An individual psychosis setting him apart from others, also in daily life, does not seem to fit his case. But there is another form of psychosis that fits his narcissistic hatred and paranoid violence so removed from the average. His psychosis is produced and triggered by the polarization-escalation aspect of conflict, not easily captured by individualizing psychiatry as his daily life attitude and behavior may be (near) normal. His psychosis is collective, shared. His ego is part of a real or imagined collectivity that may include those higher up; not an individual disorder associated with the deviant lower down. There…
الكاتب: Johan Galtung
Thinking aloud: we need all good ideas to combat our double economic crisis: the increasing misery crisis at the bottom, now also in rich countries in the West, and the increasing system crisis, also striking those countries; but both are all over. So the following are notes for an epilogue to a forthcoming book, Peace Economics, about how to overcome the flagrant structural violence in the misery crisis, and the threat of direct violence, not only terrorism and state terrorism, but a major world war to get the West out of the system–like the Second World War lifted them out…
Talk at the Université de Strasbourg, France Important is not only to think peace, but to speak, write and contribute to making, building and keeping it. For that purpose a little formula might be useful: + Positive Peace Equity X Harmony Peace = ________________ = _________________ – Negative Peace Trauma X Conflict There is positive peace in the numerator: the more the better. And key factors leading to direct, structural and cultural violence–the opposite of negative peace–in the denominator: the less the better. What is gained in peace is easily lost through inattention to negative pace.…
Six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities. Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is…
US politics has for a long time, since the 1970s, been the politics of inequality. Not only have the indicators of inequality, like the ratio in average income between the top and the bottom 20%, or the salary ratio between a CEO and the average employee in a corporation, increased (from 50 to 1100). But the top 10 or 1 or 0.1 percent, has acquired wealth so far unheard of. And the bottom 90, or 99 or 99.1 percent see the average family income in real terms decreasing; for the lowest down below the poverty line, way down into misery…
75 years ago Germany-Italy bombed this sacred Basque-Spanish town, adding state terrorism to the destruction of arms factories. Picasso made the atrocity enter world collective memory forever. As a testimony to the power of art, and memory, the painting was ordered covered when USA tried to make the case that Iraq was producing mass destruction weapons for the UN Security Council. Two kinds of memories serve politics: glories and traumas. The glories–victory, liberation, constitution–are celebrated as the birth of a nation. The traumas–defeat, invasion-occupation, decline and fall–are surrounded with the oath NEVER AGAIN! We are guided not only by future…
The Civil War ended 147 years ago with General Robert E. Lee of the CSA, Confederate States of America, capitulating to General Ulysses S. Grant of the USA, United States of America. Ended? Not quite. Grant accepted the capitulation of the Army of Northern Virginia; the others capitulated one by one (like Army of Tennessee 26 April, Trans-Mississippi June 2 and finally, November 6, Confederate cruiser Shenandoah surrendered). The Washington Post (Apr 1, 2012) celebrated the opening of the Appomattox branch of the Museum of the Confederacy the day before, quoting the museum curator: “it is one of the great…
One wonders what the US political leaders want. The incumbent lives in this world, playing an ultra-realist game: extra-judicial executions in maybe 70 countries, drone attacks; minimizing US losses, maximizing direct hits at what he sees as the problem, concrete identified individuals, not concrete unidentified conflicts. He has neither the moral nor the intellectual courage to do that. The challengers, with one exception, are focusing on one issue: down with the welfare state. Ron Paul, the libertarian, adds: down with the warfare state. He has registered Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq and the next in line, Iran-Syria, as unwinnable and unaffordable for a bankrupt…
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; then [2] Cease-fire, appealing to the parties, or intervening, imposing; [3] Negotiation among all legitimate parties; and from that [4] A political solution as a compromise between the positions. It looks so logical. There…
It does, even in print; pardon some publicity! You may start at the end with the table of contents, then, here, the book epilogue: Epilogue: Enthusiast E and Skeptic S: Dialogue at a Higher Level E: Well, where are we now? How do you feel? S: A little exhausted. But greatly relieved at one major point. E: Any particular chapter, branch, part of peace theory? S: No, the whole thing. I worried that you would put something belonging to all of us, peace, into a big machine with parameters and then the machine would produce outputs about what to do.…
In The Fall of the US Empire-And Then What? [1] a subtitle is US Fascism or US Blossoming? Of blossoming there seems to be none, with the Dow Jones crossing the 13,000 border, the real economy still mostly in bad shape, the Republican candidates embracing the economic system that produced the crisis, and Obama running the progressive rhetoric trick that brought him into power in 2008. By midterm 2010 the bluff was called, with a landslide. The OWS, Occupy Wall Street, is in the first three stages, consciousness-formation, mobilization and some confrontation; but not yet in the real struggle with…
The state system at its worst: trading insults and threats, sanctions, readiness to use extreme violence, forward deployment of US troops in Israel as hostages to guarantee US involvement, disregard for common people and the effects of warfare in the Middle East and the world. The options are harder sanctions, or war. The far better option, sitting down, with mediators, talking and searching for solutions, is absent. Polarization, escalation, the material of which wars are made fill the media. What a shame. Indeed, there are multiple underlying conflicts. Take the nuclear issue: two haves against one have-not. But the USA…
Traduction françaiseLa Syrie est horrible. Assad devrait démissionner immédiatement, un gouvernement de coalition devrait voir le jour, et mille médiateurs devraient discuter avec les diverses parties, peut-être avec une fédération en vue. Mais l’Algérie est encore pire. Un quart de million de tués après que les élections démocratiques aient été rejetées, avec le consentement de l’Occident voilà plus de vingt ans. Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas de printemps algérien ? Peut-être parce que l’obscurité est trop profonde, trop complète, trop répressive. Pourquoi n’y a-t-il eu aucune protestation de l’Occident ? Peut-être parce que le gouvernement algérien a fait tout ce que…
Norway’s by no comparison greatest philosopher was born one hundred years ago today, and died close to the age of 97. A world philosopher, a human being with an incredible radiation. Nobody who came close remained the same. What was his basic theme? In one word: nonviolence, but in a broader and deeper sense than most approaching demanding idea. Næss was very sensitive to verbal violence in debates; his answer was objectivity. He identified physical violence in political struggle; his answer was gandhian nonviolence, strongly inspired as a student in Paris early 1930s by Indian students strongly convinced that nonviolence…
We are heading for a new load of advice from the self-appointed “World Economic Forum”, still having fresh in mind their utter inability to come to grips with the September 2008 manifestation of the world economic crisis when they met three years ago. So, what are they going to talk about now?Lee Howell, in “The failure of governance in a hyperconnected world”, International Herald Tribune, 11 Jan 2012, gives us a preview. General question: “What risks should world leaders be addressing over the next 10 years?” We would expect, of course, the massive suffering and indignity at the bottom of…
The clouds are dark.And we sense one on the horizon, black; a point so far. The name of the cloud: using a major war, even with Russia-China, to revive an economy in depression; destroying capital, rebuilding.Depression? Yes, because of the dismantling of the welfare state (The Nation, 2 January 2012), the withering away of livelihood that will show up as increasing morbidity and mortality, on the health indicators that are the only true measures of “development”. With the health of nature, of course, also known as ecological stability. When we need them most, the unemployment, health and pensions safety nets…
The story (1 Samuel 17:41-57) is a staple children’s tale, and a figure of thought used everywhere. The apparently powerless, a boy, against the apparently powerful, a nine-foot tall giant. A narrow valley offering no escape, armies pitted against each other. David emerges, challenging the giant to battle–and wins. According to the Old Testament God was on his side; others might point to wits, courage, self-confidence, a slingshot and a collection of stones. One stone found the vulnerable spot in Goliath’s armor, and that was it. Keep God out of it.A metaphor for world history and for the year we…
The church was not as overfilled as it used to be for midnight mass on Christmas eve. But the ritual unfolded as it has done for centuries, around John 3:16 “little bible”, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. And the priest spoke about two parallel Christmases, one spiritual, of the bible, and one material with gifts, food, and licores.Could there also be two parallel Jesuses, one the Christ, and the other a revolutionary, fighting the Roman Empire and its…
This is about neo-nazis underground killing 140 people–foreigners, police, Jews, since the German reunification–, and a monster in Norway going to war against his own country on 22 July 2011–killing 77, in his view traitors paving the way for an islamic take-over.And it is about how to understand these phenomena.Names matter, they steer understanding and action. The word “Rechtsextremismus“, “right wing extremism”, flows easily. However, it obscures more than it clarifies. People on the left use it as happily as people on the right use “left wing extremism” and social democrats, seeing themselves in the middle, talk about both.But what…
Your Excellencies,We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of NAM, the Nonaligned Movement; a great success. They were not party to the madness of NATO-WTO (Warsaw Treaty Organization) confrontation and arms race, even nuclear. NAM was headed by two country triads, India-Indonesia-Yugoslavia and Finland-Sweden-Austria, and two high quality leader triads, Nehru-Soekarno-Tito and Kekkonen-Palme-Kreisky. Their in-between roles gave the world some normalcy in the madness. Much needed for West-Islam today; but that quality leadership is missing.We are meeting in UN-Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development-UNCTAD and EnergyPact, addressing three crises: North-South inequality; the growing inequity…
It changes character, like in quantum mechanics, just by watching. The French revolution did that in the late 1780s-early 1790s. However, spring is gone, revolt is in, but so far not revolution. There are layers of rulers and layers of opposition. Unveiling has started.If seeds from a winter suicide in Tunisia sprouted buds in early spring, then they must have fallen on fertile soil. Events turn into processes when “stability” is unstable, as huge power and wealth gaps are. The trick in the US is to make a person believe in individual mobility; “if you don’t make it that is…