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“You must remember that Russia could stop this war right now.” 35 seconds is enough to realise that Jan Oberg 22 September, 2023 This article in Danish on my online home and blog. On 6 September, Denmark’ TV2 Channel ran a 35-second clip with the Prime Minister under the headline “Mette Frederiksen: You don’t win a war with words, you win it with weapons.” Watch and listen to it here. Her brief presentation of her views on Ukraine’s situation testifies to an ignorance – conscious, unconscious or opportunistic – that is not easily reconciled with state leadership in general and war participation in particular. I believe that a doctor of the same intellectual level of medical knowledge would be put out of commission. (1) War versus conflict Mette Frederiksen believes that it is impossible to win a war with words, especially when you are “up against Russia.” By focusing on...

TFF Associate and more… Luna Rossa: Sacred Blood, Cycle Wisdom – an art journal and peace offering – publication. Here is the pre-order campaign and free online events on feminine health & power themes with a deep cyclical understanding of how inner and outer peace can combine.. I’m inviting you… We may think we live in modern, advanced times. On many accounts, including the fact that we still solve conflicts through wars on this planet, we are not.  Menstruation is still a taboo in many cultures around the world, being associated with impurity, shame, and guilt for being a woman. Even though access to sanitary products has increased in many countries, education about menstruation as something to be embraced rather than ignored and medicalized is still lacking. The very ability to give life and reproduce the species that menstruation is a sign of becomes a sign of inferiority or, in other...

It’s an old US playbook. My assessment is that the US attempt to contain China is not only wrongheaded in principle, but destined to fail in practice. Jeffrey Sachs September 18, 2023 China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, below the forecasts made last year and far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real-estate market, a general overhang of debt, and other ills. Yet much of the slowdown is the result of US measures that aim to slow China’s growth. Such US policies violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and are a danger to global prosperity. They should be stopped. Originally published on Jeffrey Sach’s homepage on August 22, 2023 The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of...

Be a Peace Warrior – The Online Participatory Peace Project in English and German Dr Norbert Stute & Rachael Mellor September 4, 2023 Better World Info is a unique platform for peace, offering important resources and reliable information on the most pressing peace issues.We invite peace activists who enjoy research and content creation to contact us and contribute to this ever-growing, high-quality Peace Directory making a difference. While military budgets are skyrocketing, peacebuilding remains a grossly underfunded sideline. Global military spending increased for the eighth consecutive year in 2022, reaching a staggering $2.2 trillion. More 28 wars and armed conflicts are currently active, deadly, and unrelenting. “The world is over-armed, and peace is under-funded,” said Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General. Advancing peace efforts effectively is a collaborative journey. Our common goals for peace require the active participation and shared support of activists, organisations, journalists, scientists, politicians, and philanthropists. The power...

Peter Ross From invading Afghanistan to dismantling Confederate monuments, George Orwell has been pressed into the service of all sorts of causes. But the real Orwell remains unknown. August 31, 2023 “It was a bright cold day in April,” said Richard Blair, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Blair is seventy-three and the son of George Orwell. To witness him stand at a lectern and read the opening line of his father’s great final novel, 1984, is to experience a sense of completion, an equation solved. We were in Senate House, now part of the University of London, for 1984 Live. For the first time in the United Kingdom, the book was to be read aloud publicly from start to finish. It had been estimated that it would take sixty or so readers—well-known journalists, academics, actors, activists—thirteen hours, that Orwellian number, to get from the bright cold day to the gin-scented tears. “All...

When a mistaken attempt at censorship is called a bug. You will boycott Bitly, too, when you read this Jan Oberg August 28, 2023 Bitly.com is a New York-based company that creates short links, QR codes and link-in-bio pages. We’ve used it for years because it is practical to shorten long links on social media and elsewhere. However… Last week, when TFF (in English) and I (in Danish) published a rather critical article about Denmark’s decision to supply 19 F16s to Ukraine, Bitly immediately blocked all links to these two articles so that when people clicked to read them, what they got was the sign above! And not only that, Bitly did the same to all articles we’ve published back in time! People wrote in and asked what this meant – but soon found out that they could go to The Transnational and to Jan Oberg and read the articles...

Jan Oberg August 21, 2023 For Danish/Nordic readers, there is a Danish-language version here. The unity is as uncompromising as it is dangerous in its consequences. No Danish politician, diplomat, researcher or journalist dares to take on the role of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. Not even to get a debate going. About Denmark’s Ukraine/Russia/NATO policy. The government, parliamentary parties and media suffer from extreme groupthink – a well-known social psychological concept. Groupthink rejects any alternative expertise, information and interpretation, and gradually convinces decision-makers that they are on the only possible right course – and that everyone else is uninformed, stupid or – in this case – “Putinists.” Over time, groupthink leads to overconfident and catastrophic decisions because reality has been kept outside the group’s walls of infallibility, moral superiority and we-know-it-all for far too long. There is only one narrative here:...

Jan Oberg August 19, 2023 On August 19, 2023, it is 70 years ago that the US/CIA and others, with the assistance of their British peers, did one of its countless regime changes worldwide, namely in Iran: The U.S.- and UK-instigated, Iranian army-led overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Here is Wikipedia’s detailed account of this shameful act. And with the exception of the years under the Shah’s rule, relations between the West and Iran have been utterly conflictual ever since, and every potential for cooperation has been squandered. The US has felt its usual exceptionalist privilege to harass the country decade after decade, telling it that it will never acquire nuclear weapons, which the US itself and Israel have plenty of – and which it’s doubtful that Iran ever wanted to acquire –...

Join Substack and TFF on Substack! Jan Oberg August 10, 2023 You’ve noticed that TFF is now active on three platform: • The foundation’s homepage: The Transnational (here) which is on WordPress (more about WP here); • “TFF 2 News” which is on Flipboard; • TFF on Substack: TFF • Transnational Foundation & Jan Oberg. It’s different kinds of audiences – readers and viewers – on each and, thus, only seldom do we publish the same post on two of them or all three. In this way, we reach more people than ever. Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.[5] It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers.[6][7] Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco – according to Wikipedia. We’ve tested Substack, published energetically, and we are, after a couple of months, among the 15%...

Jan Oberg July 4, 2023 This weekend, Saudi Arabia hosts an international meeting about peace in Ukraine – however, Russia is not invited. At the time of writing, it is not known whether China would – but it must be seen as very unlikely, although some participating countries pretend to say that there is a fair chance it will this time while it stayed away from the preceding Copenhagen meeting. With US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, being there, one can guess that it is, for all practical purposes, part of a US strategy after the fatal NATO Summit in Vilnius at which Ukraine’s NATO membership was cancelled – and all promises to it since 2008 broken. Saudi Arabia has not issued anything about the meeting; for instance, its “Arab News” carries nothing today. If peace in Ukraine were the real purpose of this meeting, it would have been planned...

The choice of St. Petersburg to host the Russia-Africa Summit 2023 was no accident. It was a symbolic move. Dmitry Trenin is a research professor at the Higher School of Economics and a lead research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He is also a member of the Russian International Affairs Council. Intro This piece was published on July 31, 2023, by RT – formerly Russia Today, blocked by most Western countries – and we bring it here because we believe it is essential to know how Russia’s leading intellectuals look upon things and because we believe it is deeply wrong of the West to practise censorship while preaching freedom of expression and having signed human rights declarations to the effect that every human being has a right to freely seek information and shape her og his opinion about the world. Also, RT upholds at least as...

South China Morning Post, June 6, 2023 July 27, 2023 The high-tech corporations and social media – like Apple, Google, Facebook, and others – have served the governments of US/NATO/EU world to erode everything we used to call privacy, integrity and freedom. That spells, of course, the end of democracy, too. Here is a short video that gives you the essentials – also how hesitant so-called democracies are to delimit what is legal and what is not. At the same time, they are very good at blaming ‘autocratic’ states for spying on us all from the outside – thereby legitimising their own illegal policies. Jan ObergEditor