By Jan Oberg January 19, 2018 Most media covering the speech that US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, gave at the Hoover Institution on January 17, 2018 merely points out that he said that the United States would stay in Syria – open-ended – in the future and until President Bashar al-Assad has left the […]
By Johan Galtung Foreword to Michael Haas’ Book January 8, 2018 What is that American Diplomacy, after US bombing killed 3,5 million in Pyongyang in 1952 and the US Army killed 3 million in Vietnam from 1961 (Kennedy) to 30 Apr 1975 (Ford)? Softer? This very rich, well researched book by Michael Haas–a senior, […]
By Jan Oberg You’ve heard it for years: Iran is a military threat to Europe, to the world – because it wants to acquire nuclear weapons – to the US and its allies in the Middle East. It takes shrewd steps to become a hegemon through de-stabilising policies all around and by supporting terrorism everywhere. […]
By Juan Cole Fascism as a political ideology is difficult to define, in part because it usually contains a big dose of populism, and the content of populism differs from people to people Via juancole.com In my view Mussolini’s fascism in Italy is a fair exemplar of the phenomenon. One characteristic fascist societies have in […]
By John Scales Avery Introduction This is a collection of biographical sketches showing people whose wise voices from the past can help to guide us today. All of the women and men, brief glimpses of whose lives and ideas are portrayed here, gave a high place to compassion. None of them was a slave […]
By David Kline A year ago, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi (sha-oh-me) had fallen from the world’s most valuable unicorn to a “unicorpse.” Sales plunged in 2016, pushing the company from first to fifth place among China’s smartphone makers. No firm had ever come back from a wound that severe in the trench warfare of […]
By Johan Galtung • Keynote, World Futures Studies Federation Conference – Jondal, Norway 7 Jun 2017 West of Jondal is Torsnes, named after the Nordic war god Thor with his Hammer, a center of the Viking era from 800 to 1050, only 250 years. Why so short? Successful with raids and colonization–Gardarike in Russia, […]
By John S. Uebersax • Pitirim Sorokin, a leading 20th century sociologist, is someone you should know about. Consider this quote of his: The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; […]
By Richard Falk • Prefatory Note -This post addresses the need for dialogue with the political, economic, and cultural ‘other,’ that is, those multitudes acutely alienated from and angry with secular globalism and the Enlightenment legacy often equated with ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization.’ At the core is a search for closure on the nature of reality […]
By Jan Oberg Written April 1990 • Published in Bulletin of Peace Proposals 3-1990, pp 287-298 and on TFF’s homepage at the same time 1. Four hypotheses The West has lost a close enemy, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Which reactions can be discerned and what psycho-political emotions are they indicative of? How […]