Johan Galtung: A CHANGE IN WASHINGTON? 06-12-2012
 
Washington, Election Night: OK, one of them won even if the real winners as usual were the non-voters, for whatever reason; men more than women. At about 23:15 Obama passed the magic 50%, not of the popular votes but for the electoral college, with 302-206 well above 270 and it turned into a landslide. Net result: status quo, no change. The media did their best to make the presidential election look important, being the pinnacle, the altar on which democracy is built. Some democracy. (Click here to read on)

Interview-Excerpt: “If you want peace, abolish hunger”
 
Federica Riccadonna: You say different communities have varying abilities to overcome and transcend conflict which you call the ‘local potential of peace’. How do you assess the Nepali people’s potential for peace?
Johan Galtung: Nepalis have a capacity for negative peace. The 10-year-long conflict was a testament to their potential for excessive violence, while during the 18 days of Jana Andolan II in 2006, they toppled a 240-year-old monarchy without resorting to violence.
Nepalis are specially good at ‘negative’ forms of non-violence like civil disobedience, demonstrations, and non-cooperation, but they struggle when it comes to positive non-violence, like nation building and constructiveactions towards peace.
 
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After the Cartoons and the recent movie, the question is becoming more and more important:
How are we to live together respectfully and guided by empathy, if this is how we treat each other.
There are two key human rights values in this confrontation:

freedom of expression–basic, but not the only value in the world;

freedom from insult and respect for the sacred–basic, but not alone.

Conflicts between two values generally have five outcomes:
 
1: Find out more here
2: What is your opinion on the matter?
 

We live in a multi-polar world;
not a bipolar world with two superpowers, nor a unipolar world with one remaining superpower. How many poles, and which, can be disputed.
But the following six may serve to map the present world: USA, EU, Russia, China, India and the OIC, the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, less crystallized than the others. We are talking about 0.31, 0.50, 0.14, 1.34, 1.21 and 1.63 billion human beings respectively, altogether 5.13 billion or 73% of the world population. Left out of this “hexagon” approach are Latin America, most of Africa, some of Asia, Japan and the Pacific.
By far the tallest diaspora in the world is Muslim: about 300 million, of them 177 in India [1], 19 in EU, 23 in China, 16 in Russia, 2.6 in USA.
This essay is about the Muslim social situation in two of the six poles: Europe and the USA. What do we mean by “social situation”? Attitude and behavior, Muslim and the host society. Attitudes vary from hatred-disdain via indifference to admiration and love; and behavior from violence via its absence ─ negative peace ─ to the positive peace of cooperation and harmony. The words “prejudice” and “discrimination” are often used for negative attitude and behavior, but they can also be positive. The basic point is the particle “pre”, a priori; a judgment made in advance, independent of direct experience. And the discrimination is built into the structure, working automatically.
1: Please click here to read on
2: To comment on the piece, please Click here.