Category: Johan Galtung

Israel-USA vs Iran: Talk Peace!

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By Johan Galtung

The state system at its worst: trading insults and threats, sanctions, readiness to use extreme violence, forward deployment of US troops in Israel as hostages to guarantee US involvement, disregard for common people and the effects of warfare in the Middle East and the world. The options are harder sanctions, or war. The far better option, sitting down, with mediators, talking and searching for solutions, is absent. Polarization, escalation, the material of which wars are made fill the media. What a shame.Read More »

Mourad Dhina, a light in the Algerian darkness, arrested

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By Johan Galtung

Galtung here focuses on a human rights case which – like the terrible mass slaughter in Algeria in the 1990s – have attracted little attention in the West. Please circulate the letter to the French prime minister below.

Syria is horrible. Assad should step down immediately, a coalition government should come into being, and a thousand mediators should talk with the many parties, maybe with a federation in view. But Algeria is even worse.Read More »

Arne Næss – the next hundred years

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By Johan Galtung
Speech given in Oslo on January 27, 2012

Norway’s by any comparison greatest philosopher was born one hundred years ago today, and died close to the age of 97. A world philosopher, a human being with an incredible radiation. Nobody who came close to him remained the same.

Arne Næss 27 January 1912 - 12 January 2009

What was his basic theme? In one word: nonviolence, but in a broader and deeper sense than most approaching demanding idea.

Arne Næss was very sensitive to verbal violence in debates; his answer was objectivity. He identified physical violence in political struggle; his answer was Gandhian nonviolence, strongly inspired as a student in Paris early 1930s by Indian students strongly convinced that nonviolence was the way. Read More »

Those poor, moody credit rating agency standards

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By Johan Galtung

What are the three credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch – 95 percent of the rating “industry” – about? Not very transparent, yet “Standard & Poor’s: silent but deadly” (El País, 16 Jan 2012), stimulates some reflections.

The agencies are US, which goes well with the tendency of the USA to sit in judgment of other countries. It also goes well with something more dangerous: the tendency of other countries to take that judgment seriously. The new prime minister of Spain said he needed no lecturing (from the agencies) on the Spanish economy; but the downgrading shook Spain. Why does Europe not have its own agencies, rating all 50 US states, for instance, like US agencies rate EU members? Read More »

Davos: The 1% world

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By Johan Galtung

From Alfàz del Pi, Spain

We are heading for a new load of advice from the self-appointed “World Economic Forum”, still having fresh in mind their utter inability to come to grips with the September 2008 manifestation of the world economic crisis when they met three years ago. So, what are they going to talk about now?

Lee Howell, in “The failure of governance in a hyperconnected world”, International Herald Tribune, 11 Jan 2012, gives us a preview. Read More »

Who was Jesus?

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By Johan Galtung

Alfàs del Pi, Spain

The church was not as overfilled as it used to be for midnight mass on Christmas eve.  But the ritual unfolded as it has done for centuries, around John 3:16 “little bible”, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”.  And the priest spoke about two parallel Christmases, one spiritual, of the bible, and one material with gifts, food, and licores.

Could there also be two parallel Jesuses, one the Christ, and the other a revolutionary, fighting the Roman Empire and its client elite in the province conquered in 63bC?  Matthias Schulz (Der Spiegel 17 2011) has theologians and historians elaborate that thesis, leaning toward the revolutionary Jesus, disturbingly similar to his look-alike and act-alike Che Guevara two millennia later, also fighting an empire, also killed by imperial clients.Read More »

Right wing extremism – or fascism?

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By Johan Galtung

This is about neo-nazis underground killing 140 people–foreigners, police, Jews, since the German reunification–, and a monster in Norway going to war against his own country on 22 July 2011–killing 77, in his view traitors paving the way for an islamic take-over.

And it is about how to understand these phenomena.Read More »

Poor USA: What a choice!

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By Johan Galtung

The Occupy Movement is a sign of US sanity.  Leaderless makes it less vulnerable, immensely consciousness-raising, not insisting on any one single analysis or remedy–for the time being.  People so concerned that they sacrifice some personal comfort–gaining togetherness and a sense of meaning, a gift for a democracy.

And what a sign of US insanity their touch with authority was: no leading politicians eager to preach or learn or both, but tear gas, pepper spray, evictions.  In the 1960’s Vietnam era, Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara ultimately left his office to talk sense into demonstrators.  It worked-the other way around.  That the social worker from Chicago, Obama, did not, is a shame.Read More »

Three crises – Three ideas

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By Johan Galtung

Speech delivered at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on 1 Dec  2011

Your Excellencies,

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of NAM, the Nonaligned Movement; a great success.  They were not party to the madness of NATO-WTO (Warsaw Treaty Organization) confrontation and arms race, even nuclear. NAM was headed by two country triads, India-Indonesia-Yugoslavia and Finland-Sweden-Austria, and two high quality leader triads, Nehru-Soekarno-Tito and Kekkonen-Palme-Kreisky.  Their in-between roles gave the world some normalcy in the madness.  Much needed for West-Islam today; but that quality leadership is missing.Read More »