Theories and concepts

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By David Swanson October 6, 2017 The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) — listen to my radio show with one of ICAN’s leaders two years ago here. It’s conceivable that some Americans will now learn, because of this award, about the new treaty that bans the possession of nuclear weapons. This treaty has been years in the works. This past summer 122 nations agreed on the language of it, including these words… Continue to the original here

Professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and University of California, Santa Barbara, board member of The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and TFF Associate since 1985 Finally, the committee in Oslo that picks a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize each year selected in 2017 an awardee that is a true embodiment of the intended legacy of Alfred Nobel when he established the prize more than a century ago. It is also a long overdue acknowledgement of the extraordinary dedication of anti-nuclear activists around the planet who for decades have done all in their power to rid the world of this infernal weaponry before it inflicts catastrophe upon all living beings even more unspeakable that what befell the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on two infamous days in August 1945. Such a prize result was actually anticipated days before the announcement by Fredrik Heffermehl, a crusading Norwegian critic of...

What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants By Gunnar Westberg TFF Board member “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants” Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino International Security, August 2017 This is a summary and a few reflections upon reading a very comprehensive academic study recently published in International Security. See it’s full text here. The nuclear taboo is no longer strong In this extensive and scholarly report of 67 pages the authors report on several opinion polls they have conducted in order to learn about the attitudes of Americans to the use of nuclear weapons compared to conventional weapons. They also review the field extensively comparing with other studies. Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Americans strongly supported the use of nuclear weapons in that situation. The approval rate decreased to a large...

Editorial #500 TRANSCEND Media Service & TFF Associate We made it! Five hundred Mondays [from 3 Mar 2008] has Antonio from Brazil-Portugal posted an editorial by me from Norway and the world – sometimes with a coauthor. With the good support of the other members of our editorial committee, Malvin Gattinger from Germany, Naakow Grant-Hayford from Ghana and Erika Degortes from Italy. THANKS! Five hundred times have I had the challenge of exploring what the UN wisely calls a “situation” – unlike me, avoiding the word “crisis”. Five hundred times have I tried to follow what I absorbed from when I was 2 years old at dining tables listening to my physician father and nurse mother–daughter of the director of health care in Norway–the program implicit in the three magic words Diagnosis-Prognosis-Therapy. DPT. Five hundred analyses of something problematic to put it mildly; five hundred efforts to forecast, foresee what...

Out of the blue the war in Vietnam is in the news. Yet it is not the fiftieth anniversary of America’s defeat in Vietnam when North Vietnam caused it to flee. It’s only the forty second. Part of this must be fearful parallels with the moral and strategic blindness of President Donald Trump who seems to believe in uttering his life and death rhetoric, akin to President Richard Nixon’s on Vietnam, he can frighten the enemy into submission – in his case North Korea. Many people are worried that Trump is ready to fight America’s biggest war since Vietnam. As did Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, he appears to be considering the use of nuclear weapons. The second reason for Vietnam-consciousness are the rave reviews that are being given to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10 part documentary on the Vietnam War. It is being mentioned all over the...

Liu Xiaobo passed away. What is the – not so hidden – truth about him? Answer: His speeches and writings show enthusiasm for the 100-year English colonization of Hong Kong, wishing 300 years colonization of China, celebrating the US war in Afghanistan, hoping for atomic weapons. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for democratization of China, had the freedom of speech, but the prize communicated as a provocation. The prize could easily have been given to their Charter, not to Liu Xiaobo. Norway’s security – what are the threats? Answer: Given the location, an invasion by USA or Russia to prevent the other from doing so. The situation is reminiscent of the threat from England, Germany and USSR to prevent one of the other from doing so in 1940; what happened was England and Germany violating Norwegian neutrality, fighting a battle on Norwegian territory. USSR nothing till they fought German...

A world map shows the West is big, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean-Black Sea-Russian border; but not that big. However, that is only Europe. Add Anglo-America, USA-Canada, from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans, from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico. The West is huge, enormous. It covers geographically the Northern Arctic and temperate zones. It houses religiously the three Christianities, much of Judaism, but not Islam. Muslims and all others count as minorities, here and there. It is the seat of another major faith, Enlightenment: humanism-liberalism-marxism-nationalism-statism-capitalism-regionalism. It is the seat of the major IGOs, NGOs and TNCs in the world. It identifies West as “developed”, and Rest as “developing”. West has attacked, invaded, conquered, colonized almost all the Rest of the world (China only partly, Japan only recently, from 1945). The overwhelming majority of wars are intra-West, or West-Rest.

“Pentagon Study Declares American Empire Is ‘Collapsing,’” is the title of an essay by Nafeez Ahmed, analyzing the study. Sounds interesting. His subtitle: “Report demands massive expansion of military-industrial complex to maintain global ‘access to resources’”. Sounds familiar. Using excerpts from the Pentagon study made by Nafeez Ahmed, and deeply grateful to him, here are our comments. Based on some work in the field – The Decline and Fall of the US Empire; And Then What?, TRANSCEND University Press, 2010 [i] – Pentagon is a key institution in the USA, next to the White House-Congress-Wall Street. How it sees its own role in the USA and in the world is of primary importance to understand where USA is heading.

By Gunnar Westberg Board member of TFF August 20, 2017 The author has been twice to North Korea and maintains contacts with physicians in the North Korean branch of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in that country. ”If your country continues to develop nuclear weapons, you will be attacked, maybe with nuclear weapons”. This what we have told our colleagues from North Korea, at visits to Pyongyang or at international meetings. “Oh no,” they said. “Look at Saddam Hussein and Mohamad Ghadafi. They gave up their plans for nuclear weapons, and they were attacked”. “Nuclear weapons development is not the only reason for the USA to attack. Oil is the other”, we said. It turns out we were right. North Korea – DPRK – continued on the path to nuclear weapons and the President of the USA threatens to attack. The crisis is, for the moment fading,...

Lecture notes at the Hardanger Academy for Peace Development and Environment 30 Jul 2017 These are the goals of the United Nations; the Hardanger Academy in little Jondal, Norway (population ca.1150) made them three foci. The problem arose: what do they have in common? Are they three aspects of the same thing? If so, what is that “thing”? Four ways of trying to answer have been identified and explored. Four because of four ways of approaching social reality, through: • actors, with intentions-capabilities-contexts, with their needs; • culture, defining the true-good-right-beautiful-sacred; • structure, the patterns of individual and collective interaction; • nature, evolving to higher complexity, with diversity and symbiosis. All four have surfaces and deeper aspects. The surface aspects are conscious, can be articulated and communicated. The deeper aspects are repressed into the subconscious as inconvenient, too obvious or simply unknown. They can be “conscientized” (Freire), or simply be...