Jondal, Bergen, Kristiansund – Norway The West–North America and Europe to somewhere in Mexico and Ukraine– declines, outcompeted economically, defeated militarily, confronted politically, contested culturally. But still strong on all four, with much to offer in a more egalitarian world. No need to fall further by working against itself. Take the 70th anniversary demarcation of the victory over nazism, take thousands of Africans drowning in the waters around Lampedusa, Italy, take the Islamic State, take Ukraine–and a country up there in the high North of Europe, Norway. Elections have moved the country from “red-green” to “blue-blue” coloring of the same…
الكاتب: Johan Galtung
01. Japanese Constitution Article 9 or something similar for all states: ‘__forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes’.02. Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 28 criminalizing war: ‘a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration can be fully realized’03. UD Article 3 “Everybody has the right to life, freedom and security of person” should also apply to cross-border aggression of any kind.04. Local authorities, regions, NGOs, IGOs and TNCs with the capability and intention to…
Mohandas Gandhi invented the nonviolent approach to basic social change, Satyagraha, in South Africa in the early 20th century; Nelson Mandela presided over the birth of a one person-one vote democracy at the end of the century. Both were lawyers, trained in English Common Law; good in the sense of a keen consciousness of what is right and wrong, bad in the sense of a court process identifying who is in the wrong rather than solving underlying conflicts, and wrong in the sense of punishing the wrong-doer; violence rather than cooperation. Both built on the positive side of law–the indelible…
Let us start by summarizing. We are looking at six major leaders of forces and movements shaping centuries–Churchill- Hitler-Stalin-Mao-Gandhi-Mandela–comparing, two at a time. We are looking for similarities and dissimilarities. Some of them are out in the open, in their spoken ideologies. But most of them–maybe the most interesting–are hidden to the untrained eye. There are the similarities when they are from the same civilization and the dissimilarities when different– however much they profess to be on the same or very different lines. The six were themselves hardly aware of this factor. As Churchill, Hitler and Stalin share the Christian-secular…
Churchill and Hitler made history but did not change it; after the war their societies found their old forms. Stalin and Mao changed their much bigger societies basically, and gave the Westphalian state system new fault-lines, alliances: anti-Russia-USSR, anti-China-DPRC. There was also a short lasting USSR-DPRC alliance 1949-53, when Stalin was alive. But when he was murdered the banner as leader of the rapidly expanding Communist World was not passed on to the biggest country, but stayed in Moscow. The new leader was not Mao Zedong but the colorless Malenkov. Surface level conflict; and important. But the concept of a…
Hitler was about race, Stalin about class. Their theories were based on one contradiction: Aryans vs non-Aryans for one; workers vs capitalists/landowners for the other. The ills of their countries followed from the contradictions at the top of their verbal pyramids. As Western intellectuals they tried to explain much from one axiom. Thus, to Hitler bolsheviks and plutocrats were both mainly Jewish. Their utopias were contradiction-free, by cleansing; ethnic for Hitler, class for Stalin. Only Aryans; all others killed-expelled-marginalized by the power of the NSDAP, National-Socialist German Labor Party for one; all capitalists/landowners killed-expelled-marginalized by the power of the vanguard…
Who wrote this? “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”. “The Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd)–all Jews” “The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews–in Hungary” “The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany–preying” “-the schemes of the international Jews /against/ spiritual hopes” “-this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization” “-it played recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution” “-the mainspring in every subversive movement in the 19th century” Churchill did. (from Robert Barsocchini, countercurrents.org 02-02-15). His point was not that Jews were active in many places, the point is that for Churchill they were the…
…is the title of our conference. There will never be any such thing. “New”, yes; “World”, yes–“Order”, No. Wherever there is life there is contradiction, dialectic, forces and counter-forces. At the very obvious level the question arises–Order, in whose interest, against whom? Sow any new order and the seeds of its undoing are already taking root, sprouts are coming. As the Chinese say, “There are human beings without contradictions; they are called corpses.” Follow that hint; go to the moon. New moons once a month, and order, the order of death, of non-life. The Old Moon Order. As part of…
President Richard von Weizsäcker passed away 31 January and was very much celebrated in Germany for his brilliant presidency to normalize a Germany with a troubled past, even divided on top of that. But, by and large leaving out his global perspectives mentioned below. His brother Carl Friedrich was a nuclear physicist turned peace activist with a wonderful peace program, in one word: Weltinnenpolitik, world domestic policy (well, it depends on the country, some domestic policies are better than others; I would go for a Swiss coalition governance, federalism, direct democracy). The president’s nephew Ernst Ulrich is an energy-environment leader,…
Society is tri-partite: State, Capital, and People with their associations, the Civil Society. There is hard-won and applaudable freedom of expression for People, directed at the State and its feudal predecessors, Clergy and Aristocracy. But how about Capital? Consider this. Somebody can pay for access to the media–papers, radio, TV–with total freedom of expression of strong views, filling pages and hours of reading space and listening-viewing time; one way. Uncontradicted, nobody writing or voicing contrary views, sowing doubts, coming up with data to the contrary, values, theories against. One-way flow of expression, and not merely a flow of bla-bla words…
Kuala Lumpur Have a look at this statement by Cecil Rhodes: “I was in East End London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for BREAD!–and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than convinced of the importance of IMPERIALISM…My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e. in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population to provide new markets…
Penang Institute, Penang A theory serves comprehension, prediction and identification of conditions for change. Seven such historical-cultural pointers will be indicated for China; using the West in general, and the USA in particular, for comparisons. The presentation draws on countless dialogues in China over 40 years, since 1973. * China: in time, as dynasties; West: in space as empires. Look at a histomap combining world history and geography, time and space: China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions–and the West as empires–birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, UK and now US empires–duration vs bubbles that burst;…
A time machine set on the long haul backward may be useful to understand the present in the light of the past. For instance Iberia, the peninsula, today with two states, Spain and Portugal. The time machine operator is Vigdis L’Orsa, Norwegian journalist, a pillar in the Norwegian community on Costa Blanca with incredible small towns like Alfaz with above one hundred nations living peacefully together. She runs seminars on Spanish history inviting Norwegians, professionals and amateurs, to explore the Spanish past. And has recently produced a wonderful book, a historical novel, a love story to beat: I skyggen av…
Three, maybe four dramatic, global processes are unfolding. First, the West–particularly USA, Israel, France–fighting very violently and counter-productively to keep their grip on the world. Second, Eurasia, spearheaded by Russia-India-China in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) expanding and consolidating, successfully and nonviolently. Third, Islam expanding and consolidating, partly by conversion to Islam, partly through the dream of a new caliphate, partly violently. Fourth, Latin America and Africa in the old Third World expanding and consolidating, spearheaded by Brazil-South Africa in BRICS. If you want to live drama, you have chosen the right year. The basic conflict is the…
What happened–known all over the world–is totally unacceptable and inexcusable. As inexcusable as 9/11, the coming Western attack and the Islamist retaliation, wherever. As inexcusable as the Western coups and mega-violence on Muslim lands since Iran 1953, massacring people as endowed with personality and identity as French cartoonists. But to the West they are not even statistics; “military secrets”. However, the unacceptable is not unexplainable. In this tragic saga of West-Islam violence, spiraling downwards, the way out is to identify the conflict, what is this violence about, and search for solutions. I wonder how many now pontificating on Paris–a city…
Yes, what is it?–let us start this New Year on a positive note. Keeping in mind that peace is an honor word, like health, salvation for many: a focus of dreams and wishes, a summum bonum that should be both very precise and amenable to professional peace work and kept open, filled with new dreams and aspirations. Like for health, new aspects come up all the time; for instance in positive psychology. Peace presupposes absence, or low level, of violence, direct as well as structural, and of the cultural violence justifying the other two. But we can also go for…
Here is a list of 15 current conflicts-violence relations, avoiding identifying conflicts with violent conflict arenas: USA-Japan-South Korea vs North Korea vs China USA-ASEAN vs China-Taiwan and Japan vs Korea over China Sea islands USA-NATO-Japan vs China-Russia-SCO over encircling USA-EU vs Russia over Ukraine-Georgia membership in NATO-EU USA-led coalition/NATO vs Many, diverse parties in Afghanistan USA-led coalition/NATO vs Many, diverse parties in Iraq USA-Shia-Iran(?) vs Arabia-Sunni-caliphate/ISIS-Turkey(?) Kurds vs Turkey-Syria-Iraq-Iran over autonomy Israel vs Palestine over The Holy Land/Cana’an USA-Israel vs Arab-Muslim countries over Israel vs Palestine USA vs 134 states over terrorism using state torture-sniping-droning USA-UK-Canada-Australia-New Zealand (“Five eyes”) vs…
The immediate reaction to Obama’s Executive Order of 17 December 2014–re-establishing diplomatic relations, easing travel, swapping prisoners–was a sense of relief: finally correcting a more than 50-year old stupidity. But why now? Later. First, back to June 1960. We drove from New York to Key West, then a ferry–the captain was Norwegian–to La Habana; we wanted to drive all over, talk with everybody to understand. And the social picture was very clear: black, woman, low class overwhelmingly in favor of the revolution; white, man, middle-upper class ended up in Miami. Why gender? US imperialism was obvious but in addition Cuba…
Here is an image of today’s multi-polar world, with 8 poles[i]:Four states, four regions, with cultural-economic-military-political power; surrounded by BRICS[ii]. Emerging Russia-India-China-OIC are on top, declining EU-USA, EUSA in the middle, and “Third World” Latin America-Africa at the bottom–with some military bridges between them. For all eight the term “civilization” applies, with “clashes”. Have a look at the Octagon Rank Profiles: 8 actors, 4 dimensions: Ranks Spacetime Population GDP Military RUSSIA INDIA CHINA OIC 3 4 2 1 8 3 2 1 7 8 3 4 5 7 4 3 EU USA 7 5 6 7 1 2 2 1…
Muhammadiyah University – Yogyakarta, Indonesia Coming from Malaysia, the two neighbors are incredibly different. Indonesia, richer in ancient cultures, larger in territory, an archipelago of thousands of islands, has GDP/capita 3,500 and Malaysia 11,500; three times+ more. Products of brutal Western colonialism, Dutch for Indonesia, English for Malaya, which became Malaysia. Exploited, robbed, impoverished. Both hoped that World War II, fought for democracy-human rights, would end that in 1945, but got wars to keep colonialism instead–till 1949 and 1957, respectively. Both had been occupied for 3 1/2 years by Japan going south to beat the US-imposed boycott, heading for oil…
Kuala Lumpur: IAIS-International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, IIUM-International Islamic University of Malaysia Yes, Islam and Christianity are on old Buddhist lands; with Muslim-Buddhist clashes in Sri Lanka, Myanmar. Occident is the big space of the three Abrahamic religions Judaism-Christianity-Islam, with the secularisms of the first two, excluding each other. Indonesia-Philippines are in the Occident. Orient is a big space spanned by Buddhism, which does not exclude others, not even violent state power; hence more complex. There are pure Buddhist countries: Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam; and mixed Buddhist countries, with other non-exclusive world views: in China with…