August 2024

Contemporary reports of the birth of the United Nations in June 1945 in San Francisco warmly welcomed the news of its establishment and congratulated the United States for conceiving and delivering the new international organisation. President Truman’s remarks at the closing ceremony – “what a great day this can be in history” – were widely shared. There were enormous expectations that, in contrast to the discredited League of Nations, there was now a strong institution that would keep the peace and promote international cooperation. The momentum of San Francisco was maintained in the later months of 1945 in London where with the new Labour government and decisive leadership from the Foreign Office, the necessary practical measures were taken very quickly to put in place the principal organs, especially the Security Council, the General Assembly and the secretariat. A major deficiency of the Charter – the absence of provisions on human...

It’s produced by The China Academy in Shanghai and speaks for itself with no need for an introduction.

Source: Getty Images As Western elites shape their countries’ relationship with the Jewish state, they should apply one standard for all. Michael Young* August 20, 2024 On August 5, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that starving 2 million Palestinians in Gaza “to death” might be the “right and moral” thing to do until Israeli hostages held in Gaza are released, but that the “world won’t let us.” It took several days for countries to react to Smotrich’s effort to transform a genocidal impulse into a morally justified action. The U.S. State Department spokesman said his government was “appalled by these comments and reiterate[s] that this rhetoric is harmful and disturbing.” Under the circumstances, the rebuke was rather tame. Calling for the mass starvation of an entire civilian population should qualify as more than just “harmful and disturbing.” But perhaps the State Department was unwilling to go too far in...

Few are better qualified to challenge the official orthodoxy that stifles any discussion of this topic Peter Oborne August 12, 2024 No review has yet been published of Professor Ilan Pappe’s magnificent and passionate new book on the Zionist lobby. This silence is no surprise. Even a passing reference to the lobby is liable to lead to charges of antisemitism and potential career destruction. Faiza Shaheen was dropped like a stone last month as Labour candidate for the London seat of Chingford and Woodford Green. “There have been complaints, allegedly, about her ‘liking’ a tweet that referred to the ‘Israel lobby’ – widely considered an anti-Semitic trope,” reported the New Statesman’s associate political editor, Rachel Cunliffe. On a now-infamous Newsnight appearance following her defenestration, a tearful Shaheen apologised for liking the tweet and accepted it was a “trope”. She didn’t have much choice. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC),...

John J. Mearsheimer Aug 05, 2024 The question of who is responsible for causing the Ukraine war has been a deeply contentious issue since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The answer to this question matters enormously because the war has been a disaster for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that Ukraine has effectively been wrecked. It has lost a substantial amount of its territory and is likely to lose more, its economy is in tatters, huge numbers of Ukrainians are internally displaced or have fled the country, and it has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Of course, Russia has paid a significant blood price as well. On the strategic level, relations between Russia and Europe, not to mention Russia and Ukraine, have been poisoned for the foreseeable future, which means that the threat of a major war in Europe will be with...

On August 6, Hiroshima Day, 2024, I published a long, very well-documented article by Irene Galtung, the daughter of peace research professor Johan Galtung, about the tragic circumstances surrounding his last months alive and the human rights violations they both had to endure. What is left of that publication now is only my foreword below. As the editor and publisher of The Transnational, I have decided under threat to delete it, and I owe our readers to explain how I came to that decision. The reason is that her mother and Johan’s wife, Fumiko Nishimura Galtung, her two half-brothers, Andreas Galtung and Harald Eide Galtung and her brother Fredrik Galtung, had turned to lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas at the Glitterlind Law Firm in Oslo, asking him to demand that it be deleted in its entirety. The reason behind that demand and warning was that they considered that text constituted violations of their constitutional right to privacy and amounted to defamation. Thus, according to the...