World future

Daryl Guppy April 11, 2024 This article, first published by Pearls & Irritations on April 4, 2024, focuses on Australia but there is no reason that you could not insert any Western country in its place. Hannah Arendt’s BANALITY OF EVIL report on the Eichmann trial failed to adequately address a key question. How could the German people not have known and how could they have let the holocaust happen? Arendt’s observation that the administrative industrialisation of evil led to its banality is most relevant today, but it is enhanced and magnified by the pervasive distribution of horrendous images by ubiquitous social media. What the mainstream Western media chooses not to show, or report, is readily available on Facebook, X and Instagram. Israel’s disproportionate response in Gaza to the Hamas’ attack, the al-Shifa hospital massacre, images of children crushed beneath tanks, joyous Israeli troops looting houses and the outright lie...

Farhang Jahanpour Professor emeritus & TFF Associate* April 10, 2024 The world is in turmoil and perhaps closer to the possibility of a devastating nuclear war than at any time since the Second World War. There are at least three ongoing conflicts that have the potential of expanding into something much more serious that will lead to regional or even global wars. Wars are raging in the heart of Europe, the Middle East and, if some US hawks can get their way, soon there will be another disastrous war between the West and China. Yet, world leaders seem to be asleep and are moving blindly towards the precipice. War in Ukraine On 25 March 2024, in a letter to President Joe Biden, a large number of the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warned that in the light of the reports that France was preparing to dispatch a force...

With the superego dissolved, there is no felt obligation to judge oneself in reference to any external or abstract standard. Narcissistic tendencies flourish. A similar psychology removes the requisite for experiencing shame. Is there now a moral void at the heart of Western societies?  That question haunts us as governments in the United States and Europe act as accomplices in Israel’s atrocious crimes against the Palestinians. The Jewish state’s conduct meets the standard of genocide as stated in the United Nations Convention on Genocide, of which they all are signatories. Confirmation is likely to come soon in a conclusive determination by the International Court of Justice. The ICJ already in January recognized a prime facie case for genocide. The UN’s top court ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. The ICJ found it did have jurisdiction on the matter, and decided there was a plausible case under the 1948 Genocide Convention. At...

Jan Oberg April 8, 2024 This 7-minute video was shot by The China Academy in January 2024, posted on Wave Media on YouTube and then picked up by Taiwan’s CTi News and the Chinese Global Times magazine. This means a very large audience. Here is the link to see the many comments it created. I’m simply trying, in the shortest possible manner, to summarise what is happening these years from a macrohistorical perspective. If you think this way of thinking is interesting, why not reward TFF for bringing you fresh, different perspectives and always with a touch of a better future and a more peaceful world? It’s fast, simple and safe. Just hit this Big Red Button

Neutrality Studies is an excellent YouTube platform and homepage. TFF recommends it highly. NATO turned 75 on April 4, 2024. The only problem is that it should have been dissolved when its historical raisin d’etre – the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact – disappeared completely. But Western militarists exploited the opportunity and expanded it right up to the border of Russia – while Russia was on its knees. Against all Western promises to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch,” NATO helped greatly in destroying neutral Yugoslavia. Then it wooed the former Warsaw Pact countries to join, the 11th in that process being Ukraine. The autistic hubris alliance listened to no warnings from Western experts, former US ambassadors in Moscow or scholars. While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was certainly a counterproductive move that NATO could use to its own advantage, it doesn’t take a professor of political...

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Jan Oberg March 19, 2024 I was very pleased to be re-invited very quickly to “Through the Eyes of…” run by Ania K, whose YouTube channel has more than 100,000 subscribers. Please watch our conversation here and also run through the many – 99% appreciative – comments. There is no doubt that people want to hear more about peace possibilities than about war, that they have heard enough doom and gloom to cover up for NATO’s own warmongering and blaming everything on one side in a conflict, namely Russia. It won’t last for long. And peace is eminently possible. Press YouTube at the bottom right to watch it on YouTube and see the comments.

H. Peter Langille February 14, 2024 Now more than ever, we need a more effective United Nations; one with an appropriate instrument for preventing armed conflict and advancing sustainable common security. Despite having primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, the UN still lacks a dedicated capacity to respond rapidly and reliably to prevent armed conflict and protect people. As a result, the world has witnessed humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sir Lanka, Darfur, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, Tigray, the Ukraine, Sudan and Israel/Palestine/Gaza. Despite the promise of “never again”, mass atrocities occur again and again. Even before the war on Gaza, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned, “the world is now facing the highest number of violent conflicts since 1945. He identified the crux of the problem, “we have no instruments to deal with crisis…we live in a dangerous...

, I had the great pleasure of being Ania K’s guest on her YouTube Channel. Here is a link to it – and I want you to use the link to access it on YouTube and not here. The amusing thing is that it’s been viewed by 11,000 people in a few days, and less than a week later, there are 160 comments, 99,99 % positive about the whole thing. I note a frequent comment from Ania’s viewers: Where have you been hiding, Jan? How come I did not hear about him before and that sort of “we never heard about him…” comments. This is striking after having been the co-founder and director of the Transnational Foundation since 1986 – and quite active in doing research, on-the-ground conflict mitigation work and having written thousands of articles, book chapters and comments. But I’ve heard it before and here are some reasons: One,...

Photo – Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash Jan Oberg December 30, 2023 ”It is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.”Unknown but wise person’s statement. I do not pretend my predictions below are scientific or based on a sophisticated social science methodology. They are merely intuitive and hypothetical and based on some of my accumulated knowledge and experience about international affairs over more than four decades. You may say they grow out of a Wright Mills-like sociological – and peace research – imagination. I regret I can’t mobilise more optimism at this point in world history. I hope, therefore, that many of these predictions will turn out to be wrong. But keep or archive them. Time will tell. (1) The war on Gaza will continue, probably for months or years, and the worldwide anger directed at Israel will increase exponentially. Israel will be more and more isolated and attacked in...

Gordon Hahn November 10, 2023 The world split is quickly evolving into something less like a split – if by ‘split’ one means a more or less evenly balanced division between two parts – and more like the isolation of one smaller part of the international community from a larger, significant or supermajority. Moreover, this isolation resembles self-solation, and the self-isolated party is the West. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Even before the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Washington and Brussels were touting success in isolating first Russia and then China from ‘community of democracies’ (even as Washington was itself abandoning what should properly be called not democratic government but republican government). Instead, the reverse is occurring. By means of arrogance and obstinance, the West, led by Washington, is finding itself increasingly isolated. The West’s isolation is largely an accidental self-isolation brought about by a series of radical policy choices...

Todd Hayen October 23, 2023 We have finally reached a point in the advancement of our technology where we no longer can believe anything we see or hear. I mean, we can if we want to, but we can also choose not to, because the presentation of anything in a photograph, a video, or an audio recording, is no longer reliable evidence of reality. Originally published at Off-Guardian Soon we will not be able to rely on what we see right in front of our face when we are taking a walk in what we believe to be the real world. In fact, we don’t have to wait for this, it is already here. Holographic technology can already deceive us into believing something we see occurring in our own perceived reality. Many say the planes flying into the World Trade Center were holographs. Maybe they were. The technology probably exists to do...