April 2023

Christopher Quigley April 28, 2023 Very few people today know that between 1934 and 1961 the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote A Study of History describing the rise and fall of the 23 civilizations he had identified in human history. In contrast to Oswald Spengler, who thought that the rise and fall of civilizations was inevitable, Toynbee maintained that the fate of civilizations is determined by their response to the challenges facing them. In fact the unifying theme throughout the book is challenge and response. One of the ground-breaking discoveries by Toynbee is the fact that there have been so many highly developed civilizations. Understandably in the West, our history lessons focus on our own civilization with its roots in Greek and Roman cultures, but in addition, there have been Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Islamic, Sumerian and Orthodox civilizations, to name but a few. According to Toynbee, civilizations start to decay...

© Oberg PhotoGraphics 2022 Hussein Askary April 27, 2023 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared in his “End of History and The Last Man,” published in 1992,that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era in 1991 marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Originally posted on the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden’s website on March 23rd, 2023 A utopian, rosy picture of a world living a submissive, silent, and in Fukuyama’s word “boring” life under what turned out to be a sword of the Western liberal democratic military power. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was followed by the U.S. invasion of Panama a month...

Photo by David Dennis/Flickr Henry Heller April 19, 2023 The focal point of the world’s economy is shifting to Asia and Eurasia China’s place on the world stage advances year by year. It is arguably already the world’s largest economy. Its Belt and Road Initiative and its other international links like the BRICS have helped to magnify its economic but also its political and cultural influence worldwide. More and more countries in the Global South are benefiting from these connections and are looking to China for leadership on the basis of mutual benefit. There is every reason to believe these trends will continue. Moreover, we can see that the focal point of the world’s economy is shifting to Asia and Eurasia. Originally published at Canadian Dimension on March 27, 2023 At the same time, geopolitically, we are headed for a multipolar world with no country able to impose itself as a hegemon. Notably, the...

Colin Mackerras April 20, 2023 The implication of AUKUS is that China constitutes a danger to Australian security. It borders on official Australian policy that China is an aggressive power bent on domination. But the history of the People’s Republic suggests its military is for defence, not aggression and that the cases where it has used external military force are very few. Under Xi Jinping it may be assertive and keen to extend influence, especially economic, but it shows no signs of political/military aggression. On the contrary, it is the U.S. that constantly uses external military force and is bent on maintaining domination at all costs. It was less than a year after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949 that the Korean War broke out. Korean history of the first years after World War II is too complex to pursue here. But essentially,...

Gordon Hahn April 17, 2023 I have written several pieces on the causes of the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War. In them, I focused on the long-term as well as the immediate causes in the run-up to Putin’s decision to invade. However, all this needs to be put together with new revelations in order to understand the mood in the Kremlin in late January-early February (most likely mid-February) when Putin decided to pull the trigger. We have the background causes: • decades of NATO expansion; • NATO’s attack on Serbia, • Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia despite a UN resolution it sponsored stipulating Serbia’s territorial inviolability; • ‘democracy promotion’ colour revolutionism in Ukraine and other states neighbouring Russia; • Western financial and moral support for a colour revolution in Russia; • the Western-backed February 2014 Maidan color revolution; • the cover-up of the Maidan ultranationalist, neofascist wing’s snipers’ flag terrorist...

Or fake à la Falbe: Public service choosing ‘US intelligence’ to protect both the US and Denmark? Ages ago, I was born in Denmark, and I still hold a Danish passport. Quite often, I visit the homepage of the Danish Broadcasting Company – Danmarks Radio (DR). It is public service, regulated by laws passed by the Danish People’s Parliament – “Folketinget.” I sadly admit that there is an element of masochism in my visits to DR. In the particular fields of news reporting on global affairs, security politics and peace/war, this public service’s long-term trend has been down in quality and out of relevance. Sometimes I visit it only to see how biased the coverage of a certain event or decision in the mentioned fields is. I have often written an admittedly wry comment on social media or on my online home and blog, Jan Oberg. Why? Because I believe...

Andi Olluri April 12, 2023 A recent Pentagon conference on psychological warfare noted that the forces of indoctrination “cannot wait until a crisis begins”. A high-ranking chief at the Department of Defence suggested a model for propaganda, in no way new: “Look at marketing … What makes people drink Coke, what makes people drink Pepsi?” In short, public “marketing”. “I think”, the chief lauded, that “the private sector has used the information domain through marketing to the Nth degree … And I think we, as a department and in the national security enterprise, need to be able to pull some of those lessons”. (1) In fact, the “lessons” of effective indoctrination and public persuasion have been perfected in the domain of US government propaganda in conjunction with a servile ‘free’ press. A natural prediction of this is that in discussions of war, peace, diplomacy, violence and so on, essentially any...

He Jun April 11th, 2023 The policy of decoupling and containment towards China pushed by the United States is most aggressive in the technology field. Although the current state of U.S.-China relations has not yet reached the level of a cold war, researchers at ANBOUND believe that in the technology field, the competition between the two countries has become similar to a “technology cold war”. Due to the difference in the levels of technological and industrial development between the two, this is an asymmetric game, with the U.S. having a significant advantage. Originally posted on Eurasia Review’s official website on March 30, 2023 The Institute of International Technology and Economy (IITE), a think tank of China’s State Council, has recently published an article titled “Systematic Trends of U.S. Technology Containment towards China”. This article shows the understanding, analysis, and judgment of Chinese official research institutions on the technological competition between...

Toynbee and Ikeda “Another Way of Seeing Things”, is a short film based on an essay by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda – a TFF Associate for more than 20 years – in which, along with a friend and close colleague/collaborator Arnold Toynbee, he challenges media stereotyping and how this can give rise to prejudice and barriers between people of different nationalities and religions. Toynbee – one of the greatest and most respected macro-historians ever – went to a conflict zone and gave an account different from the black-and-white media narrative of the time and was then forced from his academic position. This was more than 100 years ago. That the media convey one-sided, politically correct views or outright lies is nothing new – perhaps what is new today is the uniformity, the intensity and the frequency with which it is done. This is a beautiful and moving rendition of the...

Ted Snider April 5, 2023 In 2008, William Burns, who is now Biden’s director of the CIA but was then ambassador to Russia, warned that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” He warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Short even of expansion into Ukraine, Burns called NATO expansion into Eastern Europe “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” If it came to Ukraine, Burns warned, “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.” But Burns was not the first Russia expert to flash that warning sign to the White House. In 1990, as the Soviet Union broke apart like a jigsaw puzzle into separate countries, the US and NATO were at a crucial...