Category: Psychology – war & peace

Living in the 21st Century

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By Richard Falk

The following post is more personal than is my natural mode of communicating on this website. I hope it causes no offense. It is confessional to the extent of acknowledging my own surroundings of digital devices that while liberating in some respects are repressive in others. To sustain our freedom under these ‘postmodern’ conditions requires the rechristening of meditative intelligence (as distinct from the instrumental rationality that acted as wet nurse of the ‘modern.’

Ever since I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen I have been haunted by the suggestive resonance of its opening line:

“When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.”

Of course, Rankine allows this quietness to evoke her anguishing memories of past subtle racist slights that are the hurtful daily experiences of embedded racism that has for centuries undermined the normative pretensions of ‘civilization,’ not only here in the United States, but globally. Recently, a series of police atrocities throughout America has reminded us ever so forcefully that the election of an African American as president did not mean the end of racism, but alarmingly, an ugly new beginning, an apt occasion for the emergence of Black Lives Matter. (You may listen to Rankine here, Editor)

It is the first part of Rankine’s sentence that speaks so simply, yet so responsively, to the circumstance of our 21st century reality, our struggles with loneliness while treasuring the self-discoveries that are uniquely dependent on reflective solitude.

What Rankine is telling us is that digital modernity has diminished our capacity to be creatively alone and sufficiently sensitive to the arts of self-discovery.Read More »

TFF PressInfo # 342 – The iron fist inside a velvet glove

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By Jonathan Power

“1789 is an historic date but it is not an historic example”. The French Revolution, violent to its fingertips, began with the highest motives, led by the most inspired and determined of people, but descended step by step into its own self-created inferno where the revolution consumed its own children.

Violence begets violence and, as Martin Luther King said, “The means and the ends must cohere. We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represents the ideal in the making, and the end in process. And, ultimately, you can’t reach your good ends through evil means, because the means represents the seed and the end the tree.”

According Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, writing in the August, 2014, edition of Foreign Affairs, “Between 1900 and 2006 campaigns of nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes were twice as likely to succeed as violent movements. Nonviolent resistance also increased the chances that the overthrow of a dictatorship would lead to peace and democratic rule. This was true even in highly authoritarian and repressive countries, where one might expect nonviolent resistance to fail.”

Critics of nonviolence are always swift to cite cases when non-violent campaigns were counterproductive – the student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the failure of the Arab Spring where non-violent protests were hijacked by extremists, as in Syria, or were self-sabotaged by their leaders who had no strategy for the long term, as in Egypt.

More recently in Ukraine the ferment unleashed by those protesting against the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych while achieving its aim of toppling him has been compromised by the infiltration of extreme rightists which, in turn, worked to provoke Russian military intervention in the east.

All such criticisms are right. But Read More »

Why a simple life matters

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By Kamran Mofid

The Path to peace and happiness lies in the simple things in life

Ever wish you had a few more hours in the day so you could get everything done you need to get finished?

What if, instead of always trying to do more, we slowed down a little and embraced a slower paced life. What if we didn’t try to do everything, but slowed down and concentrated only on the things that are truly valuable and important to us.

A slower paced life introduces margin and gives us more awareness about how we spend our time. Slow doesn’t happen naturally. In fact, our lives tend to pile more and more on because we rarely remove commitments even if we add new ones. It’s almost like that old computer that just keeps piling on junk and virus’ until it gets so slow it needs a reformat or a trip to the trash can. Is your life ready for a reboot? Are you ready to embrace a slower paced life?

Continued here…

Hiroshima and the Dangers of a New Cold War

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By Farhang Jahanpour

On the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is important to look back at the reasons for those barbaric acts and to look forward to what needs to be done.
The First and the Second World Wars were the most devastating wars ever waged in history. Nevertheless, although those wars killed tens of millions of human beings and destroyed many cities, the end of the Second World War witnessed the use of a new category of weapons by the United States that have the potential to end human civilization as we know it.

Grotesquely called ‘Little Boy’, the bomb that flattened Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, was a uranium bomb that killed between 130,000-140,000 civilians instantly, and many thousands later. ‘Fat Man’ that blasted Nagasaki three days later, was a plutonium bomb and killed about 70,000 people instantly.

There has been a great deal of debate about whether the use of those bombs was necessary to force Japan’s surrender and to end the war. While these debates seem archaic and a part of history, nevertheless, it is important to see whether those weapons were necessary from a military point of view, or whether they had other purposes, something that would have relevance for us today.

First of all, it is remarkable that those two bombs were dropped on two non-military targets, and the vast majority of those killed were civilians.

The two bombs were of two different types, one was a uranium and the other a plutonium bomb. They constituted the two most horrendous single instances of mass slaughter in the history of the world, yet they have not received the attention that they deserve and appropriate lessons have not been learned. It is important to point out these facts to American citizens who have been kept mainly in the dark regarding their past history.

The Germans have apologized to the Jews and to the Poles for Nazi atrocities. The Japanese have apologized to the Chinese and the Koreans, and even to the United States for failing to break off diplomatic relations before attacking Pearl Harbor. The Russians have apologized to the Poles for atrocities committed against civilians, and to the Japanese for abuse of prisoners.

The Soviet Communist Party even apologized for foreign policy errors that “heightened tension with the West.” Pope John Paul II apologized for the Catholic Church’s past behavior towards the Jews. Britain has apologized for slavery. The Australian prime minister has apologized for the treatment of the aborigines.

Yet up till now there has not been an American apology for those two horrendous acts of genocide in Japan. Read More »

TFF PressInfo # 333 – Look at nuclear weapons in new ways!

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By Jan Oberg

It’s absolutely necessary to remember what happened 70 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see the movies from then, listen to the survivors, the hibakusa. But it isn’t enough for us to rid the world of these crimes-against-humanity weapons. And that we must.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki is history and it is also the essence of the age you and I live in – the nuclear age. If the hypothesis is that by showing these films, we create opinion against nuclear weapons, 70 years of every more nuclearism should be enough to conclude that that hypothesis is plain wrong.

There is a need for a frontal attack on not only the weapons but on the nuclearism – the thinking/ideology on which they are based and made to look ‘necessary’ for security and peace.

Nuclear weapons – only for terrorists

At its core, terrorism is about harming or killing innocent people and not only combatants. Any country that possesses nukes is aware that nukes can’t be used without killing millions of innocent people – infinitely more lethal than Al-Qaeda, ISIS etc. Since 9/11 governments and media have conveniently promoted the idea that terrorism is only about small non-governmental groups and thus tried to make us forget that the nuclear ‘haves’ themselves practise state terrorism and hold the humanity hostage to potential civilizational genocide (omnicide).

Dictatorship

No nuclear state has ever dared to hold a referendum and ask its citizens: Do you or do you not accept to be defended by a nuclear arsenal? Nuclear weapons with the omnicidal -kill all and everything – characteristics is pure dictatorship, incompatible with both parliamentary and direct democracy. And freedom.

Citizens generally have more, or better, morals than governments and do not wish to see themselves, their neighbours or fellow human beings around the world burn up in a process that would make the Holocaust look like a cozy afternoon tea party. In short, nuclear weapons states either arrange referendums or must accept the label dictatorship.

The idea that a few hundred politicians and military people in the world’s nuclear states have a self-appointed right to play God and decide whether project humankind shall continue or not belongs to the realm of the civilisational perverse or the Theatre of the Absurd. Such people must run on the assumption, deep down, that they are Chosen People with a higher mission. Gandhi rightly called Western civilisation diluted fascism.

Unethical

Why? Because – simply – there can be no political or other goal that justifies the use of this doomsday weapon and the killing of millions of people, or making the earth uninhabitable.

Possession versus proliferation

The trick played on us all since 1945 is that there are some ‘responsible’ – predominantly Christian, Western – countries that can, should, or must, have nuclear weapons and then there are some irresponsible governments/leaders elsewhere that must be prevented by all means from acquiring them. In other words, that proliferation rather than possession is the problem. However, it is built into the Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT, that those who don’t have nuclear weapons shall abstain from acquiring them as a quid pro quo for the nuclear-haves to disarm theirs completely.

That is, the whole world shall become a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ).

Those who have nuclear weapons provoke others to get them too. Possession leads to proliferation.

The recent negotiations with Iran is a good example of this bizarre world view: the five nuclear terrorist states, sitting on enough nukes to blow up the world several times over and who have systematically violated international law in general and the NPT in particular, tell Iran – which abides by the NPT and doesn’t want nuclear weapons – that it must never obtain nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, they turn a blind eye to nuclear terrorist state, Israel’s 50+ years old nuclear arsenals.

And it is all actively assisted by mainstram media who seem to lack the knowledge and/or intellectual capacity to challenge this whole set-up – including the racist belief structure that “we have a God-given right and are more responsible than everybody else – particularly non-Christians…”

But what about deterrence?

You’ve heard the philosophical nonsense repatedly over 70 years: Nuclear weapons are good to deter everyone from starting the ‘third world war’. That nukes are here to never be used. That no one would start that war because he/she would know that there would be a mass murder on one’s own population in a second strike, retaliation. But think! Two small, simple counterarguments:

a) You cannot deter anyone from doing something unless you are willing to implement your threat, your deterrent. If A knows that B would never use his nukes, A would not be afraid of the retaliation. Thus, every nuclear weapons state is ready to use nukes under some defined circumstance; if not there is no deterrence whatsoever.

b) The United States has long ago done two things (as the only one on earth): 1) decided on a doctrine in which the use of small nukes in a conventional role is fundamental, thus blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons; 2) its missile defence (that it also wants in Europe) is about preventing a second strike back – shooting down retaliatory missiles – so it can start, fight and win a nuclear war without being harmed itself. Or so it can hope.

There are many other aspects – but let’s mention just one more:

Nuclear weapons have already caused wars

The war on Iraq is a good example. If Iran will be bombed – which can’t be excluded at all – it’s about nuclear weapons. Ukraine is about expanding nuclear-based NATO and nuclear-based EU right up to the border of Russia. The enemy image of North Korea – where war can also not be excluded in the future – is mainly about it being a nuclear weapons state. The conflicts surrounding Israel are intimately connected with its nuclear weapons threatening everyone – non-nuclear – around it.

Hope

No, let’s rid the world of this civilisational mistake. Nuclearism and nuclear deterrence is the world most dangerous ideology comparable to slavery, absolute monarchy and cannibalism that we have decided – because we are humans and civilised and can think and feel – to put behind us.

There is no co-existence possible between nuclear weapons on the one hand and democracy, peace and civilisation on the other.

It’s time to regai hope by looking at all the – civilised – non-nuclear countries and follow their example. Thus, 99% of the southern hemisphere landmass is nuclear weapons free. 60% of the 193 states, with 33% of the world population, are included in this free zone.

And here are the countries which have contemplated to obtain – but decided to abstain from – nuclear weapons (including those who have had them and gotten rid of them): Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Libya, Austria, Mongolia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Japan, Antartica, the Seabed, Outer Space. Finally, dozens of countries have the technical capacity but would not dream of joining the nuclear club.

The West, the U.S. in particular, that started the terrible Nuclear Age should now follow the far majority of humanity, apologise for its nuclearism and move to zero.

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 »

TFF PressInfo # 330 – Iran’s Nuclear Deal: A great achievement, but hard work ahead

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By Farhang Jahanpour

The announcement of the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers is a rare moment in history that gives us hope and provides a basis for optimism.

By contemplating what the alternative would have entailed, any agreement, no matter how defective, is a great achievement and has to be welcomed.

However, the indications are that, as the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has declared at a joint press conference with the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, there has been a win-win agreement that will benefit everyone. In short, they have made history.

Ms. Mogherini said: “It is a decision that can open the way to a new chapter in international relations. I think this is a sign of hope for the entire world.” The Iranian foreign minister echoed those sentiments and described the deal as “a historic moment”.

He continued: “Today could have been the end of hope, but now we are starting a new chapter of hope.” Zarif rightly pointed out that the deal has ended an unnecessary conflict. As the TFF Associate Gareth Porter has shown in his book of the same title, it was in fact “A Manufactured Crisis”.

It should be remembered that Iran had been ready since 2003 to reach a nuclear deal when she agreed to ratify the Additional Protocol and voluntarily suspended enrichment for two years. The Bush Administration killed that deal by illegally stating that, contrary to the NPT regulations, Iran was not allowed to have any enrichment on her soil. Read More »

TFF PressInfo # 329: Congratulations and thank you, Iran!

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By Jan Oberg

Much better on the 14th of July, the French Revolution Day, than the 13th would have been. And it is a kind of revolution – namely, solving problems at the table rather than through yet another failed, counterproductive and self-defeating Western war on a Middle Eastern country.

A victory for non-violence and intelligence over violence and human folly.

Truly a victory for civilisation, for civilised manners – and with the “object” itself being a civilisation.

Javad Zarif – Iran’s brilliant foreign minister, perhaps the most professional and with the most friendly body language, including smiles, among peers anywhere – and his team achieved the impossible, namely to get a deal in an extremely a-symmetric conflict and negotiation set-up.

A-symmetry? Yes, to the trained conflict eye.

There’s been the Western bullying of Iran since the CIA-led US and UK coup d’etat against Iran’s democratic leader in 1953.

There has been Read More »