Ethics and values
The UN Calendar: The World’s Conscience
By Johan Galtung
It is amazing. The United Nations have decades, years, weeks and days, dedicated to more values, goals and concerns than most of us are aware of. Compare it to nation-states usually with only one day, their day, their national day, celebrating nobody but themselves.
Maybe the UN overdoes it, that one decade flows into the next without leaving more than some verbal traces?
Missing: Political creativity
By Johan Galtung
A key slogan during the student revolt in Paris May 1968, soon 50 years ago, was Imagination au pouvoir! Bring imagination to power!
We were there, walking with thousands from Champs-Élysées to Place Etoile where a stentorian voice commanded us to sit in small groups in the circles under the Arch to “discuss the situation”. So we did.
The hypocrisy of owning nuclear weapons
By Jonathan Power
May 16th 2017
During the French election no candidate talked about France’s nuclear weapons. In Britain, the subject has been raised in its election in an attempt to undermine the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But the long-time anti-bomb activist compromised his views, saying in effect he was against them but Labour Party policy was for them.
The Post Glory Exuberance Disorder – PGED
By Johan Galtung
Very well known is post trauma stress disorder, PTSD; no doubt a very painful disorder experienced by many, most, maybe by all of us. Something went very wrong: a shock, violence, physical, verbal, by and to individuals, groups in society, societies, groups of societies. Not only by and to individuals: PTSD does not belong to psychology only.
For first time an African president convicted of war crimes
May 2nd 2017
Last May a court in Senegal convicted and sentenced to life-imprisonment Hissene Habre, the former ruler of Chad, for the crime of torture and crimes against humanity. On Thursday last, an appeal court upheld the sentence and now Habre, who ran from Chad after a coup in a military transport that airlifted him, his entourage and a Mercedes to what he hoped would be a luxurious exile in Senegal, is languishing in an ordinary prison cell.
US/NATO increasing tension with Russia – focus Syria: New frosty Cold War
TFF Live
April 12, 2017
The secretaries of state, Tillerson and Lavrov meet today. We seem to enter a stage of what must appropriately be perceived as a frosty new Cold War.
In the worst of cases this can lead to a new Cuban Missile Crisis. God forbid!
The dangers of populism waxing
By Jonathan Power
April 4th 2017
The long talked-about referendum in Turkey will happen on April 16th. In effect voters have to decide whether the president, Recep Erdogan, in theory the incumbent of a relatively modest political post, should now be given the powers of the president and prime minister together.