TFF global posts 2019

Remissvar om Lars-Erik Lundins utredning avgivet av Fredsrörelsen på Orust 24:e april 2019 Inledning Under läsningen av utredningens 215 sidor framtonar några grundläggande drag i den världsbild och den begreppsapparat som utredaren utgår ifrån och använder. Ingen öppen redovisning eller definition görs av dessa grundläggande drag i utredningen och dess slutsatser. Här följer ett representativt urval av begrepp som de kan förstås i utredningen. (Video med Lars-Erik Lundins presentation av utredningen). Säkerhet ett ord för trygghet i världen och frånvaro av osäkerhet för Sverige. (sid 69) Säkerhetspolitik utgörs av militära rustningar och samarbete med militäralliansen Nato och dess kärnvapenparaply (sid 24) Samarbete innebär verksamhet, avtal och militär utveckling tillsammans med Nato. (sid 69 och 153 Exempel: ”Rysslands ökade aggressivitet understryker vikten av samarbete”.) Försvar utgörs av militär styrka (överallt där ordet används) Avskräckning är målet för säkerhets- och försvarspolitik riktad mot Ryssland. Trovärdigt hot om användning av kärnvapen ingår. (sid...

Let’s make America great again! Or as the prime minister of France said: Let’s make France great again. Or, as President Donald Trump conceded, let every nation in the world announce that they are going to be great again. But what makes for greatness? Over that there is a big dispute. Strategists say that power has to be measured carefully because “the balance of power is the motor of world politics, playing a role as central as the role of energy in physics and money in economics”, as writes Professor Michael Beckley of Tufts University, in his analysis The Power of Nations. Measuring what really matters. “Power is like love, it is easier to define than measure. Just as one cannot say, ‘I love you 3.6 times more than her,’ scholars cannot calculate the balance of power precisely, because power is largely unobservable and context-dependent”. So what can scholars do? ...

Conversation with Manmohan Singh was always fascinating at the time he was prime minister of India. It was difficult to challenge his superior intellect. He could, in his calm, disciplined way, out-argue anyone. He saw where India was going with a degree of exactness that dwarfed other observers. On the economic front it was, for his Congress Party government, all about ending poverty which he thought doable, although achieving a fairer income distribution was much more difficult. On the political front it was all about catching up with China which three decades ago had been on the same level as India but was now way ahead. And it was about making peace with its nuclear-armed adversary, Pakistan. In the election, which India is now in the middle of, the issues remain the same, except that the incumbent right wing prime minister, Narendra Modi adds his own twist and interpretations. He...

I suppose it is of interest that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have found something to agree about – the criminal indictment of Julian Assange.  Trump is acutely vulnerable to the exposure of truth and Clinton blames her electoral defeat in 2016 partly on what WikiLeaks disclosed about her improper use of a government computer to send private emails. Such are the perverse ways of the deeply unjust. The liberal media is not happy with this indictment, although it also wants to distance itself from justifications for Assange’s claims of journalistic privilege, viewing him as a lone wolf with rogue traits. There are solemn assessments evaluating the narrowly framed government indictment charging cyber-crime, that is, publishing illicitly obtained classified documents from a digital source, apparently an apolitical everyday occurrence for government employees. What is apparently at legal issue is deciding whether or not Assange should be protected by reference to...

You have certainly not heard much about this in the West. And it didn’t get a fraction of the media attention (and none of the hundreds of millions of Euro pledges by the perversely rich) that the Notre Dame fire did. However, if disastrous floods had hit 28 out of 31 provinces and affected 10 million people in some European country or in the US, I believe you would have heard about it from Day One. But now it is Iran. Only the Iranians. The situation is disastrous but not so much because thousands have died. Rather, because floods of this magnitude are likely to have terrible long-term consequences for agricultural and other production, infrastructure, energy production, transport and daily lives (see pictures below and on the links). The basic facts about 3 weeks into the disaster are: 28 of 31 provinces affected, the area around Shiraz the most. 78...

Nobel Laureate and TFF Associate Mairead Maguire requests UK Home Office permission to visit her friend Julian Assange whom this year she has nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ‘I want to visit Julian to see he is receiving medical care and to let him know that there are many people around the world who admire him and are grateful for his courage in trying to stop the wars and end the suffering of others’ Thursday 11th April, will go down in history as a dark day for the Rights of humanity, when Julian Assange, a brave and good man, was arrested, by British Metropolitan Police, forcibly removed without prior warning, in a style befitting of a war criminal, from the Ecuadorian Embassy, and bundled into a police van. It is a sad time when the UK Government at the behest of the United States Government, arrested Julian Assange, a...

Have you ever thought of why virtually everything you hear in the West about China is negative and judgemental? And that it builds exclusively on Western criteria, values and perspectives – and not on an attempt to understand China on its own, as different from the West? Here is a Singaporean diplomat, expert in philosophy and international affairs who, in about 4 minutes, explains it in a delightfully succinct, pedagogical way. His name is Kishore Mahbubani and here is his homepage.

M. K. Gandhi on democracy The jaws of power “The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.” John Adams, (1735-1826) According to the Nuremberg Principles, the citizens of a country have aresponsibility for the crimes that their governments commit. But to preventthese crimes, the people need to have some knowledge of what is going on. Indeed, democracy cannot function at all without this knowledge, What are we to think when governments make every effort to keep their actions secret from their own citizens? We can only conclude that although they may call themselves democracies, such governments are in fact oligarchies or dictatorships. At the end of World War I, it was realized that secret treaties had been responsible for its outbreak, and an effort was made to ensure that diplomacy would...

It’s Friday, April 5, 2019, at 9 PM. An entertaining talk show, “Skavlan”. A dialogue between a prime minister and a special forces soldier who has no regret having kicked in doors and “killed a lot” in Afghanistan. He justifies himself by the most primitive and long-ago debunked theory about Good and Evil in this world. And then the listening prime minister expresses his admiration. Something roamed around in my mind hours after the event and I had to check: Did he really say what I think I heard? It made me think about theories and worldviews on which political decisions can be founded. About the general, normalized fascination of war and killing, and about the soldier as hero and the victim as invisible, non-existent. It made me think about the sophisticated, almost imperceptible, media methods by which perpetrators of law violations and war crimes are turned (and turn themselves)...

, the US taxpayers are paying US $ 32 million. That is now close to US$ 5000 billion in total! Add to that the tragedy of the absurd: from Vietnam to Syria, 1955 till today or 64 years, there is no documentable evidence that all of its wars, interventions, occupations, meddlings, regime changes have been anything but failures. There is no evidence either that today’s world is a better place than it would have been without these wars, alliances, deterrence and confrontational policies. But there is plenty of hard evidence that the United States of America is in relative decline as a world power. Plenty of facts to show that others – who spend much less on their military and have no Empire – are growing and destined to surpass the US on fundamental indicators in just a few years. As the largest military machine in human history, it has...

“Since the days of the Roman Empire”, Daniel Kalder wrote in his book “The Infernal Library”, “dictators have written books, but in the twentieth century there was a Krakatoa-like eruption of despotic verbiage, which continues flowing to this day.” It’s a strange thing but true that many dictators began their working lives as writers “which probably goes a long way towards explain their megalomaniac conviction in the awesome significance of their own thoughts.” Vladimir Lenin was the father of twentieth-century dictator literature. He relied on the inspiration of Marx. Sitting in the comfort of his mother’s big, comfortable, house he translated “The Communist Manifesto”. Marx was then not well known – in 1883 only eleven people had turned up at his funeral. Contrary to Lenin and Stalin’s books and articles, Marx and Engels (his co-writer) had written a mesmerizing piece of work. In contrast Das Kapital was dense and over theoretical....

Av Erni & Ola FriholtTFF Associerade 6:e april 2019 2018 sände Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB) en broschyr till Sveriges invånare. Den heter ”Om krisen eller kriget kommer”, och inleds med rubriken ”Vad skulle du göra om din vardag vändes upp och ner?” På nio punkter visas akut vattenbrist, el-brist, matbrist, drivmedelsbrist, icke-fungerande data, betalkort, transporter och slutligen brist på medicinsk behandling. Och svaret på denna utmålade kris är att hamstra viktiga livsmedel, kontanter, vatten och energi. Dessutom manas vi vara vaksamma mot falsk information och terrorattentat. Och om kriget kommer manas vi att inte ge upp. Detta är de förberedelser som rekommenderas av Sveriges högsta myndighet för vårt skydd. Vi får anta att detta skydd kompletteras av och inordnas i det militära försvaret. Allt är som förut Det är inte fel att vara förberedd för hårdare tider. Men det har stor betydelse hur de befarade tiderna kan förväntas...