TFF PressInfo

The Danish foreign, defence and the prime minister is greeted by President Zelensky (right) Jan Oberg February 2, 2023 In Danish here The West/NATO has always lacked a long-term strategy. After all, it was militarily, economically and politically superior and could impose its will. Didn’t have to think. Hoping Ukraine would join NATO without fuss was hubris-ridden wishful thinking, and stupid to boot, in that it’s been convincingly documented that Russia’s leaders, from Gorbachev to Putin for the past 30 years, have said that NATO expansion was: a) a clear violation of the promises made by all important Western leaders to Gorbachev – and it’s true; b) a humiliation and counterproductive if you want common security; and c) that if it could be no other way, then Ukraine would be Russia’s definitive red line. No one listened. Because, as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen so aptly put it:...

Cameron Leckie January 29, 2023 Western powers appear to have no viable strategy to bring the Ukraine war to an end. The best they can do is keep Ukraine on life support. But, as Sun Tzu put it, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Imagine if Ukraine had capitulated three days after the Russian invasion commenced in February 2022, as some predicted. The Donetsk and Luhansk Republics would likely have gained autonomy within the Ukrainian state, and life would have carried on like normal for most Ukrainians (minus the regular shelling for the residents of the Donbas). No doubt the capitulation would have seen changes in Ukraine’s political leadership – politics is a ruthless game; whilst the casualties resulting from Russia’s incursion would have been (from a numbers perspective) insignificant compared to the mass loss of life that has since occurred. Or even better yet, imagine if the...

Branko Marcetic January 28, 2023 Editor’s note This is probably the most detailed and solid documentation of the historical fact that NATO leaders knew perfectly well that Russia was deeply concerned and against NATO’s expansion and stated those concern for more than 20 years. In other words, that NATO decided deliberately not to listen and not to respect those concerns. It also shows that Russia’s thickest red line was – yes, Ukraine. It was originally published by the very important and respected American Committee for US-Russia Accord here. Jan Oberg Nearly a year in, the war in Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought the world to the brink of, in President Joe Biden’s own words, “Armageddon.” Alongside the literal battlefield has been a similarly bitter intellectual battle over the war’s causes.  Commentators have rushed to declare the long-criticized policy of NATO expansion as irrelevant to the...

January 28, 2023 Born and brought up in Scotland, David Ferguson moved to China to work and live in 2006. In 2008, he joined the Foreign Languages Press, covering major issues, including the Wenchuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games and the Shanghai World Expo. “I spend quite a lot of my time writing about China. I’ve written six or seven books about China now, and I always take the opportunity to try to correct misperceptions when I’m writing.” Ferguson is also the English editor for President Xi Jinping’s Governance of China books, and says he is glad to have the opportunity to see how Xi Jinping Thought works as a whole. Watch one of a series on CGTN, China’s global TV Channel. In my view, we can do nothing more important but to build bridges, cooperate instead of confronting. That is, if it is peace we want. Jan ObergEditor

May others avoid that fate… The first Cold War played out between the East and the Western Occident and the East lost with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Both built – more or less faithfully – on Western mechanical thinking, one on Marx and other socialist/communist philosophers, the other on twisting moral philosopher Adam Smith into a God’s hand individualist utility market prophet and pair him with various types of liberal, parliamentary democracy thinking. The Soviet and East European system had come to the end of its history, but what about the twin Occidental brother, the US-EU system? The latter had not only survived or ”won;” it had also forced the Soviet Union to spend an unsustainable proportion of its resources on the military. And now the Second West is destined to follow suit. The point I shall make is that the West – US-EU-based...

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984 Edward Curtin January 24, 2023 As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me. Soon after I was greeted by...

Give yourself 38 min, and you’ll understand how extremely self-destructive the NATO/EU world’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been and why all the assumption it made was wrong. Professor Emeritus of Economics (University of Massachusetts) and founder of Democracy at Work, Richard Wolff, talks with brilliant clarity about the economic impact of the Ukraine war. He assesses the impact of Western sanctions on Russia as well as how the war has affected the West economically. And very importantly, he analyses just how destructive arms spending is for the rest of society and the working people. Here are the main themes: 0:00 Introduction 0:32 “Economic War” with Russia? 12:01 Moral significance of Western sanctions 14:20 Economic impact on the United States 21:07 Economic impact of military spending 32:21 Economic impact on Ukraine I cannot recommend this – and the acTVism Munich and The Source Channel – enough. Please share...

Baher Kamal, Human Wrongs Watch January 23, 2023 Or the perversities of the nuclear age priorities. We could help hundreds of millions of children with a fraction of the money that goes into warfare and nukes As if the 100 billion dollars that the United States has so far provided to Ukraine in both weapons and aid were not enough, the US has now started to install in Europe its brand new, more destructive nuclear warheads. The US 100 billion dollars are to be added to all the weapons and aid that 40 Washington’s ‘allies’ –Europe in particular– have been sending to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The US spending on the Ukrainian war in less than a year amounts to the desperately needed funding that the United Nations require to partially alleviate some of the horrifying suffering of over one billion human beings over...

This article was published on January 5, 2023, by the very important Chinese “Global Times” under the headline, Two reasons that Europe would be forced to decouple from the US. Please read it directly there and, when you are anyhow there, browse a bit, see various menus and articles – and ask yourself why Global Times is consistently called a “tabloid” by Western mainstream people and media.

Maria Popova December 20, 2022 “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of actuality.” The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means, “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale. Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in...

Three experts on warfare, weapons and underlying conflicts – and even some views on peace-making – after NATO foreign ministers’ summit in Bucharest. Today I participated in CrossTalk, edited and performed by Peter Lavelle on RT, formerly Russia Today. It was a delightful preparation process that made clear what it would be about, length, participants etc – and treated the invited persons with respect and asked also – professionally – how we wanted to be presented. My praise goes to Aleksandra Danilova, RT, in this regard. You may think that is only natural, but not everybody does it the professional way, I can tell. Please see this half an hour below. You may also enjoy Peter Lavelle’s and my “pushbacks” at each other when I talked about the MIMAC – Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex and militarism. But it ends very nicely. The video – and all of RT’s programs – are on...

Jan Oberg November 20, 2022 Perhaps you have no time to read thick analytical books, but you are interested in macro-history and how the world changes right before our eyes? If so, the two clips below from 2021 and 2022 are loaded with content that speaks volumes of history, conflict and world order change. And the decline of the West. Watch – and, in particular – listen carefully (here is The Guardian’s longer text with quotes): Something is happening, and we do know what it is, don’t we, Mr Jones…?