TFF Blog

Jan Oberg February 17, 2025 Johan Galtung died a tragic death today a year ago. I have taken it upon myself to create a memorial site for one of the greatest social scientists of our time. It is launched today. I have two motives for doing so: One, Johan Galtung was one of my mentors, a colleague, and a dear friend for over precisely 50 years and a TFF Associate since we started in 1986. That is the 80%. The second is that Johan was forced to endure gross human rights violations by the Norwegian health and other authorities as well as by individuals in the last months of his life. So, too, his daughter Irene, who was the only one who cared for him to the end. This human rights story – that Galtung wanted to become public – has been repressed by means that do not belong to...

So happy again to be on a show at Pascal’s Neutrality Studies and meet Ulrike Guérot. I’m advancing the idea – and not for the first time – that humanity, all of us, think far too much about the past and the present – so much so that there is no space and interest in how to define and search for a better future. Click “Watch on YouTube” if you also want to see the – amazingly – many and constructive comments. And share/re-post wherever you can. Was this useful to you? Please share, re-post or refer other to it … OR click here and support TFF’s uniquely independent work for peace by peaceful means in these mad militarist times…

It’s all self-destructive. The West should join the world and become a good partner, not a dominator On February 10, 2025, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Anthony Fatseas, who runs the WTFinance Channel on YouTube. Interestingly, Anthony’s channel defines economy in a much broader, structural framework than most of the departments of ‘national economics.’ I would call it Real, social or cultural economics. I urge you to watch it on YouTube rather than here – then you will see both how this is going viral and the – for me – profoundly heart-warming hundreds of comments. Sadly, I cannot comment or thank all these good-hearted people because YouTube has cancelled me, and I cannot even log in. Once again, people prove how they want peace – while their governments don’t know what it is or how to achieve it because they are obsessed with confrontation, war-planning and...

But does the West want to understand China? Jan Oberg February 7, 2025 This is a chapter in a TFF anthology in the making “If You Want To Understand China.” Foreword, Introduction, Authors and Table of Content here. We learn about other cultures than our own mostly through our media – however, in many cases, also through books, films, travels and personal encounters. All news are micro glimpses in time and space – something happens there and then, something else happens the next minute. In addition, the world is seen through negative lenses: dramatic and ’bad’ stuff makes the news. Bad news makes good news. We look for causes behind news and events in the immediate past or present, like B did this because A recently did that. It’s all micro in time and space, and very seldom do we get the macro – the larger/broader or deeper space and...

This is a chapter in a TFF anthology in the making “If You Want To Understand China.” Foreword, Introduction, Authors and Table of Content here. China has had an unprecedented development in the last 4 decades. It cannot be disputed. The progress list is long and covers absolutely everything, literally all walks of life, from on pavements to in space, from schools to research, from microchips to quantum computing, from one child to many and on and on. In several fields, though, China remains stable: the culture, the hard work and the commitment to The Project, the project for a shared future for humankind. It is a fact that the West is in decline, and China is on the rise. Relatively speaking, it is logical because that is how it is in zero-sum games. But is it really a zero-sum game? I do not think so; the cake can be...

I am very pleased with Thomas Karat’s very well-conducted interview and the perspectives he chose to focus on with me. I recommend his fine YouTube Channel warmly. I hope you will like it and share it – and, of course, leave your comments below. You may also go to the interview on YouTube and see the wonderful comments. The interview happened before the Western-supported al-Nusra terrorist regime-change in Syria, but that is, of course, on par with the two conflict areas mentioned in the video title. You’ll find many more videos on TFF’s Video Library on Substack.

Johan and Irene Galtung On August 6, Hiroshima Day, 2024, I published a long, very well-documented article by Irene Galtung, the daughter of peace research professor Johan Galtung, about the tragic circumstances surrounding his last months alive and the human rights violations they both had to endure. What is left of that publication now is only my foreword below. As the editor and publisher of The Transnational, I have decided under threat to delete it, and I owe our readers to explain how I came to that decision. The reason is that her mother and Johan’s wife, Fumiko Nishimura Galtung, her two half-brothers, Andreas Galtung and Harald Eide Galtung and her brother Fredrik Galtung, had turned to lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas at the Glitterlind Law Firm in Oslo, asking him to demand that it be deleted in its entirety. The reason behind that demand and warning was that they considered that...

Jan Oberg January 15, 2025 Five years ago, Trump wanted to buy Greenland, got Danish PM Mette Fredriksen’s response that it was ‘absurd’ and then cancelled his visit and scolded her to the point where all the trousers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were shaking. Shortly afterwards – as a plaster on his wounds? – negotiations about American bases in Denmark began. The US now has 3 bases in Denmark, access to 12 base areas in Norway, 17 bases in Sweden and 15 in Finland – all under US jurisdiction. And now the sight is on Canada and Greenland – “we need it for economic, national security’ as Trump stated and did not rule out the use of military means and economic sanctions to get it. Everything is related to everything else. That is, if you want to see it. Finland and Sweden rushed down the NATO mouse hole...

) My friend and solidarity colleague, Biljana Vankovska, has been dismissed as director of the Center of the Global Changes Center where she is a full Professor at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, in a chilling encroachment on academic freedom. The Center was conceived and brought to life by Biljana a year and a half ago and had already built a reputation for academic excellence mainly on the basis of a stimulating conference devoted to “the emerging cooperative multipolar system” and due to her ability to attract world-class scholars to join the Center’s Board and take part in this inaugural event. As the eloquent explanatory essay below indicates, this action by an educational administrator in her university was based on trumped-up charges. Biljana’s explanation that this punitive action in response to a development that undoubtedly enhanced the academic reputation of this Macedonian rings true—namely, that the government...

Talk at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, September 2010 Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen It is a great honor to be on a panel with the Director of CPC-CC Foreign Affairs, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, the Editor-in-chief of China Daily, the Dean of the National Office of Chinese Language, the Deputy Commander of the People’s Liberation Army.  I express my gratitude to the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament and the American Friends Service Committee for having brought me to this tenth visit to China since 1973, and to Beijing Foreign Studies University for inviting me to this Forum on Public Diplomacy and China’s International Image. I define public diplomacy as diplomacy for the people and by the people. The purpose is neither public relations nor propaganda, but to bring the peoples of the world together by making them understandable to each other.  Like languages have their own logic,...

Eastern Aleppo. al-Nusra occupation. Photo © Jan Oberg 2016 TFF is also your go-to source for understanding the Syria catastrophe in the making from now on. Jan Oberg December 9, 2024 Introduction: The colonialist mentality Few things should surprise us anymore regarding the un-principled nature of the contemporary Western world. One day it sees a genocide and keeps supporting its ongoing barbarism. The next day – actually December 8 in the early morning – it fully supports terrorism, which, allegedly, it has been fighting since September 11, 2001. NATO countries such as the US and Turkey are the main supporters of the terrorist movements that have now occupied the cultured country, Syria, home to 25 million extremely mixed people. As far as I have looked into it, no Western leader has pointed out that taking over an entire country and sending its leadership fleeing is a violation of international law;...