November 2001

LONDON – There are no points awarded for having seen this truck coming down the road. I first wrote about the likelihood of a group with no address getting its hands on a nuclear weapon in my column in the International Herald Tribune in 1975. Likewise, those liberals who worried out loud for years about Afghanistan first being armed and then left to rot by the West or pointed out the dangers of letting the structures of the Soviet Union collapse without sufficient economic aid to ease the transition in a sensible and organised way, have gained precious little kudos with public opinion at large. We are compelled to stand aside whilst the hardliners call the shots. If they go wrong and provoke a coup d’etat in Saudi Arabia or cause Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to fall into the wrong hands or leave a residue of Arab hatred far deeper than...

LONDON – Gung-ho about the fall of Kabul, but wary about the political morass that now confronts it, the U.S. has thrown the ball to the United Nations, an organisation not normally held in high regard in Washington but, as on past occasions, a useful refuge in times of grave crisis. Yet if history is any guide, a wave of amnesia about the value of the UN will fall over Washington as soon as the matter in hand has been dealt with. It has long been so. In 1954 there was the incident of the capture of seventeen U.S. airmen over China. Just as in the later Iranian hostage taking-taking, American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was asked to intervene and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou En-lai. It took six months...

London – Can the spirit of the successful achievement of the Putin-Bush meeting now be carried over into Russia’s relationship with Europe? In many ways it is easier for the U.S. to make a big peace with Russia than it is for Europe. There has never been any territorial issue between the two, apart from the quiet selling of Alaska to the U.S. in 1867. Despite all the tension of the Cold War it remains true that neither Russia nor the U.S. lost a soldier to the other side in combat. Yet for Europe the memories of war with Russia and Russian occupation run deep. Is it at last possible, ten years after the fall of communism, for contemporary Europe to finally respond to Mikhail Gorbachev’s plea to build a “common European house”? This is Europe’s call. America will want to be privy to the content of the discussions, but...

 8 november, 2001  Glädjande nyheter från vår egen värld. Fredag den 26 oktober 2001 försvarade TFF:s medstiftare, Christina Spännar, sin doktorsavhandling på Sociologiska Institutionen vid Lunds Universitet. Titeln är Med främmande bagage. Tankar och erfarenheter hos unga människor med ursprung i annan kultur eller Det postmoderna främlingskapet. “Christina har genomfört sin forskning samtidigt som hon tar hand om många vardagsuppgifter vid stiftelsen, inte minst när jag är borta,” säger Jan Öberg. “Hon deltar i alla beslut om TFF:s verksamhet och politik och utför massor av redaktionellt arbete på våra publikationer och hemsidesartiklar. Det går inte ut någon PressInfo utan hon har kommenterat och förbättrat utkasten.” “Hon läser och kommenterar i praktiken alla mina texter och jag är glad över att ha kunnat betala tillbaka lite genom att under tiden ha givit synpunkter på de olika delarna i slutfasen av avhandlingen,” säger Jan Öberg. “Christina är TFF-ankare och inspiratör – i mycket...

Happy news from our own world! On Friday October 26, 2001, TFF co-founder Christina Spännar successfully defended her dissertation at the Department of Sociology at the University of Lund. The title is With foreign luggage. Thoughts and experiences told by young people with roots in other cultures or The postmodern strangehood. “Christina has conducted her research while also caring for many everyday tasks at the foundation, particularly when I travel,” says Jan Oberg. “She participates in all important decisions about TFF policies and does a lot of editorial work on our publications and site articles. No PressInfo is distributed around the world before she has commented and improved on the drafts.” “She reads and comments on virtually all my texts and I am happy to have been able to pay back a little now by being her test reader and comment-maker through the work with her dissertation, ” says Jan Oberg....

LONDON – Primitive man, like other animals, followed his instincts and killed his enemy as swiftly as the job could be done. Archaeologists who have dug up prehistoric skeletons have found no evidence of torture. Even human sacrifices were made without prolonged suffering. Torture, the systematized use of violence to inflict the maximum amount of pain in order to extract information, to break resistance or simply to intimidate, is a product of civilization. But to reintroduce it now would be one of the greatest setbacks for civilisation imaginable. Before the American authorities rush into it with the righteousness that comes from a conviction that they might be extracting information that could forestall a terrorist nuclear attack on Manhattan they would do well to ponder the course the debate on torture has taken over the three and a half millennia of Western civilization. It has been abolished for good reason. Both...