Category: Johan Galtung

Fighting anti-semitism constructively

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

From Grenzach-Wyhlen, Germany

Anti-Semitism, AS, is to be against Jews as such; pre-judging all based on some, pars pro toto. Being anti any category humans are born into – woman-man, black-white – is a fatal disease, with prejudice escalating to hatred, leading to discrimination, escalating to war, even genocide. There is linearity; perpetrators to victims.

To prevent and cure this disease we must understand its causes, roots, and learn what, and what not, to do. To be against disease is not good enough. With the open mind provided by academic freedom, and freedom of speech as a basic human right, we have explored diseases like cancer to identify the roots, the carcinogens. Smoking, active and passive, is among them; saying so is not “blaming the victim”. Diseases are systems with feedbacks, as is prejudice-discrimination. Rooted in relations between Jews and others, in traumas of the past, conflicts in the present, and the victim feedback. There are loops.Read More »

At the UN – Two empires crumbling: U.S. and Israel

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

There is History in the UN 29 November 2012 vote: 138 YES to giving Palestine the UN status as “nonmember observer state”, only 9 NO, and 41 abstentions. Beyond Middle East politics the vote also mirrors the limits to the US global, and the Israeli regional, empires: 138 defy their grip and favor change, 41+9=50 do not, for various reasons. A crucial vote on a crucial issue is a crucial test. Who wants what?Read More »

The history of Peace: The Past and the Future?

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

Review of The Glorious Art of Peace by John Gittings, NYC: Oxford University Press, 2012. Info about this book and a video with Gittings here.

Editor’s note
This is Galtung’s draft which has been submitted to International Affairs.

What a wonderful idea, the history of peace! Something most people want to learn about, the art of peace! Like the history of health, food and love, as opposed to the history of wars, illness and hunger, of generals, kings and empires. This is the history of something that can inspire people, statesmen-women among them, to do better. This is a more adequate textbook for schools than the usual list of kings (and queens, like “divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived”).

Gittings’ historiography covers seven periods: “ancient peace” based on Greece and China; the “morality of peace” of the middle ages, from Jesus to the Crusades; the “humanist approach” of the early modern renaissance with a focus on Erasmus; then the “peace consciousness” of the enlightenment; the “alternatives to war” of the League of Nations, peaceful settlement of disputes, and nonviolence (Tolstoy, Gandhi); the “misappropriation of peace” from the UN to the Cold War; “giving peace a chance” from the Cold War to Iraq. The focus is on modernity with five of seven periods, and on the West, with laudable excursions into China and India-Russia for their impact on the West. Missing: the small non-West peace, like American Indian (Sioux confederation), Polynesian (ho’o pono pono), Zulu (ubuntu). Missing: the big non-West mega-peace between the biggest countries in the world, China and India. But Gittings covers a rich lot “from the Iliad to Iraq”.

Gittings’ methodology is empirical with events, countries and persons, and fascinating quotes and art photos; relating them causally and by similarities; always interestingly. Missing: theoretical explorations based on, say, conditioning by nature (geography, nutrition); by culture, like dualism for Greeks, yin/yang for Chinese; by structure, like caste/class verticality vs equity. But Gittings offers a lot of raw material for the theoretically minded.

The major impression from the book is the history of anti-war carried by persons and sometimes by groups; in other words, negative peace against violence. Of positive peace, like building equity and harmony, dissolving traumas and conflicts, there is close to nothing.

But Gittings is not to be faulted for this; rather, the civilizations he explored are. Read More »

Cultivating peace, preventing violence

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

… was the title of the Symposium at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia-USA 17-19 Nov 2012. An example of the blossoming wave of peace studies all over the US; inter-disciplinary and international. Most papers were given by very promising students on most aspects of peace studies. It is inconceivable that this will not have a major impact on US foreign policy in a generation or so, particularly with the demographic shift from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males voting Romney to the negations of all of that, including Blacks, Latins and women voting Obama. And with that shift the idea of a Chosen People with a Promised Land and a Covenant with the Almighty making them exceptional and indispensable, above the law of ordinary states, will slowly die.Read More »

Peace studies by peaceful means

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

Peace studies matter; same as health studies. We are born with the inclination to reject suffering, be it from violence or disease, and to seek wellbeing, call it peace, call it health. But we are not born with the knowledge and skills, theory and practice.

We have found causes and conditions for health in the body-mind-spirit context, as in the World Health Organization’s focus on health as physical, mental and social wellbeing. We rejected illness as divine punishment for the sick person’s Evil and explored pathogens–factors carrying diseases–such as traumas (also from violence, wars), contagious diseases, stress diseases (cardio-vascular, malignant tumors, mental disorders), chronic diseases that we can learn to live with, etc. To be adamantly against disease and in favor of health was seen as necessary – adding human will to the healthy as a sanogen, a factor carrying health. But health studies were needed. Knowledge and skills were needed. Theories were as indispensable for good health practice as vice versa.Read More »

A change in Washington ? (1)

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

From Washington, DC on Election Night

One of them won, of course, even if the real winners as usual were the non-voters, for whatever reason: men more than women. About 23:15 Obama passed the magic 50 percent mark, not of popular votes but of electoral colleges, with 302-206, well above 270; it turned into a landslide. Net result: status quo, no change.

The media did their best to make the presidential election look important, being the pinnacle, the altar on which democracy is built. Some democracy. Bad enough with a Supreme Court washing the process in six billion dollars as one more freedom of expression like talking words; any kind of words, libelous, often neither true nor relevant. Stupid TV spots. But many issues were somehow articulated, there were real disagreements, there was some kind of rhetorical left-right.Read More »

The European finance crisis: Germany/GIPSI

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

A crisis so massive–with the health network in Greece collapsing and 50 percent of Spanish youth unemployed–begs for big causes. Some unknown planet with great gravitation pull, some super-radioactive element not yet identified? Probably; there may be more causes lining up–efforts to destroy the welfare state and to save the US$ as the world currency-but for the time being we have to do with what we have. Here are Four Big ones:Read More »

The Peace Prize: Nobel or ignoble?

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

Both, of course. Well deserved for EU’s past and for relations within, in the tradition of West rewarding West. But critics are right about relations without and the present; like debt bondage of GIPSI–Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland/EU periphery–to Germany.

But first, the arguments in favor.

Two French politicians, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, declared that Germany had been so atrocious that it had to become member of the family, and then created the family: Genius, peace genius. On 1 Jan, 1958 the European Community embodied the Treaty of Rome, which was signed in 1957 by a horde of men. It certainly fulfilled Nobel’s testament for reducing standing armies against each other and increasing understanding. The prize did not live up to the condition of the preceding year though. But events need some time to prove themselves, like Obama’s rhetoric – and, more importantly: a major omission; but better late than never.Read More »

Turkey: Cyprus, Kurds, Armenia and Syria

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

There was a time, a century or so ago, when Turkey was the “sick man of Europe”. Times are a-changing. Today Turkey is quite healthy, and much of Europe is sick, suffering from gross institutional and economic problems, including a flagrant inequality within and between countries, between a creditor and a periphery of debtors in bondage.

This in no way means that Turkey is problem-free; no country is. The focus here is on four problems involving other nations: the Greeks, the Kurds, the Armenians and the many nations in Syria. With an explicit foreign policy of zero problems with neighbors great progress has been made, but much remains to be done.Read More »

The Balkan wars at 100: Four ways to good neighborhood

JOLeave a comment

By Johan Galtung

*Keynote Speech, Istanbul, Hacettepe University, 4 October 2012

Empires come and go. The Ottoman-Muslim Empire was among the better whereas the Iberian-Catholic and the European-Protestant were among the worst.

The religions of the kitab were respected and Turkish language was not imposed. Religious-linguistic entities in the Balkans survived, as opposed to those in Latin-Caribbean America. National independence movements succeeded: Greece in 1829, Serbia and Romania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Albania in 1912.

But the nation-states were incomplete. And on October 8, 1912 – a century ago – the Balkan League–Serbia-Bulgaria-Greece-Montenegro–declared war on the Ottoman Empire; and won. Then came the Second Balkan war in 1913, among the victors, Serbia-Greece-Romania against Bulgaria over Macedonia. Bulgaria lost.

Today this all sounds disturbingly familiar; but it is very far from Kant’s “eternal peace”. The wars may be over right now but recent ones have claimed many more lives than the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, estimated at 122,000 killed in action, 20,000 from wounds and 82,000 from disease. Positive peace seems far away; there is only some unstable negative peace.

This keynote will use a four factor formula for positive peace…Read More »