Religion

That his life and his deeds had black dots is part of the story; but that should not block seeing the greatness of a maker of history. First, in his own society, Venezuela, he lifted the bottom people up from misery, into economic wellness, political participation, cultural pride (of their often African, or Indian, blood), social dignity; much beyond Gini coefficients to measure increasing equality. Even the rich human rights language is too bland to reflect all that. Second, he did the same for Latin America; he helped lift the bottom countries up, also under the name of the iconic Simón Bolívar: Cuba and Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, Brazil to mention some. Of course the two policies are related. Colombia with its immense record of violence 1948-2013, is a pariah country and can only be lifted up by lifting its bottom up, attacking flagrant inequality. Chávez and his fellow leaders...

TFF PressInfo 1-2013 On Tuesday February 26, in Kazakhstan, a new round of negotiations are due between Iran and the Five Permanent UN Security Council members + Germany. We’d like to bring the following expert statement to your attention. Contacts for interviews as well as analytical sources below the statement. Summary The problem is not nuclear weapons, essentially. It’s strategic interests such as control of oil and gas and that requires a change of Iran’s ‘obstinate’ and ‘defiant’ regime.

 The present US/NATO/EU policy is based on escalating threats without an exit strategy. This increases the risk of war, whether intended or not. If that is not the deliberate purpose, an entirely new Western policy vis-a-vis Iran must be developed. The Transnational Foundation in Sweden – an independent think tank with 27 years of experience – provides you with the diagnosis, the prognosis and the proposals for improved relations built on...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Dean Acheson, the distinguished US Secretary of State who coined such phrases as “Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role” also once said: “Moral talk is fine preaching for the Final Day of Judgement, but it was not a view I could entertain as a public servant.” No wonder he could justify the use of the nuclear bomb on Japan. The last four Popes, including Benedict who has just announced his retirement, would never have supported the Hiroshima bombing. Neither did they support the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. They believed in moral talk here and now. “Moral talk” led Pope John Paul to wage a long and successful fight against communism in his homeland, Poland. Indeed, many say that victory was the catalyst for the fall of communism in the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. “Moral talk” led to...

Ever since atomic bombs were exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II, end-of-the-world forebodings have been present in Western cultural consciousness. In the background of such thinking is the religious anticipation of a day of judgment when life in earth will be replaced by the consignment of everyone then living to either the hell of damnation or the heaven of salvation. The first type of end time thinking is based on the fear that the Promethean gift of technological innovation when carried to its omega point will produce a big bang terminal moment in the human experience. The second kind of end time thinking imagines that the gift of planetary life was a testing time for the human species that would end with endless punishment for the many and eternal rewards for a few, and was divinely programmed in a...

From Liverpool-UK The uncontested center of the world slave trade, 40%, well documented in the International Slavery Museum in the port where slave ships docked. The trade was triangular: from Liverpool (Bristol, London) with Manchester textiles, metals, beads, alcohol and guns for slave traders in the Bay of Guinea; with slaves from there to the Caribbean, the Middle Passage; and from there with sugar, coffee and cotton grown by slaves back to England. To stealing people, 2/3 young men ages 15-25, and killing their societies, they added stealing raw materials in return for cheap manufactures. Hand in hand they went; from the beginning by the Portuguese in 1502 till the slave trade was forbidden in England in 1807–continued in other ways, also today. We talk about millions of slaves landed in the arch from Rio to Washington with the point of gravity in the Caribbean, and some south of Rio,...

From Grenzach-Wyhlen, Germany Anti-Semitism, AS, is to be against Jews as such; pre-judging all based on some, pars pro toto. Being anti any category humans are born into – woman-man, black-white – is a fatal disease, with prejudice escalating to hatred, leading to discrimination, escalating to war, even genocide. There is linearity; perpetrators to victims. To prevent and cure this disease we must understand its causes, roots, and learn what, and what not, to do. To be against disease is not good enough. With the open mind provided by academic freedom, and freedom of speech as a basic human right, we have explored diseases like cancer to identify the roots, the carcinogens. Smoking, active and passive, is among them; saying so is not “blaming the victim”. Diseases are systems with feedbacks, as is prejudice-discrimination. Rooted in relations between Jews and others, in traumas of the past, conflicts in the present,...

Testimony for Russell Tribunal on Palestine – New York City Honorable Members of the Jury! Sociocide is a new concept that has not found its place in positive international law. But Genocide, the unspeakable crime of massive killing of members of a genus, a nation, for no other reason than membership, has. And Ecocide, the unspeakable crime of killing Mother Earth who nourishes us all, is finding its place via the constitutions of some countries in Latin America. Sociocide, the killing of a society’s capacity to survive and to reproduce itself, should become equally and prominently a crime against humanity.

Chaiwat Satha-Anand, TFF Associate Chairperson, Strategic Nonviolence Commisssion, Thailand Research Fund Senior Research Fellow, TODA Institute of Global Peace and Policy Research On August 6, 2012, the neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page walked into the gurudwara (Sikh temple) of Wisconsin in Oak Creek and murdered 6 people including the temple president. He was killed by the police in the incident. While the Sikhs in the US had suffered from discrimination since they started coming to the United States in the early 20th century: they were driven out of Bellingham, Washington, in 1907; and out of St. John, Oregon in 1910, this most recent Oak Creek killing sparked global outcries from Washington DC to New Delhi. In India, members of Sikh communities staged protest demonstrations in several cities including New Delhi and Jammu, Kashmir. There are many ways to understand this abominable incident.

How do we come to grips, intellectually, with today’s world? Some time ago the geopolitical map was based on the direct East-West conflict, the two superpowers USA/USSR with alliances, and the neutral-nonaligned treated as a residual category. The world was Bipolar. The implosion of the USSR made it Unipolar, “the only surviving superpower”, 2-1 = 1. Or so we were told. Today we have four huge states: the three largest in population, China-India-USA, and the largest in area, Russia. And the EU, a region with five middle-range states: UK-France-Germany-Italy-Spain. But there is one more pole on the geopolitical map: Islam.

President Obama has responded to the killing of six members of the Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin this last Sunday with these words: “All of us recognize that these kinds of terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity. It is time for soul searching and we need to think of ways to reduce violence.” What is most noticeable here, as it was in Obama’s tepid message of consolation to the families of the victims of the Auror a movie theater shooting of two week ago, is this reality: party politics trumps moral principle and even common sense in the aftermath of these extreme challenges to civic peace in America. To fail to mention the grotesque absurdity of legally allowing almost everyone in the United States to buy assault weapons and large quantities of ammunition online or at neighborhood shops can only be explained by the intimidating influence of...

The police explores concrete logistic collaborators and-or ideological support; like Peter Mangs in Sweden, the “laser man” who killed what looked like immigrants, wrote a rightwing manifesto and an autobiography; or “Fjordman” with 111 mentions. Breivik was a member of a Norwegian rightwing anti-immigration party, Fremskrittspartiet – a legal stand in a democracy – but left. He also left the Free Masons, with the following Compendium comment: “Being a Free Mason myself I know that /the Freemasons are a Zionist organization/ is not only a false claim but actually quite ridiculous. The Freemasons is not in any way political (I wish the organization was, believe me) and it is true that they have a positive view on Jews. However, this is from a Christian religious context where solidarity to Jews and Israel is important. The Freemasons is a Christian only organization and no Muslim or Jew could become a member...

The UN Alliance of Civilization (AOC) was initiated by Kofi Annan in 2005 while he was Secretary General of the UN with the joint sponsorship of Turkey and Spain, with its principal center of operations in Istanbul. It was formed under the dark skies that existed after the 9/11 attacks, and seeks to provide an alternative narrative to that of inter-civilizational war, that starkly negative scenario of Islam versus the West associated with the inflammatory views of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington that continues to provide fuel for Islamophobia that burns ever more brightly in Europe and North America. It was several years since I had heard as many references to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis as I did during the discussions and presentations at the Istanbul Forum, which was opened by speeches made by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and Ban Ki Moon, the current UN...