By Daisaku Ikeda
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES
MAR 5, 2015
As this year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, I believe that Japan should take this as an opportunity to renew its pledge to build lasting peace and step up its efforts to contribute to stability and development throughout Asia. Strengthening of cooperation to address environmental problems and disaster risk reduction is a particularly urgent priority.
In November last year… continued here >
By Johan Galtung
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. Here quoted from Robert Barsocchini in Countercurrents in February 2015. His point was not that Jews were active in many places, the point is that for Churchill they were the cause of all the revolutions, the root of evil, not, for instance, feudalism gone mad.
What does Churchill, a top politician, believe in? (same source):
“-the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years”
“-100,000 degenerate Britons sterilized /to save the/ British race”
“-the increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded insane classes”
“Two fifths of Cubans fighting Spanish are negroes–a black republic”
“Gandhi ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and trampled upon by an enormous elephant with the Viceroy seated”
Three million starved to death due to Empire policy. Churchill:
“why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?”Read More »
By Johan Galtung Kuala Lumpur
…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 this Perdana Global Peace Foundation Conference, so well composed by Dr Hitam, President Tun Dr. Mahathir unveiled a giant copy of my book just published, Abolishing War: Criminalizing War, Removing War Causes, Removing War as an Institution (TPU and IIUM Press, 2015) together with a smaller book Clash of Civilizations[i]Read More »
By Jonathan Power
March 3rd, 2015
Is disorder the measure of our times?
Can anyone see an end to the upheavals in The Middle East and what can be done? My answer to the first question is “no” and my second is: “Wind the clock back to the days of the Ottoman Empire when vast stretches of the Middle East lived in relative peace under the benign rule of the sultans”.
The Ottoman Empire disintegrated because of its foolish decision to join the wrong side in World War 1. The French and British then carved up the Middle East to create the present day countries and to serve their interests (later oil).
What could have been done as recently as 12 years ago? Not invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and bring the house tumbling down, ruining nearly everyone’s well-being, breeding the conditions under which sectarian war between Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam flourishes and which became fertile ground for Al Qaeda and now their successor, the Islamic State (ISIS).
ISIS covers great swathes of Iraq and Syria and could well undermine the governments of Lebanon, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia. The decision of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to act on willfully distorted intelligence on Iraq’s supposed stock of weapons of mass destruction must be regarded as an unforgiveable crime against humanity.
The US and its Arab partners can’t bomb ISIS into submission any more than the US could the Vietcong. All outsiders can do is to sanction it (but avoiding the mistakes of the sanctions on Iraq when 30,000 children died as a result). It may take 10 years or more to win a favourable result.
The periphery of Europe will continue to be unstable until the big Western powers make a loud public promise not to expand NATO and to allow Ukraine to make Read More »
By Jan Oberg
What is terrorism? Why do we talk much more about that than other types of deaths? Why is the word misused? What has nuclear weapons – that politicians and media hardly ever talk about – got to do with terror? Why should we all be careful not to exaggerate the phenomenon of terror?
10 x more terrorism than before 9/11
Tell you what: I’ve been critical of the ”war on terror” since September 12, 2001 and particularly since 10/7 when the war on Afghanistan started. If the War on Terror was the answer to 9/11, the U.S. and its friends asked the wrong questions.
Because, what has been the result?
According to U.S. statistics at the time, in the years up to the horrific crime in New York, about 1,000-1,500 people were hit by terror per year worldwide; 1/3 of whom died, the rest were wounded. Most of it happened in South America, some in Europe; small groups such as Baader-Meinhof.
Almost 3,000 were killed on 9/11, many nationalities, far from only American citizens. (About 30,000 die annually from shooting each other).
Today? About 18,000 were killed in terror in 2013.
Although data may not be directly comparable or definitions be the same, the difference between 1,500 and 18,000 cannot be explained by methodological and other variations.Read More »
By Jonathan Power
17th February 2015
If there is such a thing as a “frozen conflict” the best place to look is not in Eastern Europe but in Korea where after years of merciless war that ended in 1953 there was an armistice, a line was drawn across the Korean peninsular and its two halves went their separate ways- one, the south, to fast capitalist development and the other, the north, to stultifying dictatorship that seemed to do only one thing competently – build nuclear bombs. Today there is no war on the Korean peninsular but there is no peace.
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have all tried to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear bomb program and to bring to a close the military stand-off between north and south. All their attempts have come to naught, not just because of North Korean stubbornness but also because of Republican majorities in Congress which have constantly undermined what seemed to be breakthroughs in negotiations.
Now Obama has summoned up the strength to return to the ring. The two countries’ nuclear envoys have been discussing the idea of “talks about talks”. A majority of long time observers are doubtful that after two decades of on/off negotiations that real progress can be made.
But they forget the major progress made by Clinton Read More »
By Johan Galtung
2 February 2015 at the 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; as China-centric vs hegemonic.Read More »
By Jonathan Power
January 27th 2015
It looks like the recent slaying of 130 school children by rabid Islamic extremists finally has brought a halt to the long time policy of Pakistan facing both ways. Pakistan, because of policies developed over decades by its all-powerful army and its intelligence service, the ISI, has long played both ends against the middle.
On one end is the West, especially the US, trying to tug Pakistan into its orbit, so that it becomes a strategic partner in defeating the Afghan Taliban and its associates, and bringing peaceful democracy to Afghanistan. At the other end is what has been seen as the need to encourage and support the Islamic warriors in their effort to wrest a good slice of Kashmir away from India and, besides that, to make sure that Afghanistan under American tutelage doesn’t fall into the reach of Indian influence and thus threaten Pakistan’s deepest interests.
This clash of policies hitherto has been settled, say many, in favour of the militants, with the ISI for decades giving them arms, training and direction.Read More »
By Richard Falk
By chance I was reading César Vallejo’s poem, “Black Stone on a White Stone,” in a translation by Geoffrey Brock, and was struck by the opening stanza:
I’ll die in Paris in the pouring rain
a day I have a memory of already.
I’ll die in Paris—I won’t try to run—
a Thursday perhaps, in Autumn, like today.
Without being literal, I was reminded that I could appraise my death while alive, and not leave a final reckoning to some solemn memorial event in which speakers are challenged to find humorous anecdotes to lighten the occasion, otherwise uttering honorific platitudes quite unrelated to the experiential core of my being.
I had been thinking quite a bit recently about ‘lost causes.’
Recently I gave a lecture at Columbia University on this theme, inspired by Edward Said’s seminal late essay “On Lost Causes” (1997) in which he ties together the ‘nobility of failure’ as portrayed in literature with his own unswerving dedication to the Palestinian struggle for a just peace. On that occasion, Read More »
By Johan Galtung
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 World, spying
USA vs China (USA-EU vs Eurasia) over the shape of geopolitics
USA-UK-France-Italy-Norway vs Libya-Mali-Sudan-Somalia etc. in Africa
USA vs Latin America/Caribbean over equality of the Americas
The most striking feature is, indeed, the presence of one country, USA, in almost all of them. Why? Read More »
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