Category: Johan Galtung

Aesthetics as One Road to Peace?

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By Johan Galtung

The eminent historian of Central and South India, William Dalrymple, had a remarkable article in The New York Review of Books (June 25, 2015): “The Renaissance of the Sultans”. Being a fan myself, this editorial column is very much based on that eye-opener.

The focus is on one Sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah II, of the central Indian kingdom of Bijapur, between Mumbai and Goa; we are talking about early 17th century. The Sultan is described as “an erudite scholar, a lute player, poet, singer, calligrapher, chess master and aesthete”. How different from Western rulers with military-political skills; how similar to many Chinese rulers, emperors, mandarins with poetry, calligraphy and more as indelible part of their legitimacy.

However, the point of the story, as told by Dalrymple on the basis of the impressive works he reviews, goes far beyond describing what must have been a remarkable ruler. That ruler himself also goes beyond, even beyond this statement that “the two most beautiful things in the world are a lute and a beautiful woman”. He has a theory:

“Bringing together Hindu and Muslim traditions in an atmosphere of heterodox learning, and uniting Persians, Africans and Europeans in a cosmopolitan artistic meritocracy, Ibrahim presided over a free-thinking court in which art was a defining passion. For Ibrahim was literally obsessed with the power of art. In his poems he dwells on its ability to bring people together, and on the way that art, and particularly music, acted on the body and was capable of moving an individual to tears, or ecstasy, or a deep melancholic sadness”.

How true. We notice that he is not only bridging geographical gaps but also gaps in the body, seeking to reconcile “the old Greek medical ideas of the humors of the body” with Hindu ideas of reaching the human spirit through aesthetic appreciation.

Moreover, “through music and art he believed that his people could learn to look at each other with mutual understanding: They speak different languages, But they feel the same thing, The Turk and the Brahmin.”

Well, they hardly feel “the same thing”; but they feel, and good art engenders good feelings, visible to each other.

Nevertheless, art bringing people together Read More »

TPP-TTIP-Tisa: A Tipping Edge from Democracy

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By Johan Galtung

Unbelievable but true: Obama, other presidents and governments are seriously contemplating to hand their countries, people and all, over to business to create the largest “free trade areas” in history with NAFTA for North America, TPP for the Pacific, TTIP to the Atlantic and TiSA, services covering some 50 states all over.

Pharmaceuticals, chemicals, textiles, chicken; communications, e-trade, financial services, insurance, what not, negotiate across the oceans how to market each other’s products across oceans, overriding domestic laws, even constitutions that stand in the way of business.

The State-Capital-People, or Government-Investors-Civil Society restructured against not only Civil Society, but Parliament and Law.

The gains for business are obvious; removing the last inter-state tariff and non-tariff barriers, and more importantly: intra-state laws and regulations impeding the free flow of goods and services to protect people and nature; except laws protecting business.

So, imagine what may happen. Read More »

Oxi or Nai? Oxi !

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By Johan Galtung

At the time of starting writing this editorial the referendum is on, so is the TV. Those two Greek words are all over. But the outcome is unknown; it will be known at the time of finishing the editorial.

However, could the most important aspect of the referendum be the referendum itself, not the outcome? The idea of asking people, the very demos in a democracy, even at the risk of losing, resigning?

The most aggressive creditor against Greece, Germany, did not dare to do that over the Euro entry. They decided for a people they knew were against, hiding behind Hitler’s use of a referendum as demagogy.

Any OXI-NAI outcome means a new departure. With no party below, say, 1/3, serious attention has to be paid to both sides’ narratives.

Let us be clinical about that bad EU-Greece relation.

There is a deep culture: another Christianity, with “optimism in the longer run”, another alphabet. They relate across deep gaps.

There is a deep structure: the division ofRead More »

The nemesis of race

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By Johan Galtung

We have been revisited, not only Charleston SC, not only the USA; the whole world by the shocking massacre in the iconic Emanuel Church. It hit this aging Norwegian male deep in the heart; once a young man, sociology professor at Columbia University, NY, as American as any with that passport, deeply involved in the desegregation conflict in Charlottesville, VA. Like millions others now trying to come to grips with this enormity of history moving backward to comprehend, searching for “how could it have been avoided”; any solution anywhere?

Using an old tested method, “what does this remind me of”, Anders Behring Breivik, a fellow Norwegian, came up. On 22 July 2011, first a bomb at a government building killing seven, then a massacre of young laborites at an island, killing 69 more. Having researched the case, I see him located in a triangle with his pure, blond and blue-eyed Norway of believers in true Christianity in one corner, threatened by Muslim invasion; the traitors to that society–the Labor government, the laborites in the second, and in the third corner those who stand up, do something against the Muslim menace: Israel, the hard Zionists.

Obsessed, it worked in and on him till the calling comes, only I have understood this, it falls upon me to do the unspeakable, to unleash history from its shackles by forcing people to see the Truth, starting with the enemy in our own camp, not Muslims, the traitors.

The psycho-pathology driving him was not childhood traumas but conflict polarization, Read More »

Pope Francis: Spiritual, Liberating Theology

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By Johan Galtung

What a gift to humanity, this Pope!

To choose global climate change as a major theme of his papacy is in the spirit of the times. What is revolutionary, and he uses that word often, is the focus on the poor. Climate change–including the long trend global warming over and above some lulls and local variations–has a clear class address, goes beyond making him the spiritual world leader.

The Pope talks about filth covering the earth, and about greed stimulated by corporate capitalism and consumerism as major causes underlying the technicality of CO2 release. The Pope also mentions the freshness of the gospels, including the unambiguous stand of Jesus for the poor in Matt 6:24–God vs Mammon–Matt 13:12–our economic system, and Matt 19:20-24 about giving one’s riches to the poor.

Pope Francis follows in his footsteps. Simply beautiful.

But there is more to it: a general theological discourse from the same continent as this non-Italian Pope: Liberation Theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Miguel d’Escoto–Peruvian, Brazilian, Nicaraguan, from the major parts of the Latin Americas–now in their 80s have been rehabilitated. D’Escoto was foreign minister of the Sandinista government and one-year president of the UN General Assembly.

However, the rehabilitation has moved on, into the Caribbean, to the Latin American country that made world history, Cuba, and to the two Castros. Read More »

Meanwhile – with great narratives unfolding

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By Johan Galtung

The decline and fall of the US Empire’s grip on the world; of the West; of the state system–with the rise of the TNC-IGO-NGO system, regions, nations, local authorities; the rise of the East and the South; of China–many details cross an editor’s desk; inspiring some rethinking:

Thus, in a pile of quotes not to be forgotten, from Balfour 1917:

“it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status of Jews in any other country“.

Very prescient thinking, not clearly understood. Time to rethink?

Bin Laden’s bookshelf has been presented to the media (Sy Hersh claims he was captured and imprisoned by the Pakistani ISI; the USA did not find him but was told and given access): he practices Sun Tzu’s doctrines; know your enemy, know yourself. “The US Intelligence Community does not endorse any of the publications in the list”. Of course not, US leaders have probably not even read them, a Chomsky, a Blum. It might have made them rethink deeply failed policies.Read More »

“Getting Away With Murder”

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By Johan Galtung

“Getting Away With Murder” is the title of Susan George’s (as usual) brilliant analysis of the banking situation after the US banking 9/11, the 2008 crash (published by Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. If the West had freedom of the press the analysis by a leading expert on these matters, and her suggestions for remedies, would have been on media everywhere with detailed interviews. But, alas.

Picking one point among many: the operation of the European Central Bank to extend credits; at a generous 1%. In a Union of 28 states, we might imagine, it would go directly to member states with problems. Not at all, directly to banks, from them to states; at, for instance, 6%. In other words, the more miserable the situation in a country, the more banks and their top boards, CEOs and some functionaries will be thriving. This is EU oligarchs feeding EU oligarchs, not direct credit to states to cover pensions and salaries of civil servants (yes, there are still servants around, and many of them are civil).

At the same time most, not all, of the problems in the GIPSI countries – Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland – can be traced to their oligarchs having enriched themselves at the expensive of the rest. Protected by their media, in Greece by media fighting Syriza and Tsipras, let alone his brilliant finance minister – among other things simply too bright for the ECB-IMF-EU. The commentariate focus on what they understand, leather jacket, motorbike, no tie, not on his important words. What a shame, what a disgrace to EU public, to democracy; transforming it into oligarchy. Bancocracy.

All of this adds up to non-oligarchs paying for the misdeeds of oligarchs. Read More »

A Warning against Kaplan’s Argument That “It’s Time to Bring Imperialism Back to the Middle East”

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By Johan Galtung and Naakow Hayford

There is much to agree with Robert D. Kaplan’s 25 May 2015 publication in Foreign Policy in his well-informed analysis. And very much to disagree with, especially his wrong remedy.

Kaplan ascribes the present “chaos” – as if major changes can be orderly or take place under old much praised “order” and “stability” – to the break-down of imperialisms, in plural, starting with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. And he manages the incredible: not a single word about who gave them that death blow: Sykes-Picot, UK-France, helped by czarist Russia. Analysis?

However, he has much positive to say about the Empire-Caliphate as an order where diverse groups had very few territorial disputes (the millet system). But he does not draw the obvious conclusion: maybe there is a longing in the whole region back to that order–without Istanbul?

True, it is Sunni but do not leave out the possibility of some genius bridging the Sunni-Shia gap by creating a political-economic-military community including both Iran and a new Saudi orientation. Kaplan leaves no opening for any such potential, even though it is desired by millions in the region. More important than ISIS is the yearning for a caliphate. That is the driving force behind ISIS.

Rather, Kaplan sees the rise of the Islamic State as a result of the collapse of the European empire Read More »

On Violence: Suicide, homicide and both/and

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By Johan Galtung

Violence is to harm and hurt body, mind, spirit, even lethally, suicide, homicide, genocide (“cide”, from Latin “caedere”, falling). The focus here is on body violence, “sui” standing for Self, “homi” for Other. They do not exclude each other, they can be combined.

We have in mind US shootings-killings in recent decades, often at schools, spraying Others with bullets, in the end also Self, at his own hand or somebody else’s, with a gun. The killing by somebody else may or may not have been expected, but exposure to such extreme risk makes intention likely. In short, homicide and suicide. Both-And.

Hitler sacrificed millions of Germans and committed suicide.

We are used to seeing suicide as the consequence of life being intolerable: “I am better off leaving this world”; and homicide as other(s) being intolerable, “the world is better off without you”. These tragic, aggressive outcomes of double frustration may be rooted in unsolved problems and conflicts (dilemmas, disputes). Seeing it that way the “both-and” category makes sense: “I am a total failure; but you people betrayed me and deserve to be severely punished”.

Suicide can be combined with individual or collective homicide. The latter should not be confused with Durkheim’s distinction between egoistic suicide on behalf of oneself only, and altruistic suicide, Read More »

Middle East peace – Be inspired by Europe’s history

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By Johan Galtung

In the middle of the Middle East is Israel, harboring dreams of an Israel even greater than King David’s. Israel has 5 neighbors:

Lebanon-Syria-Jordan-Palestine (recognized by 135 states)-Egypt.

This first circle of neighbors borders on a second circle of 6: Cyprus-Turkey-Iraq-Arabia-Sudan-Libya.

The second circle of neighbors borders on a third circle with 8: Greece-Iran-Kuwait-Bahrain-Qatar-United Arab Emirates-Oman-Yemen.

Adding up to 1+5+6+8 = 20 states; covering greater Middle East.

Israel has no ally among the 19, has been at war, with or in, the first circle, Iraq in the second, working for a US+ attack on Iran in the third. Greater Israel, from Nile to Euphrates would absorb the entire first circle and much of Turkey-Iraq-Arabia from the second.

Next:

In the middle of post-World War I Europe was Germany, harboring dreams of a Germany even greater than Bismarck’s Second Reich: a Third Reich more like the First, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation destroyed by Napoleon in 1806: a Neuordnung, nuovo ordine with Italy for Europe, with Russia as German colony.Read More »