March 2023

John Mearsheimer April 1, 2023 No introduction is needed. Professor Mearsheimer is a leading scholar of the realist school and, with his texts and lectures, has made himself a major source of an enlightened understanding of the conflicts that blew up in the proxy war now being fought out so tragically and cynically in Ukraine. Indeed, he is also a brilliant pedagogical lecturer who needs neither manuscript nor notes. The quality of content and form, therefore, speaks volumes about what a good intellectual is – contrasting the de-intellectualised field of international politics and much of the study of it. Jan Oberg, editor The author Click on his name above, and you get to his rich personal homepage.

The story of the BRICS countries and their accelerating role in world affairs. We bring you this 13:45 minutes video from US-based Sino Sphere on YouTube about BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Watch it with your colleagues, friends or family and ask yourself why you hear so little about these tremendously important countries and changes in world history. Among many other facts, you’ll learn that BRICS is now economically bigger than the G7 countries… Recommended reading and viewing About BRICS Deutsche WelleA new world order? BRICS nations offer alternative to West Silk Road BriefingThe BRICS Has Overtaken The G7 In Global GDP China’s GovernmentBRICS 2022 China The New Development Bank, NDB (formerly BRICS Development Bank) – including a fine short video presentation.

Unknown cartoon from the Internet The thing NATO and EU countries persistently deny when talking about the war in Ukraine is – yes, exactly – NATO’s expansion. But that is the conflict basis that caused Russia to start a war on Russia. This very precise formulation is not an endorsement of that war – I wrote against it on February 25, 2022. Only fools believe that an explanation is the same as legitimisation and endorsement. The underlying conflict – not the violence that grows out of it, is always the key to peace. Peace comes from dealing with the conflict and finding a solution. It is not called war resolution; it is called conflict resolution. Like the doctor doesn’t just look at the point of pain but goes deeper and asks: What is the cause? What is the problem? So do people who are professionals in peace and nonviolence. They...

Meetings of the G7 and NATO (top) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (bottom) Ben Norton March 29, 2023 A study by the elite EU-funded European Council on Foreign Relations found the West is out of touch politically with the rest of the world. Most people in China, India, and Türkiye see Russia as an important ally, and they want multipolarity, not continued “American global supremacy”. Originally published at Geopolitical Economy on February 25, 2023 A study by an elite European government-funded think tank found that, while the United States and Europe are growing closer together, the West is increasingly out of touch politically with the rest of the world. The report, from the EU member state-financed European Council on Foreign Relations, conceded that the system of “American global supremacy” is in rapid decline, and many people in the Global South want a new “multipolar world”. The series of polls concluded that NATO’s proxy...

Erni & Ola Friholt TFF Associates In 1904, in the run-up to World War I, with the Triple Alliance on one side and the Entente on the other, the Principal of the London School of Economics, Halford Mackinder, gave a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society. The title was ‘The Geographical Axis of History’. Mackinder explained that world power could not, as in the past, be won by controlling the seas, which had been the main route for Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and Britain to their colonial empires, which had lasted some 400 years. Now, he argues, it is about controlling the interior of the Euro-Asian landmass, to which he also counted Africa. This huge land mass he called an island, the World Island. Its heartland lies in the plains and forests of Asia and is so vast that it could only be ruled from its peripheral lands in eastern...

Face 2 Face Channel March 22, 2023 Some time ago, we published an urgently important article by Tony Robinson – “We must stop the march towards World War III, now!” We thought, therefore, that it would be good for our readers to see him talk more about these issues – and not just the dangers we face but – much more creatively – the world that we should work for. Face 2 Face has produced this interview and writes that “We speak here with Tony Robinson about the situation in Europe and his latest article published on Pressenza titled “We must stop the march towards World War III, now!” requesting “The foundations of a new peace movement”. Tony is a Humanist Movement Activist, ex-Director of the Middle East Treaty Organization and coordinating committee member of Abolition 2000 – Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, author of the book “Coffee with...

Composite portrait: (top) President George W. Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln announces the end of major combat in Iraq, May 1, 2003 (Stephen Jaffe, AFP); (middle right) U.S. Marines arrest Iraqi council members (hooded) in Baghdad, Nov. 2, 2004 (Anja Niedringhaus, AP); (bottom) Mosul’s Old City neighbourhood reduced to ruins by U.S. bombardments in a campaign against ISIS, July 14, 2017 (Andrea Dicenzo, AFP) Ralph Nader March 22, 2023 23 Feb 2023I wrote the following column ten years ago. Note the absence of any accountability or regret by Bush, Cheney and their co-war criminals. Ten years ago [now 20 years ago, on March 19, 2003], George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies,...

Letter from a soul-sister stranger for peace One autumn day in 2022, a mail winged into TFF’s inbox from a woman in the United States. Here first some excerpts; the first sentence reveals a sense of being in a larger world. ” Ihope you’re feeling all right, even though it’s difficult to feel that way now. I’d like to send you this letter that I’m sending to as many people that I can think of. Given the urgency of the international situation I figure it’s no time to be shy. Here it is! Hardly a soul responds to me, but I was hoping maybe you would. Peace will never arrive if people are not able to listen to the other side’s perspective. Peace will never arrive if people on one side of conflict tell half-truths and lies to paint the other side as only evil, thus falsely justifying weapon shipments,...

Writing this, I must admit that my rage and pain build up inside, still twenty years later. Below, see what TFF and I wrote back then and why we were, simply put, making better predictions on a shoestring budget than the US and other NATO decision-makers on multi-billion-dollar budgets. Like other wars and interventions, this was no “mistake”. It was an unavoidable consequence of Western MIRE – Militarism, Imperialism, Racism and Exceptionalism. The West has learned nothing. Militarism is now its main cohesive force into its manifest destiny: Decline and fall. President George W. Bush announcing that he has just started the war on Iraq. Listen carefully! All the arguments and aims he presents were either false, mistaken or outright lies. And sanctimonious. TFF’s fact-finding missions and scattered memories Permit me start out with a quotation from the British Stop The War Coalition’s newsletter: “A report released this week by...

A list to be updated if and when The human right to freely seek information is laid down in the American Convention on Human Rights from 1968. Article 13 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 states in Article 19 that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 states in Article 19 that: “1) Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. 2) Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart...

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. Robert Freeman March 16, 2023 “Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie. In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose...