Siduduzile Nyoni, a mother of three, busily completing one of her ilala palm products, which will be sold through a women’s cooperative in western Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Jun 24 2017 (IPS)

Humanity has had and has big projects. Mastery of nature is one, still going on. Middle range phenomena have been mastered, but not the micro level of viri–HIV is a current case–nor the macro level of climate–to the contrary, humanity is making it worse.

Johan Galtung

Another huge project can be called Material-somatic comfort, including health. Well-ness not ill-ness. Amazingly successful, look at an average day in what can be called the bourgeois way of life. As is well known, this second project may contradict the first project.

Other huge projects stand in line, calling on our attention.

Spiritual-mental comfort, also called happiness, well-being, is one, not to be to be confused with indicators of material-somatic comfort assuming that one automatically translates into the other.

Peace, both as absence of violence and as positive peace, being good to each other, is another. Between persons called friendship, love; problematic. Between nations, states, civilizations, regions very problematic. One reason: we may not have wanted it enough, too low priority relative to the others. And that also applies to:

Equality, both by lifting the bottom up meeting their needs and reducing gaps between high and low. There are those who get material and spiritual comfort from war and inequality like the present Trump-generals-billionaires regime in the USA; fascist with a strong and belligerent state and super-capitalist in its economy. With none of the socialist elements in Hitler’s nazism and Mussolini’s fascism. (*)

Inequality and violence, urban vs rural, hit those who produce and deliver food for all of us; one reason being urban fear of a delivery strike. China experiments with radical elimination of the urban-rural difference by moving industries to villages run by agricultural-industrial cooperatives, most or many working in both. Interesting, but let us look at cooperatives to master rural poverty.

Cooperatives as opposed to farms. Farms are companies with CEOs, farmers owning the land and family members and others tiling the soil. The risks are many: unmastered nature, conjunctures, food imports; the farms become indebted-impoverished, farmers starving, suicide.

The primary purpose of rural cooperatives is to feed themselves by sharing risks, and share gains on top of that. Members are both farmers and farm workers with risk-absorbing capacity and sharing.

Poor and unemployed from towns and cities may join, at least getting food in exchange for work. There may be mental aspects: old, lonely farmer couples wanting vacationing students as company, they also sustaining themselves.

The old farm = company is not good enough. Nor is capital buying all the land for single crop automated farming at the expense of both human and nature’s needs.

Rural cooperatives for rural uplift, Gandhi’s sarvodaya with villages as a productive units, means exactly that. Although this could go beyond Gandhi and be much more diverse, adjusted to local contexts.

Spain offers a fascinating example. Travel from Sevilla toward Cartagena, white, poor villages with farmers tilling small plots, the land often owned by absent land-owners, some unused, massive misery.

And then suddenly Marinaleda, a commune that became a rural cooperative by getting help from the region expropriating the land-owners, the population being paid according to the work input, run by general assemblies and setting aside funds for kindergarten-schools-health services, all free.

The mayor is the highly entrepreneurial Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo. Lad-owners all over Spain will do their best to prevent a repeat, but Gordillo has shown how it can be done. It will happen again.

A “modern” company offers low price-low quality products, pays workers and managers a minimum, the CEO a maximum for handing over the net profit to the board. In a cooperative, they are at the same level rotating among functions. Basic input work, not capital.

They are dramatically different. The jump is dramatic. Could it be more gradual, are there in-betweens?

Starting with customers-clients: “modern” business spies on them, gets their “profiles” from IT data for “matching” products. The method is that of dictatorships. In cooperatives, a producer-consumer dialogue between equals about products–like better cars, computers–is easy, developing products together. The method is that of democracy.

Take advertising in the media, with no chance for consumers to rebut, criticizing products. Dictators get some feedback, but the media treat ads as gospel truths for fear of losing advertisers. We need a culture of open product discussion and producers may find that this also serves their interests, not only those of consumers.

But companies could do better. “Marketing research” uses questionnaires and interviews, they could easily include dialogues.

Take the whole exploitation aspect, squeezing downward. Companies are now gradually accepting listing “negative side-effects”, especially for medicines. One day also for cars and computers and the rest.

Take the penetration of the human mind by what we often call “commercialization”, buying and selling, with few or no questions asked. And look at the list of Big Projects and bring them in–does this buying-and-selling serve peace? Equality?

Have a look at the price of the final product and break it down into what is paid for resources, capital, labor and profit. Customers have a right to know.

Take the segmentation of workers and of customers; trade unions and customers associations have brought them together. Good and decent companies would celebrate not fight, not marginalize them from decision-making but would include them as cooperatives do, by definition.

Treat the countryside badly, you get revenge: “Why Rural America Voted for Trump” (Robert Leonard, NYT 5 Jan 2017). Treat it well, let it have its own life, integrate rural and urban, and get a good country.

Note:

(*) “Half of World’s Wealth, in the Pockets of Just Eight Men” (Inter Press Service 16 Jan 2017). “Obscene”, pathological. Who are they? Bill Gates (Microsoft), Amancio Ortega (Zara), Warren Buffet (Hathaway), Carlos Slim (Carso), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Elison (Oracle), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg). Six Americans, one Spaniard, one Mexican. Let Trump isolate America. America or the California-Canada-China-Mexico alliance gets the upper hand.

Johan Galtung’s article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS): TMS: Rural Poverty? Cooperatives!

The statements and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Mar 14 2017 (IPS)

Wikipedia has much to offer under “aging”. Highly recommended are the 10 points by the world’s oldest living man, 114, Walter Breuning.

Johan Galtung

Rule no. 1: Keep mind and body active; maintain a good nutrition.

Obvious to counteract aging. However, equally important:

Rule no. 2: Be open to the positive sides and advantages of aging.

Bertrand Russell’s “On Being 90” in the Observer dispenses with the disadvantages as obvious, in favor of his advantage: the overview. At the age of 5 he sat on the knee of a man who had fought Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815-=-. The longer the lives we have lived, the more events have impinged upon us. An “overview” identifies some link, a narrative, a common factor. That identification is often referred to as “wisdom”.

However: thigh muscles weaken, walking falters, fatigue, seeing and hearing impaired. Exercise helps, but aging is unavoidable.

Rule no. 3: At least do not fall; not breaking fragile bones, no ending up bedridden in a hospital, contracting new diseases. Equip the room, the home, the context with handles and handrails.

Then the mental aspects of aging: memories failing, not only of recent events, less ability to handle many and simultaneous stimuli. As a result, many and more mistakes reinforcing the sense of aging.

Rule no. 4: Simplify the context, contract the circle of living. Be realistic, change the structure of daily life, narrow the circle to what can be handled easily: the ward, the village, the context, the home, the room–but then equipped with a maximum of music, books, social media, as enriching as possible. If driving, then on known roads with little traffic, in small towns, villages.

Rule no. 5: Togetherness. A society with much loneliness for young or old is a bad society. Get old together, with a spouse, a cooperating partner. Much conversation will be about pains suffered. But cut it short. Focus on positives, beautiful landscapes, gardens, music, literature. Enjoyment together is more than double enjoyment.

Make shared meals as much of a feast as possible. The ability to enjoy good food lasts; our senses of smell and taste are more solid. No smoking of course and moderation with alcohol, sugar and cereals. Let good food and drinks stay a while in the mouth where the taste buds are, tied to the smell; do not just swallow and “wash it down”.

Rule no. 6: Live both real and virtual lives. Postmodern life has two realities; not only what we sense but also a virtual, IT, reality with friendship and enriching exchanges activating the mind. IT offers all of that–with no risks of falling!–in the simple context of a ca computer. Particularly when adding Skype, and even free!

Rule no. 7: no retirement. Go for a job where the older can share experiences with the younger, even if no longer showing up at work. A work place closed to the older is a bad work place. In post-modernity this is possible in ways unthought-of, for mutual benefit. How much, paid or unpaid, can be negotiated. Being productive is what matters.

Negate this. Retire, cut all links, live only one reality, alone/lonely, in a complex world with physical and mental risks, nothing positive, passively, no exercise, bad nutrition. Brutish, nasty, and short.

Better contract from the macro-society of country-region-world to a rich micro-society of a circle around oneself and the partner(s), relating to other circles. But it does not have to be that micro.

We can argue: high time. To be born into micro-society, then the macro-society of education and work, and then a poor micro-society of retirement is not good enough. Traditionally, women continue working longer than men, living more human lives. Is this why women live longer?

Due to better health, and family planning favoring 2 children, we now have aging populations and even more return into micro-society in old age homes.

Some time ago, huge macro-society growth swallowed such micro-societies as villages; now there is a return to villages and a return to childhood at old age. And macro becomes even more macro, regional, global, marginalizing the old even more. Inhuman; a far cry from retired farmers still living on the farm for care and experience.

Major structural changes, hence this structural theory of aging.

In those micro-societies of the aged, with nurses and others for “assisted living”, all know that the purpose of still living is dying. And before that there may be physical and mental suffering. Inhuman!

Fight it; practice Rules 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Aging is nothing to be afraid of, but foresight and planning are indispensable. Some macro can be created. A married couple here and an unmarried there, each managing in their ways, can relate, exchange experiences, also to old-age homes that may be the longer term answer to the aging. Virtually this micro to micro can even cross borders. Reconquering macro life.

Let me end on a subjective note. Having lived an eventful rich life, including meeting many people “high up”, I remember thinking “how can I live without this when I get older”? I find myself, older, thinking “how could I live without the wonderful life I now have”? Deluding myself, in both cases, closing the eye to all the negatives? Maybe. But then, maybe some selection is part of a good life.

I find myself floating, navigating through time and life, trying, not always successfully, to do more good and less harm. Not concluding that the present is the best period although it often feels like that. It is different, and very good. One positive aspect is obvious: with less work in the sense of a job there is more time for work in the sense of being creative. With hands and the mind. On the computer.

Thanks, Life, the best of all gifts. For every day.

Johan Galtung’s article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 13 March 2017: TMS: A Structural Theory of Aging

The statements and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Feb 1 2017 (IPS)

Attacking the Affordable Care Act; the “global gag rule” against abortion; the federal regulation and hiring freeze; canceling the TPP; restarting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline; limiting entry with the Mexican Wall; the 90-day travel ban on seven countries; more undocumented people prioritized for deportation; no federal funding for cities refusing to cooperate; communications blackout from federal agencies; Guantánamo torture continued–What does it add up to?

Johan Galtung

Fascism? Too early to say; but in that direction. It opens for questions about the inner workings of Donald J. Trump. Who is he?

A Johns Hopkins psychologist sees Trump suffering from “malignant narcissism“. A Norwegian historian, Öystein Morten, in a detailed analysis of Norwegian king crusader Sigurd Jorsalafare (1103-1130)–clearly crazy–has a Norwegian psychiatrist diagnose him as suffering from “bipolar depression”, manic-depressive. Is Trump only manic?

This column early on saw Trump as suffering from “autism”, living in his own bubble, speaking his babble with no sense of reciprocity, the reaction of the other side. The column stands by that.

However, this column drew a line between his words and deeds; denouncing his rhetoric as grossly insulting and prejudicial, but pinning some hope on his deeds. Wrong, and sorry about that. After one week, Trump clearly means every word he says, and enacts them from Day 1; even what he once retracted in a New York Times interview.

Combine the two points just made: autism and immediate enactment. He acts, and from his bubble does not sense how others will react, and increasingly proact. He assumes that others will accept his orders, obey, and that is it. It is not. His orders my even backfire.

As many point out, terrorism in the USA after 9/11 is almost nil. But his actions may change that. Some Mexicans may hit back, not only against the wall but the border itself, drawn by USA grabbing 53% of Mexican territory in 1846-48, then soaking Mexico in debt and violence importing drugs and exporting arms, even unaware of the harm they do.

Take the seven countries targeted by Trump for collective punishment: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen; the old seven with state central banks targeted by Bush, with Yemen substituted for Lebanon. All mainly Muslim.

Imagine them reacting by cooperating, learning from China to raise the bottom up, starting building a West Asian community with links across the Red Sea, and “Saudi” Arabia soon joining?

If their governments do not do that, imagine the Islamic State doing exactly that? What a gift to the Islamic State/Caliphate!

As a minimum, the 7 might reciprocate and block US citizens’ entry for the same period. How would that affect US military operations? Would it force Trump to use force? In fact, are his demands on other countries so extreme, not only in words but in deeds, that there are no more words and deeds left short of force? Does his extremism limit his range of options, making war as probable as under Hillary Clinton?

And yet what he has done so far, firing and backfiring, is little relative to what other US presidents have done of harm.

Take FDR spending much of his presidencies on beating Japan, scheming to provoke Japan into war, defeat and permanent occupation to eliminate Japan as a threat to US economy and polity. That policy is still being enacted, now as “collective self-defense.”

Take JFK getting USA into the Vietnam War in 1961.

Take Eisenhower eliminating Lumumba, maybe Hammarskjöld.

They caused devastation of Japan, of Vietnam and set back Africa on its way to freedom, autonomy, independence. Trump is retracting, contracting, away from others, but not expanding into them. So far.

The reaction inside the USA has been from judges challenging the legality of the orders and launching court suits. The market has been ambiguous but generally down with heavy protests from Silicon Valley. Trump claims the orders are working. What else will happen?

It is difficult to imagine that there will not be a CIA response, being challenged and provoked by Trump, not only for accusing Russia of intervening to his advantage.

There are probably at this moment countless meetings in Washington on how to get rid of Trump. Yet, he has command over not only his Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court, but also over the overwhelming number of states in the union.

US presidents have been assassinated before Trump when the forces against are sufficiently strong. Could somebody from the Travel ban 7 be hired to do the job, making it look as a foreign conspiracy?

Another and more hopeful scenario would be nonviolent resistance. Difficult for border officials. But inside the USA people to be deported may be hidden, protected by their own kind and by others–with care though, Trump also has some good points.

More constructive would be alternative foreign policies by cities, at present not by the federation, nor by most of the states. Reaching out to the seven and above all to Mexico for dialogue; searching for better relations than at present and under Trump.

Preparing the ground for something new, under the Democratic Party or not. Not a third party, impossible in the USA it seems, but as general approach. The relation between New York and Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, Tripoli, Khartoum, Mogadisciu and Sana’a as an example. Still some space!

There is no greatness in what Trump does, he makes USA smaller. Trying rebirth instead of rust, canceling stupid deals like TPP: OK. But retracting into a self-glorifying strong state is not greatness, it is isolation. Greatness is not in what you are but in how you relate. And Trump relates very badly.

Johan Galtung’s article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS): TMS: The Trump Presidency: The First Week

The statements and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Nov 1 2016 (IPS)

The last one hundred years life expectancy has increased by about 25 per cent-from near 80 to near 100-in some countries. But, instead of increasing playful childhood, education, work and retirement by 25 per cent, the age of retirement has moved much less than the age at death.

Johan Galtung

Homo sapiens as homo ludens not homo faber.

Longer, but emptier lives.

A crime against humanity if there ever was any. However, with two clear remedies: continue working self-employed with pension as salary, or find meaning in dedication to something beyond oneself, some cause, volunteer work.

That should be planned well in advance before entering a “career” that peaks before, or at, retirement; the rest being downhill even steeply.

Life is expansion from a fertilized egg to a mature human being and contraction to ever narrower space around oneself till time is up.

Western history has many narratives about expansion from some little point to a full-blown empire and contraction to ever narrower spaces.

The two model each other with empire expansion giving meaning to life, and contraction, death of empires making life meaningless, with waves of massive suicide ending the Habsburg, Nazi, Apartheid empires.

Hitler, in 1940 the head of the largest European empire ever, in 1945 only of his bunker, may have been a suicide model. But it was deeper.

We are now living the accelerating history of the end of the US empire, in the wake of about 11 in Europe; and the general decline and fall of Western hegemony. Suicide waves on both sides of the Atlantic?

To the contrary, EU creates an EU Army HQ, USA elects a president known for belligerence, Brexit England revives symbols of an empire long since gone; finding meaning in war and domination. Far better would have been for all three to lift up the bottom living in misery.

But are we not at least living healthier lives, with lower mortality, and also with lower morbidity? The World Health Assembly of WHO in Geneva 23-28 May 2016 sheds some doubts on that.

The Director-General Dr Chan celebrates declines in infant and maternal mortality and in death from TBC and HIV.

But on the dark side are air pollution and climate change, drug-resistant pathogens, resurgence of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, chronic non-communicable disease, chemicals such as lead, pesticides, obesity, inappropriate marketing of unhealthy, sweetened food with gifts and free samples, and lack of access to affordable medicines and vaccines.

We sense profit before/above health, as evidenced by BRICS speakers mentioning TPP; and behind the waning US empire. Shall we die from all of the above, to save the West from transatlantic suicide waves?

From neither. There are good solutions, some medical-technical, some based on state power–laws, taxation, subsidies–some based on people defending themselves with information, boycotts, alternatives. And the USA may even join the world, leaving global hegemony behind.

However, “meaningful vs empty” goes deeper. Take the Internet; very much meaning can be derived from the screen. Or, is there a snag? Wendy HK Chun from “In the Depths of the Digital Age” (NYRB 23 Jun 2016):

“When you read on paper, you are more likely to follow the thread of a narrative or argument, whereas when you read on screen you are more likely to scan for keywords–and may end up with stronger feelings /like anger/ about them, not with the potentially different ideas”.

But cannot anger be as meaningful as ideas? Sure, but anger may produce more anger in a destructive polarization while ideas produce ideas in a constructive cooperation. More meaningful in the long run.

The review calls attention to software in “smart watches” telling the sate of health. Useful, but it reduces the wearer to an object rather than a subject, with “meaning” imposed, not proposed.

And among the leading diseases (Nºs 1 and 4) according to WHO, are increasing uni- and bi-polar depression, both meaning-killers.

Let me share experiences getting older, 86 on the day this is published. No doubt outer life, like work far from home, contracts, eg. to Skype. The circles grow smaller around the home. Work filling it with comfort, beauty and meaning is well spent. But inner life expands if not too much energy goes into health concerns.

I am reminded of Bertrand Russell’s article in The Observer, “On Turning 90”: the disadvantages are obvious, but there is the overview, that long-time perspective from having lived long. Events, processes, the non-changes experienced accumulate. Their synergies come forth as wisdom.

“What did I learn from that” comes up frequently. Positive, inspiring answers may give more meaning than warnings. And younger people beware, we older know a little bit about love and all that.

When younger, I asked myself how I can, when older, live without such exciting activities; getting older how I could live with them. A life not disturbing endless mental and spiritual vitality opens for deep contemplation.

Togetherness with a spouse multiplies the richness: jointly enjoying nature, changing climates, wonderful people, delicious food, culture, in town or at home. Consciousness, a little work, much gratitude are needed. The happiest years of my life.

Childhood, adolescence, early adulthood pass review in thoughts and dreams; to be explored for positive messages, and for something that went wrong and can be remedied.

I dream summer and good weather, travel, some kind of mission, something going wrong and being fixed or in the process–in short, a life review. That enriches life by living two of them together, here-and-now and there-and-then. Fascinating.

And the bad things that happened?

They are there but go beyond, into here-and-now. Of course writing helps the processing and the search for new horizons. Also looking at a screen, without looking back in anger.

But maybe with a deeper understanding pointing forward to one more tomorrow, in that wonderful flow of expanding inner lives.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 24 October 2016: TMS: Longer, but Less Meaningful Lives?

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Sep 6 2016 (IPS)

Watching Christianity nearly a century–fundamentalist Christians fighting ritualistic Christians fighting secularism, generally moving fundamentalism–>ritualism–>secularism–maybe the same for Islam? Their similarities make “Islam right now” a repetition of Christianity; their differences shout, Watch Out! Let us see where this leads us.

Johan Galtung

Beauty of worship, the psychology of confession, less verbalism; all help.

Secularism makes faith so metaphorical for many that Christianity becomes only a ritual for Christmas-Easter, baptism-marriage-funeral (if there are no secular alternatives). Result: empty churches.

Our secular age makes literal faith in dogmas difficult, and that tears at the faith. But this is where two major differences enter:
• Islam is much less dogmatic, there is much less to tear at, only the readily acceptable shahada, faith in one Alla’h and his prophet Muhammad;
• If that faith turns metaphorical, Islam has the other four pillars of Islam to fall back upon: prayer together, sharing, fasting, pilgrimage, every day, a whole month every year, once a life.

The point of gravity in Islam moves more easily from faith to practice; and may stop there. There is much built-in outer practice that will survive a decrease in inner faith. Result: full mosques.

Moreover, the four pillars are compatible with key secular values:
• prayer together: with more we-, less I-culture less loneliness;
• sharing: with more altruism, less egoism;
• fasting: with more solidarity for those in misery and self-control;
• pilgrimage, with the sharing of something sacred, above our selves.

A “good Muslim” does all that; what does a “good Christian” do? Going to mass and to the confession booth are church, not social, answers. The clear social answer is monastic orders, monks and nuns dressing, living apart from others, doing Samaritan work. Others are invited to do the same, but where-when-how? Easier leaving it to the state.

The West should stop talking about jihad and jihadism as “holy war”, even if also abused by some Muslims, and try to understand[i]. Jihad means “to strive, exert oneself in the path of God”[ii].

There are four aspects: inner, greater jihad fighting the evil in oneself; spreading Islam by the word; by good deeds, like honest business; and defensive jihad if Islam is trampled upon with moderate retribution. No aggression: “Fight in the way of God against those who fight you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! God loveth not aggression.” (Qur’an 2:190).

Jihad accommodates honest business a religious duty. Like chosen people, promised land (Genesis 15:18) in Judaism makes fighting for Israel from Nile to Euphrates a religious duty. Like warfare to protect the West is a Christian duty, for God, King and Fatherland.

God is divine, King semi-divine as rex gratia dei, Fatherland not. The gap between Christianity and secular Fatherland has been bridged by preventive war as sacrament[iii]; reactive war against attack not needed. In EU, however, there is a mix of Fatherlands with no King and no God. Hence Br-exit for her to continue to Rule the Waves, for God or not.

Imagine Muslims abusing a Western sacred word, democracy, calling Western wars “democratism”.

They would be right because people who profess democracy also often go to war. And they would be wrong by missing the whole idea. Like “jihadism”, “democratism” would locate the cause of war on the other side, and not in the relation between them; making the relation even worse instead of appreciating the profundity.

Christians give to Caesar that of Caesar and to God that of God, opening for secularism. Islam does not, but moves from fundamentalist true faith to ritualistic true practice are compatible with secularisms.

Such as democracy, in Muslim Egypt and Turkey; Islam embracing “all equal under the law” as a special case of “all equal under Alla’h”. USA did not like it but preferred a military coup. To Washington, national evangelist, “true” democracy means “pro-USA” democracy.

How about IS, is it more I for Islamic faith, or more S for State with institutions for the other four pillars? It could be both, making transitions from true believers to true ritualistic practitioners easy. The problematic word is not “Islamic” but “State”. Pitted against USA and EU IS may take on their attributes; after Brexit more USA than EU.

The historical record is terrifying and long-lasting, including:
• Islam expanding East-West to the Iberian peninsula 711-1492, north but beaten at Tours (732), Lepanto (1571), Vienna (1683); stopped in the Balkans;
• The Catholic Christian Crusades 1095-1291 against Muslims but also against Orthodox Christians and Jews;
• Three centuries across the Mediterranean to Barcelona-Genoa-Napoli to catch Christian slaves for heavy road work[iv];
• West colonizing Islam (except Iran) 1830-1960, starting with Algeria;
• The massive US-led coalitions attacking in Afghanistan from 2001 and in Iraq from 2003 with 9/11 as a pretext, killing, displacing millions;
• IS now killing a small fraction, as retribution with moderation[v].

Six violences, three by each. The first four lasted centuries, a bad omen for the last two. But have a second look. In the first two the two religions played major roles; in the last two the state system, United States vs Islamic State[vi].

State wars are shorter; decades, not centuries. However, the wisdom of challenging US as an Islamic state rather than as an invincible ummah with provinces can be disputed[vii].

We have given reasons that Islam will survive secularization better than Christianity, having much to fall back upon; how about IS vs US?

We might argue that both will lose because the state system itself is yielding to regionalism and localism. Islam is ready, with ummah regionalism and imam localism.

Christianity, however, is split between Latin and Anglo America, US and EU, Catholic-Protestant and Orthodox Europe–much more than Sunni vs Shia and Arab vs non-Arab. And local churches are more for spiritual, not also for mundane affairs[viii].

On top of that: the world, even USA, is tired of endless warfare. Let Islam settle. The West and Christianity have serious work to do.

NOTES:

[i]. Gary Wills, the famous columnist, took the trouble to understand: “My Koran problem”, NYRB, 24 March 2016. His Koran problem was that he knew nothing: “–we Christians begin with the greatest deficit of knowledge /whereas/those who know the Koran have quite a lot of knowledge about Torah and Gospel, since Allah sent them both to earth before he sent the Koran.–we Westerners cannot even remember it unless we learn something about the Koran. It’s about time”. Indeed.

[ii].Professor Mohammad Hashim Kamali, chairman of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies in Malaysia, in a lecture and in articles like “Concept of ‘jihad’ misunderstood”, New Straits Times 14 July 2014.

[iii]. Look at who comes to the funerals of Norwegian soldiers with mandate to kill in Afghanistan: the King, top bishops.

[iv]. Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, Palgrave Macmillan.

[v]. Sarah Birke, “How ISIS Rules”, NYRB, 5 Feb 2015: armed resistance being difficult, the alternative from the inside was silent resistance, or migration. Or what we have now, open US/IS warfare.

[vi]. But religious discourse did not wither away, here are two:
* George Bush 10 Feb 2003, on a possible attack on Iraq: “Liberty is God’s gift to every human being in the world”. (Washington Post, 10 Feb 2003);
* Osama bin Laden 11 Feb 2003: “victory comes only from God, all we have to do is to prepare and motivate for jihad”. Audio message conveyed by jorgenj@peace.uit.no.

[vii]. For a deep analysis of the present situation, see Abbas Aroua, “The Salafiscape in the Wake of the Arab Spring”, www.cordoue.ch.

[viii]. In a play, Maria og Magdalena; Lidelseshistorien og kristen=dommen (the Passion Story and Christianity) Oslo: Kolofon 2016, this author tries to liberate Crist, driven by conscience and compassion, from the Church as Mary’s son, not God’s begotten by the Holy Spirit–as inspiration for us all.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 September 2016: TMS: Islam Right Now

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Aug 2 2016 (IPS)

The US mountain, so rich in human talent, labored and produced the two dwarfs for the huge job. A radical Republican strongman[i] and a conventional Democrat, disliked by 62% and 67%–bad for electing the president of a country that still puts some stamp on the world.

Johan Galtung

In both parties, in the name of unity, a veil was drawn over these basic US conflicts today, not between the parties, but within. Cruz did not give in, Sanders did–maybe bribed by some verbal rephrasing.

So there they are. Trump has his base in the vast WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class middle-aged who used to rule the country [ii], promising to make America–meaning WASP–great again.

Hillary has her base in that other Democratic Party, the Southern Democrats, in older people and the groups traditionally voting Democrat–Blacks, Hispanics, cultural minorities, women and much of labor– greatly aided by that wasp, Trump, stinging all of them.

Younger people may abstain. So may many, even most, in the choice between a less war-and-market Republican and a market-and-war Democrat willing, on sale for more wars.

Add the careers of these big Egos: one a businessman wrecking others, the other wrecking state secrets. “Stop him by all means” and “Lock her up” become mantras heard often. The high dislikes are well rooted. BUT, there is a difference: there is also much enthusiasm for Trump; none, it seems, for Hillary.

The election campaign started long before the nominations were over and the foretaste is bad. One thing is the candidates fighting; another, the burning issues for the USA and the world. They may both be right when certifying that the other is unfit for the presidency.

But that is still personal, ad hominem, cutting huge political cakes along personal lines. How about the issues facing the USA?

Take the issue-complex “speculation-massive inequality-misery”. 1% vs 99%. Traditionally, causes for the Democrats.

Sanders got at it; but his proposals were unclear or missing. Here some policy staples that the Democrats missed: separating investment and savings banking; holding Capital responsible for failures, not drawing upon State = tax-payers’ money; attacking inequality by illegalizing companies with the CEO:worker salary ratios way above, say, 10; lifting the bottom of US society with credits for the basic needs focused cooperatives.

How could Democrats justify such policies? Through Human Rights:

What a marvelous collection of rights and freedoms! Democrats should not forever be accepting the US non-ratification of ESC human rights.

Trump, eager to make his middle class great, may actually do some ESC at the expense of UD to protect them from “trade” with loss of jobs from above and the threat of revolution, with violence from below that has already started, along racial lines, initiated by the White police.

Take the issue-complex “foreign policy-war”. “An isolationist Trump could save American lives”[iii] (and many more non-American lives). But doing so to save money is not good enough; take the issues head on.

“Clinton and Trump jostle for a position over North Korea”[iv] is more to the point: Trump is open to negotiate directly with Kim Jung-un, Hillary sticks to conventional isolation-sanctions-multilateralism.

Trump might become the first US president to take North Korea on the word: “peace treaty-normalization-a nuclear-free Korean peninsula”. Hillary’s line leads nowhere. What is missing is an open debate on the two untouchables: US foreign policy and the US right and duty to war.

The “less-than-Third World” infrastructure” has been mentioned.

However, how about the suicide and homicide rates? Not only the easy gun access aspect, what it says about demoralized US society? How about the shortening of lives due to deteriorating living conditions? How about the climate and the environment, specifics, not generalities? How about the whole American dream or dreams becoming exactly that, a dream only, dreamt in the past?

Trump has a new dream for his chosen people, greatness, Hillary’s dream is status quo since nothing has gone wrong.

And to that we may add: how about US democracy? Does it exist?

“Clinton did not run a clean campaign, she cheated. Caucus after caucus, primary after primary, the Clinton team robbed Sanders of votes that were rightfully his. Here is how. Parties run caucuses. States run primaries. The DNC controlled by Clinton allies like Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz[v]. Democratic governors are behind Clinton: State election officials report to them. These officials decide where to send voting booths, which votes get counted, which do not. You thought this was a democracy? Ha.”[vi]

The details make the “Ha” an understatement. And that in a country so bent on lecturing to others on their lack of democracy. Forget it. Even so, Sanders won 22 states; had basic rules been respected, he would have made a majority of states even if Clinton had delegate majority.

“The world is watching US elections,” CNN says with nationalistic pride. In disbelief and dismay, waiting for guidance beyond mutual name-calling. They may be dwarfs relative to a giant job. But nobody is born a president; they are made by the campaigns and on the job.

So far, the impression is that Trump learns more than Clinton, testing out new ideas well before he can put them into practice. Because he has more to learn, having no experience? Yes, he has a lot to learn. But her “experience”, in killing? In not solving conflicts? Maybe she has a lot to unlearn. Any evidence she does that? None whatsoever.

This gives an edge favoring Trump. We know what to expect from Hillary; not from Trump. On the two huge issue-complexes mentioned above, Hillary spells status quo, Trump not. Trump is gambling on his own–proven to be very high–persuasion capacity. Not quite hopeless.

Notes:
[i]. J. R. Hibbing and E.Theiss-Morse, in an article in Washington Post, make the point that “A Surprising amount of Americans dislike how messy democracy is. They like Trump.”, english@other-news.info, 17 May 2016. In their study 60 percent believed that “government would work better if it were run like a business”.

[ii]. Bryce Covert, “America was great, again”, INYT 17 May 2016: “Donald Trump’s campaign promise is appealing because it promises–to make the country great again for the people who had it pretty great in the first place”.

[iii]. Dough Bandow, Japan Times, 31-05-2016.

[iv]. INYT, 20 May 2016.

[v]. Now dismissed because of an e-mail scandal.

[vi]. Ted Rall, “Clinton beating Sanders by hook and by crook”, Japan Times, 05 July 2016.

Johan Galtung’s article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 July 2016: TMS: The US Nominations.

The statements and views mentioned in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of IPS.

Excerpt:

Source: TRANSCEND Media Service

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, Jun 26 2016 (IPS)

The vote turned out like the two referenda held in Norway in 1972 and 1994. And much for the same reason: Protestant break with Rome–Catholic, imperial–Henry VIII made himself head of the Anglican Church in 1534.

Religion was not the only reason, there are Protestant Nordic members of EU, closer to the continent and closer to Russia. World history, a short while after Pope Francis-Patriarch Kirill also made world history, bridging the Catholic-Orthodox 395-1054 gap.

The Disunited Queendom is now London with surroundings; England. The implications are enormous, for UK-GB and the British Isles in general, for EU and Europe in general, USA and the world in general. The US Trojan horse decided to leave the EU on 23 June 2016.

UK-GB and the British Isles in general.

Johan Galtung

Goodbye Great Britain, GB, we may get Scotland in EU instead.

Welcome to Britain of England-Wales, if they care for that vocabulary.

Welcome to new-born England, 23 June being the Day of Independence.

Independence? Washington, having lost its inside EU ally, will soon remind London of their “special relationship” as unsinkable aircraft carrier also doing the killing job–maybe some wanted that.

And yet. England had the whole Global Establishment, if there ever was one, mobilized to pressure them to remain. They did not. There is something very impressive in that, however bad the campaign.

And yet. There is something to those British Isles, a shared and twisted history between Anglo-Saxons and Celts–Vikings, Normans–an enormous impact on the world now torn to pieces, torn into new pieces.

Maybe time has come for something this author proposed in an NGO encounter at the Houses of Parliament on Northern Ireland-Ulster right before the Good Friday Agreement: CBI, a Confederation of the British Isles, with United Ireland, Scotland, England-Wales and smaller islands.

EU and Europe in general.

On the possible positive side is EU independence of the USA, not choosing US foreign-military (and university system!) policy instead of working out its own. EU can now follow France-Germany in a Ukraine they know much better than the USA.

They nay one day meet Russia in some “European House”–may Gorbachev see that before he passes away–and they may one day, hopefully soon, have a European Parliament recognizing Palestine as a state, making it clear this is not anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, but pro the other Semitic, pro-Palestine.

On the possible negative side is Germany winning the two “world wars” in Europe over who shall run Europe: Germany or England-France.

Germany had visions of something close to an EU with economic center in Brussels and political in Berlin. After 1945 it was France, not England that stretched out a hand to beaten Germany, the 1950 coal and steel handshake that morphed into the Treaty of Rome (what a bad choice of name).

France will have to do that again, but this time not from the strong position of being on the winning side of a war, but the weak position of being in layer 3 of the present 5 in EU with Germany on top and Greece at the bottom, the Nordics no 3, then the Latins, then Eastern Europe.

This pyramid has to be flattened; many of the exit movements derive their momentum from that sad EU reality.

But also from a boring EU in spite of having to its credit, “acquis” open borders, the euro, a Europe with war held unthinkable.

Could some of that come from not being masters in their own house, always listening to His Master’s Voice?

Could healthy regionalism inspire a new deal, like healthy nationalism could for England? Freed from fighting US wars, liberated to build peace all over, like in EU?

Making an ever stronger or weaker union? Maybe stronger in peace policy. And maybe with the euro as common, not single currency, and not pressing members into a solidarity with no historical basis?

USA and the world in general.

This might be one more wake-up call for the USA, at a time with everybody but Hillary already awake.

Talk about NATO as out of date, Europe and the Middle East taking care of their own affairs, wars as non-affordable, as counter-productive, some awareness that there are other victims than Americans in the wars, had been unthinkable, unspeakable. But old addictive habits are hard to change.

That opens for a possible widening slit between USA-England and EU-Europe. There is a model: the split between the West Roman (Catholic) and East Roman (Orthodox) empires in 395, the former lasting about 81 more years, the latter more than a thousand.

This time the religious split would be between evangelical-protestant in the West and catholic-orthodox in the East, with a smart federation at the border, Ukraine, as a possible solution. A major test.

Another: defensive defense against IS brutality, negotiations with them, recognizing their right to have an IS when Europe has EU, and a Caliphate when Christianity has Vatican and the Patriarchy(ies).

Learning from Islam about togetherness and sharing, how to overcome loneliness and alienation, admitting that the West needs to learn.

And China? Learning from them like they do from the West, inviting them to join the world from “between heaven and earth”.

The world in general? Moving away from states, toward regions. Be a good, caring Mother of regions, sharing solutions and problems generously with other regions around the world.

With Latin America-Caribbean, Anglo-America–maybe with Mexico as MEXUSCAN–the African Union, the European House, SAARC, ASEAN. And the three badly missing ones in Asia: West Asia with Israel and Palestine, Iraq and Syria; Central Asia with Afghanistan, and Northeast Asia with the two Chinas, the two Koreas, Far East Russia and Japan now at nuclear logger-heads.

EU: a wake-up call! Don’t despair, grow, and help the world.

 
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 24 June 2016: TMS: Brex’it, So Be’it; And Then What?

The statments and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessariliy represente those of IPS.

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
SEOUL, South Korea, May 31 2016 (IPS)

Like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the world has gotten tired of it, “what, the two Koreas still unable to sort it out”? Also, like Israel-Palestine, the USA is in it; making the situation complicated.

Johan Galtung

And where is that conflict? Not between North and South Korea, but between North Korea and USA that after 140+ years of victorious warfare had to accept armistice, not victory, in Korea.

Conflict means incompatible goals. Travel to Pyongyang and find that their goals are peace treaty, normalization of relations, and a nuclear free Korean Peninsula.

And the US goal is the collapse of the present NK regime; failing that, status quo. Given the threat of a major war, even nuclear war, that goal is untenable. Some points.

• Why does NK have nuclear capability? Because NK is threatened by the USA-South Korea alliance in general and their “Team Spirit” in particular to deter conventional, or nuclear attacks; failing that to fight back, and particularly against where the attack might come from: US bases in Okinawa-RyuKyu, and from Japan proper. Militarily trivial.
• AND to have a bargaining chip in any denuclearization that of course has to be monitored; given the US cheating in connection with Austrian neutralization in 1955 focused particularly on that one.
• AND to show that we are not collapsing, we are capable of making nuclear bombs and the missiles to carry them; far from collapsing.
• AND, ominously: as the ultimate response if threatened by collapse. Nuclear suicide? More likely killing those seen as never listening, never thawing in sunshine, using boycotts and sanctions.
•
Beat a dog repeatedly and it becomes crazy. NK has been beaten, also by exceptional rain causing slides of clay covering enormous cultivated areas, but mainly by an unholy alliance Seoul-Washington. Seoul even commits fratricide on their brothers and sisters in NK, into death and collapse, because Seoul dislikes their regime.

This situation has made both Koreas absurd societies, detached from reality. In the North a fundamentalist Confucian society with a filial piety through the Kims, assuming that the spirit of Kim Il Sung drifts down to son and grandson as incorporations in one person of the national will; in the South through the Parks, at present running a society that is a carbon copy of Japan down to the smallest details on the basis of hysterical anti-Japanism, run by US micro-management.

They will both change. Absurdities are unsustainable.

SK is also a Christian, Methodist-Catholic, country. But one senses no Love Thy Neighbor and Love Thy Enemy, only much of Seoul sitting in “judgment over living and dead”. Jointly with USA.

Sanctions are multi-state terrorism, like terrorism and state terrorism hitting the weak, defenseless, and like them backfiring. Idea: “get rid of your leaders and terrorism will stop”. Reality: the victims turn against the killers, not the leaders. One more absurdity.

There is a way out. Build on the North Korean goals, hold NK to their words. Their regime will, like all regimes, change; even the USA is now heading for basic change. Design a peace treaty, like with South Korea, normalize diplomatic relations North-South and North-USA; and design a regime for a nuclear free peninsula, destroying or removing weapons monitored by solid UN inspection.

The two instruments for normalization and denuclearization are then exchanged by depositing them in an escrow with a third party–the UN General Assembly, not UNSC, too similar to the Six Parties Talks.

Then: implementation; preferably quick; de Gaulle style.

But that is only the beginning, only remedies for a pathological and very dangerous situation. Then comes the peace-building, based on cooperation for mutual and equal benefit, equity (not some SK chaebol-재벌 getting cheap labor in NK), and on harmony based on deep empathy with each other, sharing joys and sorrows; not the opposite, like enjoying suffering and imminent collapse because “sanctions are having a bite”.

Of 40 such proposals here are two.

There is the contested maritime zone between the two different maritime border: use it for joint fishing and joint fish breeding. Share the income 40-40-20; 20 for the ecology and administration.

There is no flight Seoul-Pyongyang: start it both ways. Use it also for the construction workers and personnel for two embassies.

Admittedly, it is unlikely that USA will come to its senses and initiate all of this although not impossible-the absurdity built into the US boycott of Cuba is being remedied after 58 years. For Korea under a Trump or Sanders presidency, but not belligerent Clinton.

South Korea has to do it, by becoming an independent, autonomous country, not micro-managed, on at least this issue. There is a longer term mechanism: absurdities have limited life expectancy as witnessed by the decline and fall of empires to the UK, Soviet and US empires.

And there is a short term possibility: presidential power in SK accrues to the two term UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, if elected as a candidate for the governing Sae Noo Ri party. Watching his choice of words on the Korean issue, he is always emphasizing dialogue. He would know how to handle a UN General Assembly Uniting for Peace, could have dialogue contact with NK; the rest more or less as above.

Could a united Korean nation with two states at peace inspire the other four of the Six, their ten relations all non-peace, some even recently at war? History moves quickly these days. If pushed by democratic pressure from below. And pulled by power from above.

*Johan Galtung’s editorial originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 May 2016: TMS: The Korean Peninsula Conflict: A Way Out

Excerpt:

The modern Silk Road linking East-West, Yiwu/China to Madrid/Spain. Although the transit time for goods or people to transit the route is 21 days, this is 30 days faster than a ship and is 1/10 the cost of shipping freight. www.bulwarkreview.com | Source: TRANSCEND Media Service.

By Johan Galtung
ALICANTE, Spain, May 20 2016 (IPS)

China is changing world geography, or at least trying to do so.

Not in the sense of land and water like the Netherlands, but in the sense of weaving new infrastructures on land, on water, in the air, and on the web.

It is not surprising that a country with some Marxist orientation would focus politics on infrastructure–but as means of transportation-communication, not as means of production.

Nor is it surprising that a country with a Daoist worldview focuses politics on totalities, on holons and dialectics, forces and counter-forces, trying to tilt balances in China’s favor. How this will work depends on the background, and its implications.

Two recent books, Valerie Hansen, Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Knopf, 2015) see them as arteries connecting the world, globalization, before that term became a la mode. Not that loads of goods moved all the way in both directions, parts of the way, maybe further. Europe had much less to offer in return; however:

“Viking traders from–Norway–coarse, suspicious men, by Arab account–were moving down the great rivers of Russia–trading honey, amber and slaves–as early as the ninth century–returning home to be buried with the silks of Byzantium and China beside them”. (Frankopan)

Johan Galtung

For long periods run by Buddhists in the East and Muslims in the West; Islam using them to expand, from Casablanca to the Philippines. Frankopan sees the high points in the Han dynasty (-207-220, capital Xi’an for West Han), the Tang dynasty (618-902, capital mainly Xi’an) and under Mongolian, Yuan rule–for goods, ideas, faiths, inventions.

Xi’an, 3,000 years old, served as a starting point, both for Silk Roads and for the Silk Lanes, traveling the Yangzi River, or over land, to the East China Sea coast. Till the military uprising against the Tang emperor in 755 (Hansen, Ch. 5, “The Cosmopolitan Terminus on the Silk Road”); but Xi’an is destined always to play major roles.

China is now reviving the past, adding Silk Railroads from East China to Madrid via Kazakhstan-Russia-Belarus-Poland-Germany-France, to Thailand, from East to West Africa–from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic–from North to South Africa. Silk Flights. And Silk Web.

A silky cocoon is being woven, by worms in China. Too much?

Two features stand out in this approach to geopolitics.

First, weaving together Eurasiafrica, three “continents” by old-fashioned geography. Second, leaving out the other two “continents”, separated by oceans from Eurasiafrica: the Americas, Australia-NZ.

However, South-South-South trade opens lanes to Latin America-Caribbean from West Africa, and Australia-New Zealand are much closer to China than to their colonial origins in England. That leaves us with Anglo-America, USA-Canada, isolated by two oceans that served as their protection, really left out of silky road and lane nets.

USA does not like that, hence a “pivot” to Asia, based on alliances and TPP. With some major differences: China builds on a millennia old tradition, the USA on one and half century since Perry “opened up” East Asia. China’s domination in “their” Himalayas-Gobi-Tundra-Sea “pocket” is millennia old; U.S. massive killing in Korea and Vietnam is recent; fresh in people’s memory.

However, the key difference is between U.S. “everybody but China” policy and China’s silk nets open to everybody. Roads, railroads, lanes, flights are two-way. Chinese goods move on China-built infrastructure available to others as well. Prognosis: states in East Asia will play on both, thereby favoring China more than USA.

Is this possible, with the USA trying to replace Russia in India; playing on China-India conflicts that they, since Zhou Enlai-Nehru, have been good at solving?

Nepal, with long borders to both, tilting toward China, given Indian domination and boycott?

Mongolia, friendly to both Russia and China, making little space for USA?

And 10 ASEAN states in the Southeast that, given the composition have to be friends with all?

There is much (Southern) China in ASEAN; Singapore, as minorities, and culturally–in something for good reasons once called “Indo-China”. We get ASEAN+, and +, playing on all horses.

There is a message in this to the Big Powers, to China and USA, India and Russia: do not press, do not demand exclusive allegiance; offer positive services. China’s silk diplomacy is nonviolent; its defense of what China sees as old patterns to be revived is not. No longer massive People’s Liberation Army defensive defense; with “modern”, provocative arms.

And there is a message to the smaller powers: choose both, even all four; leaning toward one will mobilize the worst in the other(s).

How does this tally with silk diplomacy? Quite well, except for South China Sea. China did not colonize along Silk roads and lanes, nor chinize. Japan japanized rather than colonized and–as opposed to China–fought Western colonialism. Silk nets open for huge tourism and trade both ways, weaving continents together when demand meets supply; that may take some time.

Nevertheless, the symmetry built into Silk diplomacy makes negotiated conflict solutions, and even a (North) East Asian Community, possible. U.S. asymmetry rules out both.

In the South China Sea U.S. demands “freedom of navigation” for U.S. aircraft carriers right off China’s coast, ASEAN has navy exercises, and China militarizes. China has to respect the UN Law of the Sea, demand revision of freedom for military navigation, and make clear that the lanes are open for civilian–U.S., EU, ASEAN, whatever–trade.

All will gain from silk diplomacy; and lose from militarization.

Johan Galtung’s article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 16 May 2016: TMS: China’s Silk Geopolitics

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
Antwerp, Alfaz, May 11 2016 (IPS)

We are dealing with mass migration, basically into EU, and European nationalisms, many in favor of exits from the EU.

Why this mass migration, maybe to the point of Völkerwanderung, mainly into EU–but then what kind of EU–and why the European nationalisms now found one way or the other in many member states?

Johan Galtung

Better think in terms of 50 million migrants over 50 years, from regions considered uninhabitable to inhabitable regions. There seem to be five major causes underlying this basic world asymmetry:

• Slavery, four centuries, depriving societies particularly of able-bodied males, by Arabs, then Westerners, cross-Atlantic transportation mainly by the English (Liverpool);
• Colonialism, by Muslims after the death of the prophet in 632, from Casablanca to Southern Philippines, till the end of the 15th century, close to nine centuries, then by Christians close to five centuries, till colonialism was officially ended in the 1960s;
• Robbery Capitalism, stealing or paying next to nothing for resources processed into manufactured goods, pocketing the value added;
• Wars, mainly initiated by the West, killing millions (the USA more than 20 million in 37 countries after WWII), destroying property;
• Ecological Factors, like depletion-pollution, often toxic for humans or nature, erratic climate partly due to climate gases, NOX, CO2, CH4.

These are the causes of poverty in some parts of the world but also of wealth in others; creating the asymmetry uninhabitable vs inhabitable by exploitation, becoming rich at the expense of others becoming poor.

That clearly applies to slavery, colonialism, robbery capitalism and many wars (the difference between bombing and being bombed). But the ecological factor hits both; so, the West attends to that factor.

Anyhow, many think: Time has come to share more equitably this wealth.

Of 28 EU members, 11 were colonial powers. 9 in Africa: England, Netherlands, France, Belgium-Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, Portugal, till the end of WWI Germany; all enriching themselves.

To believe that the other 28 – 9 = 19 members will accept “quotas” for migration due to the violence of the 9–England-France particularly, in the Middle East by Sykes-Picot colonization (*)–is simply naive. EU has institutions, but has not managed fusion into a Europe of one for all, all for one.

EU today is an exploitative pyramid: Germany on top; 8 Northern-Germanic countries; 5 Southern-Latin countries with France, Ireland; 12 Eastern countries; Greece at the bottom. With inequity and quotas, not strange that nationalisms flourish, tearing EU apart. Remove the causes: England-France, pick up the bill; EU, flatten the pyramid. (**)

Nevertheless, that only solves the intra-EU problem, not the world problem of mass migration from parts of the world mainly damaged by the West. Migrating into the EU, over land and across the Mediterranean, with a small part into a USA protected by two major oceans from the problems they helped to cause–except for migration via and from Mexico.

Mass migration is now an “industry” with “helpers”, smugglers, drugs and trafficking, dubious migrants, police and military among them. Yet that does not detract from the role of the five root causes, even if all kinds of lesser causes and effects make them less visible.

EU redirects migrant flows from the Middle East to Turkey at high costs; the flow from Africa to Nigeria; NATO patrols the Mediterranean. But these are at most stopgap measures. They are migrants not only from but also to–to the colonial “mother countries”, England and France.

Today they travel on foot, by bus, taxis–tomorrow by submarines (like drug smugglers), planes (many do) or by more massive numbers? Claiming a right to settle, uninvited, where much of their human and natural resources has been processed into the wealth of others–who also settled, uninvited. How do we handle this? Are there solutions?

5 Causes, 2 (groups of) Solutions. For Each, Negative and Positive

Slavery:

Negative: CARICOM [Caribbean Community] leads in denouncing slavery, followed by eLAC Summit meeting in Quito; EU endorsing; joint history books (USA: Frederick Douglass testimony); mapping levels of slavery; museums-memorials.

Positive: EU-AU conciliation sessions; negotiate compensation.

Colonialism:

Negative: South Africa leads in denouncing, followed by AU; others should join; joint history books on the experience.

Positive: EU-AU conciliation sessions; cover federation-confederation costs for multi-nation states and multi-state nations.

Robbery Capitalism:

Negative: Documentation, like using Sevilla customs data calculating the value as debt of the resources robbed; “Hands Off Africa”.

Positive: Africa processing its own resources; the Gaddafi 3 points; SSS trade also with China; lifting the bottom up; new infrastructure.

Wars:

Negative: Stop killing (bombing, SEALs); how many killed in how many countries, like for USA; denounce events (like Berlusconi for 1911).

Positive: Use military defensively against IS violence; solve conflicts with “terrorists” (IS)–with “communists” (Vietnam) after they won.

Ecology:
Negative: reduce CO2+CH4 levels controlling fossil fuels and fracking.

Positive: Switch to renewable non-polluting resources like sun, wind; increase diversity of biota and abiota resources; help with symbiosis (enough CO2!); improve light-dark balance to absorb less solar heat.

Much more awareness is needed to understand the damage done. But three positive approaches, from “trickling down” capitalism to lifting the bottom up, from offensive to defensive use of military, from victory to solution, could carry far way, even quickly. Likely?

Notes:

(*) To tilt the WWI power balance in their favor one century ago, the four colonies they created–instead of freedom for the Arabs–have been at the root of most Middle East problems. Take Syria as example, an artificial state constructed by Paris, with 7 built-in conflicts: with Israel-USA blocking for Eretz Israel (Golan is one aspect); with Russia if a government should deny Russia their only base (as opposed to at least 800 US bases); between minority Shia-Alawite dictatorship with tolerance for others and a majority Sunni dictatorship without; between Arab Muslims and others like Kurds, Turks, Christians, Jews; between Shia and Sunni and their countries, the Shia living in the Fertile Crescent; between Al Qaeda+ and foreigners; and between all of the above and the Islamic State. IS wants to undo Sykes-Picot and to recreate the Ottoman Empire and their Caliphate without Istanbul; and see themselves as Islamic responses to the EU and the Vatican.

In so doing IS has a decisive advantage relative to “all of the above” who reify Syria as something sustainable with basic changes. IS relates to a reality where today’s Syria is located that lasted four centuries, 1516-1916. They want to reconstruct a past based on provinces and proceed accordingly. This author would be surprised if Iraq as a state survives beyond 2020 and Syria as a state beyond 2025.

(**) If we collapse the top three and the bottom 2 levels 14 Western and 12 Eastern; with ten islands 28. Add Turkey and the point of gravity moves further East, with Istanbul challenging Brussels. And what happe then to the migrants stranded in Turkey?

Johan Galtung’s op-ed originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 9 May 2016: TMS: Mass Migration, EU, European Nationalisms

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
OSLO, Jan 12 2016 (IPS)

Baher Kamal, in … And All of a Sudden Syria!: “The “big five,” the United Nations veto powers, have just agreed United Nations Resolution 2254 of 18-12-2015, time to end the Syrian five-year long human tragedy; they waited until 300,000 innocent civilians were killed and 4.5 million humans lost as refugees and homeless at home, hundreds of field testing of state-of-the-art drones made, and daily U.S., British, French and Russian bombing carried out.” No Chinese bombing.

Johan Galtung

One term in the resolution, road map, already spells failure. There is another reason: missing issues. But something can be done. Roads twist, turn and may be far from straight. Traveling a road is a linear, one step or mile-stone after another, process, by the map. The West loves linearity; as causal chains, (falling dominoes,) from a root cause; as deductive chains from axioms; as ranks from high to low.

However, is that not how the world is, moving in time, causes-effects, axioms-consequences, rank, power, over others? Are roads not rather useful? They are. Is there an alternative to a road map? There is.

One step after the other in time is diachronic. An alternative would be synchronic; at the same time. Let us call it a cake map.

A cake is served, cut in slices, each party takes a slice, waits till all are served to start together. By the road map, first come first served first to eat. Or, highest rank eats first, down the line. The cake map stands for togetherness, simultaneity, shared experience. Not necessarily good: it was also used by the West to carve up Africa.

The cake is an issue; the slices are aspects. How it is defined, how it is cut, who are invited is essential. Basic to the cake map is equality among parties and slices: all get theirs at the same time.

For the Syria issue the Resolution lists the aspects on the road:
• 25 January 2016 (in two weeks) as the target date to begin talks;
• immediately all parties stop attacking civilians;
• within one month: options for a ceasefire monitoring mechanism;
• within 6 months “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance”;
• within 18 months “free and fair elections–by the new constitution”.

Kamal mentions many actors and crucial problems with this agenda. The focus here is on the linearity: ceasefire-governance-constitution-free and fair elections. Why stop attacking civilians who can become or are combatants? Why should actors agree to a ceasefire before their rights are guaranteed in a constitution? Why non-sectarian “governance” in a sectarian country? Each step presupposes the next. The “peace process” can be blocked, at any point, by any one party. Like a road.

Proposal: On 25 January, appoint four representative commissions– one for each of the four aspects–with mechanisms of dialogue for all six pairs and plenaries. Then report on all aspects on the agenda.

Back to the cake, “Syria.” Does “Syria” exist? Once much of the Middle East, the name was used for the French “mandate” carved out of the vast Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1916 when ended by Sykes-Picot. A commission on the Ottoman period, exploring millets for minorities, is indispensable. So is a commission on the Sykes-Picot trauma, also with Turkey as a member; hopefully with UK-France-Russia apologizing.

We have seen it before. The US was a major party to the conflict and the UN conference manager 2013-14. There are now more parties: Jordan has identified up to 160 terrorist groups (Kamal), probably not counting state terrorists. And today the UN is the conference manager.

This column at the time (27 Jan 2014) identified seven Syria conflicts:
1 Minority/majority, democracy/dictatorship, Assad/not Assad in Syria;
2 Sunni/Shia all over, also with “Sunni Islamic State Iraq-Syria ISIS”;
3 Syrians/minorities “like Turks and Kurds, Maronites and Christians”;
4 Syria/”those who, like USA and Israel, prefer Syria fragmented”;
5 Syria/Turkey with “neo-Ottoman expansionist policies”;
6 USA-UK-France/Russia-China “determined to avoid another Libya”;
7 Violent perpetrators of all kinds/killed-bereaved-potential victims.

All seven are still there. They have become more violent, like the second, between Saudi Arabia–also financing IS–and Iran. But the resolution focuses on the first and the last. All parties mentioned should be invited or at least consulted publicly. Last time Iran was excluded, defined as the bad one; this time IS(IS), today called Daesh.

A process excluding major process parties is doomed in advance.

However, imagine that the cake is defined as, “the conflict formation in and around Syria”; that the slices are the seven conflicts indicated with one commission for each; that around the table are the actors mentioned, some grouped together. The Resolution aspects are on their agendas; with commissions on the Ottoman Empire and Sykes-Picot.

What can we expect, what can we reasonably hope for, as visions?

“Mandate”, “colony”: there is some reality to Syria (and to Iraq). The borders are hopeless and should be respected, but not for a unitary state. For something looser, a (con)federation. Basic building-blocs would be provinces from Ottoman times, millets for smaller minorities, and cantons for the strip of Kurds along the Turkish border. The constitution could define a national assembly with two chambers: one territorial for the provinces, and one non-territorial for nations and faiths with some cultural veto in matters concerning themselves.

There is also the Swiss model with the assembly being based on territorially defined cantons, and the cabinet on nations-faiths: of 7 members 3 speak German, 1 Rheto-roman, 2 French and 1 Italian (4 Protestant and 3 Catholic?). Not impossible for Syria. With the Kurds as some kind of Liechtenstein (that is where con-federation enters).

In addition to parallel NGO fora. There is much to articulate.

Assad or not? If he is excluded as punishment for violence, there are many to be excluded. A conference only for victims, and China?

Better see it as human tragedy-stupidity, and build something new.

The violent parties will not get what they want. The victims can be accommodated peacefully in this looser Syria. Moreover, the perpetrators should fund reconstruction proportionate to the violence they wrought in the past four years. As quickly as humanly possible.

Syria offered a poor choice between a minority dictatorship with tolerance and a majority dictatorship–democracy–without. Violence flourished, attracting old suspects for proxy wars. “Bomb Syria” was the panacea, after “bomb Libya”. What a shame. Bring it to an end.

*Johan Galtung’s editorial originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 11 January 2016: TRANSCEND Media Service – TMS: Syria (Minding the Minds II)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
PENANG, Malaysia, Feb 9 2015 (IPS)

A theory serves comprehension, prediction and identification of conditions for change. Seven such historical-cultural pointers will be indicated for China – using the West in general, and the United States in particular, for comparison.

Look at a map combining world history and geography, time and space. China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions and the West as empires-birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, British and now U.S. empires – duration vs bubbles that burst, China-centric vs hegemonic.

Johan Galtung

China marginalised space peopled by South-West-North-East barbarians – outside the “Chinese pocket” between the Himalayas-Gobi desert-Tundra-Sea, except for the East China-East Africa silk roads, destroyed by Portugal and England from 1500, colonising Macao-Hong Kong.

A goal of current Chinese foreign policy is to restore the silk roads and lanes: high speed trains for Eurasia, cooperating for mutual and equal benefit, harmony.

The United States marginalises time by disregarding past history, and with the idea that creates future New Beginnings for immigrants, and New History for itself, for other countries, for the whole world.

For Daoism, valid knowledge is holistic and dialectic, based on big, complex units of thought (whole humans, China, the world) riveted by forces and counter-forces, yin-yang, good vs bad, themselves yin-yang, with what is suppressed growing and what is dominant declining until the next turn. The holon may jump from one contradiction tapering off to the next.

For the West, valid knowledge is based on subdivision and accumulation of knowledge about elements, woven together in theories.

For Mao Zedong the basic contradiction was foreign imperialism with landowners vs the people, students-peasants-workers. The 1949 revolution started a distribution vs growth dialectic with jumps every nine years (1958-1967-1976): Mao’s death, four chaotic years.“China shows up through 4,000 years as relatively coherent dynasties with complex transitions and the West as empires-birth-growth-peaking-decline-fall, like the Roman, British and now U.S. empires”

For Deng Xiaopeng, it was misery vs lack of growth. The 1980 revolution accumulated capital with farmers near cities and in Shenzen (26 percent annual growth), and re-created merchants. Then nine years distribution vs growth again: from 1989 (Tiananmen!) distribution, 1998, 2007, 2016: new focus on growth.

China draws on Daoist insights, on Confucian ideas of hierarchies with harmony, and Buddhist small community equality: Buddhism for distribution, Confucianism for growth, Daoism for jumps between them.

The West could have drawn upon the positives in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but focused on negatives for discrimination-prejudice-war-genocide – now as Judeo-Christianity vs Islam – with unused synergies.

Chinese Mandarin rulers combined rule by rules with high culture, over farmers and artisans, and merchants marginalised at the bottom; Western aristocrat rulers combined rule with force, trade and clergy benediction; later to become State, Capital, Intelligentsia. A basic difference was marginalisation vs integration of merchants.

The Chinese Emperors were Sons of the Heaven trading with those who paid tribute to the Emperor; in the West, Heaven was the only God for the whole world at all time, creating and taking life, the monarch being the only person with a Mandate from God-rex gratia dei-by the grace of God, also entitled to take life, delegated to His army.

The English refused to pay tribute, using opium wars, “gunboat diplomacy”, burning (with the French) the imperial palace instead; China was never violent outside the “pocket” (except when provoked by India in 1962).

The Mandate of the Heaven is lost when People shout in the streets, and regained by addressing their grievances and ideas in the ancient petition system – by “idea democracy, not arithmetic democracy”; the West counting votes in multi-party national fair and free elections.

The Cultural Revolution shouted in the streets against Confucian rule by older men with high education from East China, paving the way for the young, the women and West China – also in 80 million educated “communist” Party members, presumably wise enough to understand the yin-yang dialectics. Tiananmen 1989 was not about democracy, “no votes for uneducated”, but – like Hong Kong (?) – about losing their feudal position to wealthy farmers, merchants, private and state capitalists.

China is China-centric, the deep culture is still holistic-dialectic with a Western surface, the three civilisations synergy is there. So is the Chinese inability to handle the “pocket”: Taiwan-Tibet-Uighurs-Mongolians-Vietnamese-Koreans.

But China indeed went global; trading with barbarians; upgrading merchants-traders-money people; accumulating huge wealth. Mao opened up society for huge masses of Chinese, the young, women, and the West; Deng lifted the bottom 300-400 million up 1991-2004, with the communist focus on the needs of the neediest, into capitalism: capi-communism. Beijing 1980: six million bicycles 0 private cars; 2010: 0 vs five million.

The West, out-competed by BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), did more killing than learning.

China’s ruling class, steeped in culture, linked dynastic cycles to yin-yang thought, and traders to barbarians. Today’s rulers, deep in money shouting to beget more money, link money to corruption – and speculation? And competition from Latin America+Africa – shouting in the streets may send China packing – and the end of a dynasty is near.

China’s lead is not forever. Nothing ever was. Except, maybe, some China. A more spiritual dynasty, after materialist “communism”? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 20 2015 (IPS)

What happened in Paris on Jan. 7 – known all over the world – is totally unacceptable and inexcusable.

As inexcusable as 9/11, the coming Western attack and the Islamist retaliation, wherever. As inexcusable as the Western coups and mega-violence on Muslim lands since Iran 1953, massacring people as endowed with personality and identity as the French cartoonists.

But to the West they are not even statistics, they are “military secrets”.

However, the unacceptable is not unexplainable.

Johan Galtung

In this tragic saga of West-Islam violence, the way out is to identify the conflict and search for solutions. I wonder how many now pontificating on Paris – a city so deep in our hearts – have taken the trouble to sit down with someone identified with Al Qaeda, and simply ask: “What does the world look like where you would like to live?”

I always get the same answer: “A world where Islam is not trampled upon but respected.”

“Trampled upon” sounds physically violent – but there are two types of direct violence intended to harm, to hurt: physical violence with arm-arms-armies; and verbal violence with words, with symbols, with, for example, cartoons.

The naiveté in blaming the secret police for not having uncovered the brothers on time is crying to the heavens. What happened to Charlie Hebdo was as predictable as the reaction to the 2005 cartoon in Jyllands-Posten, whose cultural editor thought he should save Danish media from the self-censorship he had found in Soviet journalists.

But one thing is political criticism of and in the former USSR, quite another is existential stabbing right in the heart of the basis of existence.“There are two types of direct violence intended to harm, to hurt: physical violence with arm-arms-armies; and verbal violence with words, with symbols, with, for example, cartoons”

Undermine the spiritual existence of others – as Charlie Hebdo did all over the spiritual world – but there may be reactions to that verbal violence. Some of the others deeply hurt by Charlie Hebdo and its cultural autism, sitting in some office and sending poisoned arrows anywhere, may celebrate the atrocity – but inside themselves, not publicly.

The West has one presumably killing argument in favour of verbal violence for spiritual killing: freedom of expression – a wonderful freedom, deeply appreciated by those who have something to express.

And very easily undermined, not by censorship by self or some Other, but by freedom of non-impression, the freedom not to be impressed: let expression happen, let them talk and write, but do not listen and read, make them non-persons. Nevertheless, a major achievement of, by and for the West more than elsewhere.

How simple life would be if that freedom were the only norm governing expression! Say or write anything about others as if they were stones, inanimate objects, unimpressed by oral and written expression. But human beings are not.

Of course, the targets of verbal violence can opt for the freedom of non-impression, shutting themselves off from the perpetrators, neither reading nor listening. Do we really want that, a
society now polarised by cartoons – into those who laugh and enjoy, and those who are hurt, suffering deeply?

We do not, and that is why there are others value, other norms, in the land of expression: consideration, decency, respect for life. We have libel laws asking not only “is it true?” but “is it relevant?” to cut out nastiness in, for example, political “debate”.

We rule out hate speech, propaganda for torture, genocide, war, child pornography. Some people unable to argue about issues insult persons instead; that is why they are often – perhaps not often enough – called to order: stick to the issue!

Many, unable to understand or argue with converts to Islam in France, overstep norms of decency instead.

Islam retaliated, and in Paris overstepped its own rule about doing so mercifully. No Muslim can retaliate with spiritual killing of Judaism-Christianity because both are believed to be the “incomplete message”. Bodies were killed in return for spiritual killing instead.

Incidentally, there is somebody else doing the same: the United States, very attentive to critical words as indicative not only of somebody being anti-American, but even a threat to America, to be eliminated. Could “freedom of expression” also be a tool to lure, smoke them out into the open, make them available for killing by snipers?

How should the Islamic side have handled the issue? The way they tried, and to some extent managed, in Denmark: through dialogue. They should have invited the Charlies to private and public dialogue, explaining their side of the cartoon issue, appealing to a common core of humanity in us all.

There is no argument against humour and satire as such, but there is against verbal violence hitting, hurting, harming others.

The Islamic side should also control better its own recourse to self-defence by violence: only legitimate if declared by appropriate Muslim authority. That the West fails to do so – just look at the enormities of violence unleashed upon Islam since 1953 – is no excuse for Islam to sink down to Western governmental levels, using democracy as a blanket cheque for war.

The two sides have millions, maybe billions, of common people who can easily agree that the key problem is violence by extremist governments and others. The task is to let such voices come forward with concrete ideas. Like the next Charlie online, hiring a Muslim consultant to draw a border between freedom and inconsideration?

This could have saved many lives, in Paris and where the West retaliates. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2014 (IPS)

More senseless bombing of Muslims, more defeats for the United States-West, more ISIS-type movements, more West-Islam polarisation. Any way out?

“ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq-Syria] Appeals to a Longing for the Caliphate”, writes Farhang Jahanpour in an IPS column. For the Ottoman Caliphate with the Sultan as Caliph – the Shadow of God on Earth – after the 1516-17 victories all over until the collapse of both Empire and Caliphate in 1922, at the hands of the allies England-France-Russia.

Johan Galtung

Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone.

And imagine that they who had brought about the collapse had a tendency to bomb, invade,  conquer, dominate Catholic countries, one after the other, like after the two [George] Bush wars in Afghanistan-Iraq, five Obama wars in Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia-Libya-Syria and “special operations”.

Would we not predict a longing for the Vatican, and an extreme hatred of the perpetrators? Fortunately, it did not happen.

But it happened in the Middle East, leaving a trauma fuelled by killing hundreds of thousands. The Sykes-Picot_Agreement between Britain and France of 16 May 1916 led to the collapse, with their four well-known colonies, the less known promise of Istanbul to Russia, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration offering parts of Arab lands as “national home for the Jewish people”. Jahanpour cites Winston Churchill as “selling one piece of real estate, not theirs, to two peoples at the same time”.“Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone”

The Middle East colonies fought the West through military coups for independence; Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk was a model. The second liberation is militant Islam-Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algiers and so on against secular military dictatorships.

The West prefers military order against history.

The longing cannot be stopped. ISIS is only one expression, and exceedingly brutal. But, damage and destruction by U.S. President Barack Obama and allies will be followed by a dozen ISIS from 1.6 billion Muslims in 57 countries.

A little military politicking today, some “training” here, fighting there, bombing all over, are only ripples on a groundswell. This will end with a Sunni caliphate sooner or later. And, the lost caliphate they are longing for had no Israel, only a “national home”. This is behind some of the U.S.-West despair. Any solution?

The way out is cease-fire and negotiation, under United Nations auspices, with full Security Council backing. To gain time, switch to a defensive military strategy, defending Baghdad, the Kurds, the Shia and others in Syria and Iraq.

The historical-cultural-political position of ISIS and its successors is strong.

The West cannot offer withdrawal in return for anything because it has already officially withdrawn. The West, however, can offer reconciliation, both in the sense of clearing the past and opening the future.

Known in the United States as “apologism”, a difficult policy to pursue. But for once the onus of Sykes-Picot is not on the United States, but on Britain and France.

Russia dropped out after the 1917 revolution, but revealed the plot.

Bombing, an atrocity, will lead to more ISIS atrocities. A conciliatory West might change that. An international commission could work on Sykes-Picot and its aftermath, and open the book with compensation on it.

Above all, future cooperation. The West, and here the United States enters, could make Israel return the West Bank, except for small cantons, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital – or else! – sparing the horrible long-lasting Arab-Israeli warfare.

This would be decency, sanity, rationality; the question is whether the West possesses these qualities. The prognosis is dim.

There is the Anglo-American self-image as infallible, a gift to humanity, a little rough at times civilising the die-hards, but not weak.

If not an apology, at least they could wish to undo their own policies in the region since, say, 1967. No sign of that.

So much for the willingness. Does the West have the ability? Does it know how to reconcile?

After Portugal and England conquering the East China-East Africa sea lane around 1500, ultimately establishing themselves in Macao and Hong Kong, after the First and Second Opium wars of 1839-1860 in China, ending with Anglo-French forces burning the Imperial Palace in Beijing, did Britain use the “hand over” of Hong Kong to reflect on the past?

Not a word from Prince Charles.

China could have flattened those two colonies – but did not. Given that Islam has retaliation among its values, the West may be in for a lot.

Le Nouvel Observateur lists “groupes terroristes islamistes” in the world: Iraq-Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Chechenya.

The groups, named, grew out of similar local circumstances. Imagine that they increasingly share that longing for a caliphate; the Ottoman Empire covered much more than the Middle East, way into Africa and Asia. And more groups are coming. Invincible.

Imagine that Turkey itself shares that dream, maybe hoping to play a major role (in the past, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu a superb academic, a specialist on the Empire.)

Could that be the reason for Turkey not really joining, as it seems, this anti-ISIS crusade?

The West should be realistic, not “realist”. Switch to rationality. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain , Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

History, not only law, matters: like how Crimea and Abkhazia-South Ossetia – basically Russian-Orthodox – became Ukrainian and Georgian, respectively.

Two Soviet dictators, Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin, transferred Crimea to Ukraine and Abkhazia-South Ossetia to Georgia by dictate. The local people were not asked – just as Hawaiians were not consulted when the U.S. annexed their kingdom in 1898.

Johan Galtung

The first referendum in Crimea, held Mar. 16, resulted in an overwhelming No to Ukraine and Yes to the Russian Federation.

Khrushchev’s 1954 transfer of Crimea was within the Soviet Union, and under Red Army control. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Red Army became the Russian army, the conditions changed.

Former U.S. president George W. Bush wanted Ukraine and Georgia to become NATO members, moving the Russian minorities two steps away from Russia. Nothing similar applies to the other Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics. They are people living on somebody else’s land, not people living on their own land.

What happened to Crimea was a correction of what had become a basic mistake. However, Russia moving into eastern Ukraine could be – as the West says – invasion-occupation-annexation.

But that would be highly unlikely, unless civil war broke out between Ukraine West and East, and the Russian minority in the East – Donetsk – was in danger. Russia would not stand by, just as NATO would not if something similar happened close to the Polish border in Lvov.

This simply must not happen, but the possibility is growing.

President Vladimir Putin has the formula: a Ukrainian federation. Look at the maps, for instance the votes for Yulia Tymoshenko in the West and North and for Viktor Yanukovych in East and South Ukraine in the 2010 elections.

Elections decided by longitude-latitude mean two countries, and yet there is also just one.

The solution: a federation with high levels of autonomy for both parts. Educated guess: it will happen.

This is where Putin made his basic mistake: he moved too fast. He is more intelligent -better informed, more able to manage many factors mentally at the same time – than Western leaders. Others are slower; they need more time.

A referendum is the right of any people regardless of what the law says, a serious act under freedom of expression – whether in Crimea (illegal), Scotland (legal), Catalonia in Spain (illegal). What then happens is a very different matter. If people vote for a divorce, then so be it. But make it clean. Putin has made it dirty so far – but the situation can be
remedied.

Putin should have called a conference right after the referendum, before any annexation, making it clear that he would respect the call for Crimea’s entry into the Russian Federation, but would take the concerns of everyone touched directly by the outcome seriously.

The Tatars are Muslims, not Orthodox. Not unlike the Serbs in Kosovo, who are Orthodox, not Muslim like the Albanian majority. Respect them, offer them the dignity of autonomy within Crimea, try to amend the horrors perpetrated against them in the past, be open to reconciliation.

The Ukrainians in Crimea, soldiers or civilians: If firmly rooted, invite them to stay; if garrisoned soldiers, invite them to leave peacefully before any annexation makes it look like surrender.

The Russian-speaking in Ukraine (16 percent): Leave the door open for a Crimean-style process with referendum and annexation if they so wish – but make it clear that the West of Ukraine would have the same right.

Providing a neutral buffer might be better for all. How could the European Union-Russia-NATO-Shanghai Cooperation Organisation cooperate to make that a reality?

Let them benefit jointly from the offers to make them lean one way or the other, towards the EU or towards Russia. Could the West do one, and the East the other?

The how, when, where and by whom to be discussed at the conference.

Kievan-Rus: Yes, there are Russian origins in the Ukrainian capital. This does not give Russia a legitimate claim to Kiev, just as origin does not give Israel legitimate claim to Palestinian land even if the West accepts it, origin does not give Serbia legitimate claim to all of Kosovo, and origin does not give Damascus-Baghdad legitimate claims in Southern Spain.

European borders have shifted a great deal; there are many origins to claim.

Sanctions against selected individuals: Make it clear that Russia has not and will not kill anybody if not attacked, and that sanctions may also one day be applied to individuals who launch aggressive, not defensive wars, such as the one in Afghanistan; admit that the Russian invasion there was also a mistake.

Kosova/o. The Albanians based on an overwhelming majority took Kosovo out of Serbia, but they did not have the right to take the Serbian minority with them – a good reason for not recognising Kosova. The solution is a federation with high autonomy for Serbs.

Now Putin has to show his willingness to do that for the Tatars and then recognise Kosovo – asking them to use Yugo-space as he will use the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
(END/IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Mar 13 2014 (IPS)

There is much in a name. Ukraine means borderland. The position of the extreme West – like U.S. neocons – is clear: get all into NATO, encircling, containing, defeating Russia.

Some in Ukraine and Georgia share that goal. The less extreme West would focus on European Union (EU) membership, both being European countries.

Some of them, in turn, might focus on loans as there is much money to be made. Thus, Bosnia-Herzegovina had nine billion dollars debt before the EU takeover as “high authority”; now 107 billion dollars. “Austerity” around the corner.

The position of Russia as expressed by president Vladimir Putin and minister Sergei Lavrov: no way. Crimea will revert to Russia after it was given to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev – himself born in Kalinovka, Ukraine in 1894, the wife an Ukrainian – possibly mainly for economic reasons as his son at Brown University, U.S. argues.

However, Ukraine is not only a borderland but also two countries between Poland and Russia. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1569 and the Austria-Hungarian Empire once covered most of Ukraine; so did czarist Russia and Soviet Union in their heydays.

More importantly, the dividing line of the Roman Empire from 395, confirmed by the schism between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in 1054 is reflected in Ukraine’s extremely complex history.

The result is unmistakable: moving east the Catholic attachment yield to the Orthodox and Ukrainian to Russian. When Poland became a member of EU and even NATO the handwriting for Ukraine was on the wall; bringing to mind Polish First Marshal Pilsudski’s Odessa-Black Sea ambitions after World War I.

Odessa is in the West, Donets in the East, Ukrainian in the West, more Russian in the East. And Kiev – origin of Russia, Rus – the capital, in the middle.

No doubt there is also a Ukraine uniting the two, a land, not only a border; also united in popular revolt against corruption all over. One split in two, two united in one: both true.

But watch out: one thing is the corruption-inequality pandemic all over the world hitting Ukraine; another is centuries of history leaving lasting impacts. Imagine corruption-inequality subsiding, and the fault lines will come up, even with a vengeance.

So much for diagnosis. Prognosis: Crimea reverts to Russia; Ukraine under Washington-Brussels hegemony; civil war threatening. Anti-semitism, Islamism. But not escalating to a world war: However, balance of terror is not peace, so what is the possible therapy?

But first Georgia, also deeply divided with Russian-speaking Orthodox South Ossetia and Abkhazia within 1921 borders where Joseph Stalin – a Georgian – played a key role (Zviad Gamsakhardia, independent president in 1991, re-asserted Georgian hegemony; now more disputed).

The Soviet power centre was in Moscow, but they showered the non-Russians with gifts of various kinds, even land. The two stories are similar, with Russian troops in Abkhazia-South Ossetia and military encounters. Thus, Georgia attacked South Ossetia in 2008, evidently hoping to provoke Russia to provoke NATO but the plot was revealed.

Georgia 2003 -Ukraine 2004 had rose-orange “colour revolutions”; now U.S. uses more forceful demonstrations also helped by Resistance!, the Beograd student group fighting Milosevic, to install governments.

Europe is more sensitive to conflicts between nations, making a NATO consensus unlikely.

Europe had the Cold War experience that a neutral-nonaligned belt between West and East is useful; the roles of Finland and Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, Yugoslavia.

To Washington they were half-way traitors, “equalizing” West and East, to be won over, even coerced. But, a non-aligned borderland between today’s NATO Poland-Lithuania and Russia and NATO Turkey and Russia, could also one day be useful.

The choice for Ukraine is not between one unitary state ruled from Kiev, and two states run from, say, Odessa and Donets. There are three in-betweens.

First, there is devolution, decentralisation, already working, with regional parliaments reflecting the deep differences. But they are weak relative to Kiev, let alone relative to Washington-Moscow.

Second, federation; the Federal Republic of Ukraine, with high level of autonomy for the two parts to express their character, yet sharing foreign, security (neutral!), finance and logistics policies.

Third, confederation, the Ukrainian Community, two independent countries each other’s major partners economically and politically.

Examples of the three: United Kingdom, Belgium, the Nordics; with similarities and differences. Thus, the UK is now loosening, possibly breaking up in spite of shared language and history.

How Belgium will turn out history will show. The Nordics work well with even more differences than there is inside Ukraine and are not even contiguous.

The West and Russia compete with economic offers, but identity is probably more important. Ukraine West feels West, Ukraine East feels Russian; united historically, divided culturally. Could one be in EU and the other in the Russian federation, both enjoying the carrots offered? – in a Ukrainian Community with open borders? Too divisive.

None of the three is perfect, but the federation may be the best way out. There is unity and diversity. Ukraine, a founding member of the United Nations, is still a country, yet the different identities are fully respected. Be smart, could that federation even be both an associate member of the EU and the Russian federation?

Prediction: within five years we have both federations. Crisis over.

Excerpt:

There are conflicts old and new crying for solution and reconciliation, not violence, with reasonable, realistic ways out.

Take the South Sudan conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka. We know the story of the borders drawn by the colonial powers, confirmed in Berlin in 1884. Change a border by splitting a country – referendum or not – and what do you expect opening Pandora’s box? More Pandora.

There is a solution: not drawing borders, making them irrelevant. The former Sudan could have become a federation with much autonomy, keeping some apart and others together in confederations-communities, also across borders. Much to learn from Switzerland, EU and ASEAN.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

Take the Maghreb-Mali+ complex: a road to peace runs through Tuareg high autonomy and confederations of the autonomies, in addition to the state system. Proceeds from natural resources – oil, uranium, gold, metals – should benefit the owners, not former colonisers. The United Nations’ task is to make the West comply with socioeconomic human rights.

Take what is called the last colony (well, Ulster? Palestine?): Sahrawi, Spain’s shame for not having decolonised; the United Nations Charter Article 73 formula is not perfect but differential treatment is unacceptable.

Take Ceuta and Melilla, “Spanish” enclaves in Morocco, and Gibraltar, an “English” enclave in Spain: use the Hong Kong formula with sovereignty for the owners, flag and garrison, and leave the system as it is.

Geography and history matter; sovereignty for one, system for the other. Not a bad formula for the Falkland/Malvinas islands or Northern Ireland, with a reborn Republic of Ireland in a Confederation of British Isles.

Back to Berlin 1884, institutionalising the outrageous sociocide, with genocide and ecocide, perpetrated on Africans on top of centuries of Arab-West slavery. But do not forget the Congress of Berlin six years earlier, in 1878, doing the same to the Balkans, with the infamous Article 25 giving the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, the right to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina temporarily.

On Oct. 6, 1908 they did exactly that, Turkey and Russia both being weak. What do you expect when annexing someone’s land? A resistance movement of course, and ultimately, on Jun. 28, 1914, the sacred date to the Serbs, having been defeated by the Turks 525 years earlier: Two shots rang out in Sarajevo.

One century later “historians” (who pay their salaries, states?) see the shots as the cause of World War I, not what caused the shots; like seeing the terrorists, not what causes terrorism.

Then as now the same two stories, nations made prisoners of states, and states-peoples made prisoners of empires. Sarajevo used against terrorism.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson used self-determination to dismantle the beaten Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires; but not the victors’ empires as a young Vietnamese in Paris experiences, chased away from the U.S. Embassy: Ho Chi Minh, claiming the same for his people.

And the U.S. Versailles delegation rejected that claim by Sudeten Germans against Czechoslovakia; accepted by England, not to “appease” Adolf Hitler, but to rectify a wrong.

What a fantastic chance for German-Austrian foreign policy!

Start this 2014 centenary year preparing 150 anniversary conferences, in 2028 and 2034, apologising for 1914, undoing some harm, letting Africans be Africans and Balkans be Balkans of various kinds, stop blaming their victims for being unruly, restless, terrorist and so on. The peaceful century 1815-1914: some peace! Don’t miss the chance.

But they were not alone. In 1905 the U.S.-Japan, Taft-Katsura (later president and prime minister, respectively) agreed to U.S. rule in the Philippines and Japanese rule in Korea, in the interest of “peace in East Asia” – their peace, meaning rule. A good century later the Obama-Abe (president and prime minister, respectively) uneasy agreement on Japan’s aggressive policy.

The solution to the Korean Peninsula conflict is a peace treaty and normalisation with North Korea, a Korean nuclear free zone and work on the open border-confederation-federation-unitary state continuum.

If the U.S. fails to go along, why not go ahead, also multilaterally and via United Nations.

But they were not alone: in 1917 Balfour Jewish homeland followed the Sykes-Picot treason with four disastrous colonies. With a major difference, however: the Jews had been there before; some title to some land, but not to an ever-expanding Jewish state (just one word away from “only Jewish”).

The road to peace must pass through a pre-1967 Israel with Jewish characteristics, Palestine recognised, a Middle East Community of Israel with border countries, an Organisation for Cooperation and Security in West Asia, with Syria (an upper chamber for the many nations with cultural autonomy – Ottoman millet), Iraq (maybe confederation, with no U.S. bases), the Kurds (autonomy in the four countries for some land, a confederation of autonomies), Iran (an end to Benjamin Netanyahu extremism), a moderate Israel, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection.

Afghanistan? Full U.S.-NATO withdrawal, an end to foreign bases, coalition government, Swiss-style constitution with much autonomy for villages and nations, and gender parity. But let Afghans be Afghans.

China’s claims on sea and air space? Too much, but the Chinese had been there before, 500-1500; some title to some sea, some air.

And U.S.-China: direct cooperation for mutual benefit, make it more equal; the U.S. is cheating itself, building warehouses, not factories.

U.S. spying on the world: the point is not clemency for Edward Snowden but to drop the NSA and punish those, also allies, who violated human rights.

The West tries to claim the moral high ground by changing discourse to something they think they have and others do not: democracy. Running a huge colonial-imperial system against the will of others? Some democracy.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

By Johan Galtung
WASHINGTON, Dec 4 2013 (IPS)

In a passage in Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, he condemns an egalitarian native people at the tip of South America to remain primitive.

Development presupposes inequality, having chiefs – whether human, animals, races – to look up to and learn from. And the evolution theory emerging from a mind thus pre-programmed is obvious: competition, struggle for survival, not mutual aid, like the substitute narrative for Genesis 1:20-28, 4th to 6th day – but without God.

However, a man of God, Pope Francis – if anyone is saving Western civilisation from itself it is him, not economic growth presidents-prime ministers – has come out and decried inequality and “trickle-down economics” as a “crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power”.

Or maybe “those wielding intellectual power” – the civil servants, the economists, instead?

Look at BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), accounting for 45 percent of the world population and 25 percent of the global world product. No to inequality and trickle-down: Brazil under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva-Dilma Rousseff, Russia with revolution, China lifting the bottom up, South Africa breaking down apartheid. India has some trickle-down, but social walls are too strong to break.

The Asian Development Bank’s Social Protection Index score is three times higher for China than India (Japan’s is almost three times that of China – having started distribution already in the 1870s).

But in the U.S. and European Union, inequality is growing. This matters: more people are suffering, and may threaten the social “order”; even a minimal level of social protection costs; people at the very bottom have very low productivity; people at the very bottom consume with very low “consumptivity” (value consumed per person-hour); they are hungry, on the brink of starving.

Johan Galtung

Lift the bottom up and consumption and production follow. People with adequate food, health and education work better. The cuts in U.S. social protection are pathetic. Obamacare is a failure, Medicare-Medicaid-food stamps are shrinking, pensions are suffering from speculation, Congress has failed to increase the minimum wage. But states and local authorities may do so, lifting up the bottom in rich states (with the U.S. Southeast – Tea Party territory – lagging behind).

The four costs above add up to the U.S. committing economic suicide. Lift the bottom up so that they buy from the lower-middle classes who will buy more from the middle- middle classes. Wheels turning. Stimulus of cooperatives at the bottom will give better returns than stimulus for small existing businesses.

How about debt? The problem is not debt, but servicing debt at the cost of servicing people, and servicing by printing money. A debt is investment in a productive future managed by competent actors, not by stupid incompetence. The new debt ceiling day is approaching, with no new ideas floating in the air.

How about the EU debt relative to GDP? Five countries are – like the U.S. – above 100 percent: Greece (close to 170!), Italy, Portugal, Ireland; Belgium and France are in-between. Spain is doing slightly better, France worse

But then comes the private debt, by households and companies. Eight of the 17 eurozone countries have private debt above twice GDP: companies do not invest, and households consume less – like in the U.S.

There was the idea of cutting the numbers of people risking misery and exclusion by 20 million from 2008 to 2020. Instead, 24 million were added. Gone are great visions, in its struggle for survival to fill an EU niche in the world and to keep a Union between key creditor Germany and indebted EU members to the West and the South, with old enmities lurking beneath the surface.

For the world the key creditor is China. When the U.S. government had an 18-day shutdown President Barack Obama could not travel to ASEAN-APEC meetings to launch a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) excluding China. Chinese president Xi Jinping did go, reviving a China-Asia maritime Silk Route that operated from 500 to 1500 AD, to which was added the Silk Railroad. Chinese inter-governmental diplomacy: equal footing, mutual benefit, compromise, non-interference.

By 2020 China-ASEAN trade may reach one trillion dollars, with China-Malaysia trade set to reach 160 billion dollars by 2017. Malaysia’s militarily pro-U.S. Prime Minister Najib Razak says he may pull out of the TPP to preserve sovereignty.

Deals come more easily for the world’s biggest creditor than for the biggest debtor. The U.S. is now better at breeding enemies than friends: with NSA-Edward Snowden the Transatlantic Partnership (TAP) may never be what the U.S. envisaged. The TPP and TAP make Big Business the winners through protectionism and increased inequality. Follow the leader! – while China is playing the mutual aid card.

Add the speculation that Wall Street – with JP Morgan Chase-Citibank-Bank of America-Goldman Sachs accounting for more than 90 percent of the known derivative trade – is perpetrating on the world.

Glen Ford, the editor of the Black Agenda Report, wrote that “Wall Street bets a quadrillion dollars of everybody else’s money”; 1.2 quadrillion equals 16.7 times the gross world product. Derivatives are valued at six times the world wealth. Sheer madness.

Add to this the contradictions in the U.S. economy between serving debts and serving people, between money in circulation and U.S. worth, and between the growth of the financial economy and the real economy. Which bubble will burst first is hard to tell.

But with 80 percent of U.S. workers seeing no real wage raise in the last three decades, and 400 individuals owning more than the bottom 180 million, the situation is worse than before the French and Russian revolutions.

Friends of the U.S.: give sound advice, but de-Americanise, keep your distance. The global economy is heading East and South: BRICS+ with a stagnant EU. Growth with distribution, not stagnation with inequality.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 2013 (Columnist Service)

The linchpin of an empire is the link between two elites, one in the imperial centre, the others in the peripheries. Symmetric alliances exist, but not when there is a superpower at the centre.

The periphery elites do jobs for the centre: killing, say, in Libya or Syria, when they are asked to do so; securing the centre’s economic interests in return for a substantial cut; serving as a bridgehead culturally – called Americanisation; or delivering obedience in exchange for protection.

For this to work, the elites have to believe in the empire. They put words up front – like democracy, human rights, rule of law – serving as human shields. But the costs may be heavy, the benefits may be decreasing, they may have difficulties with restless students, working classes, other countries. Or worse: they may sense that the empire is not working, is heading for decline and fall, and want to get out.

And even if this is not the case the U.S. elites, the policy officials, may suspect it to be so, and spy on empire-alliance leaders. The director of the National Security Agency (NSA), General Keith Alexander, said the agency was asked by policy officials to discover the “leadership intentions” of foreign countries. “If you want to know leadership intentions, these are the issues,” he said.

Clear from the beginning – beyond “threats to privacy”, “they all do it”, “it was technically feasible”, and similar smoke screens. Spying on the intentions of enemy leaders – the “humint” to complement capabilities – is an obvious part of the state system. But on allies?

Johan Galtung

Look at this through Angela Merkel’s eyes. She hated East Germany’s Stasi surveillance. But they were amateurs; these people are professionals. This went unnoticed for a decade, till Edward Snowden. Imagine her rage, comparing.

And imagine the non-rage over the same in Spain: beyond Francisco Franco, yes, but Rajoy’s party is the – highly corrupt – heir to the 1939-1975 Franco dictatorship.

But just as there is an inner circle of self-appointed elites, there is an inner circle of allies that can presumably be trusted, the “Five Eyes”: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – Anglo-America writ large.

Who are they? A club of countries selected on a racist-culturalist basis, white and Anglo; killers of indigenous peoples all over: of native Indians in the U.S. and in Canada to a slightly lesser extent; of Aborigines in Australia and in New Zealand a little less; on the part of the UK – all over, getting the others launched on that slippery slope of genocide and sociocide.

They know this: that the world majority is the kind of people they killed, and they feel strongly that they have to keep together, distrusting non-members. But the U.S. spies on UK Labour and Parliament, and the U.S.-UK together on the other three.

Germany wants to join the club for another 5+l, like in the case of the United Nations Security Council veto powers. Race isn’t a problem, but culture is: they are not Anglo.

We would expect more spying to identify the enemy within, the more the empire declines. In what state is the empire? Not good.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. won bases and a pipeline and nothing else, and may lose both after the 2014 withdrawal.

Iran is gaining more influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, being seen as more legitimate than Saudi-Qatar and the G7 in general, with its Islamism.

In Iraq, the U.S. won bases and access to oil and seems to be losing both. And it managed to do what Iran did not, turning Iraq into a Shia country.

In Syria, dividing the country into three, four or smaller parts does not seem to be working; at any rate the leading anti-Assad faction is Islamist Sunni.

In Egypt, the U.S. misread the situation totally, stranded in a choice between two evils they do not master.

In Libya, another misreading, not understanding how Western secular imperialism (Italy-UK-France-U.S.-Israel) had ignited an Islamist (rather than Arab) and a Berber-Tuareg (rather than Arab) awakening;

In Israel, spying on U.S. elites, tail-wags-dog politics, more U.S. anti-Semitism than ever (watch Youtube), media increasingly critical of Israel; and Israel in the agony between a Jewish state and democracy, sooner or later forced to declare its Eastern border, facing a South Africa-like scenario, and being declared a liability for Washington.

Now, how about the other force in the world, BRICS? Not bad: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was the first to speak at the United Nations General Assembly with a devastating critique of the NSA spy programme, calling for alternative internet servers.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin may have put an end to the Syrian crisis as part of a general Middle East crisis – like Mikhail Gorbachev put an end to the Cold War; not the U.S. with perennial war and threats of war – calling for an end to weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, in the region.

In China, the Xinhua news agency called for general de-Americanisation and an end to the dollar as the “world reserve currency”, in particular favouring a basket of currencies rather than any single country’s currency.

But it is unlikely that the Washington politics-media conglomerate will come up with solutions to calamities that dramatic. Few regimes have.

Halvdan Koht, Norway’s foreign minister, spent the night that Germany invaded Norway with his mistress; Vidkun Quisling, who took over, spent the last cabinet meeting discussing police uniforms, then surrendered to the police. One wonders what Washington DC will do with the double, triple, debacle.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
MANASSAS, Virginia, U.S. , Oct 28 2013 (Columnist Service)

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one chamber to put the livelihoods of millions of people inside and outside the U.S. at risk, for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead.

And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted No in the end, only 87 Yes.

President Barack Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.

Johan Galtung

The budget deal postponed the government shutdown to Jan. 15 and the U.S. default to Feb. 7, solving nothing.

Worse, there was much reporting but few ideas floating in the media. Worse still, there was no massive million “Stop this Nonsense” March on Congress, but widespread apathy. Worst: the most clearly outspoken group was veterans and reserve officers (1.1 million strong) – indicative of a major threat should their Nov. 1 paychecks not arrive.

The two blocs hardly talk, but treat each other like they treat the Taliban. Terrorists are punished by not being listened to – a bad thing when the Republicans have arguments. The Health Care Act may not be affordable, there may be a coverage gap, etc.; work remains to be done.

There are solutions for a country as resourceful as the U.S. The government shutdown is about the federal budget deficit. Do as households do: decrease the expenditure, increase the income.

Three major parts of the federal budget are loan interest, the military, and Social Security-Medicare-Medicaid – all enormous.

The three giants are in a NATO vs Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) arms race; joint military terrorism putting humanity at risk. How about the U.S. making a deal with the Chinese and the Russians? Chinese forgiveness of 50 percent of the U.S. debt against a 50 percent U.S. reduction of the most offensive military components – the 800 bases around the world – over 5-10 years?

Accompanied by a similar multilateral and balanced reduction in offensive arms in all three, building on the Russian chemical arms momentum?

Social Security: let everybody at an older age who wants to work do so. More tax revenue, less expenditure.

Medicare-Medicaid: create a more healthy population. The decrease in smoking, mainly thanks to the U.S., was a great step forward. Next in line: sodas. Selling and serving sodas should become as illegitimate as smoking in public; much more to gain than from outlawing marijuana.

The debt ceiling is a deeper problem, affecting an economy that does not produce a surplus sufficient to run a modern society with an acceptable livelihood for all of its citizens. A sixth or even a fifth of the population lives in misery.

A source of much new income, at the individual, family, local community, state and federal levels. Politically difficult, but economically simple: lift the bottom up. Identify the poorest local communities, give short-term credit to cooperatives for growing and selling cheap, organic food, build affordable housing, and provide simple polyclinics for the common diseases.

Employing the neediest. Make people fend for themselves rather than depend on taxation. Like any small business, they need some initial credit; unlike small businesses they need the protection of cooperative production and consumption.

Learn from positive experiences in Spain; Mondragon, Marinaleda: a small investment in people marginalised by the mainstream economy, and they (re-)enter and become consumers and producers.

Reduce suffering, decrease inequality, and make the real economy grow; three huge flies with one huge stroke. Is the U.S. up to it?

The U.S. economy is strong on goods – with decreasing unit costs due to high resource-labour-capital-technical-administration efficiency – but weak on services, with skyrocketing costs in education, health and old age care.

Credits are needed, but not from money banks: from time banks with people exchanging services on a one hour = one hour basis.

The U.S. real economy is weak today relative to the Wall Street finance economy – and Washington bail-out rather than stimulus – using money to make more money, directly, not via cumbersome investments; in seconds, not in years, at tremendous risk; with more 2008’s lining up. Stop it.

Remedy No. 1: The five or six financial behemoths are too big to use. To stop feeding them money is like stopping to serve alcohol to an alcoholic. Let thousands of local saving banks grow for people to put their savings in, not risking that they will be used for betting, but for local investment.

Remedy No. 2: A much overdue one percent sales tax on the stock exchange.

Remedy No. 3: Outlaw money trafficking, like trafficking in drugs and women.

No such items on the table by January-February, only small-scale budget bickering and the Chinese approach comes up: de-Americanise the world economy. A “world reserve currency” – the dollar – from just one country is madness anyhow; from a country with cyclical shutdowns and ceilings – like the U.S.- it is insanity.

Strong leadership has to emerge from the White House and Congress, but especially from people – the local level, local banks and businesses. The future is above all in their hands.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
VERSONNEX, France, Oct 24 2013 (IPS)

Nobody has brought this simple message to the world like the Perdana Global Peace Foundation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As the leader, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s fourth prime minister, says: “Peace for us simply means the absence of war. We must never be deflected from this simple objective”.

So they organise compelling exhibitions and conferences to highlight the atrocities and horrors of war, starting with World War I, often in cooperation with the Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta University in Indonesia.

A very clear message from the Southeastern part of the world to the Northwestern part: Stop It! All your rules of war add up to its legitimation: wars get ever worse as measured by the percentage of non-combatant, civilian casualties – from about 10 percent in World War I to 90 percent in the Vietnam war and other wars at the end of the 20th century. They dare refer to crimes as “unintended consequences” or “collateral damage”.

Johan Galtung

Take Norway, a “peace nation”, as an example, not the United States and Israel with their concept of being chosen, and their exceptionalism. See what Norway does against the spirit of U.N. Security Council resolution 1973 aimed at protecting civilians, promoting a cease-fire and mediating a political solution in Libya. And against U.N. Charter Article 2 outlawing the use of war.

According to testimony given by pilots to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, 25 percent of the bombing was planned with targets selected in advance. The rest were chosen by the pilots who, 40,000 feet up, decided that buildings, roads and people they saw were targets: “We were told to fly into an enormous area the size of Southern Norway and search for targets ourselves. We were used to clearance from somebody on the ground, but did not get it.”

But they did get regime change. Norway obeyed orders, doing its part.

This is criminal activity, like mass murderers gone amok shooting wildly, killing whatever moves. Who ordered it? The Labour Party prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister in a “red-green” (meaning brown) coalition. Who did it? The pilots.

According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, the latter cannot claim they only followed orders; and according to the Tokyo Tribunal the former cannot claim that they were unaware of what happened. It is the duty of the pilots to assess the legality of what happens, and of the politicians to know what happens.

The case is now being made at the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg, the International Criminal Court (where Norway does not enjoy U.S. protection), and the Norwegian Constitutional Court.

They will encounter incomprehension in Norway: We, the perfect ones? Crimes?

But we must globalise crimes against humanity – a crime committed somewhere is a crime committed everywhere, like in the case of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

A criminal can in the future be arrested in any state in the world, extradited or tried where he is arrested. The Mother of parliaments in London showed the way as it also did for the war in Syria; a solvable crisis.

This would limit their freedom of travel as it already does for some top U.S. and Israeli politicians. But beyond that there is another approach: excommunicating such states from the inter-state system and the U.N., breaking or downgrading bilateral diplomatic relations.

Trade is not the issue; state legitimacy, unless that state itself takes action indicting the “warlords”, is. The present system gives a U.S. president the right almost single-handedly to press the nuclear button.

Where does this madness come from? From the Westphalia 1648 “peace” giving states the right to declare war?

That does not explain the concentration of the “right” to engage in mass murder at the top of the state pyramid.

The Abrahamic god kills massively – more in the Torah and the Bible than in the Qur’an; to be a King Dei gratia, by the grace of god, bestows the same right on kings, transferred to their successors – the presidents and prime ministers.

Not strange that we find most belligerence in the West. Democracy or not, it does not matter. The “grace of god” was transferred to the people, in vox populi vox Dei, leading to the grotesque idea that democracies have more of a mandate to kill. As if democracy was about killing and not about the non-violent transfer of power and resolution of conflicts. The exact opposite of, and the remedies, to war and killing.

We are moving in this direction. As inter-state war become more rare, wars will stand out as exceptional, illegitimate, and illegal under the U.N. Charter.

The old laws of nations applied to inter-state wars, but that distinction loses its significance as the world evolves. R2P – “responsibility to protect” (which authorises military intervention as a last resort) – kills in the territory of other states, unlike self-defence by defensive military in one’s own.

Could ulterior motives be behind the dubious idea of killing people to save people? Have all other means really been used? Not diplomats trained in promoting the interests of their own nation, but massive non-violent invasion from the outside as a buffer, protecting some while impeding others?

Deep mediation applied to all parties to the conflict, not only two chosen to fit the Abrahamic search for God vs Satan, translated into People vs Hitler and his likes; readily issuing Hitler-certificates?

Not strange if patriarchy and patriotism are yielding to parity and globalism. The Fifth Commandment, Thou shalt not kill, was for in-group only. But today we are ever more one big in-group.

Using states to kill makes the killers outlaws. Criminals. Stop it.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

THESIS ONE: The leaks are not about “whistle-blowing”, but about a nonviolent, civil disobedient fight against huge social evils.

Whistle-blowing presupposes that somebody can be warned, in fact wants to be warned, and is in a position to do something.

Obviously those who can do something about U.S. foreign policy, who have the power – legislative, the Congress, particularly the Senate; executive, State Department-Pentagon-White House; judiciary, the Supreme Court; economically, the giant banks; culturally, the mainstream media – know perfectly well what is going on: these are all efforts to hang on to imperial economic, military, political and cultural power.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

But they do not want change. And those who want a change – a major part of the
U.S. population, allied populations and most of the rest of the world – have been warned, but are to a large extent powerless. So they believe; but see thesis five.

THESIS TWO: The basic thing is not the media-political focus on Julian Assange–Bradley Manning-Edward Snowden, but on what they revealed.

Manning revealed the video of a helicopter attack in Iraq on mostly unarmed non-combatants, including two Reuters journalists.

Result: the Iraqi parliament said No to the George W. Bush administration’s wish to keep a base in the country (the U.S. military withdrew Dec. 31, 2011).

Manning revealed the full extent of the corruption of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, adding fuel to the youth revolt.

Manning revealed that Yemen dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh acquiesced to the U.S. drone attacks in Yemen, a factor in his removal from power.

Manning revealed that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered United Nations diplomats to spy on their U.N. counterparts, wanting detailed intelligence on the U.N. leadership, with passwords and encryption keys.

Manning revealed that John Kerry pressed Israel to be open to the return of the Golan Heights to Syria as part of peace negotiations.

Manning revealed Afghan government corruption was “overwhelming”.

Manning revealed the authoritarian, corrupt nature of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt.

Manning revealed that U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was against striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, arguing it would be counterproductive.

Manning revealed the Israeli policy “to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis”.

Manning revealed that Syria’s Bashar Assad and wife bought jewelry and had a gilded style of life in Europe while his artillery killed in Homs.

Take Snowden as another example: his revelations, the U.S. spying as much on their allies as on Afghanistan, threaten U.S. plans for the two big Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific trade blocs to exclude BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Should that happen, then this is world history indeed – with the U.S. now bidding for time.

THESIS THREE: Diplomacy in general was revealed, not only U.S.

When Assange’s first WikiLeaks were published, I wrote:

“The emperor unclothed. But not only the U.S. emperor, also the Diplomacy emperor. What kind of ridiculous discourse is this, so focused on the negative, on actors, usually elite persons, in elite countries? Gossip, puerile characterisations, the kind of “analysis” of power typical of immaturity. Where is the analysis of culture and structure, light years more important than actors who come and go?

“Where are positive ideas? Where are ideas about how to convert the challenges from climate change into cooperation for mutual and equal benefit? Like water distillation projects at Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Palestine, fuelled by parabolic mirrors? Like positive U.S.-Iran cooperation on alternative energy?

“Democracy dies behind closed doors. WikiLeaks opens those doors; an enormous service to democracy.”

What Manning and Snowden revealed are the death throes of the U.S. empire; what Assange et al. revealed are the death throes of the state system as we know it. Both processes will take time, the former less than the latter. But make no mistake: the three made history.

Three names that will be remembered after some U.S. presidents recede into an oblivion so well deserved. Who knows the top English in India, like viceroys and their crimes – roys of vices? Mahatma Gandhi looms larger. Who knows the names of the English who tried to keep the “Atlantic Seaboard” colonies? George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin overshadow them all.

They may even contribute to the reduction of standing armies and, if the U.S. changes, to understanding among nations. A shared Nobel Peace Prize to all three? (Not very likely, from Norway, a U.S. client country.)

THESIS FOUR: U.S. allies comply out of fear, not out of agreement. Quite concretely: they comply to avoid that one day the U.S. Air Force will land on the many bases at its disposal “as the government is unable to protect its own population”.

The Americans are coming, not the Russians, not the Muslims. And the more likely it becomes, the further the U.S. slides down the well-greased totalitarianism incline: next step, probably FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) camps for suspects -for categories, metadata! – like the Japanese during World War II.

THESIS FIVE: Everybody, and the media, can speed up the processes. Rotten apples should fall from the tree; a little shake will help.

The key star media, with Anglo-America’s The Guardian and The Washington Post playing major roles, deserve our praise. Then, let millions surround foreign ministries and embassies, demanding an end to spying, changing their servers away from the Big Traitors in the U.S., suspending further cooperation, degrading diplomatic relations. Till credible dis-spying – the equivalent of dis-armament – takes place.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
BUCHAREST, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

Future studies, like peace-development-environment studies, is an interdisciplinary, international effort to get a grip on key issues, divided into ‘preferred futures’ – utopias – whose?; ‘predicted futures’ – forecasting – who does it, for whom?; and ‘future practice’ – scenarios bending the predicted toward the preferred – by and for whom?

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The title of Ravi Morey’s book ‘Looking Backward: 2050-2013’ captures future studies in a nutshell: exploring intermediate stages between a fully democratic world government and our 2013 present.

The road may pass through a bankrupt United States, bailed out by a democratic China in 2025. Some may argue that is already happening, with China (more democratic than the West knows) being creditor No. 1, and the U.S. (more bankrupt than it admits) being debtor No. 1.

Respectively, they rank first and 190^th among 190 countries.

Like in 1967, in Oslo, for the predecessor organisation ‘Mankind 2000’, this keynote is on international futures. Preferred futures:

* Economically: a living wage for everybody on earth, eliminating misery, an end to flagrant inequality, and a new economics, focused on the reproduction of human beings and nature; not on book-keeping writ large and capital-driven markets.

* Militarily: a change from the winning-victory orientation to a solution-orientation for the underlying conflicts, by mediation-dialogues for conflict resolution, trauma reconciliation, empathy with the worldviews of others, building cooperation for mutual and equal benefit.

* Politically: a high level of autonomy for local authorities, for the 2,000 nations inside the 200 states, for states, for regions, for the global level: through federations and confederations-communities.

* Culturally: a multi-cultural world with Western-Marxist, Islamic, Buddhist, Japanese, Chinese, Polynesian, Ubuntu development models on par with Western neo-liberalism; for humanity to pick the best from them all.

Too much for one generation, 40 years? Look backward at the last 40 years at the positive gifts accelerated history gave us:

* Economically: an ever increasing flow of goods at ever lower prices, the emerging BRICS economies, the declining West;

* Militarily: inter-state wars decreasing; the end of the bipolar Cold War via a short unipolar period with one superpower to a multi-polar (octagonal?) world with poles like Latin America, the U.S., Russia, India, China, the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), the European Union and Africa as potential peace communities;

* Politically: the transition of Spain and Portugal to democracy, the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of communist dictatorship and the Soviet Empire, the end of apartheid in South Africa;

* Culturally: the much maligned and misunderstood anti-Confucian cultural revolution in China liberating hundreds of millions, women, the young, the rural and West Chinese people, paving the way for lifting close to 400 million from misery to lower-middle-class status in 1991-2004;

* Socially: the feminist revolution, a gift from the U.S.; the incredible improvement of our health, making 90 years of quite healthy life normal, as well as couples spending 60 or 70 years together – non-smoking being a key factor.

We live in somebody’s utopia. But much of it came as a surprise due to bad forecasting: good at trends, bad at events. For the latter, extrapolation is insufficient: a deep understanding of the system as a whole and internal contradictions, dialectics – in short, 2,500 years of Taoist epistemology – is indispensable. Failing to do so, Western life becomes very dramatic, one shock after the other.

A way out: in 1970 9,000 people in 20 countries were interviewed about their Images of the World in the Year 2000. The more economically developed the country, the more pessimistic their images: environmental problems, inequality, the breakdown of families, violence. Maybe common people know where the shoe pinches and elites do not? Their predictions when the Year 2000 (Y2K) came were by far superior to the experts’.

So, what is the forecast for the coming 40 years? There are positive and negative points to be made, as usual:

* Economically, the end of socialism followed by the end of capitalism, killing 140,000 daily with intolerable inequality, leading to major revolts and violence in many countries, or to something worse – apathy;

* Militarily, the decline of the state and patriotism, the rise of repressed nations and nationalism, increasing terrorism – state/non-state (9/11 being one example) – from the 2,000 nations wanting a place in the sun, the decline of the U.S. empire, the rise of U.S. global and domestic fascism, an increase in mediation and nonviolence in general;

* Politically, more multi-party national elections with more party-ocray, bank-ocracy, technocracy, autocracy, corruption, widening circles of mutual benefit but with increasing inequality;

* Culturally, the decline of Western Christian-secular culture, the rise of Islam and conflict between those two universalising worldviews.

Thus, the prospects for “peace with our futures” is mixed.

But surf on positive trends: the search for alternative economies, the decline of the state system and the U.S. empire, increasing use of mediation and nonviolence, widening circles of mutual rights and obligations, the decline of Western arrogance.

Fight inequality, boycott companies with CEOs making more than five to 10 times what the workers earn, switch to cooperatives, transfer accounts to savings banks, introduce a sales tax of five percent for financial transactions to finance a living wage and to put a brake on insane speculation, increase the quantity and quality of mediation and nonviolence all over, fight for democracy with transparency, dialogue, petitions, referenda, pick the best from worldviews, both-and, not either-or.

Islam offers togetherness and sharing needed in the West, the West offers diversity and freedom needed in Islam; go for mutual learning.

Those who surf and fight will rise. The others will sink.

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Fascism means unlimited surveillance of one's own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. Credit: Frédéric BISSON/CC-BY-2.0

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

The atrocious Second World War left behind lasting damage by lowering our standards for what is marginally acceptable.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

War is bad but if it’s not nuclear war, the limit has not yet been reached.

Fascism is bad, but if it does not come with dictatorship and the elimination of an entire people, the limit has not yet been reached.

Hiroshima, Hitler, Auschwitz are deeply rooted in our minds. And we distort them.

Hiroshima makes us disregard the state terrorism against German and Japanese cities, the killing of citizens of any age and both genders. And Hitler and Auschwitz make us disregard fascism as the pursuit of political goals by means of violence and the threat of violence.

It takes two to make a war, by whatever means. But it takes only one to make fascism, against one’s own people, and/or against others.

What is the essence of fascism? A definition has been given: coupling the pursuit of political goals with massive violence. We have democracy exactly to prevent that, a political game for the pursuit of political goals by nonviolent means, and more particularly by getting the majority, as demonstrated by free and fair elections or referenda, on one’s side.

A wonderful innovation with a logical follow-up: nonviolence even when the majority oversteps lines or limits, for instance, as written into the codes of human rights. The strong state, able and willing to display its force – including through the use of capital punishment – belongs to the essence of fascism.

That means absolute monopoly on power, including the power that does not come out of a gun, including nonviolent power. And it means a view of war as an acceptable activity of the state, normalising, even eternalising war. It means a deep contradiction with an omnipresent enemy, like Aryans against non-Aryans, or Judeo-Christianity against Islam, glorifying the former, demonising the latter.

It means unlimited surveillance of one’s own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. What matters is fear, that people are afraid and abstain from protests and nonviolent action lest they are singled out for the ultimate punishment: extrajudicial execution.

More important than actually checking everybody’s email and web activity and listening to telephone calls is that people believe this is happening. The trick is to do so indiscriminately, not focusing on suspects only but making people feel that anyone is a potential suspect.

The even more basic trick is to make fascism compatible with democracy. A piece of news comes to mind: “Admitting that British forces tortured Kenyans fighting against colonial rule in the 1950s – the government (has agreed) to compensate 5,228 victims.” (International Herald Tribune, 07-06-2013).

A staggering number, more than 5,000 – for sure there were more. Where was the Mother of Parliaments during this display of fascism? One senses a formula behind this decision, “the security of Britons in Kenya” – “security” being the bridging word between fascism and democracy, sustained by that academically institutionalised paranoia, “security studies”.

There are other ways to make fascism compatible with democracy.

First, a reductionist definition of democracy as multi-party national elections.

Second, making the parties close to identical in matters of “security”, ready to use violence internationally or nationally.

Third, privatising the economy under the heading of “freedom”, the other bridging word, essentially granting the Executive power over the judiciary, the police and the military – a move for which there is already manufactured consent. To arrive at that consent, a permanent crisis with a permanent enemy ready to hit is useful, but there are other approaches.

Just as a crisis defined as “military” catapults the military into power, a crisis defined as “economic” catapults capital into power. If the crisis is that the West has been outcompeted in the real economy, then the finance economy – the huge banks – start handling the trillions under the formula of freedom.

There is a way out, and sooner or later it will be traveled. People pay around 20 percent (in the U.S. they pay half) in tax to the state when they buy goods or services in the real economy – for end consumption – but the finance economy effectively lobbies against even one percent. Even a compromise like five percent would solve the dilemma of Western states that the real economy does not generate a surplus sufficient to run a modern state beyond force.

If freedom is defined as the freedom to use money to make more money, and security as the force to kill the designated enemy wherever he is, then we get a military-financial complex, the successor to the military-industrial complex in deindustrialising societies.

They know their enemies: peace movements and environment movements, threats to security and freedom respectively by not only casting doubts on killing, wealth and inequality but also framing them as counter-productive.

Both movements say that you are in fact producing insecurity and dictatorship. Both operate in the open, are easily infiltrated with spies and provocateurs, thereby eliminating badly needed voices.

So, here we are. Torture as enhanced investigation, de facto camps of concentration like Guantanamo, habeas corpus eliminated. And a U.S. president up front for the gullible, telling progressive tales he never enacts, never mind whether he is a hypocrite or is put up by somebody as a veil over fascist reality.

Those who pull the veil aside – Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden – are criminalised, not those building fascism. The old adage: when democracy is most needed, abolish it.

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Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

The synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
KYOTO, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

It has not been this bad since the 1950-53 Korean War.

October 1962, the Cuba-USSR-U.S. crisis, comes to mind. There were horror visions of mushroom clouds. A proud Cuba, with a strong leader-dictatorship, a social revolution in the near past, was denied a normal place in the state system, bullied by the U.S. and some allies with sanctions and boycotts into isolation, which has lasted more than 50 years.

Johan Galtung. Credit: Courtesy of the author.

The Soviet Union shipped nuclear-tipped missiles for deployment as close to the U.S. as the U.S. missiles deployed in Turkey were to the Soviet Union. And in that lay the solution: tit for tat, one nuclear threat for the other, in negotiations kept secret, ultimately revealed by Robert McNamara.

Three countries were involved in 1962; in the current crisis five countries, three nuclear powers (China, North Korea, U.S.) with Japan and South Korea. There are unreconciled traumas, of Japan having colonised Korea (1910-45), attacking China and the U.S. during the Pacific War of 1931 to 1945; U.S. using nuclear bombs against Japan in 1945, occupying Japan and South Korea; North Korea attacking South Korea; United Nations-U.S. counter-attacking, ending in 1953 with an armistice; then 60 years of an immensely frustrating quest for unification with the annual U.S.-South Korea + Team Spirit exercises close to North Korea.

And, more recently, the U.S.-China competition for the number one economic world position, the U.S.’ efforts to build economic alliances with the European Union and with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and then the Japan-China conflict over the Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands.

To top it: North Korea’s threats about nuclear weapons, fascist like anybody threatening to turn others into ashes, but so far only verbal violence.

Nonetheless, even against a background like that, there are some ways of defusing this Three against Two pentagon.

Dae-Hwa Chung, a professor at Pusan National University in South Korea wrote about the 60 years conflict, with U.S. bullying North Korea by withholding a peace treaty and normalisation. His basic points: the Soviet Union pulled out of North Korea, but the U.S. remained in South Korea to encircle China; Soviet Union and China recognised South Korea, the United Nations recognised both, U.S. and Japan failed to live up to the agreement of cross-recognition, never recognised North Korea but made peace, and a de facto alliance, with South Korea.

One may speculate why. Both Koreas were dictatorships; South Korea acquired democratic features only in the 1990s. U.S. had a visceral hatred of North Korea for breaking the chain of U.S. war victories since the second War of Independence in 1812 by not capitulating, together with Japan and South Korea hoping for its collapse, even more so after the 1989-90 collapse and absorption of East Germany into Germany.

There are sombre speculations. Both Japan and U.S. have a history of losing wars on the Korean peninsula, Japan in the 1590s under shogun Hideyoshi, and then in 1945 to the U.S. and USSR; the U.S. in 1953, by not winning.

Hawks in both countries might keep the polarisation and nurse their own traumas to fuel a war of revenge, winning, not losing this time; not like the Bay of Pigs in Cuba 1961. For Japanese hawks, some in power under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the current crisis is a golden opportunity to “normalise” their own country, getting rid of Constitution Article 9 depriving Japan of the right to war, brushing away any reconciliation with the Koreas and China (by admitting Japanese wrongs from 1910-1931-1945) — to the contrary, making young Japanese proud of their country.

With strong, even existential motives such as these fueling North Korean, U.S. and Japanese intransigence, the prospects are dim.

And yet let us look for some glimmer of hope, however distant.

A bilateral deal like Cuba 1962 is difficult because the U.S.’ use of Turkey and the USSR’s use of Cuba were symmetric, inviting a tit for tat. What could North Korea give in return for the indispensable peace treaty-normalisation? Credible International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) control used to be the answer, but North Korea has crossed the red line and become a nuclear power.

North Korea could dismantle its verbal and physical threats, hoping for peace treaty-normalisation in return. Would the U.S., used to dictating outcomes giving nothing in return, agree? Like in 1962 keeping it secret, with a “profile in courage” narrative? Hopefully, but not very likely, some secret deals are in the making.

A multilateral deal involving the whole pentagon, giving goods for goods for international conviviality, would be the real Team Spirit. Concretely this would be a (North)East Asian Community with China, Taiwan, Hong Kong-Macao, Japan, the Korean peninsula; and Mongolia, the Russian Far East, maybe more.

The Community would relate equitably to the U.S. and the Pacific by extending TPP to include China and a fully recognised North Korea. The Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands with their exclusive economic zones would belong to the (North) East Asian Community. China-Japan would own it together, share the revenue, with a portion to sustain the community.

There would be mutual and equal benefits; everybody would gain.

And that is a problem for the minds hostage to zero-sum games and addicted to winning; at present found in all five, using patriotism to fuel such games. A change of mentality is needed, like in Europe in 1950. That may take centuries, but could also happen very quickly under enlightened statesmanship. None of the five qualifies for that, today. But together, in a summit meeting, buoyed by NGOs and media?

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Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Mar 8 2013 (IPS)

That his life and his deeds had black dots is part of the story but should not prevent us from seeing the greatness of a maker of history. First, in his own country, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez lifted those at the bottom up from misery, into economic wellness, political participation, cultural pride (in their often African, or Indian, blood), social dignity – going far beyond Gini coefficients to measure increasing equality.

Johan Galtung

Second, he did the same for Latin America, he helped lift the bottom countries up, under the name of the iconic Simón Bolívar: Cuba and Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, Brazil…to mention some.

Of course the two policies are related. Colombia, with its long record of violence from 1948 to 2013, is a pariah country and can only be lifted up by lifting up those at the bottom, attacking flagrant inequality. Chávez and his fellow leaders, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales, Lula da Silva, are on line.

A formidable team, doing far more than the European leaders who are trying to manage their crisis. The late essayist-journalist Christopher Hitchens interviewed Chávez some years ago, asking him about his similarities and differences with Fidel Castro. Chávez answered that when it came to U.S. imperialism they were of one mind, in complete solidarity.

But then he added: however, Fidel is a communist who believes in a one-party state headed by the communist party; I am a democrat to the left, believing in a multi-party state and free elections; Fidel is a Marxist who believes in the public, state sector of the economy only; I believe in a mixed economy, public and private; Fidel is an atheist, believing in scientific atheism; I am a Catholic and take note of the fact that Jesus lived among the poor.

Too dissonant for some Anglo-American minds to handle. Very meaningful in Latin America, however, particularly when so many leave the Catholic Church, joining the evangelicals.

The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, as a political programme: not lifting the bottom up to Heaven, but to a better reality in this world. Many countries have the oil money to do so, and the majority of poor to give them democratic legitimacy. But Chávez did it, inspiring and sharing with other Latin American leaders and peoples, and beyond, the world.

Is Venezuela economically sustainable? The economy is in trouble, there is a lack of investments, debt to the Chinese is piling up (a minor point as long as oil flows to China rather than to a U.S. now turning tar sands into sink holes).

The key factor is to make former marginalised, excluded slum dwellers contribute to the economy, strengthening both production, supply, and demand. Many feel threatened by the poor and the race factor, including Chávez himself: “Will they treat us the way we treated them?” And, will they outcompete us?

Some will sabotage — too late to kill Chávez, but maybe some of the economy. Many countries will feel threatened by poor countries coming up, for the same reasons and one more: will that inspire our own downtrodden people to do the same?

Could blacks in the U.S. and Gulf states be interested in a (con)federation with Caribbean countries populated the same way, by slavers from Liverpool?

Somebody is working 24/7 for Venezuela not to succeed, for sure. But it may be too late. The egg has been stood on its end, and it was Chávez who did it.

There are questions beyond Venezuela’s future on the horizon. It will be difficult for economists to stick to their trickling down illusions given Chávez’s bold moves. But positive discrimination is sometimes an indispensable shock therapy to lift up those in misery — women all over the world, non-whites, Malays in Malaysia, dalits in India, even if it “destroys market mechanisms” – for the short time it took to have an effect in Venezuela.

Economists should help with lifting up those at the bottom, including in countries that do not have oil wealth, not only to show the problems, but also because it will be difficult for Christian theologians to disregard this challenge: Jesus lived among the poor, not only preaching on the Mount, but feeding, nursing, comforting, with compassion, on earth.

Chávez was not a theologian entering that intellectual landscape, mined for two millennia where every step is wrong, for some, for many. He acted.

This eternal debate inside the church is by no means new, as Hans Kung writes in his superb “Is it time, at last, for a Vatican Spring?” (International Herald Tribune, Mar. 1, 2013). If not, says Kung, “the church will fall into a new ice age, shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect”.

Kung himself could turn it around, as pope, for the whole world. It will also be difficult for left wing extremists to see Fidel Castro’s line as the only possible one. Western democratic legitimacy, diverse-symbiotic economy and strong ethical motivation may carry us further.

But the West has a tendency to confuse violence with conflict, ceasefire and disarmament of “rebels” with solutions, multi-party electoral democracy with mediation; and the rule of law leaves out acts of omission and human rights leave out people’s rights. A genius makes us think, and act, differently, thereby making history. Chávez was one. Thank you, Hugo!

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Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
LIVERPOOL, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

­That Liverpool was once the uncontested centre of the world slave trade, accounting for 40 percent, is well documented in the International Slavery Museum in the port where slave ships docked.

Johan Galtung

The trade was triangular: from Liverpool (Bristol, London) with Manchester textiles, metals, beads, alcohol and guns for slave traders in the Bay of Guinea; with slaves from there to the Caribbean, the ‘Middle Passage’; and from the Caribbean — with sugar, coffee and cotton grown by slaves ­ back to England.

To stealing people ­ two-thirds young men from 15 to 25 years of age ­ and killing their societies, the colonisers added stealing raw materials in return for cheap manufactures. This lasted from the beginning ­ practiced by the Portuguese in 1502 — till the slave trade was forbidden in England in 1807: but it continued in other ways.

We talk about millions of slaves landed in an arch from Rio to Washington with the point of gravity in the Caribbean, and some south of Rio, north of Washington and around the coast to the Pacific side of Latin America. An unspeakable crime against humanity.

Another unspeakable crime, the shoa, had its Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27 in England. Should be remembered, indeed, but somebody else’s, Germany’s–enemy of England–comes more easily. No Slavery Memorial Day, no Colonialism Memorial Day.

Nor is there a memorial to the 10 million or so killed in King Leopold II’s Congo in Antwerp where the guns went to Africa and the rubber came in return. Guns converted into rubber is more easily understood than the manufactured goods converted into slaves converted into commodities. Maybe one day all three memorial days will come, land for slavery and imperialism in the U.S., with museums, next to the Holocaust museum, in Washington D.C. In no way diminishing the enormity of the shoa, but for perspective, for better understanding. All entirely intended, justified by seeing the victims as subhuman or worse, like Joseph Stalin’s murder of kulaks.

Back to slavery. Points worth remembering, from the catalogue:

* Sir Francis Drake, hero in English history for raiding the Spanish, getting the gold, navigating the world, was one of the first slavers, in the early years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, and knighted by her;

* Liverpool ships carried around 1.5 million slaves, 45,000 in the peak year 1799;

* Liverpool still has streets with the names of slave traders;

* Between 10 and 25 percent died during the Middle Passage transportation under atrocious conditions;

* Only five percent of the enslaved Africans who survived ended up in British North America, lasting close to 250 years in Southern;

* When 131 Africans were thrown overboard from a Liverpool slave ship the case was treated as an insurance dispute, not as a murder trial;

* “Sold, branded–with hot iron, like cattle–issued with a new name, the Africans were separated from families and friends and stripped of their identity in a deliberate process which aimed to break their willpower and leave them passive and subservient, enslaved Africans were ‘seasoned’. For a period of two or three years they were ‘trained’ to obey or receive the lash, and acclimatised to their work and conditions. Here was mental and physical torture. Justified by seeing them as closer to animals than to white people”;

* Europeans considered the achievements of their own civilisation as paramount, and used their own rigid ideas of civilisation to justify the enslavement and abuse of Africans;

* After emancipation in 1863 came the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 by Confederate Army veterans and more than 3,000 lynchings of Blacks between 1882 and 1951–before Civil Rights in, say, 1962.

And this torture lasted throughout their lives, not some years; for centuries, not for years. Carefully, intelligently planned, based on cost-benefit analysis of resources, African humans and commodities.

Liverpool, however, has more to offer, like the remarkable Catholic Cathedral, modern, circular, no ship, the priests officiate in the centre not at the end. With a circular tower. Very beautiful. Stained glass windows with the occasional sunlight enhancing the Christian message. What message? How beautiful had it been, Jesus living with the poor, Jesus with other women than his mother, as baby, Jesus comforting and nursing the ill, feeding the hungry, cleansing the temple from the cult of Mammon.

Jesus turning the other cheek, not resisting evil; Jesus giving the cloak to whoever steals the coat.

Nothing of the kind. The Cross indeed, the suffering, the Father sacrificing His Son, giving us human sinners new hope. And the Son resurrected on the third day joining Father in Heaven.

Deep down we sense a connection. Merchants of Liverpool, with relatives and friends as rich planters “over there”, are the stern Father sacrificing the sons, the Negroes from Negroland in Africa, for the benefit of us all, ultimately also for the slaves: If or when they turn to Christ they will be resurrected and end up in Paradise, by all the criteria of the Sermon on the Mount.

Lincoln wrote, “My paramount object is to save the Union–not to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” (letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, Aug. 22, 1862).

Better: neither slavery nor union.

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Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
LIVERPOOL, Feb 4 2013 (IPS)

The Middle East-North Africa – MENA — is Arab-Muslim with a growing Jewish island in its midst. It was colonised for over four centuries by the Sunni Ottoman Turks, then the secular West, United Kingdom-France-Italy — for half a century and is now under Israeli colonialism and U.S. imperialism.

Johan Galtung

The latter two have controlled MENA through dictatorships, condoning violence and corruption as long as they support U.S.-Israel policies in the area. The Arab awakening is against the violence in favour of democracy, against corruption in favour of growth and jobs, and against U.S.-Israel domination. There is also a Muslim awakening — to believe that Islam tolerates imposed secularism is incredibly naive. But there are many Islams, like there are multiple Christianities and Judaisms.

How does the U.S.-Israel react, and what would be a positive reaction to their reaction — keeping in mind that this is old colonial territory?

U.S. policy is, by and large, state building – with U.S. as model, with multi-party national elections and “free” markets controlled by multinationals in general, private banks and finance banking in particular, also controlling elections. On maps states have one colour, so states are seen as unitary, with one market for the economy, one state for multi-party elections, and one political focus: the capital. Multicoloured maps showing the nations and fault-lines inside might be enlightening.

That reality is used to fragment states that stand in the way: the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were divided into 15 and seven states, some now members of NATO or the European Union.

States seen as Islamist-terrorist are in for the same: Sudan-Somalia broken into two and three parts. They are both on the list of seven countries the White House ordered the Pentagon to “take out” right after 9/11 (general Wesley Clark, Democracy Now, Mar. 2, 2007): Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Somalia; seen as hostile, with state, not private central banks, blocking market globalisation.

For Israel what matters most are the neighbours. From the early beginning this is the usual story of violence and counter-violence read two ways. The Israeli reading is violence against a Jewish homeland becoming a state, legitimised by the Shoa in general; and counter-violence to defend that emerging state. The Arab reading is an Israel established by violence, the Nakba, and counter-violence to contain the expansion of that state. A typical example of two truths that do not add up to one Truth. The result is an endless, fruitless, angry exchange of accusations about who started what, where, and when. A Truth would go beyond fruitless quarrels, identifying a stop. An end to escalation, acceptable to both: like Jun. 4, 1967, with swaps.

However, that symmetry breaks down when Israel still expands – invades-occupies-lays siege – on ever more Arab-Palestinian territory. And even more so when visions of a Greater Israel take shape:

Scenario 1: from the Mediterranean to Jordan;

Scenario 2: from the Nile to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18), where nine countries are located. Both scenarios are for Jews only, Jewish states.

In search of recognised and secure borders? Only by forcing Arab-Muslim states into submission, dissolving them into mini-states, using internal fault-lines. The list would certainly include Pakistan, a doubly artificial construct, and a nuclear power. Israel’s Mossad and the Indian army’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) cooperate against Pakistan.

Assuming that Lebanon and Iraq – like Palestine – are fragmented, that Jordan is kept for a possible Scenario 1, that Libya is steeped in internal provincial-clan-racial-religious fights, what remains of the seven countries are Syria and Iran. Israeli press mentions a partition of Syria into four states: Shia Alawite, Sunni, Druze and Kurdish (in the Northeast). Egypt, Tunisia are resilient.

The approach to Iran — no colonial construct, fault-lines (Kurds, Azeris, Arabs in Khuzistan) but less vulnerable – is bombing, based on U.S.-Israeli division of labour, the shared accusation that Iran is close to their status as nuclear powers, and the shared, fabricated lie that president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Tehran on Oct. 25, 2005: “Israel must be wiped off the map”. He never said that, but quoted imam Ruhollah Khomeini: “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. And mentioned three examples of such regimes: the Shah of Iran, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein. History tells us that regimes come and go; countries, even states, remain.

The U.S. strategy in the region, to use existing states and bend them to their economic purposes – like imposing private central banks in all seven — is doomed to fail because of inner fault-lines. The Israeli strategy is more intelligent, using fault-lines to fragment states.

In all these cases how much fragmentation is by U.S.-Israeli design and how much by inner tensions will sooner or later be better known.

What would be the Arab-Muslim counter-strategy?

(1) Federations. Fault-lines are real and most people want to be governed by their own kind in autonomous sub-states with common foreign-security-finance-logistics policies. Forty percent of humanity lives in 25 federations, and there is much to learn from Mother Switzerland.

(2) Confederations-communities. Tie them together in strong solidarity communities resisting divide and rule policies.

Do both, and the Arab-Muslim world is more resilient than today.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jan 14 2013 (IPS)

The problem of the U.S. economy lies much deeper than the fiscal cliff. Wise people–Robert Borosage, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz–see neither the fiscal deficit nor the U.S. debt as the key problems, but the lack of growth.

Johan Galtung

They point to the Bill Clinton years and how, through growth, the Debt/Gross Domestic (GDP) ratio went from a half to a third. Important, but then there is a fourth consideration: some Americans are suffering, out there. The bottom “16 percent” of people and families below the poverty line do not know for sure where their next meal will come from and have no medical insurance. Macro-economics is blind to basic human needs, yet there are solutions.

After Clinton, increasing expenditure with enormously costly wars making conflicts even worse, and, in addition, lowering the revenue by reducing taxes on the super-rich. That a fiscal deficit would rear its ugly head, fed by such policies year after year, was a foregone conclusion. U.S. voters, you asked for it, you got it.

Congress voted a compromise on ten fiscal cliff factors. The market reacted “positively”, if that is the right word when the finance economy makes a Dow Jones Index leap upwards while the real economy is stagnant, thus increasing the gap feeding future crashes.

It was a lazy compromise, little new beyond the juggling of old factors. Major problems like Medicare payment–the U.S. health services, at 17 percent of the GDP, produce less health than the typical European services at eight percent of GDP–and unemployment insurance were postponed, not solved. Like the debt ceiling. The new Congress inherits ever more intractable and pressing problems. One reason is obvious: the fiscal cliff discourse is much too narrow.

There is nothing pointing in new directions. How about a Municipal Uplift Authority (MUA) as a major federal programme? Hovering over the U.S. municipal map, identifying the municipalities with the highest levels of misery–people below the poverty line, with hunger threatening and no health coverage–is easy. Lift them up!

Cutting some expenditure and increasing taxes on the rich is indispensable, but limited and limiting. A huge imaginative programme for the 16 percent to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, with credits for small companies-cooperatives designed to produce food, clothing and housing, health and education all at affordable prices might do miracles.

Carefully monitored, MUA should be self-sustaining, and after the credits have been repaid, generate domestic demand for considerable economic growth. Sixteen percent is a major proportion. A more realistic approach to getting the economic wheels turning than hoping to become the major world hydrocarbon exporter by 2030–by then hydrocarbons may be phased out. Better turn inward, facing the fact: U.S. and Western world trade dominance is gone. Outcompeted.

But there are also other approaches, and they in no way exclude each other, nor do they exclude the fiscal cliff avoidance compromise.

The U.S. debt is increasing. States and corporations buy U.S bonds at low interest–parking dollars for some limited time to avoid the costs of buying other currencies–trusting to be serviced by freshly printed dollars. But that cannot last forever, given the many schemes for regional and world currencies based on a mix, not on any single currency.

With a (flexible) U.S. debt ceiling of 16.3 trillion dollars the major creditor, China, has problems. Could the two agree on something in return for some debt forgiveness? Like the reduction of a major U.S. federal expenditure, the one trillion dollars on military expenses?

A creditor is entitled to look at the debtor’s budgets to identity cuts; the debtor is entitled to say “that one has to do with you (and Russia)”, and the creditor to reply, “if so, let us talk; our economy is still smaller than yours, to match you militarily is more of a burden on us; how about bilateral-balanced-controlled disarmament, and we could throw some debt relief into the bargain?” China might demand no encircling of China militarily, nor any Trans-Pacific Partnership bloc excluding China economically. Who will benefit? Obviously both; relieved of military waste, of a sizeable tip of the debt iceberg, cooperating rather than competing in the global arena.

We sense three possible losers: European Union, Russia and Japan, with Australia, hoping to be favoured by one or the other. But USA-China together matter more; they might even engage in imaginative joint projects for poverty alleviation elsewhere. Lift up the bottom, create customers.

The two policies, lifting up municipalities and tying debt relief to disarmament, are both rational. But in the way of rationality stands the arithmetic of Congressional voting, as adjusted to the arithmetic of the deficit reduction as a hand to a glove; even if the hand becomes paralysed. They fit too well, blocking out other views.

Some other input is needed if the legislative power has no other game to offer. The onus is on the executive power. Could there be a latent New Deal, hiding in Obama’s second term? If not, poor U.S.–four more years of the same, downhill.

In the swamp of problems there are bubbles waiting to burst: finance versus real economy, printed money versus real value, debt service versus people service. There is a way out.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

A Third World War is not impossible, but fortunately is rather unlikely. Let us explore why, and what can be done to prevent it.

Johan Galtung

The worst-case scenario is a world war between the West — NATO, U.S., EU with Japan-Taiwan-South Korea — and the East—the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) with Russia, China, Central Asia as members and India, Pakistan, Iran as observers. With four nuclear powers on each side, and West versus Islam as a major issue. In the centre is the explosive mix of a divided territory (Israel-Palestine) and Jerusalem, a capital divided by a wall.

We have been there before: the Cold War, with West versus Communism as a major issue. In the centre was the explosive mix of a divided Germany, and Berlin, a capital divided by a wall; and a divided Korea, by a demilitarised zone. And yet no direct, hot war, except by proxies; Korea, Vietnam. Why?

No doubt nuclear deterrence was one factor. They went to the brink but turned around–like in the 1962 Cuba-Turkey missile crisis. And no doubt nuclear deterrence also plays a role today, limiting the attacks on Israel, U.S. support for Israeli attacks on Arab-Muslim states ­ Syria-Iran in particular ­and any attack on Russia-China. But nuclear deterrence is not the material out of which positive peace is made: no depolarisation, and certainly no solution and conciliation.

The Cold War NATO-Warsaw Pact system was polarised, with secret police controlling contacts, speech and thoughts, looking for traitors. But the world was not polarised: there was the huge non-aligned movement. Europe was not polarised: there were the 10 neutral, or non-aligned, countries. And ultimately a strong movement against war emerged.

The NATO+-SCO+ system is less polarised, but the world and Europe more. So far, no non-aligned movement, and no strong peace movement.

The United Nations vote showed a 3/4 world united in YES for Palestine, NO to USA-Israel. Both are turning any moral high ground into moral deficit through continued expansion-occupation-siege and invasion-occupation-extrajudicial killings. The world is not against U.S.-Israel defending true homeland borders or 1967 borders but against the force and excesses they seem incapable of reversing. Reverse those policies and they could regain the moral high ground.

But still no actors carrying concrete peace policies like the Helsinki Accords. The reason lies in the difference between the West-Islam and the West-communism conflicts. Islam, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, covers more of the world territory and population than the West, but has few friends outside; unlike the West, emulated and admired by Russia-China-India, by Latin America and Africa. In all but Israel, Islam has a huge and growing diaspora by immigration-birth-conversion. Not a superpower, not an alliance, only “Islamic cooperation”; but present everywhere.

The result is uncertainty and fear: what do they want? A challenge to other worldviews, guaranteed by the freedoms of speech and religion. Islam offers healing togetherness and sharing to a West suffering from materialist individualism and egoism.

But Islam also threatens Western institutions with unwanted change. Western secular states won the struggle against the church with a secularism also exported to the Muslim colonies as loyalty to the state and the empires behind them. Today parts of the Islamic diaspora hit back, demanding loyalty to Alla’h and the ummah (community) beyond loyalty to Western states.

For immigration to be a peace-building effort, immigrants must respect laws and customs of the host country and be met with curiosity and respect in dialogues, for mutual learning benefiting all. If broken by either or both, stop immigration, and build ummah at home.

How about the other danger spots and zones in the world?

Afghanistan is coming to a close, not only with NATO withdrawal–except to guard what it was all about: a base for a possible war with China and an oil pipeline. There may be wars between India and Pakistan, but no other country feels strongly enough about Kashmir to participate. The world is concerned with Israel not because of anti-Semitism, but because of an alliance that may involve so much of the rest of the world.

North Korea has both nuclear arms and missiles, and will neither attack nor be attacked. The fight for peace treaty and normalisation with the U.S. will probably bear fruits, in the interest of all.

Taiwan and China will slowly converge toward a Hong Kong style solution of one country-two systems, Taiwan as part of China yet highly autonomous. Wisdom would urge the same for a limited Tibet. In neither case do we have conflicts out of which a third world war is made. For that to happen the ties have to be tight, like U.S. to other NATO countries and to Israel. Or, presumably, Russia and China to each other.

We are left with West-Islam. The lack of cohesion on the Islamic side helps. But we are missing a non-aligned Hindu India, lined up with the West in any major confrontation. Indonesia and Egypt are on the Islamic side, neutral Yugoslavia no longer exists, Latin America is Christian-West, and Africa is divided.

We need moderates on both sides. Tunisia-Turkey and the non-aligned powers, Egypt and Indonesia. And the West—maybe Germany, experienced in inter-faith dialogue? Germany should play a major peace role!

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” (www.transcend.org/tup)

On Nov. 29, 138 member states of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of giving Palestine “non-member observer state” status. Only nine voted no, 41 abstained. Beyond Middle East politics, the vote also mirrors the limits of the U.S. global, and the Israeli regional, empires: 138 defy their grip and favour change, 41+9=50 do not for various reasons. Who wants what?

Johan Galtung

First: the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) did not yield to U.S.-Israel in spite of the efforts against the Arab awakening. Israel is alone in the region: Greece-Turkey-Cyprus all voted yes.

Second: more than half of the states not in favour of the move were Eastern Europe (16) and the Pacific (10 – nine mini-states, and Australia). Add seven from Latin America, five from Africa, three from Asia (not Japan) and we get 41.

Third: Western Europe-NATO was divided. The Nordic European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) were in favour, as well as Austria, France and GIPSI (Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland), the indebted EU periphery. Not in favour: UK, Germany, Netherlands; three mini-states; and the hard core, U.S.-Israel-Canada, making 50, only a quarter of the U.N. members.

The General Assembly is the closest we have to world democracy: no Security Council ‘big power’ veto. Israel has no regional support and the U.S. only little, shaky, insignificant, world support. U.S. clout does not even reach Afghanistan-Iraq-Libya, recently bombed-invaded-occupied. The UK remains at heel, like poodle to master.

Read the vote in terms of a world regionalisation process: Green light for OIC; some political leadership is needed in the Latin America-Caribbean, Africa and Asia regions. The Nordic-EFTA moral light is intact, and the new Third World, GIPSI, is joining the old.

The U.S. is out of touch. Stop droning, killing; make a beautiful North America with Mexico and Canada.

But empires also crumble from within through demoralisation. With political demoralisation, world clout is disappearing. Also watch the “fiscal cliff” for doubts about the U.S. political process: two parties, at loggerheads. No cancelling of mortgage debts, no lifting of the bottom 16 percent – many not knowing where the next meal comes from – into the economy, increasing domestic demand.

With economic demoralisation: the West is outcompeted. And the financial crisis and Great Recession scared the wits out of most Americans –cautious, risk-averse and defensive- spending less and saving more. Not a single person was imprisoned for exorbitant commissions and bonuses, secret deals and obscure derivatives; but Wall Street continues to lobby against new legislation.

With military demoralisation: the U.S.-NATO is losing. And consider the lifestyle and affair of a top U.S. Army official in Afghanistan and director of the CIA, killing machines: general David Petraeus. Imagine the effect on soldiers risking their lives for an unwinnable and dubious war while the top fools around.

With cultural demoralisation: faith in U.S. exceptionalism is decreasing. Public figures ignore what happens in the real world. Truth will soon dawn upon them.

With social demoralisation: the U.S. birthrate plummets to the lowest level since the 1920s. This may imply a decline in the U.S. population and in tax revenue, as in much of the West.

Add it all up: the fall of the U.S. empire is on track.

How about Israel? Heading for a cliff of its own making.

The United Nations vote was on the 65th anniversary of the U.N. two-state resolution 181. Shortly after the adoption of the resolution, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte was murdered by the Zionist group Lehi. Then the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948. The problem is not Zionism but hard, revisionist Expansion-Occupation-Siege (E-O-S) Zionism driving to the cliff.

The U.N. vote legitimised Palestine and delegitimised that kind of Israel.

Direct negotiations lead nowhere: the Oslo process left security, Jerusalem, refugees, Israeli settlements, boundaries, for “later”.

But Israel had to react to the rockets! Yes, by dropping E-O-S for ‘2-6-20+’: two States in a six-state community with Arab neighbors in a 20+ states Organisation for Security and Cooperation with a nuclear free zone. But Israel delegitimised itself by choosing violence. Israel also reacts to nonviolence-boycott, non-cooperation, civil disobedience, with violence, as it did against boats trying to break the siege. And delegitimises itself even further.

Together with mainstream U.S., Israel tries to control the discourse by branding all critics as anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. A non-starter in democracies. Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Falk, to mention some recently branded that way, are neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Israel, but use transparency and dialogue – the hallmarks of democracy – constructively. Stifle that, and we get two elites listening only to themselves.

Travel these roads: delegitimise yourself, meet violence with violence, meet nonviolence with violence, control discourse, and down the road, very close to the cliff, the South African scenario is waiting. The U.S. decides one day that Israel is more of a liability than an asset.

Israel is out of touch. A regime change from within is needed. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of ‘The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?’, published by the TRANSCEND University Press.

The media did their best to make the U.S. presidential election look important, the altar on which democracy is built. But there has been a problem ever since the Supreme Court legalised unlimited campaign spending (six billion dollars this year), thereby authorising one more freedom of expression, called “commercial speech” even though much of this speech is libellous, often neither true nor relevant.

Johan Galtung

There were real disagreements, some kind of rhetorical left-right. However, the real problem lies somewhere else, not in what was said but in what was not. The list is long. The Washington Post on election day (Manuel Roig-Fanza): “A tough day for causes without a candidate”. The article mentions climate change, gun control and immigration as issues that werent picked up by either one of the party conventions, nor in the debates. But there are many more pressing problems confronting the country.

Two major lobbies advocating the use of force were left untouched: the National Rifle Association, NRA, for violence in the U.S., and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, AIPAC, for violence abroad, mainly anti-Muslim wars.

They both exercise power through their impact on the media, denying critical politicians access to political power, thereby removing obstacles to violence. Dennis Kucinich, a voice for peace in Congress, and other critics, had the boundaries of their districts changed so that they were not reelected, fatally reducing the political spectrum in Congress and elsewhere. Both presidential candidates knew that to take them on would be suicidal.

Foreign policy was twisted in the debates to economic relations with China, trying to sound tough. But the U.S. majority cannot live without affordable Chinese goods with adequate quality/price ratios. Unless a big unless the U.S. restructures its economy from below, with cooperatives and self-employment, activating the countryside and local communities with numerous small enterprises focused on basic needs, food above all, housing and clothing, health and education, direct from producers to consumers.

No country in the world has a population so creative and cooperative. But the blossoming Occupy Movement has so far limited itself to occupation and critique, not to constructive action. They left untouched the basic change in the world: the U.S. grip on elites in other countries is loosening, in Latin America, even Africa, in the Arab awakening.

Instead they recited the “largest economy in the world” (the European Union is bigger, and China will overtake the U.S. soon) and the “strongest military power in the world” (losing Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan is a strange concept of “strongest”).

Climate change: the U.S. is dragging its feet, delaying action in any international fora. Not the candidates, but Nature, in the shape of Sandy, talked, a brutal reminder of climate reality. How much is man-made is uncertain but the change is certain enough. And the self-proclaimed world leader does not lead.

Then, incredible: the fact that 16 percent are in misery and hunger, while one percent live in opulence, feeding on speculation, was drowned in glib talk about the “middle class”. Yes, it is large, and stagnant. But far from 100 percent.

Neither candidate had answers, possibly agreeing to be silent. The U.S. desperately needs more parties that are less afraid of truth (as they will not win anyhow), for democratic transparency, and open dialogue.

Does the election make a difference? What change will the second Barack Obama term bring? Obama said in his victory speech that he will focus on deficit, the taxation system, and immigration. None of the above mentioned issues. In foreign policy Mitt Romney, like George W. Bush, might have been more reckless, accelerating the fall of the empire. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is better informed, more sophisticated, holding up the fall a little longer. And democrats are more inclined to do what Israel wants.

Obamacare will continue, whatever that is worth given the rise in costs for any medical care possibly because the “state will pay”.

On Jan. 1, 2013, the debt ceiling strikes, according to the Congress consensus, with major “austerity” for those who can least afford it, touching the military gently. Misery will accelerate and so could military deployment and wars waged the Obama way, with drones and SEALs, extrajudicial executions.

Imagine a Politburo committee in China studying photos to decide whom to kill abroad for anti-Chinese activity or threats to China’s security. Or China arming Cuba and Haiti countries as close to the U.S. as Taiwan is to China to the teeth; with a fleet cruising in the Caribbean. The U.S. would find this unacceptable.

But Obama will play, “I am above the parties uniting the nation. In his first term he was leaning over backward to the Republicans and was badly punished mid-term; this time that makes Romney a de facto co-president. The Dodd-Frank finance economy reforms will be very bland, Wall Street will by and large continue its lethal games. The rich may be taxed and may find more loopholes including settling abroad. Like the French super-rich in London?

Is U.S. democracy a two-party system becoming a one-party state? If so, other countries beware. Do not imitate. Democracy is more than elections. It is also transparency and dialogue, for real change. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” ( www.transcend.org/tup)

Empires come and go. The Ottoman-Muslim Empire was among the better, and the Iberian-Catholic and European-Protestant among the worst. In the Ottoman empire, religions of the kitab (‘the book’: Judaism, Christianity, Islam) were respected; Turkish was not imposed. Religious-linguistic entities survived in the Balkans as opposed to in Latin-Caribbean America. National independence movements succeeded: Greece in 1829, Serbia and Rumania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Albania in 1912.

But the nation-states were incomplete, and a century ago the Balkan League – Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro ­ declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and won. Then came the Second Balkan war of 1913 among the victors, Serbia-Greece-Romania against Bulgaria over Macedonia, which Bulgaria lost.

Today this all sounds disturbingly familiar, and very far from Immanuel Kant’s “eternal peace”. Wars may be over right now, but the recent wars cost many more lives than the Balkan wars of 1912-13, with an estimated 122,000 killed in action, 20,000 from wounds and 82,000 from disease. Positive peace seems far away; there is only some unstable negative peace.

Peace improves with equity and harmony, and is reduced by trauma and conflict: equity (cooperation for mutual and equal benefit), harmony (mutual empathy), reconciliation to reduce violence from trauma, and resolution processes to reduce violence from conflict.

The conclusion will point in the direction of a Balkan Community ­ not only West Balkan ­ in southeast Europe, corresponding to the Nordic Community in the northwestern corner. This would give a new and positive meaning to “Balkanisation”.

The Balkans were doubly divided in the 11th century: the schism between Catholics and Orthodox in 1054 ­ like the 395 split between the Western and Eastern Roman empires, Rome versus Constantinople ­ and then the declaration of war on Islam by Pope Urban II in November 1095.

Two dividing lines converged in Sarajevo, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Ground Zero for Euro-quakes. The Habsburgs from the northwest annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, and the Ottomans from the southeast defeated the Serbs in 1397 and were themselves defeated in the 1912 Balkan war, leaving behind Slavic and Albanian Muslims. A couple of years later, in 1918, the Habsburgs also went the way of all empires: decline and fall. The End.

The Soviets came, and went, the same way, in 1991; the U.S. Empire is following ­ by 30 years ­ meeting its fate not in the Balkans but in Afghanistan where empires are said to go to die. Do competing empires need each other so if one goes, so does the other? Anyhow, today the Balkans are run by Brussels: by the deeply-troubled European Union’s “high” representatives, and by NATO, itself led by a bankrupt country.

Wars, wars, wars. The West uses the Balkans as a projection of its own repressed cruel history, but Balkan countries also carry their own burden of responsibility. Greater Austria and Greater Turkey are gone. But put greater Hungary-Croatia-Bosnia-Serbia-Albania-Macedonia on the map, and then take a look through the ‘peace lens’: what a fascinating part of the world, from Austria to Greece, Dalmatia to the Aegean, Moldavia! What diversity! Add symbiosis, and equity, and we are almost there.

The Nordics made it. Denmark-Copenhagen ruled for many centuries over Norway-Faroe-Iceland-Greenland; Sweden over Finland and Norway; Sweden and Denmark fought horrible wars. We were not born peaceful; we became that way. The Nordic Community is meticulously equitable; there is much empathy; past traumas show up as jokes; and there is a rolling agenda with items loaded with conflict ­ open borders without passport and duties (by and large), a joint labour market (more Swedes in Norway now than during the domination), etc. It has been handled rather well.

And this is true not only for the five states but for the four nations without states as well: Aland, Faroe, Greenland, and the Samis (Norway-Finland).

Today the parts of the former Yugoslavia often find more common ground as a community than inside their fractured new-born countries. A Balkan region could one day play the role of uniting the region through common interests and joint projects. All that is needed to start such a bloc is a Balkan Commission with an Assembly, one chamber for the states, one for the nations. The Nordic experience is that the community survives even with three states inside and two outside the European Union. Give the nations a veto in matters of vital importance to their identity. The task is to come up with an equilibrium, and the Swiss seem to have done so for more than 700 years.

Everybody must be represented, everybody must feel at home, and the benefits ­ as well as the risks and costs ­ must be reasonably mutual and equal. Educators can make the traumas and glories of all states and nations shared property, for empathy, for harmony. Historians can bring perpetrators and victims closer to each other by producing histories acceptable to both. Politicians, and diplomats, can become more creative and find new conflict solutions, not lukewarm compromises.

Clearly such processes take time, but much bilateral groundwork is being done. Yes, Mostar divides Bosnia-Herzegovina. But there was, and is again, a bridge – maybe Bosnia-Herzegovina with a smoother federation could become a bridge joining three Balkan nations? And how about a federal Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia ­ all within an overarching Balkan Community, doing well on all four peace tasks, building symbiosis among its beautifully diverse parts? Might this be a model for Europe, and the world? Balkans of all kinds, unite; you have only your self-pity to lose. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, a professor of Peace Studies, is rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. He is co-author, most recently, of Reconciliation: Clearing the Past, Building a Future with Joanna Santa Barbara and Diane Perlman.

In trying to bring peace to conflict-ridden parts of the world, it is important to distinguish between negative peace – ceasefires and the absence of violence in general – and positive peace – cooperation for mutual and equal benefit, emotional harmony, reconciliation of past traumas, and the capacity to resolve future conflicts peacefully, nonviolently, with empathy and creativity, instead of forcing those with serious grievances to lay down their arms and reintegrate into civilian life.

For lasting peace, it is necessary to understand and remove underlying grievances.

A “both-and” approach should not be ruled out: for example, both growth and distribution as goals of that other big United Nations concern: development. The common strategy of encouraging one and then the other is not effective: what tends to happen is a ceasefire first and then nothing, or growth first and then nothing, presumably waiting for the right time for the next step. But that “right time” has a tendency not to come for two simple reasons: for those high up, violence is the problem, whereas the grievances are problems for those at the bottom. Moreover, those at the top seek growth, not distribution, which is a concern for those below.

These are existential, not philosophical, problems for countries like Mexico and Colombia with massive levels of violence within, partly due to drug trafficking. The traditional approach is to use police, military, and paramilitary forces to uproot the violence by killing and fighting. If that does not work, they try to negotiate a ceasefire. But the underlying causes have a tendency to reproduce the violence, with democracies pushing the problem onto the next administration, and dictatorships becoming even more brutal.

We do ourselves a major disservice by pursuing only negative peace, curing symptoms but not the disease.

Let us look at five concrete cases in the Americas of both negative and positive peace: Malvinas-Falklands, Cuba, drugs/arms flows, flagrant inequality, and U.S. intervention in/micro-management of Latin America and the Caribbean. There will be no lasting negative peace without positive peace.

Malvinas-Falklands exploded in 1982 as a war by the South against the North, something new at the time. It was won by Great Britain. Has this brought peace? Not at all, and it has not solved the underlying conflict. There is an obvious solution: the formula used in Hong Kong-Macau, where on Jul. 1, 1997, one flag came down, another went up, one garrison moved out, another moved in, and the rest remained the same. The sovereignty of the Malvinas obviously belongs to Argentina, for historical and geographical reasons. But the people’s wishes must be respected.

Cuba was excluded from the Organisation of American States (OAS) for not holding multi-party elections though the same was true of other Latin American countries that were allowed to join. Cuba should be made a member right away, also in honour of its being the first country to challenge the giant to the North with a leader who survived 10 U.S. presidents, most of them highly forgettable.

The trafficking of people and drugs in return for arms and money is a complex situation, but there are two promising approaches. First, narcotraffic has to be reduced from both sides, supply and demand, with each doing its best to improve the situation and agreeing on a process for mutual or, better yet, joint certification of the results. Second, the magnitude of the problem should be reduced by legalising marijuana, which is a minor issue compared to the biggest health problems in the U.S.: tobacco and alcohol, both legal. Alcohol was once prohibited with disastrous consequences: violence, gangsterism, and mafias. These disappeared with legalisation; alcoholism did not, but neither did it increase.

Underlying all of this, of course, is flagrant inequality, injustice, and exploitation. The best approach is to lift those at the bottom by providing microcredits to small companies providing basic necessities ­ above all food, clean water, health, and education ­ for the most needy and employing them so they can lift themselves up without threatening the rich. The key impediment is not technical; it is feasible to achieve this within five to 10 years. However, those high up fear that the poor “will treat us the way we treated them”. This fear has to be alleviated: those now at the bottom simply want equal opportunity and dignity.

The above can be achieved with the right approach, like using student volunteers to teach reading and writing, or training barefoot nurses to treat the most common diseases while providing helicopters to take the seriously ill to hospitals.

Then there are the inter-American dimensions, the 100 or so U.S. military interventions in the region and the ongoing emergence of the United States of Latin America and the Caribbean, which is as natural as the independence of the colonies on the Atlantic seaboard formalised with a famous declaration in 1776 and a U.S. constitution in 1787.

How would a mature U.S. react? “Welcome, brothers in the South! We know what this is about and will not repeat the stupidity of London, fighting 35 years to prevent our independence. We are no George III. How can we meet, in equity and harmony, to soothe our traumas and solve our conflicts?”

A mature Latin American answer: turn the OAS into a forum which will not accept vetoes from the North against an almost united South but is ready for dialogue, on the Malvinas, Cuba, drugs/arms, and misery ­ problems the body will approach in its own way, with open minds.

And one more step: how about a MEXUSCAN, a North America of three countries, revising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to increase equality, with Mexico as a bridge to South America with open borders, no fences, and flows in both directions of people and legitimate goods and services. Positive peace for the Americas in our lifetime. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

*Johan Galtung, a professor of Peace Studies, is rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University.