Author Archive
Humanitarian military intervention in Syria – and who is behind the atrocities?
August 8th, 2012 | 
Author: By Michel Chossudovsky, TFF Associate
August 8, 2012
We choose in this case to publish just the link to Chossudovsky’s article in which there are plenty of notes to valuable sources; we want to ensure that you can get the benefit of them all.
Jan Oberg
TFF Blog Editor
Beyond words: Poet’s lament
By Richard Falk
Poetry at its finest stretches the expressiveness of language beyond its prior limits, not necessarily by its choice of words, but through the magical invocation of feelings embedded deeply within consciousness. Yes even poetry has its own frontiers that if crossed lead to a word-less terrain littered with corpses of atrocity, what Thomas Merton and James Douglass have soulfully identified for us as the realm of ‘the unspeakable,’ and then are brave enough to explore forbidden terrain.
When we do not respect the unspeakable by our silence we domesticate the criminality of the horror that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another, and give way to the eventual emergence of normalcy as has happened with nuclear weapons detached from the happenings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Read the rest of this entry »
The Nordic countries in a world in crisis
By Johan Galtung
Talk at the Nordic Peoples’ Parliament in Jondal, Norway
Let us start with the crisis.
It is not a world crisis but a Western crisis. The root is simple: the Rest is catching up, and partly overtaking the West; China is catching up, and partly overtaking the USA–recovering from the blow received around 1500 from the Portuguese and the English destroying 1,000 years of buddhist-muslim trade from East China to Somalia via the rest of Asia; ending in Macao-Hong Kong (there are no Chinese enclaves in Portugal-England).
The West is outcompeted. The crisis is partly economic and partly a desperate Western effort, indeed Obama’s effort, to cling to hegemony. Read the rest of this entry »
Western Sahara – Divesting from all occupations
By Stephen Zunes
In response to ongoing violations of international law and basic human rights by the rightist Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere, there has been a growing call for divestment of stocks in corporations supporting the occupation.
Modeled after the largely successful divestment campaign in the 1980s against corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa, the movement targets companies that support the Israeli occupation by providing weapons or other instruments of repression to Israeli occupation forces, investing in or trading with enterprises in illegal Israeli settlements, and in other ways. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Africa, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Pro-peace & proposals, Stephen Zunes | 
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More and more nukes: Why Waltz is wrong
By David Krieger
The lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.” The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb. He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have. There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.”
In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms. But the history is short and there have been many close calls. Read the rest of this entry »
The dangers of chemical weapons, Syria’s too
By Jonathan Power
The Syrian government say that, unlike Saddam Hussein, it won’t use its sizeable stocks of chemical weapons on its own population, only on would-be attackers. That’s a comfort of sorts since nobody is going to attack it. Chemical weapons are regarded as weapons of mass destruction along with nuclear and biological weapons. Chemical agents like sarin that destroys the nervous system, VX and mustard gas can kill thousands of people in one blow.
If the UN were mandated to send in troops or the US did so unilaterally their forces could be devastated by a chemical attack. The main worry – as such an invasion is highly improbable unless a dying regime or a new regime asks for help – is that the chemical stockpiles could fall into the wrong hands – the hot-headed thorn in Israel’s flesh, Hezbollah in southern Libya or Al Qaeda which the regime says are part of the opposition. Read the rest of this entry »
The politics of the economic crisis – class warfare
By Johan Galtung
From Jondal, Norway
Writes Eduardo Porter on The New York Times:
“Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Libor scandal is how familiar it seems. Sure, for some of the world’s leading banks to try to manipulate one of the most important interest rates in contemporary finance is clearly egregious. But is that worse than packaging billions of dollars worth of dubious mortgages into a bond and having it stamped with a Triple-A rating to sell to some dupe down the road while betting against it? Or how about forging documents on an industrial scale to foreclose fraudulently on countless homeowners?”
A useful summary of the situation as of today. But, a summary of what? What is this?
We have been through many answers starting with credit squeeze, then a real estate bubble that burst, toxic assets, credit swaps, hedge funds, derivatives – bets with the money of other people, yours and mine – all finance and banking. A psychologism was added at an early stage; greed. Read the rest of this entry »
India-China cooperation in the Asian century
By Shastri Ramachandaran*
NEW DELHI – India had more than one message for China prior to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s three-day visit to Myanmar, the world’s newest darling of democracy being wooed with ardour by the two Asian giants and the US.
From New Delhi went the un-subtle message that the prime minister’s visit was actuated by the neighbourly intent of peace and prosperity; and, not by any expansionist design. Taking a dig at China comes naturally to some in New Delhi, even when it is inappropriate – as it was here, because it does not fit with Manmohan Singh’s style and persona. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in China, Future perspectives, India, India, Shastri Ramachandaran, World order/governance |
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What Dani Dayan says and why it is interesting
By Richard Falk
[Note: I have revised the first paragraph of this post to take some note of comments addressed to the original version, and in light of my own further thoughts]
Dani Dayan’s article, “Israel’s Settlers Are Here to Stay,” was published by the NY Times on July 26, 2012. Dayan is the chairman of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities, and has been long known as a leading spokesperson of the settler movement.
An obvious response to such a settler screed might be to dismiss it out of hand as an extremist expression of Israeli views, which it certainly is, but it would seem a mistake to do this before taking some account of its content and timing. The moral and legal premises that underlie Dayan’s insistence that the settlers will never leave the West Bank are without substance, but the political arguments he puts forward are so strong as to be virtually irrefutable. Read the rest of this entry »
The bonding of civility and dialogue
By Richard Falk
Recently my blog posts have attracted some venomous comments. I have somewhat reluctantly ‘approved’ of most such comments unless blatantly anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, anti-Semitic, racist, or personally defamatory, and even with such offending comments I have leaned toward inclusion.
Recently, however, I have received several critical messages suggesting that allowing such comments demeans the quality of the dialogue generated by the blog. These messages have prompted me to reconsider my way of filtering comments, and lead me to become somewhat more of a gatekeeper. Read the rest of this entry »