TFF Blog

New book by TFF Associate, Richard Falk, on the Vietnam War Revisiting the Vietnam War And International Law: Views and Interpretations of Richard Falk Editor Stefan Andersson Cambridge University Press, 2017 (US $ 157) Paperback UK £ 28 here Why the Legal and Political Debate on the Vietnam War Still Matters Introduction There has been recently a revival of interest in the Vietnam War, perhaps most notably as a result of the quite extraordinary 10-episode Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s ten-part, eighteen hour documentary film as aired on PBS, which although somewhat ideologically slanted toward an American audience has much illuminating footage, especially bearing on various Vietnamese perceptions of the war experience. I would also call attention to a series of articles by Matthew Stevenson describing his recent visit to Vietnam – “Why Vietnam Still Matters: An American Reckoning” – which combines acute journalistic observation with impressive commentary on the...

  Asia and the Middle East lead rising trend in arms imports, US exports grow significantly, says SIPRI March 12, 2018 Via sipri.org Continuing the upward trend that began in the early 2000s, the volume of international transfers of major weapons in 2013-17 was 10 per cent higher than in 2008-12, according to new data on arms transfers published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The flow of arms increased to Asia and Oceania and the Middle East between 2008–12 and 2013–17, while there was a decrease in the flow to Africa, the Americas and Europe. The five biggest exporters – the United States, Russia, France, Germany and China – together accounted for 74 per cent of all arms exports in 2013–17. ‘The increased flow of arms raises concerns over their impact on international peace and security’, says Ambassador Jan Eliasson, Chair of the SIPRI Governing Board. ‘It stresses the...

”En häpnadsväckande utveckling”, skriver brittiska The Guardian om beskedet att Donald Trump och Kim Jong-un ska mötas vid ett toppmöte i maj. Nu är det diplomati som gäller, inte kärnvapenhot. Beskedet om att Nordkoreas Kim Jong-un ska möta Donald Trump på ett toppmöte i maj var fredagens stora glädjande nyhet, en total kontrast mot höstens eskalerande utveckling mot ett tänkbart kärnvapenkrig mellan två konfliktanalfabeter. Först tryckt här på Kultur-Sörens blogg – en av Sveriges absolut mest läsvärda Brittiska The Guardian skriver engagerat om  ”a stunning development following months of tension and mutual sabre-rattling …” och det är lätt att instämma och glädjas. Amerikanska The New Yorker uttrycker sig på liknande vis: ”In a breathtaking gambit that surprised his closest advisers, President Trump, almost impulsively, accepted an invitation on Thursday to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un … I höstas genomförde Nordkorea en rad kusliga tester med missiler som kan bära...

  Intro This short article documents how Facebook – in a non-dialoguing way – practices censorship. This and many other cases was a major reason that TFF launched The Transnational – a new multidimensional peace platform and try to push the debate about our issues out of Facebook and over to our own platform (hosted by WordPress.com) so that Facebook cannot influence over and above our heads, what it wants to disseminate and what not.    I come across an article that I find both worrying and trustworthy, “Google is helping Pentagon building AI for drones” in the Gizmodo online magazine. Like I do several times a day, I post it to Facebook (my profile, public figure page and TFF’s page), to Google+ and to Twitter. In one go, via a service called Sendible. About 30 minutes later this arrives:       I of course click “This isn’t Spam”...

By Gareth Porter Via truth-out.org A portion of Golan is currently occupied by Israel, which took it from Syria in 1967. It was annexed by Israel in 1981 and populated with Israeli settlers roughly equal in numbers to its original Syrian population. Israel has expressed the fear that Syria’s recent moves could threaten Israel’s occupation in Golan. IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot declared in January that Israel “can’t ignore the fact that Hezbollah, the Shiite militias and Iran perceive themselves on the winning side in Syria, together with Bashar Assad, and share his desire to return to the Golan Heights.” Israeli officials have expressed a determination to establish de facto Israeli control in what they have called a “buffer zone” or “safe zone” covering much of the Syrian Golan. Israel had already begun laying the groundwork two years ago by arming anti-Assad opposition groups only to see much of their progress reversed by more recent Syrian military advances. The buffer zone objective...

    What do we in the West know about Islam? Perhaps more than we did before 9/11 but not much. When Tony Blair was prime minister of the United Kingdom he was photographed walking along holding the Koran. President George W. Bush said repeatedly that Islam was a religion of peace, even though at that time one of the most influential American political writers, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, had written that it wasn’t fundamentalism that was the problem, it was Islam itself. He argued in his best-selling book, “The Clash of Civilizations” that “The twentieth century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting superficial phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relationship between Islam and Christianity.” He foresaw nuclear war between the West and Islam. This seems to me to be extravagantly over the top. Yet there are many Islamic scholars who make,...

  About 1:50 into this video comment I suggest that we should think of elevating the idea of #MeToo to the international level and apply it when a country is abusing another country against its will – even to the extent that we can justifiably talk about rape and death. Apart from the obvious similarity – the lack of consent and the violence and humiliation it is expressive of – there is also the issue of proportions: People – i.e. entertainment celebrities in particular – engage very much (and rightly so) in the present #MeToo campaign – and many also in the issue of domestic gun violence (again, rightly so) but the same people hardly every have a critical word to say about their own government raping entire countries, violating international law, killing thousands of people, building bases and selling the arms that have only one result apart from profit:...

    We are not only providing you with quality materials, we also try our best to make it easy for your to keep updated. Without feeling spammed… This is a TFF PressInfo and you can get it winging into you mailbox. Just send a mail to tff@transnational.live with PI in the subject field. As easy as that and, of course, it is free. It comes one or two times a week, no spam. And it lists some of what we publish here at The Transnational. If you want to be sure you get everything, go to the front page and sign up in the upper right corner at “Get the News” and you’ll receive an e-mail every time a new thing is posted here. Try either today. You can always unsubscribe with one click. What you can also do is to share this PressInfo with a friend, family member,...

  /02/27/the-world-must-act-now-on-syria/”>New York Review of Books has published an Open Letter headlined “The World Must Act Now on Syria”  – and about 200 people from the world of culture and academia, from Syria and the rest of the world, have signed. It’s also published by PulseMedia here – on February 27, 2018. The immediate event that compels the authors of this Open Letter is the terrible fighting and humanitarian emergency in Ghouta at the outskrits of Damascus. Both articles carry on top the standard images of some men saving children out of ruins (see above, the White Helmets).   May I suggest you read the Open Letter now and then return to this page so it is clear to you why I write what I do.   What follows is a short argumentative analysis that shows how the surely good intentions behind the Open Letter are based on dubious assumptions...

  By Jan Oberg Comment on PressTV, February 17, 2018  

  By Richard Falk Prefatory Note With apologies for this long post, which attempts to situate the struggle for an ethically and ecologically viable political future for the United States and the world in the overheated preoccupation with Trump and Trumpism, which is itself a distraction from the species challenges confronting the whole of humanity at the present time. Many of us, and I include myself, have allowed the side show to become the main attraction, which is itself a reason for struggle against the enveloping darkness.   The Psycho-Politics of Geopolitical Depression It should not be all about Trump, although his election in 2016 as U.S. president is symptomatic of a menacing national tailspin. This downward political drift in the United States, not only imperils Americans, but threatens the world with multiple catastrophes, the most worrisome of which involves Trump’s double embrace of nuclearism and climate denialism. Unfortunately at...

  By Richard Falk Prefatory Note This post is a somewhat revised version of a book review that was published by the Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. XLVII, No. 2 (Winter 2018), p. 81. The book is an important contribution to an understanding of two dimensions of the Palestinian experience within the state of Israel: First, the reliance on law to ‘legalize’ discrimination, and the accompanying denial of fundamental rights that has resulted. Secondly, to develop a distinct Israeli jurisprudence that seeks to legitimize ‘ethnocracy,’ yet disguise this reality by claiming that the nationality laws and regulations distinguishing Jews and non-Jews do not invalidate Israeli claims to be a democracy. •   The Dynamic of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State By Mazen Masri Hart Publishing, 2017 Oxford, UK & Portland 256 pages. $79.70 hardcover. • This book is an odd scholarly achievement. It relies on a...