April 2020

Last year, the Danish artist Gudrun Steen-Andersen created a multimedia installation under the theme: “Perpetuum Mobile – What Would Happen If Migration Was Free Worldwide?” Naturally, it is a thought experiment – not the least in these times of multi-crisis where nationalism, xenophobia, populism and the building of walls seem to have emerged as just another – political – virus way before the Coronavirus. The Danish-language version was made in 2019 and in March this year, we repeated – more or less, that is – the video lectures in English. It was about the time when the Coronavirus had just begun its race to the top of the global agenda. You’ll find them all the videos here or click on this: Steen-Andersen’s heuristic intention – somewhat in the tradition of the great future-thinker Robert Jungk’s future workshop – was realized through her own amazing installation and by invitation to a...

Med udenrigsminister Jeppe Kofod i spidsen er Danmark nu på vej ud i sin største udenrigspolitiske skandale – det siger en del – siden besættelsen af Irak. Ifølge denne artikel på DR.dk er hverken Udenrigspolitisk Nævn eller Grønlandsudvalget blevet orienteret om USA’s “offer you can’t refuse” til Grønland – som fremstillet af den amerikanske ambassadør i København, Carla Sands, på Altinget.* © Jan Oberg Folketingsmedlemmer fra både SF og Dansk Folkeparti kalder USA’s udmelding “forkastelig” og “uhørt.” Tidligere udenrigsminister, Martin Lidegaard, siger at han ikke er blevet orienteret om det. Regeringen er altså enten blevet informeret af USA men har holdt forhandlingerne hemmelig eller også er USA nu i færd med at købe Grønland bag ryggen på Danmark. Udenrigsministerens måde at svare på i ovenstående artikels video lugter langt væk af at der er noget, der slet ikke stemmer. Og det han citeres for viser, at han ikke har forstået...

It might seem that the world is going to pot in a hand-basket. Not quite true. There are ways out. Asia has shown how to deal with the Coronavirus and how to stay politically stable. Europe, with the exception of wise Sweden, has muddled along, following belatedly the conventional wisdom of its scientific community. As for the United States, President Donald Trump has made a fool of himself and his country, ending up with the highest death rate in the world. No longer can the West rely on the US to be its leader. Even if Trump is deposed in the November election, the Europeans, the Canadians and Japanese should not let it return to being treated as the number one. It is too beholden to the military/legislative/industrial/academic complex. The consensus appears to be that confronting China and Russia is the right thing to do. The Coronavirus has shown up...

Renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the Goldwater Rule: We have a duty to warn if someone may be dangerous to others. 23 april, 2020 Bill Moyers There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit? Originally published at billmoyers.com, September 14, 2017 As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have...

By Hussein Askary April 22, 2020 When China was fighting alone against the Corona virus in January and February, Western media mocked China and its leadership for mismanaging the health affairs of the nation. A Danish newspapers gleefully published a cynical cartoon of the Chinese flag with a cluster of Corona viruses instead of the stars. Others called the COVID-19, a “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus”. China was described as “Asia’s sick man” in the Wall Street Journal. Chinese and Asian nationals suffered racist attacks in Europe and the United States. Orginally posted on Brix’s official website on March 21, 2020 The Chinese people and their leadership were busy fighting ferociously, making huge sacrifices in lives and wealth to control the epidemic. Their fight was praised by the World Health Organization (WHO), which called on the other nations of the world to learn from China in dealing with the outbreak...

Remember this? It seems that God is saying: “America, you are too arrogant and I will break the backbone of your power!” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Listen! MLK’s strong prophecy came to me today when I read this article in TIME magazine today – “Begging for Thermometers, Body Bags, and Gowns: U.S. Health Care Workers Are Dangerously Ill-Equipped to Fight COVID-19.” TIME – April 20, 2020 The health care workers have to beg – and people have to die – because their mal-developed country lacks the most basic. It’s a country which, at least since 1945, has created human history’s largest military machine, sees itself as “the policeman of the whole world” – a country that conducted wars virtually every day, built 600+ bases in 130+ countries, deploys its CIA and Special forces virtually everywhere, destroyed societies and killed millions of people around the world in warfare and economic...

By Jason Hirthler April 21, 2020 Author David Foster Wallace once said that America is, “One enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement.” The spectacle of American consumerism comes galloping to mind. But the pageant of gluttony with which we sate ourselves on a weekly basis is a pale reflection, at least in its intensity, of American foreign policy. Like our national addiction to guns mirrors our international addiction to bombs, so too our appetitive instincts at home merely reflect those same greedy impulses writ large in the global arena. From the soul of the gourmand to the surface-to-air missile, the attitude to the world is the same: take what ye would, all else be damned. Originally posted on Counterpunch’s official website on April 02, 2020 But while consumers might bankrupt themselves on needless consumption, it is the imperial arm of the state that visits mass suffering on innocents...

The greatest American foreign affairs columnist since Walter Lippmann was William Pfaff of The International Herald Tribune. He wrote in his path-breaking book, “Barbarian Sentiments” that the US political atmosphere was full of “exhausted ideas, like a dead star”. Nevertheless, “these ideas remain central to the way certain subjects are discussed and to the formulation of national policy. These are ideas that people want or need to be true”. I was told by the editorial page editor, Serge Schmemann, that when the New York Times bought the Herald Tribune the paper decided to cut back on printing Pfaff after 20 years of using him because he was considered anti-American – which, ironically, was one indication that he was right in his diagnosis. Freud reminded us in his “Civilization and its Discontents”, that we should “familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which...

Part 3 Part 1 and 2 were introductory and then made the diagnosis.In this part, we shall outline some theories and concepts that will lead to – Treatment. Part 1 of this series • Part 2 • Part 4 Militarist threat analysis that lead to disaster In spite of the often enormous sums at stake, few funds are allocated with so little intellectual input as those for the national military budget. It basically seems to be enough to point out – through the media – that there are some countries that threaten us and thereby instil fear among the citizens who are to pay for the policies. Once it was the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, then Iraq in Kuwait, then Serbia, then Afghanistan (in response to 9/11), then Iraq again and Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, then Libya, then Syria, then Iran and – all the last...

President Trump has taken one more step toward self-isolation of the US from the world community. This BBC post tells who the main contributors to the WHO were in 2018-2019 and – yes – you’ll see that the US was the largest contributor. But at least three things are striking. 1) The US contribution seems to be only US$ 400; that is the same sum Trump recently gave in military support to Ukraine. The price of just one Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft ranges between US$ 90 and 115 million.In the larger scheme of things, the WHO is a cheap organisation and the real priorities of the US are crystal clear: We can’t afford millions on something so useless as the WHO. We have more useful things to spend our money on! 2) China contributes US$ 86 million to the WHO and doesn’t rank among the ten largest...

Joe Lauria April 15, 2020 In Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ science fiction fantasy, War of the Worlds, all the military spending and preparedness by the United States could not defend the American people from the invaders from Mars. In the end what killed the superior intruders was not arms, but a microscopic organism against which the Martians’ immune system had no defense. Originally posted on Consortium News website on March 23, 2020 “Suddenly, my eyes were attracted to the immense flock of black birds that hovered directly below me. They circled to the ground, and there before my eyes, stark and silent, lay the Martians, with the hungry birds pecking and tearing brown shreds of flesh from their dead bodies. Later when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were...