There is a simple way of judging the adequacy of media: the focus is on Snowden’s revelations–PRISM, TEMPORA etc.–or on Snowden himself? He is but one in a great chain of revealers driven by conscience rather than money or oaths; there will be more revelations given the enormity of the US spying machine on the world. But, what does it do? The issue is not the “freedom of expression” of the revealers, the “whistle-blowers”. If they reveal the systematic subversion–and “superversion” from above–of all civil-political and socio-economic human rights, then the denial of the freedom of expression to machine operators…
الكاتب: Johan Galtung
Keynote Speech, World Futures Studies Federation 40th anniversary – Bucuresti, România Future studies, like peace-development-environment studies, is an inter-disciplinary, inter-national effort to get a grip on key issues; divided into preferred futures–utopias–whose?; predicted futures–forecasting–who does it for whom?; and future practice–scenarios bending the predicted toward the preferred–by and for whom? The title of Ravi Morey’s Looking Backward: 2050-2013 catches future studies in a nutshell: exploring intermediate stages between a fully democratic world government and our 2013 present. The road may pass through a bankrupt USA bailed out by a democratic China in 2025. Some may argue that is already happening,…
The atrocious Second World War left behind lasting damage by lowering our standards for what is marginally acceptable. War is bad; but if it is not nuclear, the limit has not yet been reached. Fascism is bad; but if it does not come with dictatorship and the elimination of a category of people, the limit has not yet been reached. Hiroshima, Hitler, Auschwitz are deeply rooted in our minds, distorting them. Hiroshima makes us disregard the state terrorism against German and Japanese cities, killing citizens of any age and gender. And Hitler and Auschwitz make us disregard fascism as the…
Alfaz del Pi, located between Mediterranean beaches and a couple of majestic mountains, Campana-Aitana (Man and Woman) 1500 meters high. Today this small town generously accommodates 21,500; surrounded by fertile soil, orange and olive trees, vines. Benidorm–the famous tourist resort–and Altea–more for artists–are at hand-stretching distance; on the Costa Blanca–white seen from the sea–in Spain. So far nothing special. But that little town is home to close to one hundred different nations; 57% are foreigners. The English and the Norwegians are the most frequent; the Norwegians arriving already some 45 years ago. Close to half a century of peaceful coexistence;…
From Istanbul Turkey did the impossible, moving almost without violence from a military secular dictatorship to a civilian Sunni majority democracy. Turkey got unstuck. Sarkar’s circulation of elites at work: military elites, then religious-intellectuals, then business, then ordinary people–and once again the military. Second cycle. Big Business would knock at the door, as it did in the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the mid-1980s. Hence, not surprising that a big mall was one of the projects, together with an opera, a mosque and a monument from the Ottoman period for the Taksim square-Gezi Park project. Every element a gift for Istanbul’s 14…
How do the elites of declining empires react? One answer is demoralization. Like 26,000 annual acts of sexual harassment in the US Army leaving little time for killing; and one US soldier on active duty committing suicide every 18 hours–higher than combat deaths–the figures for veterans being one every 80 minutes. Or else, simply giving up empires–like the colonial powers did before and after the official abolition of colonialism (UN Charter Art. 73). Like Moscow outside and inside the Soviet Union, copying England with a Commonwealth of Independent States. Like the USA is partly doing, and partly not, hanging on…
A few years ago the two countries were the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas. Both had good reasons: the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country; in Colombia from 1949 with some interruption, then on again from 1964 with FARC, the famous guerilla. And for the USA the conviction that Evil is around every corner, domestic and global; better have the arms to handle those bad guys. In both, structural violence as unequal distribution of economic wealth and control of economic assets are among the world’s highest. There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to…
Firenze, European University Institute Five ways of doing research, re-search, for insight, knowledge, solutions. How it is done matters. The world does not come to us sorted out according to university faculties–natural, human, social sciences–and disciplines, in social sciences from micro (psychology) via meso (sociology, politology, anthropology, economics) to macro-mega, inter-state, -inter-nation, inter-region, inter-civilization studies. Rather, the world comes to us as a set of messy, chaotic problems: some goal we want to obtain like health–or at least absence of disease–functional, be good-looking, having affordable housing, taming nature and making it serve us; or a clash of goals, known as…
We all feel desperate watching the horrible killing, feeling the suffering of the bereaved, the whole people. But, what to do? Could it be that the UN, and governments in general, have a tendency to make the same mistake, again and again, of putting the cart before the horse? The formula they use is generally: 1— Get rid of No. 1 as key responsible, using sanctions; then2— Cease-fire, appealing to the parties, or intervening, imposing;3— Negotiation among all legitimate parties; and from that4— A political solution as a compromise between the positions. It looks so logical. There is a key…
It has never been this bad since the 1950-53 Korea war. October 1962, the Cuba-USSR-USA crisis, comes to mind. There were horror visions of mushroom clouds. A proud Cuba, with a strong leader-dictatorship, a social revolution in the near past, was denied a normal place in the state system, bullied by the USA and some allies with sanctions and boycotts into isolation for now more than 50 years. Soviet Union shipped nuclear-tipped missiles for deployment as close to USA as the US missiles deployed in Turkey to Soviet Union. And in that was the solution, tit for tat, one nuclear…
Keynote Speech – Doha, Qatar – 2 April 2013Peak Oil: Challenges and Opportunities in the GCC-Gulf Cooperation Council Countries Distinguished Participants, The organizers deserve high praise for setting this key, almost existential for some, issue on the agenda for an international conference. Oil and gas being limited there obviously is a peak–in the North Sea some years ago for Denmark, the UK and Norway. But this conference is not only about whether the peak is behind us, right now, in the future, and in that case when; but about and then what. Diagnosis, prognosis, therapy. However, the peak may be…
Economic power: the West being overtaken by the Rest, with growth rates for the USA, Euro zone and Japan being respectively 0.1, -0.9, -0.2 (Italy -2.8), against Brazil 1.4, Russia 2.9, India 4.5, China 7.9. [i] BRIC. – Military power: the West being defeated by the Rest, now paying dearly for the missing peace treaty and normalization with North Korea; with the Viêt Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq anti-terror wars lost, and Libya and Mali, Syria and Iran immune to “military solutions”;- Political power: the West as minority, the UN General Assembly rejecting 138 to 9 with 41 abstentions the US…
Nobody celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 19-20 March 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq (not only the USA was responsible, the stupidity coalesced). Stephen Zunes summarizes the losses in one of his excellent articles in the Santa Cruz Sentinel[i]: “the death of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600.000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed and thousands more have received serious physical and emotional injuries that will plague them the rest of their…
The black smoke turned white, a captivating dramaturgy since 1870. And there he was on the balcony, addressing the huge crowd the way St Francis of Assisi did, fratelli, sorelle, brothers, sisters–we are all God’s children. He took to the roles as Bishop of Rome and Holy Father like a fish to water, with a mild voice, becoming a mild face, the first Latin American pope, a part of the world moving South. With dark shadows from Argentinean fascism for reflection, learning. Fratello lupo, St Francis said, Brother Wolf, the ferocious wolf of Gubbio, eating villagers, taken in by St…
That his life and his deeds had black dots is part of the story; but that should not block seeing the greatness of a maker of history. First, in his own society, Venezuela, he lifted the bottom people up from misery, into economic wellness, political participation, cultural pride (of their often African, or Indian, blood), social dignity; much beyond Gini coefficients to measure increasing equality. Even the rich human rights language is too bland to reflect all that. Second, he did the same for Latin America; he helped lift the bottom countries up, also under the name of the iconic…
There is a crisis in the Western or more particularly the Indo-European political system –for reasons to be made clear. The system is referred to as “democracy”, meaning rule with the consent of the ruled; of, by and for the people. In practice this is interpreted as multi-party national elections for a national assembly, and majority rule in its two major forms, presidential and parliamentary democracy. The minority is given the role as “loyal opposition”. The sovereign, people, are given choices not between positions on issues, but “platforms”, issue-bundles; and not between candidates, but candidate-bundles, “lists”, designed not by the…
The first prognosis for the French invasion was a quick victory given their superior weaponry; and then the real war starts: guerilla. France is up against two very strong forces, Tuareg nationalism and Muslim islamism; cooperating and in conflict. They both easily mingle with others–they are parts of them–to better target the French. No Western country likes coffins coming home; train and equip locals to do the job, deal with semi-legitimate regimes, stretch UN resolutions: AfPak, Libya. US AFRICOM wants 4000 soldiers deployed in 35 African countries this year for anti-terror training. Some pass on weapons, some shoot in the…
Liverpool-UK, 31 January 2013 The uncontested center of the world slave trade, 40%, well documented in the International Slavery Museum in the port where slave ships docked. The trade was triangular: from Liverpool (Bristol, London) with Manchester textiles, metals, beads, alcohol and guns for slave traders in the Bay of Guinea; with slaves from there to the Caribbean, the Middle Passage; and from there with sugar, coffee and cotton grown by slaves back to England. To stealing people, 2/3 young men ages 15-25, killing their societies, they added stealing raw materials in return for cheap manufactures. Hand in hand they…
The Middle East-North Africa–MENA–is Arab-Muslim with a growing Jewish island in its midst. Former colonial territory–under Sunni Ottoman Turks for four centuries+ and the secular West, England-Italy-France, for half a century–now under Jewish colonialism and US imperialism. They have controlled MENA through dictatorships, condoning violence and corruption as long as they support US-Israel policies in the area. The Arab awakening is against the violence and corruption in favor of democracy, against corruption in favor of growth and jobs, and against US-Israel domination. There is also a Muslim awakening–to believe that Islam tolerates imposed secularism is incredibly naive. But there are…
A century ago humanity, particularly in the West, was at the beginning of a major revolution, from horse culture to car culture. Today there are still (FAO-UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2008) 59 million horses, but (2010) more than 1 billion cars (in 1986 only half of that). In other parts of the world, like Japan and China, there was a revolution to cars, but from bicycles–Beijing went from 6 million bicycles to 4 million cars over a period of 20 years, only from 1990. Japan had an intermediate scooter stage–like in India, Southeast Asia–less so in China. Imagine 19th…
From Alicante, Spain “Unemployment in Spain Tops 6.1M” – Unemployment rate is 26.6 percent; for those under the age of 25, 56.5 percent; all growing, all EU records. “Bank of Spain inspectors pen damning report about wrongdoing in Spanish banks: look the other way” was the reaction, while the government spends billions of Euros to bail out those banks. (El País, early January 2013). And this: “300 Madrid health chiefs resign over privatization”; “Locksmiths in Pamplona refuse taking part in evictions involving families with young children”; “Theater chief sells carrots at 13 Euro as entrance ticket” – value-added tax down…