October 2006

LONDON – It was the rebelling colonial subjects of Britain in America who, in their Declaration of Independence in 1776, first synthesized the best ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers of Europe. And they did that in the most inspiring prose that makes the subsequent French document of thirteen years later, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, look like a shopping list. The Americans invented the modern liberal republic. It was the Americans who took a brilliant idea, two and half thousand years old, which had briefly flourished but then faded away, and reintroduced it to the modern world – democracy. It was America that inspired the French Revolution, although as has often happened since, as Napoleon rampaged all over Europe, it came to regret what it had provoked. As one who spent a portion of his youth working on Martin Luther King’s staff during his campaign against the slums...

LONDON – The saddle on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has more than slipped. It has become undone. For America to carry the world on this issue it has to become convincing. It has to demonstrate that what it is asking others to do it is also doing itself. Public opinion in Europe certainly, but also in much of the rest of the world, seems to have an intuitive understanding that: a) war over alleged nuclear weapons’ capability is hyprocrytical whilst the U.S. (and Britain and France) is so over-armed; b) is doubly hypocritical given the West’s long tolerance (only relatively recently curtailed) of exporting the ingredients for making weapons of mass destruction; c) is triply hypocritical given the blind eye it turned to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds and Israel’s manufacture of a large nuclear arsenal. There is also a further point, perhaps too sophisticated...

A total of 42 peace protesters from Sweden and Finland have been arrested after blockading an entrance to Faslane.

Smedjeback är från Malmö och för sin kamp mot kärnvapen genom organisationen Ofog som bildades 2002 med en kärnvapenfri värld som mål. Se bilderna här på Ofog.

LONDON – The atmospherics in Scotland around this week’s meeting of the main protagonists in Northern Ireland’s long civil war have been good. The IRA has given up the gun. The fundamentalist preacher and leader of hard line Protestant opinion, the Rev Ian Paisley, is prepared to sit down not just with the prime minister of Ireland, Berty Ahern, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain but also with Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader (and the person in the IRA leadership who counts the most). Scotland, with its long history of autonomy on legal matters (remember the Lockerbie air terrorism trial), its independent educational system (no wonder Scots dominate the Blair administration) and, most recently, an autonomous parliament with real power is a lesson in political devolution for all who fear it, whether it be in Belfast, Madrid, Kosovo, Tel Aviv or New Delhi. Just about everything, other that...

A nonviolence movement comprised of Muslims and Christians, from the North and the South, women and men, armed with a common goal, nonviolent principles and a will to act for a better Sudan, would indeed be a strong force in Sudan. From what I have seen and heard from the participants of this workshop I believe that it can happen in Sudan.

“Bitterness, hatred and misery…this was what I expected to find in Sudan before I came there in April 2005 for the first time in my life. What else can you expect after 21 years of civil war and when Sudan is one of the poorest countries in Africa? Instead I was met by an incredible hopefulness and belief in peace, nonviolence and reconciliation.”

LONDON – It was the late president of France, Charles de Gaulle, who famously said, “Brazil has a great future, and it always will have.” With the first round of the Brazilian election over with the favourite to win, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, coming under increasing scrutiny for corruption – the seemingly eternal Brazilian political disease – many observers seriously wonder if Brazil can ever unlock its enormous potential. Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy of the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom, but all this has come at a price – the lack of discipline in both personal and public morality. The ingrained privileges of those who have already made it, together with the manipulative corruption of the established political class, make it difficult for Brazil to engage in the economic...