Future world – imagination/real

Launched on November 17, 2024Updated with new materials regularly TFF Board members Thore Vest. Everywhere, the delegation was met with a sincere wish to develop knowledge, dialogue, cooperative projects, and initiatives based on citizens’ diplomacy – in general, but with the West in particular. For more, see “Report from the Nordic delegation to China’s Xinjiang Province, September 7-15, 2024.” While the delegation was in Xinjiang, various ideas were already being discussed from the local to the top level, i.e., with the governor and party leaders of Xinjiang. The two TFF Associates suggested that TFF set up a special section – in addition to its “China and Silk” – where various quality materials about Xinjiang would regularly be published to promote public education about Xinjiang, particularly its contemporary development – worldwide but in the West in particular. This is now a reality – as can be seen below – but it...

Foreword The Board of The Transnational Foundation in Sweden has decided to publish an easy-to-read, scholarly anthology that addresses one of the most important – and potentially dangerous – issues of our time: Why are the political, economic, and medialised Western images of China so consistently negative – and what can you do to understand China better? These images may be expressions of a political will to present only various shades of grey and black with the aim of building a consciousness about China as an enemy and not a partner. They may also be seen as a sort of world-dominating ethos of ignorance based upon the assumption that “we’ve-got-nothing-to-learn-from-others,’ we are the teacher. Another possibility is that the West, deep down, feels that it is getting relatively weaker from a macro-historical perspective and comforts itself with denial and accusations against “the other” of being the reason for its manifest...

So happy again to be on a show at Pascal’s Neutrality Studies and meet Ulrike Guérot. I’m advancing the idea – and not for the first time – that humanity, all of us, think far too much about the past and the present – so much so that there is no space and interest in how to define and search for a better future. Click “Watch on YouTube” if you also want to see the – amazingly – many and constructive comments. And share/re-post wherever you can. Was this useful to you? Please share, re-post or refer other to it … OR click here and support TFF’s uniquely independent work for peace by peaceful means in these mad militarist times…

For the last time, I am stating my views on the West’s genocide accusation and why I refuse to let the US/NATO/EU Cold War policy set the agenda and discourse about China in general and Xinjiang in particular. PART I Part II A daring prediction I shall be surprised if, in about 10-15 years, Xinjiang – the North-Western province of China, its largest province three times larger than France – has not become a world-leading cultural and economic hub in humanity’s multipolar/nodal future world. It exhibits a tremendous cultural variety that seems to be moving towards unity in an amazing diversity. It has a vast natural resource potential. It interacts with eight very important neighbouring countries. It’s the crossroads of past, present and future. Xinjiang is the sine qua non of the new Silk Roads, also called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves over 140 countries worldwide and...

Why it is essential to travel and see for yourself and then build networks and promote dialogues in the world’s likely most serious conflict. PART II PART I I recommend you read Part I before reading this second part. A dynamic melting pot You may ask where Xinjiang’s immense cultural diversity comes from. While I have not studied its history, I have learned that it has always been one big meeting place, dating back to the first Silk Roads, where people travelled, traded, explored, and migrated. Crisscrossing also borders with eight neighbours so that over time, it became a melting pot. There is a lot of diversity; each national group or ethnicity seems to have preserved vital elements of its own culture, language, aesthetics, way of living, dancing, etc. and also become part of the unity called Xinjiang and China. A woman I met told me that each nationality’s way of dancing could be...

Citizens dancing on a Friday afternoon at the Grand Bazaar Square in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China – Photo Jan Oberg 2024 This is just a brief reflection on my second visit to China. Still tired from the long journey, I’m slowly adjusting to our time zone and trying to focus on the tasks waiting for me. But a flood of impressions keeps swirling in my mind, making it impossible to rest—especially after realizing how much Western propaganda had shaped my expectations. I thought I was heading to a brutal and backward corner of China, only to find myself utterly enchanted by what I encountered. What intrigued me the most was the fact that I was about to visit what is often portrayed as China’s “most notorious” region. This is the province at the centre of ongoing accusations against China—claims of massive human rights abuses and even genocide, particularly targeting the Uyghur...

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Gordon Hahn November 10, 2023 The world split is quickly evolving into something less like a split – if by ‘split’ one means a more or less evenly balanced division between two parts – and more like the isolation of one smaller part of the international community from a larger, significant or supermajority. Moreover, this isolation resembles self-solation, and the self-isolated party is the West. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Even before the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Washington and Brussels were touting success in isolating first Russia and then China from ‘community of democracies’ (even as Washington was itself abandoning what should properly be called not democratic government but republican government). Instead, the reverse is occurring. By means of arrogance and obstinance, the West, led by Washington, is finding itself increasingly isolated. The West’s isolation is largely an accidental self-isolation brought about by a series of radical policy choices...

Todd Hayen October 23, 2023 We have finally reached a point in the advancement of our technology where we no longer can believe anything we see or hear. I mean, we can if we want to, but we can also choose not to, because the presentation of anything in a photograph, a video, or an audio recording, is no longer reliable evidence of reality. Originally published at Off-Guardian Soon we will not be able to rely on what we see right in front of our face when we are taking a walk in what we believe to be the real world. In fact, we don’t have to wait for this, it is already here. Holographic technology can already deceive us into believing something we see occurring in our own perceived reality. Many say the planes flying into the World Trade Center were holographs. Maybe they were. The technology probably exists to do...

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...

Hein Berdinesen May 10, 2023 A fundamental thesis in Hans Jonas’ The Imperative of Responsibility – In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1984) is that the golden promises of modern technology have turned into a threat, and that technology is inseparably linked with the threat. The thesis is a reminiscence of Heidegger’s diagnosis of the modern in «The Question Concerning Technology» (1977): The «Enframing» (Gestell) is a way to uncover the world where not only nature but also human beings are revealed as part of a «standing reserve» (Bestand). Through technique and technology, nature is just a raw material for manipulation. In this technological «Enframing» of the world, human beings sees everything as orderable, as part of a standing-reserve. Even man is seen as a part of a standing-reserve. This kind of uncovering the world is not in itself a threat amongst other threats, but the threat. In light of the...

Meetings of the G7 and NATO (top) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (bottom) Ben Norton March 29, 2023 A study by the elite EU-funded European Council on Foreign Relations found the West is out of touch politically with the rest of the world. Most people in China, India, and Türkiye see Russia as an important ally, and they want multipolarity, not continued “American global supremacy”. Originally published at Geopolitical Economy on February 25, 2023 A study by an elite European government-funded think tank found that, while the United States and Europe are growing closer together, the West is increasingly out of touch politically with the rest of the world. The report, from the EU member state-financed European Council on Foreign Relations, conceded that the system of “American global supremacy” is in rapid decline, and many people in the Global South want a new “multipolar world”. The series of polls concluded that NATO’s proxy...