Photo by TRANSCEND member Dr. Diane Perlman.The American Muslim Alliance Foundation-AMA honored Prof. Johan Galtung, the founder of the academic discipline of peace studies, with the Abdul Ghaffar Khan International Peace-Builder Award.In recognition:Of your lifelong struggle for peace with justice and against militarism, imperialism, and continued Israeli occupation of Palestine;For practicing and popularizing your “helicopter” consciousness, focusing your creative scholarship in freeing the pursuit of peace from the clutches of the world state system;For continuing the work you had started in partnership with the late Olof Palme to bring about a comprehensive global denuclearization;For being a spokesperson of the third…
الكاتب: Johan Galtung
The world is ambiguous, with forces and counter-forces, for good and for bad. Contradiction is the rule, with bad in the good and good in the bad, etc. And there are verbal contradictions; there is the opinion, and the other opinion, as Al Jazeera says, valid and invalid, whether such verbal debates reflect non-verbal contradictions or not. Thus, this column and author reap counter-arguments, and any author should be grateful to opponents. What can I learn? Factual mistakes? Logical? How to be so clear as to avoid misunderstandings? Or state assumptions, like ambiguity?More particularly, there were strong reactions in Tübingen,…
Dialogue of Civilizations, Rhodes Forum, Greece, 7 October 2011With the US Empire collapsing, parts of the West de-developing, the state system yielding to a region system with Latin America, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation-OIC and East Asia as new regions–maybe also a Russian Union with autonomy for Chechnya like for the Netherlands in the EU-European Union–the world center of gravity is, indeed, on the move.Economism has a narrow focus: growth rates, God=Mammon. However, what does the move mean for civilization, religion, the deeper God? Please join me in a spiritual West-South-East move. We know the landscapes: the abrahamic religions (judaism-christianity-islam)…
Dialogue of Civilizations, Rhodes Forum, Greece, 9 October 2011I will work in the tradition of the NGO I represent, TRANSCEND (www.transcend.org): diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy.The basic diagnosis is the pathological inequality growth in societies, and in the world. In the Mother of Crises, Occupy Wall Street is now a local Arab Spring, as protest, not yet proposals. “The bottom 90 percent”–an interesting US category–has annual average family income around $31,000 whereas the top permille has to be measured in millions, and many of them. Consequently, there is not enough buying power available to get the wheels of the real economy…
Talk given in Beijing at the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, 27 Sep 2011Dear Friends,Again you have kindly invited me for an open dialogue; so let us peer into the future of the Middle Kingdom. The background is rapid geopolitical change: the fall of the US Empire–Palestine’s bid in spite of Obama’s threats is an example–the de-development of many countries in the West like USA-UK and the PIIGS; the decline of the state system and rise of the region system with Latin America and the Islamic Community taking shape; the rise of the Rest like…
Thesis 1: The atrocious violence against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC did not communicate. 9/11 itself set the tone for the decade: violence as a tool of politics backfires. Some Arabs-Muslims had grievances (thesis 5). A nonviolent demonstration of Muslim women dressed in black encircling relevant US embassies (there may be many) demanding dialogue, calling the themes, contacting the media, would have communicated infinitely better. What happened was a united resolve not against the US government for its errors but against the attackers. Of course, the US kept the attackers’ letter secret.Thesis…
History seems to move, even accelerate, quickly these days.Well, maybe for those unused to dialectic thinking. There could also be an accumulation of tensions, problems, contradictions, and then we are suddenly in the midst of the rupture from the past, that famous transition from quantity to quality, to a new reality.But the acceleration?Well, it could be due to using what brought about the many crises as remedy, therapy. Curing alcoholics with wine or stronger stuff, quenching fires with gasoline. Stopping the fall of the empire with more empire, as military surge or increased bribery, for instance. Could the basic problem…
After more than 50 interviews on the 7/22 events in Norway, here is one as editorial-with Swedish free lance journalist Ditte Lundberg.1. Why do you think we are seeing increased support for right‑wing parties and populism in Europe?Because of the relative decline of the West (USA+EU) in the world, and because of the underdevelopment in a West losing much of what they had achieved economically and socially: the USA-UK-Ireland of course, and the Mediterranean countries, except non-EU Turkey. The West is not used to its empires crumbling, colonialism gone. Up comes nostalgia for the “good old days” with Europe in…
Anders Breivik was driven by a calling to save christianity–catholic essentially–from a European civil war with islam. Islam enters Europe on roads paved by multiculturalism, built by social democrats–like the Workers’ Youth League (Arbeidernes ungdomsfylking, AUF) at Utöya. Dialogue with an implacable, fanatic enemy is impossible. Violence against government quarters, and massacre of young supporters, however regrettable, was necessary. Norway, Europe needed a wake-up call to return to its origins.These three crazy articles of faith found an evil terrorist carrier? Oh yes, but those words serve as a road sign, “no further thinking needed”. That is not the way to…
There is much talk about nonviolence these days. Politicians and journalists get serious about the power that played a key role in ending colonialism (India) and the Cold War (Gdansk, Leipzig); unmentioned by Obama in his belligerent Nobel Peace Prize speech 2009. He would not have been president without the nonviolence of, say, the Freedom Riders [1] against Anglo-Saxon brutality in the US South. But, there is nonviolence and nonviolence, as with most things, and the difference matters in theory and in practice.Both are forms of power. Negative nonviolence tries to stop the other side’s direct or structural violence whereas…
Pre-Islamic Arabia lived for a long time under various forms of asabiya: chauvinism to the Arab race (arabism), to the tribe (tribalism), or to a clan within the tribe (clanism). This was the source of many long lasting wars. But, in 610, Prophet Muhammad, 40 years old, received the first verses of Al-Quran, challenging the social and political order. Asabiya yielded to brotherhood-sisterhood in a community of values, the Umma, from Umm, mother. Arabs engaged with enthusiasm in this new “matriotism” based on an Islamic religion stating that “there is no difference between an Arab and a non-Arab, or between…
The problem is in the term “humanitarian intervention”. “Humanitarian” is OK: protecting victims of autocratic killing and repression. With the two human rights conventions of 16 Dec 66 as guide we may also want to protect victims of economic exploitation and cultural alienation. They all have a human right to be protected, and “we”, also we on the other side of some state borders, have a human duty to do something.We do, try to do, or at least should do so, inside democratic countries devoted to human rights. For the violence of nature–tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes and epidemics–this works well both…
Introduction du traducteurLes guerres n’engendrent que malheur et destruction. Le nombre de victimes, de veuves et d’orphelins, conséquence des agressions militaires et de la violence aveugle contre l’Afghanistan, l’Irak et le Pakistan, est incalculable, et ceci depuis la déclaration de la « guerre contre le terrorisme » par Bush, le 12 septembre 2001.Dix ans plus tard, un autre président américain, prix Nobel de la Paix de surcroît, nous annonce que « Justice est faite », se référant à la froide élimination d’un homme. Pourtant, la violence ne peut-être juste, ni la mort d’un homme rendre le monde « safer ».Exécuter…
There is much talk about emerging powers these days.BRIC, the UNSC abstainers over “no fly zone” in Libya; BRICS, adding South Africa for all major continents; BRICS+T with Turkey for the muslim world and peace politics. Is Germany in it? Could be in their interest, but sanctions might be heavy. West defines BRIC in economic terms, still addicted to GD-NP growth; which is also a good measure of “Gross Destruction of Nature Product” as it focuses on value added by the key culprits, processing and trade.But in the name of justice and symmetry any focus on what is emerging invites…
These are the days of the christian easter and the judaic passover; the passion story of Jesus delivered to his father in heaven, and the story of Moses delivering his people to the holy land (and the Angel of Death passing over Jewish houses, killing only the Egyptian firstborn sons). The third great narrative is islam’s hegira, Mohammed’s flight in 622 from Mecca to Medina.There is much talk about islamism, politicized islam, these years. But there is also politicized judaism and christianity; judeaism and christianism. A symmetric approach is called for.We are talking about geopolitics, territorial politics; not whether railroads…
Chandra Muzaffar, in his superb JUST Commentary for March 2011, argues for Gaddafi to step down, and adds that if he so does he may be remembered “for some of his outstanding accomplishments in the first decades of his rule – accomplishments such as the closure of the huge American air base in Libya in 1970; his nationalization of oil; the pivotal role he played in the reorganization of OPEC which enabled it to emerge as a powerful cartel challenging Western dominance over the oil industry; his massive man-made river project to irrigate desert land; his housing schemes for the…
The Libya attack was planned months ago, and Alfred Ross (cell +1 917 848-3473) summarizes the history in five points:[1] Since 1969, when Gadhafi forced the US military out of Libya the US has been planning to return and overthrow him.[2] In 1981 the CIA created the NFSL, the National front for the Liberation of Libya, which launched a series of well-armed attacks in the 1980s, and its own Libyan National army, LNA. It was the CIA armed NFSL, and its spokes-person Ibrahim Sahad (a Nobel Peace Prize candidate?), who launched the demonstrations in February that led to the humanitarian…
Indeed. A physician who heals only friends, not foes, is no physician but party to a war. An organization that protects only our side civilians not the other side is not humanitarian but belligerent. We are far from the Hippocratic Oath in world affairs. Thus, there is nothing historical about the March 17 Security Council Resolution 1973.Historical would have been a resolution protecting possible foes and restraining friends of the Anglo-American-French trio dominating the UN Security Council, putting their NATO at the UN disposal as a world cop. The NATO that made headlines the same day exactly for killing civilians,…
Mother Earth, angry or not, has shown her strength. Pacific tectonic plates move under the Japan plate and the crashes show up as the heaviest earthquake in recent Japan history. 9.0. Not unexpected, but the precise when and where they are still unable to predict. Animals seem to know, but with short warning time.High rise buildings and 55 low rise nuclear energy plants were built, like the cherry tree branch yielding to let wet snow slide off, and through tons of tons of steel and cement. Flexible and robust. All over buildings oscillating with low amplitude and low frequency, but…
Ladies and gentlemen,To watch US mainstream media misleading and being misled by its narrow discourse about what happens is painful. And discourse, what you look at, through what lenses and words, shapes action.There is a simple, linear discourse, heard again and again. It started in Tunisia on December 17, 2010 when Mohammed Boazizi set himself on fire. And it spread from one country to the other, like falling dominoes, thanks to social media. The common theme is autocracy, political rights deficits, secret police, torture, killing, and the basic question is who is next in line, moving from North Africa to…
As the Arab revolt broadens and deepens, the roles of a global and a regional empire, USA and Israel, will surface increasingly. There will be more about that next week; here the focus is on the third one of the kind, the United Kingdom, or simply England, Albion, known for its perfidy, Lord Palmerston’s famous “no permanent friends, no permanent enemies; permanent interests”. John Bull = John Bully?