TFF global posts 2020

KUWAIT. March 11, 1991. The bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers hang from a truck abandoned by the fleeing Iraqi army by a road leading to Iraq. The Gulf War which was marked by the introduction of live news broadcasts from the front lines of the battle, principally by the U.S. network CNN. The war has also earned the nickname Video Game War after the daily broadcast of images from cameras on board U.S. bombers during Operation Desert Storm.Photograph: Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty August 2nd, 2020, marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most consequential and perhaps the most underestimated wars in recent history. On 2nd August 1990, between 100,000 (according to Iraqi claims) and 300,000 (according to US claims) Iraqi troops invaded and occupied Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein immediately named Iraq’s nineteenth province. In response, President George H. W. Bush and the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher formed a coalition of 39 countries,...

With statements such as these by US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo: “Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time! and “If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us,” – it’s time to see the danger that is mounting. During the last few months, a systematic Sinophobic (anti-China) policy has been rolled out all over the world by the US and its obedient mainstream media. It is so uniform in content and style that it deserves to be categorized as a ‘campaign.’ It has nothing to do with critical media, questioning and diversity of perspectives. You are being taken for a ride! It revolves around the following 7 themes – all negative, of course: CCP/Dictatorship, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hongkong, Taiwan, human rights, China as a threat in several ways, particularly militarily. • A new US/Western Cold War with China is...

In times of fake and omission – not to speak of deliberate deception and lies – society’s very foundation is shaken: What can we believe? Who can we trust? What is reliable and truthful information – and how do I know? Tragically, substantial knowledge with complex reasoning about our complex world and its problems has been overwhelmed by marketing, smart soundbites, tweets and ignorance. Diversity has been substituted by uniformity, political correctness and, more recently, the awfully destructive cancel culture and its close companion, self-censorship. People read less, and less and less the long argument – such as (good) books about global problems. Perhaps because we think we are so busy? Whatever the reason, the attention span has shrunk and many have a comfort zone the size of a pinhead. It bodes ill – no matter the kind of social body in which this disease takes root. It spread like...

Artiklen i Politiken den 9. maj 2020. Dette er en analyse af denne artikel fra Politiken den 9. maj 2020, som er skrevet af Latinamerika-korrespondent Anne M. Sørensen: ”To fantaster bag kupforsøg i Venezuela” (artiklen har en anden overskrift online end på papir): Artiklen i Politiken handler om Venezuela, men min analyse tager udgangspunkt i en artikel om Venezuela blot for at illustrere, hvordan medierne dækker udlandsstof fra et land som Venezuela, vi ikke længere hører så meget om. Hvilke ord og betegnelser anvendes i dækningen? Formår et medie som Politiken at perspektivere nyheder om Venezuela, så de bliver væsentlige og sat i en dansk indenrigspolitiks kontekst? Og formår artiklen at være kritisk overfor egne magthavere, som for et år siden var dybt interesseret og involveret i Venezuela? Min analyse kan forhåbentlig bidrage til en større bevidsthed om, hvordan de danske medier dækker udlandsstoffet og ikke altid formår at levere objektiv, perspektivrig...

Jan Oberg July 29, 2020 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) decried July 23 remarks from Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) This is a political speech to be remembered for what she says and how she says it. It’s an important contribution to non-violent ethics and politics – although this is not stated explicitly. It should also be remembered for the fine way she connects the personal and the political. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s consistent stand against US militarism and for social justice evidently comes from a deeper place. Concerning justice and peace, she does a great spontaneous walking talk on this link. In it, Ocasio-Cortez illustrates how structural violence and direct violence are connected and argues that you should never just demand that violence stops without asking what caused it in the first place. And that the remedy is to make changes that abolish those causes. She ends with justice and peace. As any...

David SwansonTFF Associate July 23, 2020 The U.S. House of Misrepresentatives on Tuesday voted 324 to 93 (with 13 not voting) to defeat a proposal to move a mere 10% of military spending to human, environmental, and health needs. The 324 people who voted the wrong way on this really should never show their faces in public again. Our society ought to shame them so deeply that they pick up and move to a country with healthcare and retirement and clean energy and a decent education system where they can discover what they’ve been depriving the United States of, as well as discover what they’ve been inflicting on the world. Originally published on Swanson’s Let’s Ty Democracy site Certainly, nobody should ever vote to elect any of them again. Data For Progress, for quite a while, seemed like it would be a progressive-except-for-peace (PEP) group, but to its enormous credit,...

Some may remember way back when US President Obama said that the US had now isolated Iran. The only problem was that on the very same day, some 130 leaders from the Non-Aligned Movement, NAM, were meeting in Tehran. The more the US withdraws from international treaties, imposes sanctions, threatens wars and otherwise antagonizes the rest of the world, the more that rest will search – and find – new partners and create a future world order that is not Western- or US-dominated. That’s what Iran is now doing. After sanctions since 1979, verbal harassment, a broken JCPOA (nuclear deal), accusations of being the world’s leading supporter of terrorism, maximal pressure policies, threat of massive war, bombings, liquidation of a top government representative, infiltrations and much else – why on earth should the leaders in Tehran (no matter what you may think about them and their policies) continue to seek...

60 years of peace theory and peace practice can be summarized in:                                                 EQUITY x HARMONY                              PEACE =   ——————————-                                                 TRAUMA x CONFLICT Four theory foci, four policy tasks, and four education topics. Any true education should prepare for practice, guided by general theory. Moving from denominator right to numerator left, this means: Mediation is verbal, based on dialogues with the parties, but the four tasks are very concrete, practical.  For doers not only talkers; for practical people like officers.  Hence the Big Question: Is peace theory-practice-education compatible with the military mind – however defined, and there are many military cultures in the world – or not? Originally published at TRANSCEND Thinkers so diverse as Nietzsche and Gandhi saw the military as exemplary because of the ésprit de corps and willingness to sacrifice, even their own lives. For Gandhi the kshatriya (military) caste was a model: he wanted non-violent warriors, with the same perseverance, also indispensable...

Another tragic turning point for the – falling – West as civilization. Its moral irresponsibility is expressed by its roaring silence on this crystal clear and gross violation of international law and evil done to the Palestinian people for decades. It can be seen as a particularly nasty, nationalist form of a victim psychology à la Sigmund Freud’s Wiederholunszwang and Alice Miller’s repetition compulsion – you project onto others today what was done to you earlier. Add to that exceptionalism (like the US), state formation through ethnic cleansing (like the US), a belief in being a Chosen People (like the US), being an extremely militarist, over-armed and nuclear power (like the US) and seeing enemies everywhere without the thought that your own behaviour may create some of them – leading to constant fear/paranoia – and you have most of a recipe for self-destruction (like the US). Two leading countries, with...

This post is a slightly modified version of an editorial contribution to TMS – Transcend Media Service – June 22-28, 2020 Sanctioning the International Criminal Court, ICC Even Orwell would be at a loss to make sense of some of the recent antics of leading governments. We would expect Orwell to be out-satirized by the American actions to impose penalties and sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court, not because they are accused of acting improperly or seem guilty of some kind of corruption or malfeasance, but because they were doing their appointed jobs carefully, yet fearlessly. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s personal blog on June 26, 2020 here Their supposed wrongdoing was to accept the request for an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by military personnel and intelligence experts of the U.S. armed forces, the Taliban, and the Afghan military. It seemed beyond reasonable...

TFF is proud to present yet another book by its Associate, John Scales Avery, who at the age of 83 remains an incredibly productive global thinker and author of books about our world’s essential problems, what causes them and what must be done. And all of Avery’s books are freely downloadable… The book is – Benefits of Equality – which presents evidence supporting the thesis that elimination of excessive economic inequality makes societies happier and better. It’s just out, 451 pages and freely downloadable Benefits of Equality Avery’s life work is presented beautifully by the online Wall Street International and by the Eqbal Ahmad Centre for Public Education. And his Collected Essays and others are published by another TFF Associate, Jørgen Johansen at Irene Publishing. Ideals of the Enlightenment The Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas during the...

Tomorrow the tanks will roll across Moscow’s Red Square. It is the day of the great parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. In the West, it’s not that well-known a fact that the Soviet Union lost many more soldiers and civilians in the war than all the rest of the allies put together. Without the alliance of the West with Russia Hitler would undoubtedly have won the war. Ignorance is a common trait not only in the West but in Russia too. How many Russians today are aware of the sheer quantity of arms, munitions and even fighter planes and bombers shipped through dangerous northern seas by the US and Britain to Russia’s northern ports in order to help Stalin’s army and air force?   Flawed and ignorant thinking in both Russia and the West today dominates the discourse when the war...