TFF Blog

Jan Oberg August 21, 2023 For Danish/Nordic readers, there is a Danish-language version here. The unity is as uncompromising as it is dangerous in its consequences. No Danish politician, diplomat, researcher or journalist dares to take on the role of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. Not even to get a debate going. About Denmark’s Ukraine/Russia/NATO policy. The government, parliamentary parties and media suffer from extreme groupthink – a well-known social psychological concept. Groupthink rejects any alternative expertise, information and interpretation, and gradually convinces decision-makers that they are on the only possible right course – and that everyone else is uninformed, stupid or – in this case – “Putinists.” Over time, groupthink leads to overconfident and catastrophic decisions because reality has been kept outside the group’s walls of infallibility, moral superiority and we-know-it-all for far too long. There is only one narrative here:...

Jan Oberg August 19, 2023 On August 19, 2023, it is 70 years ago that the US/CIA and others, with the assistance of their British peers, did one of its countless regime changes worldwide, namely in Iran: The U.S.- and UK-instigated, Iranian army-led overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Here is Wikipedia’s detailed account of this shameful act. And with the exception of the years under the Shah’s rule, relations between the West and Iran have been utterly conflictual ever since, and every potential for cooperation has been squandered. The US has felt its usual exceptionalist privilege to harass the country decade after decade, telling it that it will never acquire nuclear weapons, which the US itself and Israel have plenty of – and which it’s doubtful that Iran ever wanted to acquire –...

Join Substack and TFF on Substack! Jan Oberg August 10, 2023 You’ve noticed that TFF is now active on three platform: • The foundation’s homepage: The Transnational (here) which is on WordPress (more about WP here); • “TFF 2 News” which is on Flipboard; • TFF on Substack: TFF • Transnational Foundation & Jan Oberg. It’s different kinds of audiences – readers and viewers – on each and, thus, only seldom do we publish the same post on two of them or all three. In this way, we reach more people than ever. Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.[5] It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers.[6][7] Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco – according to Wikipedia. We’ve tested Substack, published energetically, and we are, after a couple of months, among the 15%...

Jan Oberg July 4, 2023 This weekend, Saudi Arabia hosts an international meeting about peace in Ukraine – however, Russia is not invited. At the time of writing, it is not known whether China would – but it must be seen as very unlikely, although some participating countries pretend to say that there is a fair chance it will this time while it stayed away from the preceding Copenhagen meeting. With US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, being there, one can guess that it is, for all practical purposes, part of a US strategy after the fatal NATO Summit in Vilnius at which Ukraine’s NATO membership was cancelled – and all promises to it since 2008 broken. Saudi Arabia has not issued anything about the meeting; for instance, its “Arab News” carries nothing today. If peace in Ukraine were the real purpose of this meeting, it would have been planned...

A major peace publishing event across cultures: The cover story of the esteemed “China Investment” Magazine’s July 2023 edition Jan Oberg July 23, 2023 Can you imagine a leading economics, finance and investment magazine in the Western world publishing a 30 A4-page (10 000 words) article about the future peace and security world order – a thinkpiece consisting merely of concepts, theories, visions and philosophical aspects of the theme? I can’t. They would not see it as meaningful to include perspectives on peace, nonviolence, security and related matters. But they’d probably gladly publish articles about military corporations, profits and the like. But in China, they see the value of such holistic thinking between interrelated dimensions of society – and of the world – as it really is. Economics is not only about economic things; it takes place in a framework that influences it – past, present and future. In contrast,...

Jan Oberg July 13, 2023 After the NATO Summit in Vilnius, a US-Nordic Summit took place in Helsinki on July 13, 2023. Here is, first, what I would suggest the US, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland take up: • How to back out of NATO’s conflict with Russia, stop the war in Russia and move – with the use of UN peace-keeping and -mediation – towards a viable, sustainable solution to Ukraine’s security problem that all parties can live with – although perhaps not be happy with. • How to re-create the Arctic as a de-militarised, low-tension region and cooperate to the benefit of all parties and the fragile environment. • How to secure that none of the Nordic countries shall have any US bases (except the one in Thule, Greenland, which by the way was not invited) – so to not provoke Russia unnecessarily.Given the Nordic countries’ historically comparatively...

• 1 NATO is not going to let Ukraine in as a full member. Probably never. All the statements about getting it in and its rightful place in NATO is sugar-coating. NATO cannot say that but knows now that its ill-considered promise in 2008 to make Ukraine a member is as dead as the promises made to Gorbachev that the alliance would not expand one inch. All the NATO words about military packages, G7 security assistance, reform path to be drawn up but no timetable, the new NATO-Ukraine Council with so-called ’equals,’ long-term commitments, etc. – all were words of cruel diplomacy serving to soothe a very disappointed Zelensky. • 2 The Ukrainian president will also have understood by now that the US has achieved what it wants: Economic deals with Ukraine about its resources, huge debts and a very high price to be paid by Ukraine and European NATO...

Graffiti of swastika on a softball field dugout in Wellsville, N.Y., Nov. 9, 2016. Brian Quinn, Wellsville Daily Reporter Jan Oberg June 24, 2023 One of the constant features of US society is, to put it crudely, that it is an enigmatic mixture of the worst and the best. Few who have followed this country from abroad over decades would dispute that the US has spearheaded a lot of essentially good developments, ideas and products that have benefited itself and the world. The other side of the US is that, over time, it has decayed into innumerable dimensions and types of domestic and global violence and become more destructive to the rest of the world and itself than it has ever been – and than any other country. The main historical catchwords are genocide on its native people, the slave trade, racism, socioeconomic inequality, discrimination in terms of justice, employment,...

David SwansonWorld Beyond War & TFF Associate June 12, 2023 For any given war, one can examine the months or years or decades during which one or both sides worked diligently to make it happen, and both sides conspicuously failed to develop peaceful alternatives. Even in the moment of greatest violence, one can consider the unarmed-resistance alternatives that are carefully kept out of consideration. But even if you can explain away all justification for every side of every particular war — yes, even that one, there remains the false claim that war is somehow simply part of “humanity.” If ants were to stop waging wars, nobody would bat an eye, but such a feat is deemed simply beyond the intelligence of homo sapiens. There is a problem for this nonsense. It is the problem of peaceful human societies. We know that many, if not most, hunter-gatherer groups of humans engaged...

Waving goodbye? Not agreeing whether to wave at the world or not… Words. Words. Words. And words missing. Jan Oberg June 1, 2023 The G7 countries’ share of the global GDP has fallen from about 70% in the 1960s, to 46% in 2019, to 31% in 2021 and is projected to fall to 28% in 2027. They make up less than 10% of the world’s people. According to the World Bank, between 2013 and 2021, all the G7 countries contributed 26% to world economic growth, and China 39%. I shall argue here that the G7s are in denial and need a reality check. The Hiroshima summit will, I predict, be seen in the future as a milestone of Western decline and militarism’s self-destructive role in it. These countries had agreed in advance on a statement of no less than 19 000 words, 40 pages. It contains all kinds of things...

Jan Oberg May 29, 2023 We’re delighted to announce that Kristin Christman has accepted TFF’s invitation to join us as TFF Associate. Read about Kristin in my article from March this year. Head over to her excellent YouTube Channel – and subscribe! – and then visit Countercurrents, which publishes all Christman’s articles as well as the texts she reads in her videos. Here is the latest – an 8-part critical/devastating analysis of the US National Defence Strategy 2022. We love Kristin’s passionate, unique and super-knowledgeable work for a better world and look forward to much synergy and cooperation with her in the years to come. We’re both struggling to prepare for the renaissance of peace that we believe will come when the US empire has declined further and we live in a more just, balanced and multipolar world – a humanity and peace-ruled international order…

David Swanson TFF Associate May 25, 2023 Here’s a terrible “syllogism” from a wonderful person, Ray McGovern, longtime CIA employee, then longtime peace activist, and now year-long contender, that Russia had no choice but to attack Ukraine. “The Russians had other options to invading Ukraine.They attacked Ukraine in a ‘war of choice’; also threaten NATO.Ergo, the West must arm Ukraine to the teeth, risking wider war.” This is supposedly an explanation of the thinking of we believers that Russia had some choice other than to invade Ukraine. In reality, it illustrates a very sad and enormous distance between the thinking of people who once agreed that war was immoral, but who have now spent over a year utterly failing to persuade each other of anything. Of course the quote above is not a syllogism at all. This is a syllogism: A threat of war requires war.Russia is threatened with war.Russia...