By Johan Galtung
Contemporary reality, but what is real? Two of the above were killed under Obama’s watch; Osama executed by Obama extra-judicially, in cold blood, the other two by proxies (Chávez: we do not quite know). Two of them were dictators; Osama had no state, Chávez had, but won elections apparently not more rigged than Florida 2004, Ohio 2008.
What were the problems, how might they have been solved?Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Washington and Tel Aviv make a mistake: the conflict between Israel and Palestine is only a small part of a complex between USA-Israel on one side against more or less all Arab and Muslim states and against the clear majority of UN member states in the UN General Assembly vote recognizing Palestine as a non-member state. A serious approach to peace includes Israel-Palestine negotiations without USA as “broker”; USA-Israel with Israel’s five Arab border states and the states bordering on them; and negotiations in UN regional and UNGA, in a Uniting for Peace setting. Peace calls on all levels.
An image of a reasonable solution with secure-recognized borders:
[1] Palestine fully recognized according to international law, as a UN member state, and bilaterally by an ever increasing number.
[2] A two-state Israel-Palestine nucleus with 1967 borders and some swaps, two Israeli cantons in sacred areas on the West Bank and two Palestinian cantons in Northwest Israel, heavily Palestinian before Naqba, capitals in both Jerusalems; defensive defense for Palestine.
[6] A Middle East Community modeled on the European Community of 1958 with Israel and the five Arab border countries, open borders for goods and people; a council of ministers and a commission for issues like water, return, joint patrolling; rule by consensus.
[20] A Conference, becoming Organization, for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East of the six, the countries bordering on them, and some of the countries bordering on them again (including Turkey, Cyprus, Greece) modeled on the OSCE-Organization for Security and Cooperation for Europe of 1975.
No one-state solution. Jews have a right to democracy with Jewish characteristics, but not to a state only for Jews. No modern state is only for one nation; and states are absorbed into regions anyhow.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
This is not the way to do it. A major party to the conflicts cannot be at the same time the conference manager; to the point of making the UN Secretary General disinvite a major invited party. Whether this is due to AIPAC-American Israel Public Affairs Committee buying US Senators, or whatever process internal to the USA-Israel system, or it comes out of Secretary Kerry’s genuine conviction, is immaterial.
This looks like a court where the prosecutor is also the judge, having decided who the major culprit is and instructed the judge to proceed accordingly from Court I to II, with only those agreeing to Court I being in the jury of Court II.
Had Ban Ki-moon been a man honoring UN authority he would have disinvited himself instead, claiming undue pressure. Disinvite a major party and two things are guaranteed: a lost chance to find a solution to what is also a sunni-shia conflict, and a major spoiler of whatever conclusions may be arrived at. There was a promising point: they will first talk with the parties separately to identify their positions–but, leaving out the major carrier of shia, no chance.
This foretold failure–barring a miracle–will probably not last long. The photo-card will be played out at an early stage. It looks ominous; but is an authoritarian regime like Assad’s compatible with its army taking so many potentially incriminating photos that could fall into the hands of a “self-styled defector”? Why make photos anyhow?
Let us say, brutally simplified, that there are seven conflicts, not only one, all directly or indirectly violent, unfolding in Syria.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Sometimes a look at the basics is needed. They are reproduction of the nature on which we all depend, and reproduction of humans. Formulas like renewability and recycling, to avoid depletion and pollution, and well-being, meeting basic needs for all to avoid suffering and misery, are good guides. With them guaranteed, let us extract, produce, distribute, consume, and enjoy! Sounds rational.
But the basics are not guaranteed, not built into the system.
From the economy comes many products but also ecocrisis, misery, death, guided not by rationality but by the opposite. How come?Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Alfaz, Spain
An optimistic prediction held by some; but what does it mean?
Let us define that “middle” as thousand years, 250-1250, from the start of the West Roman Empire declining (completed in 476 – 500), to the rise of the Hanseatic League transalpina as another Europe (completed around 1500 with protestantisms, Luther-Zwingli-Calvin; Anglicans).
Apart from the Crusades, 1095-1291, an early introduction to the “Modern Period”, this was a peaceful time in Europe due to the integrative forces of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” – not Holy, not Roman, not German they say – and the Vatican – Holy? – hm; Roman? Yes. 217 of the 266 popes Italian, so far; No. 2: 16 French.
The Kings ruled by intermarriages, and the Popes by theocracy, in harmony till the 11th century investiture conflict: who appoints the bishops!? The war on Islam, the Crusades 1095-1291 (Pope Urban II) was also used to unify Church and State; and also against Orthodox Christians after the schism in Christianity in 1054 (Pope Leo IX).
Europe contracting into about 500 smaller entities, duchies etc., self-centered, self-reliant, self-sufficient, living lives centered on Afterlives through salvation. “Middle”, between what and what?Read More »
By Johan Galtung
2014: there are conflicts old and new crying for solution and conciliation, not violence; with reasonable, realistic ways out.
Take the South Sudan conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka. We know the story of the borders drawn by the colonial powers, confirmed in Berlin in 1884. Change a border by splitting a country – referendum or not – and what do you expect opening Pandora’s Box? More Pandora.
There is a solution: not drawing borders, making them irrelevant. The former Sudan could have become a federation with much autonomy, keeping some apart and others together in confederations-communities, also across borders. Much to learn from Switzerland, EU and ASEAN.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Not one or a group of persons, not one or a group of countries. But they may serve as instruments for scripts engraved on the deeper recesses of their minds, not the conscious, easily retrievable ones. Scripts that are too trivial, obvious, too painful/shameful and hence repressed. Jung calls them archetypes; they often come in syndromes.
Imagine that deep down an actor–person, gender-generation-race-class, state-nation, region-civilization–is programmed for two forces in the world, one good the other evil, and sooner or later there will be a final battle for the victory of one over the other: the solution.
Dualism-Manicheism-Armageddon for short, DMA even shorter; from the first and last chapters of the Bible, imprinted on the Western mind soon for two millennia. Maybe with some long lasting impact?
Imagine all of the above driven by the opposite script: holism–holons of many units along many dimensions–and dialectics–forces and counter-forces, in plural, in all holons, and transcendence, going beyond, to new dialectics, in a new reality: the solution.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
What a Christmas gift to all of us from that amazing Pope Francis, his first Message for the World Day of Peace, Fraternity, the Foundation and Pathway to Peace. A tightly reasoned statement in ten sections; here is an effort to summarize some key points:
1. An irrepressible wish for fraternity enables us to see others not as enemies or rivals, but as brothers and sisters. However, reference to a common Father is needed; otherwise it becomes “a mere do ut des /I give so that you give/ which is both pragmatic and selfish”.
2. The story of Cain and Abel /the first brothers, sons of the first couple, Adam and Eve/ “teaches that we have an inherent calling to fraternity, but also the tragic capacity to betray that calling”: Cain killed Abel out of jealousy because God preferred Abel.
3. Human fraternity is regenerated in and by Jesus Christ through his death and resurrection–the Cross is the definitive foundational focus of that fraternity-/no/ separation between the people of the Covenant and the Gentiles–not party to the pact of the Promise.
4. Fraternity is the foundation and pathway–peace is work, an opus solidaritatis, a duty of solidarity, of social justice, of universal charity, of a more human and sustainable development.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Milano
There it is, that fantastic duomo, the fourth in size in the Christian world, honoring their God, exuding self-confidence, and the beauty of the marble stones of the huge façade. Founded six hundred years ago, took five centuries to build, a marvel of engineering and architecture. A major concert with a choir does not manage to fill the inner space of the dome, but of the listeners, yes, with awe.
Conceived in the “dark ages” as those masters of cultural violence, our historians, call them, the “middle ages”, presumably between two “shiny ages”, the Roman Empire and Western colonialism, “modern times”. Will anything built today be visited by people in five hundred years, filling them with awe? Some banks, corporations? Some corrupted national assemblies? Some stadiums, shopping centers sloppily made, collapsing, built with no love, except for money? Some huge missile ramps to sow death and harvest hatred and revenge?
Do they ever think of that, the “leaders” in the most aggressive parts of the West, Anglo-America, UKUSAF–adding F for that center of “enlightenment” and “modernity”, France – do they think of the harm they do to all of us, in the West? To our past, to our legacy?
But soon it is over; they are losing Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Mali–no democracy, no economic growth, no human rights arising from the ashes of the most basic human right, to life, insulted. All over even mainstream media are filled with negativism; crying failure.Read More »
By Johan Galtung
Washington-DC
In the shorter run, till around 2020, not good; in the longer run, from 2030, not bad at all. Short-run possibilities:
Politically: post-democracy, Congress more accountable to business than to people for election; the top executive power possibly sliding from the president to the supreme court justice, with money steering politics, protected as “freedom of expression”; Snowden-type revelations coming from once a year to once a month, once a week.
Economically: runaway inflation; accelerating inequality; deep misery affecting one third to a half of the population; depression.
Militarily: coup by evangelical fundamentalists to “give us our country back”/”give our, empire, our world”; using war to restore the economy; a temporary strong hand “to get things going”.
Culturally: declining faith in a covenant with a universal God as the Exceptional Chosen People; anomie, absence of compelling norms.
Socially: atomie, lacking social tissue, leading to collective and individual depression; increase in suicide and homicide (some by veterans back from meaningless wars); increasing “accidents” – cars, trains, planes – due to sloppiness, “don’t care”; school etc. massacres from once a year to once a week by suicidals taking others with them; general social malfunctioning; Jews used as scapegoats for the ills with rampant anti-Semitism, seeing Israel increasingly as a liability.Read More »
TFF Associates Blog 2011-2017 