can the UN member states take to violent means. As a last resort. That said, the only two problems I have with the human rights philosophy and concept are: One could also formulate it this way: Human beings have duties vis-a-vis those whose rights are not embedded in any declaration, i.e. other living creatures,...

  At last a book that attacks the “Blob” and holes it below the water line. Whether it can sink it is another matter. I’m talking about a book published last week by the Harvard professor of international affairs, Stephen Walt, “The Hell of Good Intentions”. The “Blob” is a wonderful word conjured up by President Barack Obama’s deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes. It means the group of congressmen, generals, industrialists, academics and journalists who specialize in foreign policy and have an influence promoting what Walt calls “Liberal Hegemony”. This, he defines, as the default setting for US foreign policy by the ingrown foreign policy establishment. “Open-ended efforts to remake the world in America’s image gives them plenty to do, appeals to its members’ self-regard and maximizes their status and power”. It’s a full employment policy (by those who were thrown out of work at the end of the...

  “Suppose aliens existed, and that some had been watching our planet for its entire forty-five million centuries, what would they have seen? Over most of that vast time-span, Earth’s appearance altered very gradually. Continents drifted; ice-cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved and became extinct. But just in a tiny sliver of Earth’s history – the last hundred centuries – the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture – and then urbanization.” We are at the very end of that “sliver”. So begins a new book by Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, “On the Future: Prospects for Humanity”. There is much in this short, very readable, book – the disturbing, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, future of biotech, artificial intelligence, global warming, medicine, ageing, communications, nuclear energy, weapons development, sustainability, agricultural research, poverty and employment, but its centerpiece is astronomy. Over the...

    By Uri Avnery 2 Jun 2018 I loved Gaza. That is a play on words. The Biblical Song of Songs says that love is strong as death. Strong in Hebrew is Aza. Aza is also the Hebrew name of Gaza. I have spent many happy hours in Gaza. I had many friends there. From the leftist Dr. Haidar Abd al-Shafi to the Islamist Mahmoud al-Zahar, who is now the foreign minister of Hamas. I was there when Yasser Arafat, the son of a Gazan family, came home. They put me in the first row of the reception at the Rafah border, and that evening he received me at the hotel on the Gaza sea shore, seating me next to him on the stage during a press conference. I met with a friendly attitude everywhere in the Gaza Strip, in the refugee camps and in the streets of Gaza...

  A short comment to a very good statement by Madam Mogherini about Syria. She is right – and one must wonder why virtually every big power anyhow does not invest in political, negotiated solutions but in weapons. And why the world is so woefully unbalanced in terms of war-making versus peace-making. The simple truth is that every and each conflict on earth gets more difficult to solve from the moment some type of violence is introduced into it. That is why the world should focus on reducing  military development, production and sales. If Syria had been cordoned off and no weapons had entered its space, it would have been much much easier to solve the underlying conflicts – which, by the way, have little to do with Darrah in spring 2011 but much more complex things. I find it relevant to here also mention how pervasively all Security Council...

We should carefully reflect on Martin Luther King’s  message to the World. MLK understood the relationship between America’s war agenda and social justice and civil rights in America. “No one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war [Vietnam]”. One cannot be a civil rights leader without taking a stance against U.S. led wars. In the words of Martin Luther King: “Silence is Betrayal”. Today with war hawks in the White House and the U.S. State department, America is leading a military adventure which in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity. But this is not a talking point on network TV. Nor is it a concern of the “antiwar” movement. Meanwhile, the media is “killing the truth” either through distortion or omission. Today we commemorate the passing of Martin Luther King who was assassinated in a...