TFF Blog

According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is investing more money and resources in an attempt to attract African-American voters than any previous Republican presidential campaign. The Trump camp believe that with eight months of continuous advertising coupled with the opening of field offices in black communities it can peel off enough black voters to improve his standing by a crucial couple of points. Are black votes so critical? Indeed they are as they are clustered in the denser populated states where they tend to vote as a more of a block than any other group. They can swing the election in several crucial states. It’s strange that the pundits didn’t see South Carolina coming. In that primary, Joe Biden soared ahead of his rival Bernie Sanders after having been written off because of his failures in earlier primaries. South Carolina not only has a large...

TFF PressInfo # 559 An example of what you get when you subscribe to it here on your right. And of course, it is free. Jan Oberg Lund, Sweden – March 20, 2020 This little girl’s face expresses both sorrow and hope. It’s been with me ever since I took the picture at the liberation of Eastern Aleppo in December 2016 after 4,5 years of terrorist occupation. These days, it is 9 years ago, violence broke out in Syria. The underlying conflict with the West is much older. Our leaders and media are still so peace illiterate that they don’t know the distinction between conflict and violence. I’ve seen no mention in the Western mainstream media of Syria. While COVID-19 has so far claimed about 10.000 lives worldwide, 400.000 have died in Syria. Today, it is 17 years since US President George W. Bush used shock and awe on Iraq...

Is Bernie Sanders still in with a chance? It is a slim one, but in these primary elections one never knows. There have been a number of surprising upsets. Even if Joe Biden comes out on top and has to face Donald Trump for the presidency the Democratic Party has been pushed to the left by Senator Sanders. That is all to the good. Biden needs to be more critical of capitalism, more prepared to encourage unionism among workers and more prepared to push for universal health coverage, more taxes for the wealthier classes, among many other things that Sanders has pointed out as necessary if the US is not going to shoot itself in the foot with a disintegrating body politic. If it wants a fair and stable society this is the way to go. On foreign policy Sanders has also pushed Biden to be more explicit about the...

By Jan Oberg March 17, 2020 Defender Europe 20 is a huge, basically US military exercise, on European soil between February and May this year. It has already started. In the midst of a closed-down coronavirus Europe. And it is war-preparing, not peace- or confidence-building. The diagram above from the British Army offers you details of this perverse, surreal idea – take note of Italy being one of the planned participants! Most likely, you have not heard about Defender Europe 20. When it comes to US foreign and war policies, all Western mainstream media practise self-censorship. The media would hardly be able to write about this exercise of militarist madness in a way that would not cause an uproar and moral condemnation in these times of deep, widespread concerns about war risks, climate change and the coronavirus. So better not write at all and cause diplomatic troubles with the unpredictable,...

We hear next to nothing about these sanctions in the so-called free media – primary sanctions by the US hitting Iran directly, secondary sanctions by the US demanding other countries – the EU and NATO allies in particular – to implement its sanctions, i.e. to accept that US sanctions laws shall apply to them as sovereign states. The EU has not been able to get its acts together and respect the nuclear deal, or JCPOA: not in autumn 2015 when it could not find a way to temporarily host 1,5 million refugees arriving as asylum seekers from countries destroyed predominantly by the EU/NATO members themselves – and not now when the coronavirus hits Europe and they have let China be the one who helps their neighbour Italy. On March 15, 2020, I was asked by Iran’s PressTV to comment on these matters in the wake of Iranian foreign minister, Dr...

Illustration by Shenuka Corea By Richard Falk, TFF Associate March 12, 2020 Prefatory Note International law – as so much else of value – has fallen on hard times, violated and ignored, where applicable and needed. Although this is a deplorable state of affairs as the planet burns and vulnerable people suffer from ecological hazards and predatory geopolitics, it is the time to heighten struggle, and not sit home in despair. This essay in a slightly modified form was written at the request of Fikir Turu, an online source of commentary operating from Turkey, and published in Turkish. An English version was also published in Transcend Media Service, TMS, 17 February 2020. Published at Richard Falk’s personal blog  Respecting International Law: A Practical Argument International law disappoints in so many ways, making it easy to overlook why, despite its flaws, it remains valuable and indeed vital for human wellbeing. I put here...

By Richard Falk, TFF Associate March 16, 2020 Prefatory Note This post is something new for me, an autobiographical fragment written at the request of an online listserv as a suggestive model for academics at the start of their careers as diplomatic historians. I publish it here on my blog. It was found unsuitable for publication by the group that made the initial solicitation for unspecified reasons. Maybe because my work and career were not relevant to the scholarly life of a diplomatic historian, maybe because I seemed too flaky professionally to serve as a heuristic model, maybe because what I wrote risked an angry reaction from those who have weaponized anti-Semitism as (mis)defined by the IHRA definition, maybe because…a hundred other good reasons, including what was most plausible, least paranoid, that I was in a different lane when it came to a scholarly career, making my condensed narrative a...

PhotoPainting by the author Diagnosis, prognosis and treatment in the light of Turkey’s invasion and the risk of a larger catastrophic war. By Jan Oberg March 7, 2020 Diagnosis The world looked at the violence but didn’t have the capacity to analyze the underlying conflicts in and around Syria. For sure, it is a civil war but, to a much larger extent, it is an international regime-change war. In 2006 William Roebuck, US chargé d’affaires in Damascus, advocated that US policy should focus on destabilizing the Syrian government and al-Assad. At a meeting in Marrakech on December 12, 2012, lots of countries under Western leadership – perversely calling themselves Friends of Syria on the initiative of French President Sarkozy – decided to oust President Assad by decree and establish a National Council which, from then on, was supposed to be the only legitimate Syrian governing body and representative of the...

Bits of the sociological imagination at work By Jan Oberg March 5, 2020 Researchers are citizens too – some with a sociological imagination Like everybody else, social scientists are citizens. We live a private life and a professional life and there is a tradition-based rule of thumb that the two should be kept apart in writing – like: ”Oh, the things I experience in my private sphere are just small issues that probably only I have encountered; my scattered everyday observations are not interesting or “scientific” so I ought not bother others with them.” But wait! Isn’t it part of a social scientist’s writing to be concrete, build on empirical facts and observations? To tell how it really is also on the micro-level – also when s/he does not attempt to develop big explanatory theories around such unsystematic observations or try to prove something empirically? Isn’t it important to observe...

By Johan Galtung March 3, 2020 Some 50 years ago I had been puzzled so much by two problems in connection with foreign news that I decided to do some research on reporting – Cuba, Cyprus, Congo – published first time in January 1963.(*) The first problem was empirical: how do events become news?  There are enormities of events happening, at any point of observation, by professional journalists, foreign correspondents or not: how come that some are elevated to the level of news?  What is news anyhow? The second problem was more normative: why this predilection for negative news, something bad – to somebody – happening?  Why, but then also why not?  You are driving on a road and the flash on the radio “there is a boulder blocking the road around the next sharp turn” matters more than “the road ahead is curvy but smooth”.  The positive and the...

The US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is having trouble with his socialism. The younger voters get it, but many of the older liberally-minded people don’t –  the kind of people who read the New York Times and probably like its endorsement of Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar and find socialism rather difficult to swallow. The New York Times has many virtues but it does have a bad pro-war record (pro-Vietnam, pro-overthrowing Gaddafi, pro-attacking Afghanistan, pro-invading Syria) and as for socialism or social democracy (as Sanders should label his brand) it has not exactly shouted its virtues for America from its roof-top, although it supports many social democratic regimes abroad. Somehow these voters – and the New York Times – have to be reached if Sanders is to win. First, they have to know what it is. Is it Olof Palme’s of Sweden, François Mitterand’s of France, Willy Brandt’s of Germany,...

A different take on what preceded the murder of Iranian general Solemani Here is, first, a video sequence that has gone viral. It’s U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, telling – laughingly – an audience that CIA’s perception of truth is quite advanced; and he must know since he headed that ugly institution 2017-2018. Listen to him saying how much “We lied, we cheated, we stole” from about 29:10 to 29:50 – and by all means, get an impression of this man’s way of seeing the world and the role of the United States in it. (Interestingly, this is from the official State Department channel on YouTube). And here is The Greyzone’s program PushBack with Aaron Maté interviewing investigative journalist, historian and TFF Associate, Gareth Porter – which gives you insights into the role of Israel in Iraq and its provocative attacks there which were closely related to what later...