May 2016

s and 70’s many people were convinced that it was the single most important issue of our times. Government aid agencies, especially in the Western world, gave overriding priority to distributing condoms wherever and whenever they had the chance. Some people like the bishops of the Catholic Church and the mullahs of Iran got very hot under the collar. Indeed, these two groups would unite together to vote the “no” in UN population conferences. In the Third World militants argued that this was one more perfidy carried out by the West – to rid the world of dark skinned people. Half a century later it all looks very different. Attitudes have changed everywhere. Only a few islands of Catholics continue to be anti artificial birth control. Whatever the Pope might say, not many listen. Now we stand on the cusp of a profound change in the human condition. Forecasts show...

Af Claus Kold Fra Månen kan man ikke se Danmark, lige meget hvor godt man kigger. Det kan man ikke, fordi Danmark er en kulturlig konstruktion, som er inde i danskernes hoveder, og som derfor ikke kan ses. Man kan heller ikke se Rusland, USA eller Indien. Disse stater er nemlig også kun inde i hovederne på de mennesker, der tilfældigvis er født og opvokset i det, de har valgt at kalde fx Israel. Danmark er m.a.o. en tilfældighed. Det kunne lige så godt ikke eksistere, eller ligge et andet sted eller danskerne kunne tale et andet sprog, som de godt nok ville kalde dansk, men som ikke lød dansk – for os, de rigtige danskere. Stater og statssystemer har ikke altid eksisteret, og op gennem tiden har de, der eksisterede, haft meget forskellige form. De har været religiøse, familieeje, enemandsvælder, étpartistater – i dag er det dominerende ideal territorialt...

Jeju Peace Forum, Kwangju National University, Seoul; South Korea Like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the world has gotten tired of it, “what, the two Koreas still unable to sort it out”? Also, like Israel-Palestine, the USA is in it; making the situation complicated. Never has the situation been so tense after the end of the war in Korea more than 60 years ago. Not only because of the nuclear bomb with missiles in North Korea, and the hawkish pro-nuke reaction in South Korea and Japan, but because of no moves forward to solve the underlying conflict. And where is that conflict? Not between North and South Korea, but between North Korea and USA that after 140+ years of victorious warfare had to accept armistice, not victory, in Korea. Conflict means incompatible goals. Travel to Pyongyang and find that their goals are peace treaty, normalization of relations, and a nuclear free Korean...

By Gunnar Westberg The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility”. Other serious close calls In November 1979, a recorded scenario describing a Russian nuclear attack had been entered into the US warning system NORAD. The scenario was perceived as a real full-scale Soviet attack. Nuclear missiles and bombers were readied. After six minutes the mistake became obvious. After this incident new security routines were introduced. Despite these changed routines, less that one year later the mistake was repeated – this time more persistent and dangerous. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US national security adviser, was called at three o’clock in the morning by a general on duty. He was informed that 220 Soviet missiles were on their way towards the USA. A moment later a new call came, saying that 2,200 missiles had been launched. Brzezinski was about...

By Gunnar Westberg The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility”. This unanimous statement was published by the Canberra Commission in 1996. Among the commission members were internationally known former ministers of defense and of foreign affairs and generals. The nuclear-weapon states do not intend to abolish their nuclear weapons. They promised to do so when they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970. Furthermore, the International Court in The Hague concluded in its advisory opinion more than 20 years ago that these states were obliged to negotiate and bring to a conclusion such negotiations on complete nuclear disarmament. The nuclear-weapon states disregard this obligation. On the contrary, they invest enormous sums in the modernization of these weapons of global destruction. It is difficult today to raise a strong opinion in the nuclear-weapon states for nuclear...

Introduction By Jan Oberg President Barack Obama visits Hiroshima on May 27; it’s the first time since the U.S. used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 that a sitting U.S. president visits Hiroshima It is known that he will not apologize for the crime that killed and crippled about a quarter of a million innocent people. Disturbingly, the White House has also announced that he will “not have the time” to meet any victims, the Hibakusha. According to Time he shakes off the ethical dimension of this unique mass killing by stating that “it is important to recognize that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions”(!) His commitment to peace and a nuclear weapons-free world has been an utter failure, according to TFF Associate Jonathan Power. And it seems that Obama will not use this unique opportunity to show any moral leadership or...

Marinaleda, Spain On a periphery road 108 Km east of Sevilla: one white Andalucian village after the other, traditional, poor; and suddenly this super-modern concrete reality, a utopia in many people’s minds! The basic concept is well known: authorities expropriated land lying fallow in the midst of unemployed starving land labor, and it was transformed into a communal cooperative with very inexpensive housing, kindergarten, schools, clinics. Behind that was the vision, knowledge, skill, will of the mayor for over 30 years, Juan Grillo. With the mind, a reality, and the will to transform that reality. We are dealing with more than economy and have to look beyond economics to capture what went and goes on. The old distinctions between public and private, and between owning and using, certainly enter. With comments, such as these. Generally public vs private is seen in terms of state vs capital, the state using plan...

“ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States”, President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine recently. What becomes clear in this long article, much of it Obama’s own words, is that Obama shies away from the idea that war can make bad things good. The unquenchable wars that he inherited – Iraq and Afghanistan – were set alight by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and no amount of Obama fire engines have been able to douse them with enough water to put them out. As for the rest of the waterfront of foreign affairs, he argues that after a period of uncertainty he decided that the US should not militarily involve itself in the civil war in Syria. He decided that Ukraine is not a core American interest, although it is a Russian one, and he was convinced that Iran would agree through peaceful negotiation...

China is changing world geography, or at least trying to do so. Not in the sense of land and water like the Netherlands, but in the sense of weaving new infrastructures on land, on water, in the air, and on the web. It is not surprising that a country with some Marxist orientation would focus politics on infrastructure–but as means of transportation-communication, not as means of production. Nor is it surprising that a country with a Daoist worldview focuses politics on totalities, on holons and dialectics, forces and counter-forces, trying to tilt balances in China’s favor. How this will work depends on the background, and its implications. Two recent books, Valerie Hansen, Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Knopf, 2015) see them as arteries connecting the world, globalization, before that term became a la mode....

President Barack Obama made a deal with Russian President Dimitri Medvedev to cut their respective arsenals of strategic missiles by one-third the Republican-dominated US Congress, as the price for its ratification of the deal, decreed that Obama and future presidents be made to spend a trillion dollars on updating and modernizing America’s massive arsenal. Now that chicken is coming home to roost – and a few other chickens too. President Barack Obama’s unexpected legacy is that he has presided over an America that has been at war longer than any previous president. Moreover, of recent presidents, apart from Bill Clinton, he has cut the US nuclear weapon stockpile at the slowest rate. The Republican’s extreme right clipped Obama’s wings. Of that there is no doubt, making it impossible thus far, to negotiate with Russia any further cuts. At the same time the counterproductive US/EU confrontation with Russia over Ukraine pushed...

Message to President Barack Obama with respect to forthcoming Hiroshima visit Prefatory Note I sent the following message to the White House today, and encourage readers of this blog to do the same This symbolic visit by Obama creates a major opportunity to advance a denuclearization agenda, and we should take as much advantage as possible. I am against the mainstream advice that suggests that the best way to give meaning to the event would be to announce the adoption of arms control measures such as suspending development of a new nuclear cruise missile. These measures, while intrinsically valuable, have the downside of stabilizing the nuclear weapons status quo. What would be most helpful would be a step, as suggested below, that gives primacy to nuclear disarmament instead of continuing the deceptive practice of taking prudent steps to cut risks of accidental use and curtail provocative developments and deployments. These...

Antwerpen & Alfaz We are dealing with mass migration, basically into EU, and European nationalisms, many in favor of exits from the EU. Why this mass migration, maybe to the point of Völkerwanderung, mainly into EU – but then what kind of EU? – and why the European nationalisms now found one way or the other in many member states? The forecast for migration from Africa into Italy in 2016 is about 100,000; 28,000 already arrived in the first quarter, with 1,000 drowning in the Mediterranean (INYT, 6 May 2016). Big numbers. They knew the risks they were taking, so the push away from Africa and the pull towards Italy, and beyond, must have been considerable. Better think in terms of 50 million migrants over 50 years, from regions considered uninhabitable to inhabitable regions. There seem to be five major causes underlying this basic world asymmetry: Slavery, four centuries, depriving...