Category: Culture & religion

Questioning Obamacare for Syria

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By Richard Falk

There is something particularly distressing about the ongoing debate on authorizing an internationally illegal and immoral military attack on Syria: a show of political support on the right. Such a ‘coming together’ of some of the center and much of the right in the American Congress has been sadly absent during Obama presidency until now, whether the issue was health, taxes, social services, keeping the government running, and immigration.

And this support emerges on the rare occasion when a majority of American citizens, not known for their cosmopolitan sentiments or affection for the UN Charter, oppose attacking Syria, as was the British Parliament, and as is public opinion throughout Europe. In such a setting, it is not only international law and the UN are being repudiated in a war/peace situation, but the whole fabric of democratic accountability to law and the judgment of the people.

At least we can conclude that the reactionary tendency in American political life over the course of the last decade or so is consistent in its adherence to irresponsible means in the pursuit of irresponsible ends.Read More »

The greatest speech on earth

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By Jonathan Power

Fifty years ago Martin Luther King made his earth-shattering “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

Is there anybody who watches and listens to it on YouTube not moved to the soles of their shoes? I’ve heard it a hundred times and still it stirs me. His dream that one day his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” is one of the greatest lines in all oratory. The south of the US, he said, was “sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression”.

Within ten years of the end of America’s civil war, fought over the issue of slavery, southern white Democrats had established state constitutions that stripped black citizens of their newly won political rights. Terrorist groups like the Klu Klux Klan destroyed black schools and churches and murdered at will. At the time of Dr King’s speech they were still doing it. Three weeks after his speech Klansman bombed a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls.

At the time of the March on Washington I was working in Africa. But at the next great event in the civil rights movement in 1965 I was there – in Selma, where Dr King led marchers from the segregated town – where a black couldn’t even sit in the same cafe as a white man to drink a cup of coffee – to the state capital of Montgomery. Read More »

The spreading wings of Islamophobia in Egypt

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By Richard Falk

The Orwellian features of the military takeover in Egypt have received attention, although the use of language to evade unwanted truth continues because incentives to do so persist. For this reason, Washington has remained unwilling to call what happened in Egypt on July 3rd as a coup, despite its unmistakable character. The nature of Egypt’s coup has daily become more and more evident.

It is now clear that not only was the takeover properly described as coup, but it has turned out to be a particularly bloody coup that is now being reinforced by a total lockdown of opposition forces and democratic options, including even dissenting opinions.Read More »

Civilization dialogue as a way of life

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By Johan Galtung

Civilization: there are six sources of inspiration today, vying for the attention of a humanity looking for goals and means. Two of them are Western secular, liberal and Marxist, defining to a large extent the USA and the former Soviet Union, but not identical with them. Two of them are Oriental amalgams of civilizations, the Japanese Shinto-Confucian-Buddhist civilization, trying to be Western liberal, and the Chinese Daoist-Confucian-Buddhist civilization with strong elements of Western liberal and Western Marxist. And two of them are in-between: the Islamic and the Buddhist civilizations.[i]

Dialogue: it simply has to happen. Read More »

Competition and cooperation: Finland’s school system

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By Johan Galtung

“The Secrets to Finland’s Success with School—and Everything”, The Atlantic (11-Jul-2013), has many messages to a US readership from that particular welfare state. One of them is a school system which ranks as one of the world’s best with no standard testing or South-/and East!/Asian “cramming”; limiting student testing to a necessary minimum; there is less emphasis on competition. And another, closely related, Finns have an incredible equality and very little poverty; an extremely low child-poverty rate. The two points are related.

The article, written by Olga Khazan, wisely points to smallness and high homogeneity as two factors underlying the “success”, also known to the other Nordic countries. However, as pointed out, there are “sizeable Swedish and Russian-speaking communities – the former ruling the country till 1809, the latter on till the Russian 1917 revolution–took time to even it out. What the article has not picked up is the closeness to that revolution, and its impact on the labor movements: lifting the bottom up for more equality is possible; education and health are basic tools; it is the task of the government; it requires planning; and, what USSR failed to pick up: it works better with democracy.Read More »

Death of a child and the promises of peace dialogue

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By Chaiwat Satha-Anand

On a hot summer afternoon, nothing is better than an ice-cream. When you are nine, the summer ice-cream your mom bought for you when she took you to a fair or something like that attained beautiful meaning.

Nisofian Nisani was in front of the ice-cream shop on Suwanmongkol Road in downtown Pattani when the 5 kg bomb exploded and took away his young life back to the Mercy of God on March 21, 2013 at 1.30 p.m. Fourteen others including his mother were also wounded in the violence that has claimed more than 5,000 lives and physically wounded more than 10,000 people in the past 9 years in southern Thailand, marking this deadly conflict as one of the most mysteriously ferocious in the world today.

The death of this boy at this time assumes special significance since this was the first time an attack on civilians has occurred after the signing of the “General Consensus on Peace Dialogue Process” in Kuala Lumpur Read More »

The Iraq War – 10 years later

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By Richard Falk

After a decade of combat, casualties, massive displacement, persisting violence, enhanced sectarian tension and violence between Shi’ias and Sunnis, periodic suicide bombings, and autocratic governance, a negative assessment of the Iraq War as a strategic move by the United States, United Kingdom, and a few of their secondary allies, including Japan, seems near universal.

Not only the regionally destabilizing outcome, including the blowback effect of perversely adding weight to Iran’s overall diplomatic influence, but the reputational costs in the Middle East associated with an imprudent, destructive, and failed military intervention make the Iraq War the worst American foreign policy disaster since its defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s, and undertaken with an even less persuasive legal, moral, and political rationale.

Most geopolitical accounting assessments do not bother to consider the damage to the United Nations and international law arising from an aggressive use of force in flagrant violation of the UN Charter, Read More »

Pope Francis I – A Jesuit

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By Johan Galtung

The black smoke turned white, a captivating dramaturgy since 1870. And there he was on the balcony, addressing the huge crowd the way St Francis of Assisi did, fratelli, sorelle, brothers, sisters – we are all God’s children. He took to the roles as Bishop of Rome and Holy Father like a fish to water, with a mild voice, becoming a mild face, the first Latin American pope, a part of the world moving South. With dark shadows from Argentinean fascism for reflection, learning.

Fratello lupo, St Francis said, Brother Wolf, the ferocious wolf of Gubbio, eating villagers, taken in by St Francis, persuaded to eat leftovers from meals instead, ends up joining the villagers.

Sorella morte, St Francis said, Sister Death, when time had come, embracing the inevitable as a part of his immense spirituality. But the Gubbio violence was not inevitable; the wolf was starving, nothing to eat, the solution was food. Like wolf, like poor people, people in misery, anywhere, at any time. The Franciscan message.

Cardinal Bergoglio has taken on a heavy inheritance in his choice of name; the forgettable Cardinal Ratzinger was much more modest. He has committed himself not only to the poor, but to peace, the unspoken word in the oceans of commentary, to horizontal peace between killers with teeth and arms, wolves and villagers, and to the vertical violence of starvation and misery, due to the greed of humans.Read More »

Thailand – Asian tiger prowling

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By Jonathan Power

Dateline: Bangkok

“Thai politics is a cross between Venezuela and Italy”, observed my Thai journalist friend. “Chavez and Berlusconi rolled into one is what we have.”

Deposed prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who lives in exile in Dubai, still manages to pull many of the strings of Thai politics- as does Berlusconi when not actually in office. His sister, Yingluck, is now prime minister and she provides the Chavez-style charisma for the family. Young, energetic and attractive she has wooed the voters to her side in a less divisive way than her brother.

Thailand is the only country in south-east Asia to have never experienced colonial rule. Buddhism, the monarchy and the military have been the principal shapers of its evolution from peasant society to a modern industrial power house that has seen its economy almost in continuous boom (with a a big collapse in 1997 and short pause 3 years ago) for two generations. Between 1985 and 1996 it was the world’s fastest growing economy, averaging a phenomenal 12% a year. It is expected to be 7.5% this year, the same as China.

Democracy is relatively new to Thailand. Read More »

Hugo Chavez: A maker of history

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By Johan Galtung

That his life and his deeds had black dots is part of the story; but that should not block seeing the greatness of a maker of history.

First, in his own society, Venezuela, he lifted the bottom people up from misery, into economic wellness, political participation, cultural pride (of their often African, or Indian, blood), social dignity; much beyond Gini coefficients to measure increasing equality. Even the rich human rights language is too bland to reflect all that.

Second, he did the same for Latin America; he helped lift the bottom countries up, also under the name of the iconic Simón Bolívar: Cuba and Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, Brazil to mention some.

Of course the two policies are related. Colombia with its immense record of violence 1948-2013, is a pariah country and can only be lifted up by lifting its bottom up, attacking flagrant inequality. Chávez and his fellow leaders Castro and Ortega, Correa and Moráles, Lula, are on line. The leadership of the continent, with Kirchner from Argentina, and the Salvador Allende icon from Chile! A formidable team; well beyond the European leaders trying to manage their crises.Read More »