TFF PressInfo

Jan Oberg August 22, 2021 When it comes to Western mainstream media’s coverage of international affairs, I would today dare the hypothesis that 10-20% is truthful, 20-30% is fake and narratives and 50-70% is omitted (see definition in point 2 below). This is not a scientific statement or hypothesis that I have tested empirically; rather, it is my judgement based on two things: a) witnessing over some forty years the decay of the mainstream media’s international affairs coverage and b) my experiences from conflict zones such as e.g. all parts of former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Iraq before it was occupied, Iran, Syria and China and comparing them with the media images conveyed by the mainstream Western press. Originally written as an editorial for Transcend Media Service, TMS, here In TFF’s recent analysis ”Behind The Smokescreen. An Analysis of the West’s Destructive China Cold War Agenda And Why It Must Stop”, we...

, in Washington and New York, everybody talked about who could have done it, how they did it and with what means. The only thing never brought to the fore was: WHY would somebody want to do something like 9/11 to the United States of America? By not asking the Why question, the US could stand as the innocent victim of cataclysmic violence. It would not have to do any soul searching and therefore no change of its global militarist policy. 9/11 was not a response to US foreign policy – but it needed a response. The world felt sympathy for the American suffering – much more so than for the suffering and deaths in other countries around the world. The fact is that the 9/11 attack targeted the US’ global finance-capital (World Trade Center), its global military (Pentagon) and its political (White House, however not hit) centres – not...

Iconic image of Taliban fighters in the Presidential Palace on August 15, 2021 Farhang Jahanpour TFF Associate August 16, 2021 I do not wish to rub salt into the wounds of US and British officials who are responsible for the humiliating debacle in Afghanistan, but there is no way of sugar-coating this appalling tragedy, especially for hard-pressed Afghans who have experienced war and occupation for over 40 years. In my contacts with various senior Afghan officials and ordinary civilians, especially women, during the past 40 years, I had been very encouraged and impressed by how they used a short period of peace to get educated, to establish a civil society, to serve their country and to assume positions of responsibility with relative ease, only for all those hopes and dreams to come tumbling down in a matter of few weeks. The hasty withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in the...

Comment On June 26, I gave this comment to Iran’s PressTV concerning the drawn-out negotiations in Vienna. The US under Trump left the nuclear agreement – the JCPOA – unilaterally and all it has to do is, simply, to rejoin it unilaterally. It cannot have a legitimate role standing outside shouting in its demands on Iran. Iran’s position is clear and fair: lift the sanctions, stick to the JCPOA and Iran will immediately get back into full compliance. Indeed, what could there to talk about? – Oberg asks. Here is the link to the interview. NOTEIncidentally, I found out a couple of days later that what I say above is also what official China says (July 1, 2021).

Jan Oberg June 22, 2021 Empires come and go. Innovation, vision and power lead to their establishment. If they have good carrying capacity they spread, grow and mature. Their relative power begins to increase, ascendance in more than one field, then consolidation on top–a very dangerous moment when you are second to none–extension and peak and, sooner or later with over-extension–begins the decline, ’fatigue’, lack of innovation, vision and leadership, dissolution and unavoidable fall. All empires decline and fall none have lasted forever. The next – and last – empire to fall is God’s own exceptionalist country, the United States of America. The indicators are pretty obvious in all sectors including the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC: Economic decline with uniquely high debts, muddling through with no vision (not an unclear vision but no vision) and trying to solve problems by just injecting money into a manifestly malfunctioning system instead of investing...

Lea Suter, TFF Associate June 21, 2021 Lea Suter, founder of “PeacePrints – Following the Footprints of Peacebuilders” for Peace Reporting on Post-Conflict Countries, Switzerland – and new TFF Associate. Lea has been working in the area of international relations since 2011. First, for the UN, later for a think tank on foreign policy and currently she is the Secretary-General of the UN Association in Switzerland. Originally from Switzerland, she lived in Russia and volunteered in humanitarian projects in Mongolia and Colombia. In 2017, she founded “PeacePrints – Following the Footprints of Peacebuilders” – a blog for which she travels as peace reporter to post-conflict countries to report about outstanding individuals committed to bringing a positive change. Here Lea speaks about her work and how important it is that we know, follow, learn from and honour those millions of fellow citizens around the world who cross borders, reach out and...

Gareth PorterTFF Associate June 1, 2021 A previously censored account of the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis that was sponsored by the Pentagon has been published in full by the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. The report provides a hair-raising portrait of a reckless US military leadership relentlessly pressing President Dwight Eisenhower for the authority to carry out nuclear attacks on communist China. After holding the still-classified version of the account in his possession for fifty years, Ellsberg said he decided to release it because of the growing threat of US war with China over Taiwan, and the danger that such a conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange. A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as...

The famed source of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has made another unauthorized disclosure — and wants to be prosecuted for it. By Charlie SavagePublished May 22, 2021 • Updated May 23, 2021 • 阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版 WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was. American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release. The document...

US Marines participating in the Cold Response 2016 exercise (Torbjørn Kjosvold/Norwegian Armed Forces) Fredrik S. Heffermehl May 31, 2021 USS “Stoltenberg” – Norway, now the newest US aircraft carrier Some years back Norwegian foreign minister Thorvald Stoltenberg took wise steps to reduce confrontation with Russia through a Barents Council for civilian cooperation. This was in prolongation of a long Labour tradition initiated by the legendary prime minister Einar Gerhardsen, who started a policy of low tension with the neighbouring Soviet Union: No foreign bases, restraint with military exercises in the North, no nuclear weapons in Norway or our waters. Last week Stoltenberg´s son, Jens Stoltenberg, now leader of NATO, dishonoured a high-level meeting for civilian corporation in the Arctic Council in Reykjavik by NATO holding a large navy manoeuvre in that part of the Atlantic. Many countries participated in the tension-building provocation, that has become standard Norwegian policy in later...

Jan Oberg May 15, 2021 The conflict between the US/West and China will shape humanity’s future more than any other conflict. Therefore, it is not a bilateral issue but a global concern. I believe it ought to be on top of the agenda at the peace research institutions that have not turned state-dependent and/or US-mainstreamed.Both the Trump and the Biden Administrations have determined that what is going on in Xinjiang in China is a genocide and lots of mainstream media, editorials, policy statements and experts have spread this ”determination” as the truth. However, not one has checked the accusation’s documentation, the stated “independence” of the producing institutes or the experts’ ideological connections. This was originally posted as an editorial on Transcend Media Service, TMS, on May 3, 2021 here The world has a right to expect that the extremely serious genocide accusation is based on rock-solid evidence. To find out...

Or – it isn’t every day you address several hundred million people The TFF report “The Xinjiang Genocide Determination As Agenda” has reached more people in more countries than virtually anything else we have produced the last few years. That is, outside the West, in Asia in general and in China in particular. All leading Chinese media have paid substantial attention to it in both their Chinese and English editions. It is as if there was a need for a substantial – not political – scholarly examination of the empirical basis of the accusation, or “determination,” that Western governments have issued spearheaded, of course, by the Trump and Biden Administrations. In the report we reveal that the documentation is very weak, the scholarly work biased and bordering on the anti-academic and that those who have brought the documentation are anything but independent. Instead, many of those who have provided the...

En kritisk analys av en rapport från Newlines Institute och Raoul Wallenberg Center Gordon Dumoulin, Jan Oberg och Thore Vestby Transnationella Stiftelsen för Freds- och Framtidsforskning, TFF, Lund, Sverige TFF@transnational.org • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0) 738 525200 Översättning av engelska utgåvan: Rolf Nilsson Den 5. maj, 2021 Den 8 mars 2021 publicerade Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy i Washington en rapport, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights i Montreal. Den säger att ”Denna rapport är den första oberoende experttillämpningen av folkmordskonventionen från 1948 för den pågående behandlingen av uigurerna i Kina. Det genomfördes av Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, i samarbete med Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, som svar på framväxande redogörelser för allvarliga och systematiska grymheter i Xinjiang-provinsen, särskilt riktade mot uigurerna, en etnisk minoritet, för att fastställa...