July 2023

South China Morning Post, June 6, 2023 July 27, 2023 The high-tech corporations and social media – like Apple, Google, Facebook, and others – have served the governments of US/NATO/EU world to erode everything we used to call privacy, integrity and freedom. That spells, of course, the end of democracy, too. Here is a short video that gives you the essentials – also how hesitant so-called democracies are to delimit what is legal and what is not. At the same time, they are very good at blaming ‘autocratic’ states for spying on us all from the outside – thereby legitimising their own illegal policies. Jan ObergEditor

Is there such a thing: Nonviolent journalism? Of course, there is. It’s only that we live in a perverted militarist culture and era in which nobody questions the concept of war reporting – rampant everywhere – but in which most people would probably respond to “nonviolent journalism” with a: What? Those of us in the profession of peace have long known and cherished the theory and practice of peace journalism pioneered by TFF Associates like Johan Galtung, Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick. I don’t think it is a good term in the specific sense that journalists should never promote this or that value but report as honestly and multi-faceted what they see and hear. But its specific quality, in my view, is that peace journalism is about reporting the conflicts that violence and wars are rooted in – and not only the violence that most media wallow in today (and...

Terry Gou July 22, 2023 Editor’s introduction I believe there is great confusion in the minds of many Westerners about Taiwan, its relation to China and the US’s real Taiwan policy. TFF has written about some of it in our Smokescreen Report here but you may also like to read this Wikipedia entry about the 1992 Consensus – and its problems – as well as the Chou Enlai-Nixon talks and agreements in February 1972 here and here. I would like, therefore, to recommend the article below by Terry Gou – a very successful Taiwanese businessman and politician who here promotes a peace and win-win perspective in contrast to his own government leadership and the Biden administration. Interestingly, it was published by The Washington Post (on July 17, 2023). Click! Jan Oberg, TFF director and editor

By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it was forbidden for the media in the US to show pictures of the coffins of American soldiers killed in combat. This prohibition was lifted only in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers were also banned, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such footage in the vast archives of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier was trying to climb out of a burning tank. Three seconds out of thousands...

Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy. I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen US Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United...

Just a little public relations for ourselves – Perspectives like these are now completely cancelled by Western mainstream media – MSM – US NATO mouthpieces. But we reach millions outside the West, and that is what matters for the future. China’s Xinhua News Agency in English, July 12, 2023Three articles using quotes:Interview: NATO’s policies are gross violation of its own charter, int’l law, says Swedish expert.Roundup: NATO fails to give timetable for Ukraine membership at summit.NATO summit sparks global security concern, internal rifts remain China’s national television, CCTV, July 12, 2023Jan Oberg: Three comments related to NATO’s Vilnius Summit新闻直播间]瑞典智库学者表示 北约自诩防御联盟 却持续扩张引发冲突Shared also by 163.com, CZTV.com, Jxnews.com.cn, Huanqui.com. The Citizen, India, July 8, 2023NATO – 30 Years Of Conflict Provocations The North Atlantic Treaty Organization no longer argues or analyses, it postulates. Centro Studi Sereno Regis, July 4, 2023Vertice NATO di Vilnius: 30 anni di provocazioni di conflitti See more on...

) Article 19.2 here. Why not support TFF – one of a handful of peace think tanks left that is truly independent and exclusively financed by all-volunteer workand concerned citizens like you?Go here – Thanks!

After the NATO Summit in Vilnius, a US-Nordic Summit took place in Helsinki on July 13, 2023. Here is, first, what I would suggest the US, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland take up: • How to back out of NATO’s conflict with Russia, stop the war in Russia and move – with the use of UN peace-keeping and -mediation – towards a viable, sustainable solution to Ukraine’s security problem that all parties can live with – although perhaps not be happy with. • How to re-create the Arctic as a de-militarised, low-tension region and cooperate to the benefit of all parties and the fragile environment. • How to secure that none of the Nordic countries shall have any US bases (except the one in Thule, Greenland, which by the way was not invited) – so to not provoke Russia unnecessarily.Given the Nordic countries’ historically comparatively peaceful policies, how can the...

• 1 NATO is not going to let Ukraine in as a full member. Probably never. All the statements about getting it in and its rightful place in NATO is sugar-coating. NATO cannot say that but knows now that its ill-considered promise in 2008 to make Ukraine a member is as dead as the promises made to Gorbachev that the alliance would not expand one inch. All the NATO words about military packages, G7 security assistance, reform path to be drawn up but no timetable, the new NATO-Ukraine Council with so-called ’equals,’ long-term commitments, etc. – all were words of cruel diplomacy serving to soothe a very disappointed Zelensky. • 2 The Ukrainian president will also have understood by now that the US has achieved what it wants: Economic deals with Ukraine about its resources, huge debts and a very high price to be paid by Ukraine and European NATO...

Jin Ding – China Daily NATO’s next summit will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12. Almost on the day 26 years ago – July 8-9, 1997 – NATO held a summit in Madrid which confirmed ”The Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security Between NATO and the Russian Federation” – in other words, a permanent NATO-Russia Forum – that had been signed by Yeltsin and Clinton in Paris on May 27. M. E. Sarotte’s brilliant 550-page analysis ”Not One Inch. America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate” can be read as one long illustration of how the US – and thereby NATO – in reality, has operated on a big-brother, condescending and manipulative attitude to Russia. Russia was never meant to become an equal partner, and whatever Russian concerns were taken into account, decisions were made to promote US/NATO interests in what was – and...

Einar Tangen on infer July 6, 2023 There is woefully little trust between the world’s two giants – the United States and China. US-born Einar Tangen deals with that issue in a manner that more people should be inspired by – also at the highest level. I would like to alert our readers here also to my own recent analysis of the concept of trust kindly published by China Investment in English and Chinese – “Looking ahead, where does trust come from?” More about Einar Tangen and the Taihe Institute in Beijing that he has recently joined.