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By Jonathan Power

There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. If Iran does cross the nuclear threshold the same deterrence will apply. No one rational would want to provoke their own incineration. Kenneth Waltz, the distinguished theorist on the conduct of war, has written in “Foreign Affairs” that with Israel possessing over 200 nuclear weapons Iran having a bomb would bring stability.

I don’t think I want to go as far as Waltz does with that last point. The launch of nuclear weapons can always be done by accident or by the action of rogue members of the launch team in a silo. It has nearly happened in the US a number of times.

My question is why doesn’t President Barack Obama put a lot more effort into pressuring Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. This, more than anything, would work to defuse the whole bad situation.

Or, going further, why doesn’t Obama, as Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, explains to me, push through a Middle East Nuclear-Free Zone? This is necessary not just because of Iran but because if Iran goes nuclear so perhaps will Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt. But the US torpedoed the latest attempt. Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

Yes, go beyond, transcend! That is our message, New Year or not.

Take the US school shootings. The National Rifle Association’s vice president on TV: “the only person who can stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun”. That statement struck many cords.

There is the deep US culture of Dualism – two kinds of people – and Manicheism – one bad, one good. There is Armageddon in the class room, the teacher or resident police pulling out the gun–bigger, better, more accurate–for the final battle, for the final and only solution. The NRA is riding on this DMA (Dualism/Manicheism/Armageddon) ground swell from below, and so are millions of others. It is concrete, feasible, and could start January 2013.

There is confirmation from above: this is US foreign policy. The only way to stop a bad country with arms is a good country with arms; the only way to stop evil terrorism from below is good state terrorism from above. Balance of power, countless bases, search and destroy.

We agree about the critical focus: school shootings–the USA committing suicide! – must not happen. But what do we know empirically to be constructive, creative? The answer is wrapped in ambiguity. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Falk

An Open Letter of Response to CRIF (Counsèil Représentif des Institutions juives de France)

I am shocked and saddened that your organization would label me as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew. It is utterly defamatory, and such allegations are entirely based on distortions of what I believe and what I have done. To confuse my criticisms of Israel with self-hatred of myself as a Jew or with hatred of Jews is a calumny. I have long been a critic of American foreign policy but that does not make me anti-American; it is freedom of conscience that is the core defining reality of a genuinely democratic society, and its exercise is crucial to the quality of political life in a particular country, especially here in the United States where its size and influence often has such a large impact on the lives and destiny of many peoples excluded from participating in its policy debates or elections.

It is always difficult to negate irresponsible accusations of this kind. What follows is an attempt to clarify my honestly held positions in relation to a litany of charges that have been given currency by a campaign conducted by UN Watch ever since I was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to be Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2008. What follows are brief attempts at clarification in response to the main charges: Read the rest of this entry »

By Jan Oberg

– A lecture at the World Peace Academy in Basel, Switzerland with words and photographs from his recent visit to Iran

By Richard Falk

In Further Memory of Edward Said

Always, always

That voice

remains

is gone

needed

What he gave

we miss

we need

we want

Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

After the orgy of food, drink and presents at Christmas we will have a week to think of our sins before the New Year arrives and we have to make our promises to be better human beings in 2013. What resolutions will you make?

For each person there are probably a good dozen of things to consider but my humble suggestion is that we concentrate on drink, smoking and drugs. Should our governments ban them or limit them or shrug their shoulders and say this is a free society and you do what you want, as long as you only harm yourself? Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

From Frankfurt am Main, Caritas

How do social structures and handicaps–mental or physical, spiritual or material–relate to each other?

Answer: about the same way as social structures relate to other marginalized, even stigmatized, groups: women and non-whites, younger and older, workers, the physically and mentally ill, the handicapped, and other “deviants”. And at the world level the colonized and the imperialized, the less and the least developed countries, the pariahs.

What do they have in common? That somebody is on top of them in a hierarchy. They are different, hierarchies make them unequal, and hierarchies are strong and tend to be reborn. Those on top exclude those lower down as “deviant” from “normal”, included, society. They may even exploit them economically, use force militarily, decide over them politically, imprint their way of thinking on them culturally. Four types of power, four ways of exercising structural violence in hierarchies. Not strangely, we have had amazing revolts against such hierarchies in the last centuries under the banner of the human right to be different, yet equal. From the American revolution leaving clergy and aristocracy behind and the French beheading them via working class struggle for decent livelihood, colonies for freedom, countries to shake off capitalist or communist imperial yokes to poor countries for their share, women for parity, younger people to be taken seriously.

And age: it carries stigma as in white/gray hair, care when walking. 15 years beyond retirement age, I should be in Ruhestand, quietude, on a side-track, Abstellgleis; materially well but spiritually limited to hobbies like children to playing, excluded from the challenges of real work, for individual and social development, for new syntheses. Next stop: the cemetery. So I refused to retire, to become re-tired, tired again and again for lack of challenge; like exploring how concepts close to me may explain the hindrances, Behinderung, for handicapped. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

At last someone has done something sensible in the increasingly bitter fight between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands – and that is China. China announced at the weekend that it is taking the issue to the UN. China has never done anything like this before.

It can only have been decided at the highest level by the new president himself, Xi Jinping, who in the months before he was promoted leader worked to get the various conflicting parts of the Chinese bureaucracy and the armed forces to pull in the same direction on the issue of maritime disputes. Read the rest of this entry »

By Johan Galtung

From Grenzach-Wyhlen, Germany

The probability of a devastating Third World War is not zero, but very far away from 100%. Let us explore why.

The worst case scenario is a world war between the West–NATO, USA, EU with Japan-Taiwan-S. Korea–on the one hand, and the East—SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), Russia, China, Central Asia, with the observers India, Pakistan, Iran. With 4 vs 4 nuclear powers, and West vs Islam as a major theme.

In the center is the explosive mix of a divided territory, and a divided capital, by a wall.

We have been there before: the Cold War, Atlantic and Pacific theaters; 3 vs 2 nuclear powers, and West vs Communism as major theme.

In the center was the explosive mix of a divided Germany, and a divided capital, by a wall; and a divided Korea, by a zone.

And yet no direct, hot war, except by proxies; Korea, Viét Nam. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

By Richard Falk

Once again, perhaps in the most anguishing manner ever, the deadly shooting of 20 children (and 8 adults) between the ages of 5 and 10 at the Newton, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School, has left America in a stunned posture of tragic bemusement. Why should such incidents be happening here, especially in such a peaceful and affluent town?

The shock is accompanied by spontaneous outpourings of grief, bewilderment, empathy, communal esprit, and a sense of national tragedy. Such an unavoidably dark mood is officially confirmed by the well-crafted emotional message of the president, Barack Obama.

The template of response has become a national liturgy in light of the dismal pattern of public response: media sensationalism of a totalizing kind, at once enveloping, sentimental, and tasteless (endless interviewing of surviving children and teachers, and even family members of victims), but dutifully avoiding deeper questions relating to guns, violence, and cultural stimulants and conditioning. What are called ‘difficult issues’ in the media reduce to what some refer to as ‘reasonable gun control’ (that is, a ban on assault weapons, large magazine clips, and somewhat stiffer gun registration rules) and to improved procedures for identifying those suffering the kind of mental disorders that could erupt in violent sociopathic behavior. Read the rest of this entry »