Democracy in Crisis

America’s Strategic Assault on Art, Academia, and the Imagination That Sustains Peace The United States once stood as a beacon of cultural audacity—a place where dissent could be beautiful, and beauty and innovation could challenge the present order of things. Its museums, universities, and artists helped inspire a worldwide imagination rooted in creative freedom and innovation. But today, under the Trump regime’s second term, those dynamic qualities are being systematically dismantled. Just read this. As Trump goes after the arts, many museums remain silent | CNN As CNN reports, the administration has launched an aggressive campaign to “eradicate improper ideology” from federally funded museums. Exhibitions involving race, gender, and identity are being censored or cancelled. Amy Sherald’s reimagining of the Statue of Liberty as a Black, trans woman was pulled from the Smithsonian after curators objected to its symbolism. Sherald warned that “history shows us what happens when governments demand loyalty...

And of course, they don’t tell their readers The development – or decline – of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken as a quality newspaper in the field of foreign policy pains me. Allow me a personal, somewhat nostalgic introduction. I wrote frequently for Politiken from 1971 to 1994. As a 20-year-old sociology student, I was naturally proud to be published in what was then a prestigious, liberal media outlet, which was initially shaped by Hørup’s anti-militarism and cultural radicalism. The broadest and best social debate took place in Politiken’s columns and on its debate pages. Over the years, I also got to meet some of the newspaper’s most important ‘influencers,’ editors such as Agner Ahm, not least the legendary feature editor Harald Mogensen, and later – believe it or not – I was invited to lunch with editor-in-chief Herbert Pundik himself at Hotel Kong Frederik, during which he told me,...

通过联合国改革实现全球民主治理： 面向未来的多极世界 Last year, I was asked by the prestigious “China Investment” Magazine in Beijing to write a longer analysis of my own choice. It would become the cover story in the first 2025 issue. While I have written several things before (a) for China Investment, it was the first time that I could freely choose. I feel honoured by the trust in extended by the editorial board. Since China relies heavily on long-range thinking and visions, I thought it would be interesting to write something within the field of future research—which I explain in the introduction to the analysis—about how I could envisage a future world with global governance and a reformed United Nations. I think it is urgently necessary to focus much less on the past and focus much more on the future. No one can drive to a goal by only looking in the rear mirror… And...

Talk at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, September 2010 Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen It is a great honor to be on a panel with the Director of CPC-CC Foreign Affairs, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, the Editor-in-chief of China Daily, the Dean of the National Office of Chinese Language, the Deputy Commander of the People’s Liberation Army.  I express my gratitude to the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament and the American Friends Service Committee for having brought me to this tenth visit to China since 1973, and to Beijing Foreign Studies University for inviting me to this Forum on Public Diplomacy and China’s International Image. I define public diplomacy as diplomacy for the people and by the people. The purpose is neither public relations nor propaganda, but to bring the peoples of the world together by making them understandable to each other.  Like languages have their own logic,...

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, I had the great pleasure of being Ania K’s guest on her YouTube Channel. Here is a link to it – and I want you to use the link to access it on YouTube and not here. The amusing thing is that it’s been viewed by 11,000 people in a few days, and less than a week later, there are 160 comments, 99,99 % positive about the whole thing. I note a frequent comment from Ania’s viewers: Where have you been hiding, Jan? How come I did not hear about him before and that sort of “we never heard about him…” comments. This is striking after having been the co-founder and director of the Transnational Foundation since 1986 – and quite active in doing research, on-the-ground conflict mitigation work and having written thousands of articles, book chapters and comments. But I’ve heard it before and here are some reasons: One,...

Without being a NATO member, Sweden enters into an extremely far-reaching agreement with the United States, which completely undermines the country’s ability to conduct an independent security policy. Decisions are made without debate and behind the backs of the Swedish people. The official threat perception is fake: Russia will not attack the island of Gotland, but Russian missiles will now quite naturally be aimed at Sweden and be the first to be fired – if! Sweden might as well shut down the Ministry of Defence and let the Pentagon and State do the rest. Sweden has just signed a so-called defence agreement with the US. It gives the US access to no less than 17 military bases all over Sweden – and it does not exclude nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. It is now absolutely certain to be dragged immediately into a US war – the country that has fought...

This unbiased presentation – which she reads to you in the video below – is very important, not only because it is based on very extensive reading of what he has written and said but also because he is already the victim of character assassination and demonisation. He is systematically villified and marginalised in the US media – and hardly known to people outside the US. Most Europeans, for instance, believe there are only Biden and Trump. It’s very clear that Christman is highly positive to RFK Jr. As a leading peace researcher and educator in the US, this is natural because he is the only one who fundamentally challenges – with solid knowledge, life experience and civil courage – what we call the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex. Nobody else argues for dialogue with ‘the other’ instaed of war and for the US withdrawal from all of its 600+ military...

Joint demonstration of the trade unions on May Day in Berlin under the slogan Unbroken Solidarity. Photography K.M.Krause via Reuters Anatol Lieven & George Beebe August 23, 2023 Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin’s propaganda A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it. The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the “decolonization” of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution...

Ger van Elk, Symmetry of Diplomacy, 1975, Groninger Museum   Alfred de Zayas   July 31, 2023   The blaming game has always been counter-productive. In the UN Human Rights Council, the practice is known as “naming and shaming”, as if the States engaging in “naming” would possess a higher moral authority over those “named”, and as if the assignment of blame could possibly contribute to an atmosphere conducive to dialogue and compromise.   Originally published at CounterPunch on July 25, 2023   Those who assign the blame would do better to look for root causes and, in any event, do some sweeping at their doorsteps, as China has told the US on repeated occasions[1]. I recall once the Chinese Ambassador saying in jest that he would send a couple hundred mirrors to the White House. This also reflects an idiom attributed to Confucius (551-479 BC) that “all will follow...

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

June 26, 2023 New York Times About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Originally published in The New York Times on Dec. 26, 1977 Not long after John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, arrived in India in 1961 to take up his new post as American Ambassador, he became aware of a curious political journal called Quest that was floating around the Asian subcontinent. The following oracle is bused on reporting by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B.Treaster. It was written by Mr. Crewdson. “It had a level of intellectual and political competence that was sub‐zero,”...