Treasures – TFF Associates

If a visitor from space were to read history books of human behaviour, they would certainly conclude that the answer is yes.  This is because history has largely been written as if it were the history of man, tending to move from battle to battle, because that’s what interested the authors. If, however, our visitors were to read the acclaimed Quaker sociologist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Elise Boulding, they would gain an entirely different picture.  In The Underside of History Boulding tells the other half of the story, as she traces the evolution of woman’s role from the Paleolithic to modern times. She demonstrates how very recent it is that women have begun to move from the ‘inner’ or domestic world to the ‘outer’ or political world. She considers that empowering women – to dismantle their history of being devalued and to reconstruct true equality between the sexes – will lay the...

December 10, 2008 Chaiwat Satha-Anand I’ve been asked by many, TFF included,  to try to explain the problem we face here in Thailand. Let me do this in the order indicated by the headline: The conflicts we face, the prospects for non-violence, for prognosis and for therapy, i.e. possible solutions as I see them at this point, writing on December 2, 2008. We are faced with at least three major conflicts: 1) Conflict of goals: One side (Red shirt) wants a strong government which could deliver on policy promises; the other side (Yellow shirt) wants a weak government, because they think it is corrupted (Thaksin and his nominees), and therefore what is needed is a strong monitoring measures – hence the conflict between the 1997 constitution (coming out of fighting against a coup for a strong government) and the 2007 constitution (coming out of the Sept.19, 2006 coup for a weak government). 2) Conflict...

20:e april, 2009 Once again Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, has succeeded in placing his country, and himself, in focus, “The developments in North Korea represents a serious threat”, state media headlines. How concerned should we actually be? And in what ways has the government of the DPRK, North Korea, broken international agreements and treaties? We say we know so little of what goes on in their nuclear program. But is that really so? On the plane from Beijing to Pyongyang four years ago we met – we, a delegation from IPPNW, the international movement for a world free from nuclear weapons – four well known US nuclear experts. “Yes, we go here regularly to meet our colleagues in North Korea” said one of the experts. The recently retired head of the Los Alamos Laboratories, Siegfried Hecker, wrote a paper in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences about...

July 7, 2008 Jan Oberg Review article Marc Pilisuk with Jennifer Achord RountreeWho benefits from global violence and warUncovering a destructive systemPraeger Security International –Series Contemporary Psychology2008, 316 pp If you want all the facts and a wealth of sources to back them up about the incredibly violent and resource-wasting system called market-cum-monopoly capitalism, this is the book you should plough through, require your students in political science and international relations to read and work to have translated to all the world languages. Professor Emeritus Pilisuk and doctoral student Rountree leave no stone unturned in their empirical analysis of the US foreign policy system, global militarism, empire, lies and violence. The stockpiling of evidence against the world’s so-called leading democracy is devastating, their outline of the Western values on which it is based and the “delusional megalomania” we see in practise so crushing that it is difficult, if not impossible,...

Part I On the night of August 7, the Georgian artillery caused terrible suffering to Ossetians in the tiny province of South Ossetia.  Amongst the many deaths were those of Russian peacekeepers who had been placed there after the conflict there between Ossetians and Georgians in the beginning of the 1990’s with over a thousand deaths.  My wife, Roswitha, and I with community leaders from Northern Ireland met some of the Ossetians who had fled from there during our first visit to the North Caucasus in 1991. They showed us photos of atrocities. In 1990, John Lampen, a Quaker peace worker in Northern Ireland, and I  arranged for community leaders from the North Caucasus including an Ossetian to spend a morning at the headquarters of the British army in Derry (Londonderry).  The British commander there described how he and his soldiers exercised their role of peacekeeping with sensitivity to peoples...

The Satyagraha Centenary: New Delhi, 29-30 January 2007 Today 59 years ago a bullet put an end to the physical life of that genius grown out of Indian soil. A spiritual earthquake shook us all. And far away from Birla Gardens, in Norway, a 17 year old boy, almost ignorant of Gandhi, was weeping, something he rarely did. The boy was me, and that was my spiritual birth. I became a Gandhi scholar, a peace researcher and peace worker, and the comments on our session’s topics is a mini-payback. Gandhi gave us that invaluable gift, satyagraha, to cling to satya. For Gandhi satya was an essence bridging the concepts of God, Love and Truth, uniting the spiritual, the emotional and the cognitive–not putting them in separate compartments as we do in the West, banning the first two from research and science. How can this guide us to the essence of...

TOKYO, Jul (IPS)  The human spirit has a truly remarkable capacity – the ability to generate hope from the most devastating of crises. This ability to create value can be seen in the response to the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11. Following the earthquake and tsunami, there has been a tremendous response from people throughout the world in the form of aid and relief, as well as countless outpourings of support, both material and psychological. The Japanese people will never forget this heartfelt response: as we embark on the long path to recovery, it will be with a consciousness of our debt of gratitude to the boundless goodwill of people from all around the world. The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee is known for his theory of challenge and response. “Civilisations,” he wrote, “come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges.” This struggle...

20:e april, 2009 Gunnar Westberg Återigen har Kim Jong Il lyckats placera Nordkorea i fokus. ”Utvecklingen i Nordkorea är hotfull” enligt tidningsrubrikerna. Vad finns det att oroa sig över? Och hur har egentligen regimen brutit mot internationella avtal? Man oroar sig för att vi vet så litet om vad som försiggår. Vet man verkligen så litet? På flygplanet från Beijing till Pyongyang för fyra år sedan träffade vi – en delegation från IPPNW, läkarrörelsen mot kärnvapen – fyra amerikanska kärnvapenexperter. ”Javisst, vi reser regelbundet hit för att träffa våra nordkoreanska kolleger”, sade en av amerikanerna. I gruppen ingick enligt uppgift också den förre chefen för kärnvapenlaboratoriet i Los Alamos, Siegfried Hecker. Denne skrev i en artikel i Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist att han var tveksam om kollegerna från Yongbyon, det nordkoreanska nukleära laboratoriet, skulle lyckas tillverka en atombomb. Den teknologiska nivån var alltför låg. Man hade satsat på en...

14. februar, 2007 Jan Öberg Utdelningen av Nobels fredspris för 2007 – särkilt den del som gick till Al Gore – är ett populistiskt val som bara kan nedvärdera själva fredspriset. Alfred Nobel skrev i sitt testamente att fredsspriset skulle tilldelas “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Utan att förminska betydelsen av global uppvärmnng och det arbete som uträttats av årets mottagare av priset – FN:s klimatpanel IPCC och Al Gore Jr – är det högst tveksamt huruvida det kvalificerar dem till ett FREDSpris i Alfred Nobels anda ens om om man tolkar det i dagens världsläge i stället för i 1895 års, det år då Nobel formulerade sin vision. Begreppet fred och defintionen av det bör visst vara bred. Men ingen...

Presented at a conference at ICU, International Christian University, Tokyo earlier this year I. Introduction My approach to such a daunting challenge seeks to be attentive to the urgings of Professor Shin Chiba that “..our quest for a grand theory of peace should be made in response to the crisis of the present age as it is beset by [a] series of wars, the absence of peace and safety, environmental destruction, the structural cleavage between the haves and the have nots..” It is his claim that “a grand theory can only be justified by the strong demand for a new normative theory. This new normative theory is supposed to serve the world by undertaking the..task of responding critically and constructively to the crisis of the present age.” I would only add that this sense of rooted concern and engagement with the lifeworld must also encompass, in Derridian fashion, `catastrophes to...

Australia’s new Labor government hit the ground reviewing. A swag of initiatives – the historic apology to Aboriginal people, scrapping the previous government’s workplace laws, signing up to Kyoto – were implemented straight away, having been long in the gestation. The rest is still, to some extent, up for grabs. So we’re all now being given the chance to have our say. How should Australia spend its military budget, and for what purpose? How should we relate to the Association of South East Asian Nations? Key planks of foreign and defence policy are being opened up for public consultation, with hearings on the new Defence White Paper touring all the state capitals. It might betoken a touching faith in the value of dialogue: our ability, as Australians – as human beings – to exchange firmly founded opinions and, in the process, fashion for ourselves a shared sense of what is...

Martin Smedjeback, TFF Associate, August 13, 2006. Lyssna på Smedjebacks föredrag om Jesus, Martin Luther King och ickevåldet (mp3 fil). Listen to Smedjeback’s lecture on Jesus, Martin Luther King, and nonviolence — MP3 audio. This recording was listed on the TFF oldsite Nonviolence resource index. The lecture explores Christian nonviolence, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and practical approaches to peace work. The audio was originally hosted at rilacademy.org. Download / listen: Vadå vända andra kinden till? (MP3) Note: The original rilacademy.org host may no longer be online; the link is preserved for archival reference.