TFF Blog

Jan Oberg April 8, 2024 This 7-minute video was shot by The China Academy in January 2024, posted on Wave Media on YouTube and then picked up by Taiwan’s CTi News and the Chinese Global Times magazine. This means a very large audience. Here is the link to see the many comments it created. I’m simply trying, in the shortest possible manner, to summarise what is happening these years from a macrohistorical perspective. If you think this way of thinking is interesting, why not reward TFF for bringing you fresh, different perspectives and always with a touch of a better future and a more peaceful world? It’s fast, simple and safe. Just hit this Big Red Button

Liberate yourself from NATO’s anti-intellectual and militarist fearmongering today! Why the omnipresent, massive, and uniform propagation of Russia as a threat against NATO is humbug. How a credible professional quality threat analysis is made instead. Why deciding military expenditures as a percentage of GDP is exemplary nonsense. Why NATO cannot be called ‘defensive’ and 17 reasons why Russia is not a threat to NATO or to neutral states. Jan Oberg March 19, 2024 NATO soon turns 75 – amid its deepest crisis ever, no matter what they say. During all these years, we have heard repeatedly that the ” Russians” – the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact and today’s Russia – are coming! But while the Soviets/Russians have invaded other countries, they’ve never invaded a NATO or a neutral country in Europe. And when the First Cold War ended a good 30 years ago, and archives were opened, allegedly no plans were...

Jan Oberg March 19, 2024 I was very pleased to be re-invited very quickly to “Through the Eyes of…” run by Ania K, whose YouTube channel has more than 100,000 subscribers. Please watch our conversation here and also run through the many – 99% appreciative – comments. There is no doubt that people want to hear more about peace possibilities than about war, that they have heard enough doom and gloom to cover up for NATO’s own warmongering and blaming everything on one side in a conflict, namely Russia. It won’t last for long. And peace is eminently possible. Press YouTube at the bottom right to watch it on YouTube and see the comments.

Dedication To all the brave people who refuse to participate in war, in Ukraine, Russia and everywhere else. “War is a crime against humanity. I am therefore determined not to support any kind of war, and to strive for the removal of all causes of war”The pacifist declaration of War Resisters’ International. Back cover text “How can you be a pacifist in times like these?” THE SCEPTIC asks, the Russian invasion of Ukraine fresh in mind. Majken Jul Sørensen’s first response is to counter with the opposite question: “How can you not be a pacifist in times like these? With all that we know about the consequences of modern warfare, why are all the alternatives to war not on the table?”  In “Pacifism Today”, Majken illustrates with numerous examples her understanding of pacifism and her commitment to nonviolent action and unarmed resistance to war. In this personal reflection on why...

A very important German voice with a particular background expresses his outrage about the hypocrisy of heads of state and foreign ministers flocking to Tel Aviv with one-sided messages, adding the fig leaf not to forget humanitarian aid and completely ignoring the context, the ‘why’ it all happened. Hans von Sponeck TFF Associate March 6, 2024 War – war was part of the first years of my life. I have felt war. My father was executed in 1944, my grandfather died as a prisoner of war, my half-brother lost his life on the eastern front, my mother escaped from an internment camp, and my grandmother and I saw the end of the war in a hide-out at what became the border between two Germanies. As I grew older, I was eager, very eager, to understand what could prevent war. Young as I was, it was not yet clear to me...

A video conversation about those three connected themes was published in December 2023 on various Chinese Channels and on two YouTube channels, Wave Media and Thinkers Forum, where you may also see the viewers’ comments. In the first two months, they were seen by around 100,000 people and stimulated 1200 positive, even moving, comments. These days, such an interest in peace – and in Western historical wrongdoings – is unusual and can be found almost exclusively outside the Western world. It was recorded and produced in November 2023 by The China Academy, a media syndicating organisation in Shanghai. Please also consult the TFF report Yugoslavia – What Should Have Been Done? It contains all texts – the equivalent of 2000+ A4 pages – by Johan Galtung, Håkan Wiberg and Jan Oberg and published as written back then and not changed or editor ex-post, so everyone can see where they were...

Photo © Jan Oberg “Eclecticism” 2019 Johan Galtung 2015 February 29, 2024 A theory serves comprehension, prediction and identification of conditions for change. Seven such historical-cultural pointers will be indicated for China; using the West in general, and the USA in particular, for comparisons. The presentation draws on countless dialogues in China over 40 years, since 1973. Published by Counterpunch in 2015 China: in time, as dynasties; West: in space as empires. Look at a histomap combining world history and geography, time and space: China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions – and the West as empires–birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, UK and now the US empire – duration vs bubbles that burst; as China-centric vs Western hegemonic. Chinese space: Barbarian; US time: to create, past irrelevant. China marginalized space peopled by South-West-North-East barbarians – outside the “Chinese pocket” between Himalayas-Gobi desert-Tundra-Sea–except for Silk roads...

Jan Oberg February 28, 2024 Jeffrey D. Sachs has recently written a short and highly informative article about the decades-long, disgustingly destructive activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, in every corner of the world. Below, we bring you here the first part of that and then direct your attention to a very well-researched article by investigative reporters of the New York Times that documents how the CIA has been playing its dirty games in Ukraine the last ten years since the US-orchestrated and -financed regime change – which is when the present NATO-Russia conflict and the war in Ukraine can be said to have started (although it can also be seen as having much older roots. There are facts that, generally speaking, most people have probably heard very little of. One must appreciate that both authors below are Americans. That this type of activity can continue virtually without attention...

February 24, 2024, marks the second anniversary of the tragic Russia-Ukraine war – with its underlying conflict between NATO and its reckless expansion on the one hand and Russia on the other. In this video produced by The China Academy in Shanghai, I talk about the four basic chapters of that drama and why, as it seems, none of the parties has learned any lessons yet. See this 8.02-minute video, which the important Global Times has re-posted on its YouTube Channel. And take a look at the comments, too. I have also been asked to comment, in 100 words, on this anniversary by the Chinese national news agency, Xinhua. Here is what I wrote: “Both the EU and NATO keep denying that the conflict was caused by NATO’s unnecessary expansion; they focus conveniently on the Ukraine war that Rusland caused. That serves only the Military-Industrial-Media Complex, MIMAC. The US/European ill-considered response to Russia was...

The China Academy has produced some new videos with me – and those we made last year are still to be posted here. They have been seen by an estimated hundreds of millions around the world in about three months! In this one, I address various aspects of the – predictable – fact that the US is now receiving a series of blowbacks, or boomerangs, because of its reckless policies beginning with the attack on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 – as the thoroughly wrong-headed response to what happened in New York and Washington on September 11 that developed into the Global War On Terror, perhaps the most foolish war project in modern time. The China Academy posts them on China’s Bili-Bili platform (some call it China’s YouTube) and on YouTube at its “Thinkers Forum” Channel. See this 5:35-minute video on Thinkers Forum here – “Yankees go home,” Middle Eastern...

Cole Keister on Unsplash Johan Galtung (1930-2024) February 20, 2024 IntroJohan Galtung published a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East as early as 1971 – in the Journal of Peace Research (JPR). However, today SAGE Publications seems not ashamed to charge you £ 29 to download single articles. So here is a 2015 short summary of Johan’s insights and thoughts on the issue. While everybody is focused on disappointing Israeli election results and the liberals and progressives of this world are justifiably fearful of a future pregnant with “more of the same – or worse”, it may be useful to take a look at the solution-indicative policy proposal below, to muster an idea of what measures may eventually usher in a more desirable future. Whatever the current situation may yield; releasing the peoples of the region from the grips of structurally oppressive, culturally alienating and directly destructive violence for...

NATO now holds its largest military exercise for decades, Steadfast Defender, involving 90 000 troops from all 31 NATO members and Sweden Jan Oberg February 19, 2024 Over the last 70 years, we have heard here in Europe that ”the Russians are coming.” During the old Cold War ending in 1991, they did come to Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) – and Afghanistan (1979). But they came neither to any of the neutral countries – Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia or Austria – nor to any NATO member. NATO’s militarist predictions and enemy images have proven consistently wrong over seven decades. During the First Cold War, the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact’s military expenditures were about 65-80% of NATO, and its technology and efficiency was way behind that of its Western brother. But to be sure, the OSCE – the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (set up in the early 1970s with...