TFF Associates & Themes Blog

Archive for the ‘Reflections, essays & more’ Category

By Richard Falk

Richard Falk

When Nehru was taking a train on his return to India after studying abroad he read of the Japanese victory over Russia in the 1904-05 Russo Japanese War. At that moment he had an epiphany, realizing the hitherto unthinkable, that the British Empire was vulnerable to Indian nationalism. An earlier understanding of the colonial reality by native peoples generally subscribed to the postulates of hard power primacy making it futile or worse to challenge a colonial master, although throughout history there were always pockets of resistance.

This soft power attribute of colonial hard power by way of intimidation and a façade of invincibility is what made colonialism efficient and profitable for so long at the great expense of colonized peoples.

A traditional colonial occupation assumes that the foreign domineering presence, while oppressive and exploitative, refrains from ethnic cleansing or genocide in relation to the indigenous population.

When settler versions of colonialism emerged in relation to the Western Hemisphere and regions occupied by traditional peoples that were without either population density or some kind of industrial capability, the occupier managed to achieve enduring control Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

Just before former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday made his stunning criticism of the West that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to said the West had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it as it did in Germany after the Second World War).

Gorbachev has long been the West’s pet political darling, (although the New York Times didn’t report this speech) – for undoing the straitjacket that enveloped Soviet society, for allowing the reunification of Germany and for being the major contributor to ending the Cold War.

So the question is will the West listen to him now? Will it listen to his point that the expansion of NATO has made Russia feel threatened?

Will it understand that there is a good reason why he and an overwhelming majority of Russians support President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy? Will it share his fear that “we are on the brink of a new Cold War”?

One of the people I talked to Read the rest of this entry »

Perestroika as a Challenge to the West

By Jan Oberg

Jan Oberg

Written April 1990
Published in Bulletin of Peace Proposals 3-1990, pp 287-298 and on TFF’s homepage at the same time

1. Four hypotheses

The West has lost a close enemy, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Which reactions can be discerned and what psycho-political emotions are they indicative of? How did the West cope with the first years of this new post-Cold War situation? Can we mourn the death of an enemy, can we heal ourselves after the loss? How does one learn to live a new life without a close enemy? Has the West done what it ought to do for itself and for the former enemy?

“The West” of course is a term hanging loose. We employ it in this article as meaning interchangeably “NATO, the Western hemisphere, the United States and Western Europe and a few cases, Western or Occidental culture”.

The first hypothesis of this essay is that the West, i.e. the Western part of the Occidental civilization, is traumatized by the loss of its Eastern brother.

The second is that we have discussed far too little what it means for the West and projected all our attention on the Soviet Union, i.e. acted as spectators in a certain sense.

The third hypothesis, therefore, is that the West is increasingly stuck in a self-congratulatory “we have won the cold war and socialism is dead” attitude which only increases the likelihood that it will be taken even more by surprise in the future.

And the fourth hypothesis is that the changes in the Eastern Occidental brother occur simultaneously with a number of challenges within the Western Occidental system and is bound, ultimately, to pose an overwhelming challenge to our own system. There is now an historical opportunity, a new political space and time to be filled by cooperation and exciting visions of a common future. We believe that the West has something to learn from the idea, not the content, of perestroika, i.e. experimenting with deep non-violent change in one’s own system the outcome of which cannot be known with any precision.

Czech playwright and president, Václav Havel, when in January 1990 adressing the Polish sejmen, argued that Eastern Europe should not be seen as a poor dissident or a bewildered prisoner set free but “as someone who has something to offer, namely spiritual and moral inspiration, daring peace initiatives, an unexploited creative potential, an ethos of new freedom and impulses toward bold and quick-moving solutions.” And he rounded off this speech with the following words (author’s translation again): “The most dangerous enemy today is not the dark forces of totalitarianism, intriguers or leagues of gangsters – it is our own dark sides. My program as president is therefore based on the principle of infusing spirituality, moral responsibility, humanity and humility into politics and, thus, insist on there being something higher than we humans, that our deeds shall not disappear into the dark holes of our time but be preserved, somewhere, investigated, evaluated – that we have neither a right nor a reason to maintain that we understand everything or can do everything.”

One may wonder with whom in the West Havel can have a dialogue at this level? Who in the West would respond in these existential and visionary terms? Why is the response of the West first of all Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung

“Countercyclicity” means that both move through history in cycles, up and down; with one moving up when the other moves down.

Christianity started with its founder crucified, like the first pope St Peter; Christians were tortured, killed, expelled from Jewish Palestine. But then indeed up, as religio licita in the Roman Empire in 313, defined in Nicaea in 325 by Emperor Constantine. The Empire split in 395, with a Catholic Church in the West – contracting, monastic after the Western Empire fell in 476 – and an Orthodox Church in the East, till Constantinople became Istanbul in 1453 – Moscow became “the Third Rome”.

Islam started with the Prophet’s hizrat, migration from Mecca to Medina as city-state under Mohammed till he died in 632. From then till the end of the umayyad Damascus dynasty in 750, Islam covered the lands from Iberia (not Asturias) as the caliphate of Cordoba in 711, to Iran. Moving on, the abassid Baghdad dynasty till the 1258 massacre by Mongols, the sultanates of Delhi in 1192, Pattani now Thailand, Aceh in Sumatra; Sulu and Maguindanao in Mindanao, Philippines in 1405, 1490s.

Ahead of expansionist Christian Magellan 1520-21. After Columbus 1492 – the arch-year of Christian expansion – Read the rest of this entry »

By Farhang Jahanpour

Part 2 of this series.

A shorter version of this article was published by IPS

The Origins

When all of a sudden ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Sham) emerged on the scene, and in a matter of days occupied large swathes of mainly Sunni-inhabited parts of Iraq and Syria, including Iraq’s second city Mosul and Saddam Hussein’s birthplace Tikrit and called itself the Islamic State, many people, not least Western politicians and intelligence services, were taken by surprise.

This feeling of shock and repeated reversals in the past has been due to widespread ignorance or the willful neglect of history, and general unwillingness by politicians and pundits to look at the reality as it is or to explore the root causes of the issues in the Middle East from a historical, religious and ethnic point of view.

Most politicians have been afflicted by short-termism and they stumble from one crisis to the next without an overall strategy and without the ability to look beyond their noses. Read the rest of this entry »

By Richard Falk

Richard Falk

Before ISIS

The beheading of American and British journalists who were being held hostage by ISIS creates a truly horrifying spectacle, and quite understandably mobilizes the political will to destroy the political actor who so shocks and frightens the Western sensibility, which is far from being free from responsibility for such lurid incidents.

Never in modern times has there been a clearer example of violence begetting violence.

And we need to ask ‘to what end?’ Political leaders in the West are remarkably silent and dishonest about what it is that they wish to achieve in this region beset since 2011 by a quite terrifying outbreak of political extremism, whether from above as in the cases of Syria, Egypt, and Israel or from below as with ISIS and al-Nusra.

It is difficult to recall that at the start of 2011, just three years ago, progressive voices around the world were inspired by the Arab upheavals, especially in Egypt and Tunisia, that burst upon the political scene unexpectedly.

These extraordinary events appeared to repudiate the prevailing patterns of authoritarian, exploitative, and corrupt collaboration between oppressive domestic elites, neoliberal economic forces, and the regional imperial juggernaut that had kept this humanly disastrous reality stable for so long. Yet even during that time of optimism about the Arab future, a closer scrutiny of what was happening disclosed many reasons to be worried. It is helpful to look to this recent past to have some comprehension of the perplexing present.

A Revolutionary Spirit Without Revolutionary Action

The goals of these upheavals were far too ambitious to be realized by such limited challenges directed at the established order. These movements were essentially confined to getting rid of a hated ruler. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

Despite Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and Southern Sudan the world is a lot more peaceful than it was at the end of the Cold War and shows no sign of returning to the bad old days when there were some 25 wars going on every year. Now it is down to about a dozen.

The task today is to keep that number going down – a difficult job when the outbreak of conflict in Syria, Libya and Ukraine have turned the graph upwards a few notches for the first time.

Protagonists in political quarrels tend to push the non-violent activists to one side – as they have done in Syria, Libya, Gaza and Ukraine.

This is not a good tactic as these situations have clearly shown. In Syria whole parts of cities have been reduced to rubble. Likewise in Gaza. In Ukraine this is starting to happen.

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan argue that the prospects for civil resistance to bring about political change are commonly undersold. Read the rest of this entry »

By Richard Falk

Richard Falk

Contrary to much conventional thinking that treats ‘anti-Semitism’ as exclusively a form of ethnic hatred, there is a second kind of attitude that is alleged to be ‘anti-Semitism’ because it is critical, often justifiably so, of Zionism and Israel’s policies and practices.

This second type of supposed anti-Semitism is a tactic deployed to discredit critics of Israel by insisting that criticism of Israel and hatred of the Jewish people should not be distinguished. These two distinct types of anti-Semitism actually work at cross purposes, and although there may be situations of overlap, it is a dangerous confusion to lump them together.

It is rather unusual for even the harshest critics of the behavior of the U.S. Government to be castigated as anti-American except sometimes in the midst of international security crises, but even then such accusations usually reflect the outlook of red neck patriots or extremists who identify with the right wing of American politics.

Also, such accusations, although unpleasant, lack the sting of anti-Semitism, which carries with it an implicit secondary allegation of indifference to the Holocaust, to the Nazi genocide, and to the long history of persecution directed at the Jewish people. In my view this labeling of Israel’s critics as ‘anti-Semites’ is a short-sighted form of unsavory state propaganda, generally implemented overseas by hard core Zionist groups, and partly responsible for an emergent backlash that is being expressed by hatred and hostility toward Jews.

This is a highly sensitive subject matter that is almost certain to be treated emotionally in a manner shaped by strong ideological alignments for or against the way in which Israel has behaved since its contested establishment in 1948 and in relation to attitudes toward close connections between the Zionist movement and the Jewish people.

Type I anti-Semitism is a form of virulent racism, Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung

The essay “Galtung’s Structural Violence and the Sierra Leone Civil War c. 1985-1992” by Philip Leech [TMS-Analysis 14 Jul 2014],–of all the commentators the deepest–is a very welcome opportunity to clarify and develop further some of the underlying thinking. By and large his comments, based on Peace by Peaceful Means (PBPM, SAGE, 1996); the concepts have been developed further in A Theory of Peace) are very positive. I focus on the questioning and critical, and not on Sierra Leone, having no direct mediation experience. Leech is familiar with the conflict.

Leech says repeatedly something that meets with my full agreement: “No theoretical concept can tell the whole story”. Indeed, how could a string of words match the ever evolving complexity of reality? A sharp edge–by a Marx (means vs modes) or a Toynbee (challenge vs response)–may reveal some deep aspects but never “the whole story” which, in addition, is revised all the time–with new sharp edges.

In my efforts toward nothing less than a new culture to come to grips–diagnosis, prognosis, therapy–with conflict, violence and peace, structural violence is only one component. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jan Oberg & Johan Galtung*

Lund and Kuala Lumpur, July 2014

Introduction

He was a tall man and a great man, a visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher. He took life more seriously than most and he could be playful and fun like a child. His life’s guiding principle was ”Engage in your time!” and while he wrote and talked a lot he also did it. His name was Aage Bertelsen, he was born in Denmark in 1901 and died on August 15, 1980.

Bertelsen’s imprint on history is two-fold. First, with his wife Gerda he was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organised the rescue of altogether 7.220 Danish Jews into safety in Sweden in October 1943 during the German occupation of Denmark – more here. The Lyngby Group – Lyngby is north of Copenhagen – got about 1.000 of these in safety by organising their nightly transport onboard small fisher boats over the Sound between Denmark and Sweden.

In this he deserves a place in international contemporary history for its humanity, civil courage and as an example of non-violent struggle against occupation.

Secondly, Bertelsen was an educator of and for peace. His life work educational efforts included his family and friends, his pupils over 22 years at the Aarhus Cathedral School in Aarhus, Denmark, the general public as well as national and international leaders.

He lived in pre-Internet times and very little is publicly available today about this renaissance man. From two rather different, but compatible, perspectives we’ve taken it upon us to remind the world about him – friends and colleagues of his as we happen to be.

Headmaster Aage Bertelsen in 1961 Photo: Elfeldt, Copenhagen

Why now, over 30 years after his death? Read the rest of this entry »