breakdown

Professor emeritus & TFF Associate* The world is in turmoil and perhaps closer to the possibility of a devastating nuclear war than at any time since the Second World War. There are at least three ongoing conflicts that have the potential of expanding into something much more serious that will lead to regional or even global wars. Wars are raging in the heart of Europe, the Middle East and, if some US hawks can get their way, soon there will be another disastrous war between the West and China. Yet, world leaders seem to be asleep and are moving blindly towards the precipice. War in Ukraine On 25 March 2024, in a letter to President Joe Biden, a large number of the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warned that in the light of the reports that France was preparing to dispatch a force of some 2,000 troops to Ukraine,...

I’m 70 now and all my life, I’ve heard that the Russians would one day make a surprise attack and, within 48 hours, occupy the Eifel Tower. Fait accompli! We in the West were weak – perhaps not right now but we would be within the next 5 years if we did not invest much more in ”defence”. Well, these damn Russians haven’t come yet – another reason we shouldn’t trust them, I assume! The latest variation on that bizarre and irrational theme is that Swedish military spokespersons maintain that Sweden has to plan for an isolated Russian attack on the island of Gotland – and that China aims to conquer Taiwan and Biden telling the world that the US is committed to defend Taiwan. This is a slightly revised version of an editorial for the Transcend Media Service, October 25, 2021 The time when you could understand international affairs...

A new report, published on 14 March, 2021, in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ journal Ambio, points out that humanity is hurtling towards destruction unless we have the collective wisdom to change course quickly. The Ambio article was written as part of the preparation of a meeting of Nobel Prize winners to discuss the state of the planet. The virtual meeting will be held on April 26-28, 2021. We Must Achieve a Steady-State Economic System A steady-state economic system is necessary because neither population growth nor economic growth can continue indefinitely on a finite earth. No one can maintain that exponential industrial growth is sustainable in the long run except by refusing to look more than a short  distance into the future. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between industrial growth, and growth of culture and knowledge, which can and should continue to grow. Qualitative improvements in human society are possible and...

Photo: We suffer through today’s difficult, complicated and partially obfuscated time (Photo credit: wsimag.com) By Ellyn Kaschak October 3, 2020 It is hard to know where things began when we are already in the middle of it all. This is especially so as we suffer through today’s difficult, complicated and partially obfuscated time. Originally published at Wall Street International Perhaps the beginning occurred in 1865 when the American Civil War was officially declared ended, but continued to seethe in less organized ways. Maybe the declaration by the American government in the 1950’s that Italians, Irish and Jewish people were now suddenly and irrevocably considered to be White is part of it. Perhaps some more seeds were planted during the presidency of Ronald Reagan or carefully cultivated as a backlash to the first presidency of a Black man, Barack Obama. The causes of and connections to the current multiple crises are...

Part 4 Part 1 and 2 were introductory and then made the diagnosis. Part 3 analysed the fraudulent threat analysis that fuels militarism.This 4th part focus on some theories and concepts about human security and how that concept differs fundamentally from the state-anchored, military policies that have dominated so far. Part 1 of this series • Part 2 of this series • Part 3 As pointed out in earlier parts of this series, the obsolete security concept was about national security – national military-first security. A new concept must take its departure elsewhere, namely in individual security, humanity’s security and – thereby, implicitly – the security of the environment. That is, individual and global human security and the security of the environment. It’s a much-needed holistic way of looking at it – also in the sense that human life cannot be secured if the environment decays into global climate breakdown....

May 25, 2020 Dr. Lawrence Wittner Decades ago, when I began teaching international history, I used to ask students if they thought it was possible for nations to end their fighting of wars against one another. Their responses varied. But the more pessimistic conclusions were sometimes tempered by the contention that, if the world’s nations faced a common foe, such as an invasion from another planet, this would finally pull them together. Originally published on Counterpunch on April 14, 2020 here I was reminded of this on March 23, when the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, called for “an immediate global ceasefire.” The time had come, he said, to “end the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world.” A UN summary noted that the Secretary-General had “urged warring parties across the world to lay down their weapons in support of the bigger battle against COVID-19: the...

More than earlier crises of my lifetime, including the Great Depression, World War II, 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates as never before, how precarious and uncertain is the future wellbeing, and possibly survival, of the human species. The concreteness, immediacy, and haunting uncertainties of the pandemic is quite terrifying on its own, but its heuristic pedagogy seems applicable to a range of potentially catastrophic threats of global scope, most obviously climate change, biodiversity, nuclear weaponry. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s blog on May 3, 2020 What we should now be able to realize even while asleep is that when the under-preparedness of governance and political leadership is based on ignoring a scientific consensus is combined with radical uncertainty and myopic nationalism the stage is set for planetary and species disaster, and not only personal grief and national emergency. These signature traits of the 21st century heighten our fears and feelings of...

Photo – Jan Oberg Gordon Dumoulin May 5, 2020 People from abroad ask me lately how it is to be ‘back to normal’ in Beijing after the lockdown? A little introduction First of all we have not witnessed a strict lockdown here in Beijing such as in Wuhan, Hubei province, some other cities in China e.g. Hangzhou or even in Lombardy or Paris and Madrid. Even though we have not been forced to stay at home since the beginning, public life had been minimized in Beijing and we have resiliently stayed inside most of the time for our own safety, minimizing the risk of further outbreak and in solidarity with the people fighting at the battlefield. We have been subject to intense measure and data organisations to provide a bigger picture of the pandemic and virus, both through on-site checks of temperature and whereabouts and through high-tech with apps checking...

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...

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...

Joseph Biden for president! Yesterday his main rival for the Democratic Party’s nomination, Bernie Sanders, endorsed him. If the world could vote, the overwhelming majority would vote for Biden, despite some misgivings. My reservations would be on his foreign policy. Like President Barack Obama he would be good on domestic policy but mistaken on much of his foreign policy. Obama made Biden responsible for dealing with the Ukraine crisis where he fashioned an anti-Russian policy based on little evidence that this was fair to the facts. He writes now of the need to “counter Russian aggression” and that “we must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms”. If he can’t get Russian policy right, what hope is there he will get other issues right? We don’t need an unnecessary second Cold War. If the US can’t have a policy for rapid nuclear disarmament with Russia, going well...

Let’s get death in proportion. True, Coronavirus is an appalling disease but the number of deaths it has caused this year is far lower than deaths caused by either common flue, car accidents, drug-taking, alcoholism or cigarette smoking.  Governments don’t like these things and make an effort to combat them. But they don’t get themselves as worked up as they have with Coronavirus (For starters, why don’t they outlaw all smoking?). A Russian friend texted me from Moscow the other day saying the pandemic we should worry about is “the pandemic of fear”. Where is our sense of proportion? Another issue to examine in order to clarify our thinking is how many people have US and NATO troops killed compared with the numbers killed by terrorism. Again it is a matter of getting things in proportion. Terrorism puts the fear of God up to people and governments. But there’s less...