This is an interview in which GNV’s Virgil Hawkins speaks with Jan Oberg of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF). The transcript is below.

Virgil Hawkins: It’s my great pleasure to welcome Jan Öberg, who is the founder of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with us. I’d like to talk about issues of peace. Let’s start with what is the TFF. Could you perhaps give us a bit of a summary?

Jan Oberg: Well, it’s a private foundation without an endowment, meaning we’ve always been working without any salary or compensation. And we don’t, as a principle, receive money from governments or corporations. So we are totally free research. And what do we do research on? We do it on the UN Charter’s Article 1 norm that peace shall be established by peaceful means. Now, the whole world basically has forgotten that with the exception of a few countries. But I think we should keep on arguing against today’s militarism that there are any solutions in the use of weapons. We have seen now that there isn’t. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ) was an organisation supposed to create peace. And it has now been a major reason that we have the very dangerous situation in Europe.

So what we do is we produce alternatives to the present military solution to problems. We penetrate the nonsense that is being said, and we come up with alternatives. And that is a very important thing. You are not a peace researcher if you don’t work with the possible reduction of all kinds of violence. And having said that, you can understand that we are among the very few left in this world. SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo) and all the others in Scandinavia where I sit are not doing peace research anymore.

And secondly, we have not only done academic studies, we have gone to conflict areas. We have started out in Yugoslavia, all parts of Yugoslavia. We produced the largest report or publication on the dissolution under the title, ‘What Should Have Been Done in Yugoslavia?’ It’s 2,100 A4 pages online, free of charge to anyone to go and look at what could have been done instead in Yugoslavia instead of bombing and carving out Kosovo and doing an absolutely non-peace agreement about Bosnia. And so we went to Georgia, we went to Iraq before the war, we went to Burundi to study the aftermath of the genocide. We went to Syria around the time, exactly the time, I was personally in Aleppo when it was liberated from Al-Nusra and other terrorists, which in the Western world was called the reoccupation by Bashar al-Assad and the Russians. I can tell you what it was because I was there. And we worked in Iran, quite a few trips, fact-finding missions. Iran is now the place in the Middle East where there’s most peace research done, and then we had the Global Studies Center of Tehran University. I’m a little bit guilty of that, if you will.

And now we work a lot in and with China. I’m personally going to use the rest of my life to try to understand China better because it’s one of the few places that I feel hope. I was there in 1983 and I’ve seen the difference of what it is today. It’s totally mind-boggling from a human macro-historical point of view what the Chinese have created in 30, 40 years. It’s not happened before anywhere in human life. And the West is totally ignorant and just negative and just condemning it because it doesn’t look like our society. So it must be wrong. You know, how stupid can you be? So my only advice to people who are listening also seeing this program is don’t be pro-China, don’t be anti-China, but you’re stupid if you’re not curious about China. And go there if you can.

So these are the types of things. You know, we’re academic, most of us. We are also diplomats and psychologists and God knows what. But we have never thought that the reality was in the books only. We’ve always thought that it was very important to go to places and talk with people from presidents to taxi drivers and children, and try to understand how people feel who are in conflicts.

And that lifetime commitment that I’ve had, we’re now 40 years old, is the strongest probably reason that I am so strongly against violence, all kinds of violence. I have seen what it means. Most academics are not there to go anywhere and politicians usually haven’t. Many of them have not even done their military service. And for them, you know, warfare and violence and weapons and armament is a kind of game, you know, something that you can play on a computer. They have no sense of reality. All these people who say we should just arm Ukraine, let Ukraine as young men pay the price for our wishes to defeat Russia. It’s the most immoral war I’ve seen in my life.

So I have no respect for these people. Well, I have respect for them. If I should meet them and we should talk human to human. But what do they do as politicians with their uniforms, intellectual and other uniforms on, I have no respect for. They’re destroying the world. And of course, this is not a fair struggle because, you know, we’re a tiny shoestring operation working for peace. But that’s a situation at the moment. I tell you in the long run, and that’s the last thing I’m going to say in this long introduction, peace will win in the long run, and the militarists will lose.

Virgil Hawkins: Very powerful words. And it is in fact, these perspectives on peace that I think have drawn me to want to talk with you about this. My next question is, what is peace? But I mean, this could, you know, take days to answer. But I mean, I guess your perspective, the TFF perspective of what is peace. And together with that, how might we, you know, as societies, as people represented by political entities, go about working towards peace, where this kind of conflict or violence exists?

Jan Oberg: Well, I am, I’m strongly inspired by one of my mentors of this peace researcher, Johan Galtung, who died a couple of years ago. I knew him for more than 50 years, and we were friends for more than 50 years. He’s by the way now marginalised by his own institute, because they have changed. Long story short, peace is much more than the absence of war, like health is much more than just not being ill or having cancer or fever. Peace is what he would call “negative peace”, that is, that we work against violence, where we see it, try to reduce it. But then the other side of peace is “positive peace”. And positive peace is to seek ways, structures, processes in which human potentials and societal potentials could be realised, where those who are good at something could practice this to the benefit of the common good, you know, to humanity even.

And so I have formulated it myself a little bit like this: peace is to secure development and develop security for the whole of human being, and all human beings within some kind of framework of a global, not a neighbourhood, but a global ethics of do no harm and never do anything that could risk the permanence of human life and humanity’s life. Now it is a little bit philosophical, but I’m strongly influenced by a German American philosopher Hans Jonas about global responsibilities, the responsibility we all have when we make a decision, what will its impact be on, not only the present world, but the yet unborn. You know, the yet unborn do not have the future generations not born, they cannot vote in a democracy.

That’s one of the many limitations of Western democratic thinking, but we could be intelligent enough to say, will this we do now be good for people in the future who cannot voice their opinions at the moment. So there’s, there’s so much in this, as you said, we could be talking about it for a very long time and how to realise it. Well, first of all, I think we have to talk about the necessity of bringing peace education into the school system and bring peace research into higher levels of education.

Now I’m saying this because would anybody think that we could create health in our society without the science of medicine? The answer is no. Would anybody think we could create a good welfare economy without somebody who is special, specialises in sociology and economics? The answer is no. But what we’re doing the field of security and peace is to let kakistocracy rule. Kakistocracy is government, governance by the least able and least good people and able means, the least educated people, people who just say use weapons are people who are uneducated.

And therefore I think education, which I’ve devoted my life to also, of course, as a visiting professor around the world, a public lecturer, media person now, is something that I believe we cannot do without. It’s not the only thing. I mean, there’s nothing like, if you just do A, B and C, then we will have peace in the world. That’s naive. But without knowledge, without research, without a focus on, without a public debate on it, without information about what peace could be, there won’t be peace in this world.

That’s where we are today, because all these people who are running the security system, as we call it, it doesn’t give security, so that is a fake concept or policy. But those who do that are uneducated people. I don’t know of any statesman or leader of a country who has an advisor on peace and conflict resolution, or forgiveness or reconciliation or non-violence. They all have lawyers and people in green uniforms and people with intellectual uniforms. That’s all they have. So how on earth should things go better than they do? They can’t, simply because people are ignorant around the most important things.

Provoke people and you get a bad answer, a response. Think of deterrence as something in which you, you believe, I mean, deterrence in my view is the same as you have two neighbours in both living in houses and one neighbour puts up submachine guns on his roof, pointing down toward his neighbour. And then he says, I can kill you if you don’t behave the way I would like you to do, but I don’t have an intention to do so. That is NATO in a nutshell. It’s NATO in a nutshell.

Imagine we were all trained in a personal union, so self-defence. Imagine there was a negotiation table between us so that if we have a problem, we say, oh, Saturday at 12 o’clock, let’s sit down and talk about why your grass is so long or why I think your dog should not do what it does in my garden. And then we talk about it. Now, so you’re in a situation in which these banal, and I find it very often, I find myself embarrassingly banal, saying this cannot be done the way we’re doing it.

And most of this thinking is based on what Johan Galtung used to say is a fatal mistake. Create security first and then peace. Now, if you create security the way NATO does and the way nuclear powers do, and based on offensive deterrence, the ability to kill 5,000 kilometres away, but insisting that I don’t have the intention to, if you do that, you’ll never get to peace. If you created peace first, whatever the definition of it, if you created peace first, then you would easily be able to secure it with a different security thinking.

Now, what I’m saying is these are hugely important things and they are relatively simple. Most children can understand this. But when you talk to politicians, you listen to people talk, you listen to presidents meeting, they are saying the same, which I call kakistocracy, it’s not very nice, but I would say ignorant or educated. We live in a world in which people are peace and conflict illiterate, and that will not bring us peace. Peace takes intelligence.

A final word on this. Anyone can start a fight in a bar. Anybody can punch your face. Not everyone can stop that and create trust, good human relations, cooperation, forgiveness, reconciliation and all these things. So we have a huge educational and political and media and research task in front of us to all help create a better world. But of course, you and I know that the military, industrial, media, academic, complex (MIMAC) wants to earn money from warfare. And we have small, small elites in all countries, east and west and north and south, and they earn money on the war. And they’re outside democratic control. Eisenhower said it in 1961 or 1962 or whatever I say today. It’s gone much worse than when Eisenhower talked about it.

Virgil Hawkins: Well, that then leads me to, since you have mentioned the military, industrial, media, academic complex, this is sort of one of the points that I was really wanting to get to, because I think we can understand in some ways why the leaders of countries and perhaps their militaries would think of violence and peace along the terms that you’ve just mentioned. But perhaps an observer might be surprised or perhaps confused as to why this sort of spreads the way it does. So, why is the media on board with this? Why is academia on board with this? Why does every actor that seems to be given a voice in society take on part of this sort of unified perspective on violence and peace and in a direction that does seem to go against common sense?

Jan Oberg: Well, when crisis hits, most people are not willing to stand up and pay a price for having another opinion. You saw that up to the Second World War. Secondly, this happens because the West is going down. I mean, this whole security thinking about deterrence, offensiveness, armament as a solution to everything and all that is deeply Western.

And it’s always been embedded in this Western code of mission work. You know, I can come with a Bible. And if you don’t listen to my Bible, then I can come with a sword. There’s nothing new in that. That is possible. It has been practised. And of course, it has created its, if you will, dialectic counterforces. Others have taken to weapons to counter the weapons of the West and the 630 or whatever it is, American bases in 130 countries, which of course has nothing to do with peace. Only a fool can believe that that has to do with peace. It’s paranoic hysteria and the military industrial media academic complex.

But when you go down, and there’s no doubt in my mind, and probably not in yours or your viewers, mind either that the United States, the West, what we call the West, the 12% of the Occident, if you will, put it crudely NATO and the European Union, a few others, probably including Japan could be discussed, but of course, culturally different politically inside Korea too, inside the American orbit. It’s on its way down, comparatively speaking.

And then you get in a situation like the old patriarch, who cannot understand that their children do not obey him anymore. And you get more and more grumpy. You get more and more insecure actually, but you deny it to yourself. So the tolerance, the willingness to have open debates is decreasing when you’re in trouble, when you don’t have the energy, and you don’t have the vision anymore to talk about alternatives, because alternatives require a sense of vision.

We had it up to the 1970s and 80s in the West. We don’t have it anymore. Nobody talks about the West, the future, global future in the West. I mean, a few individuals do, but they’re not part of the public discussion, which it was in the 1970s with future studies, global-run discussions and all that. And so the tolerance for more views, hey, this could be done in another way too, couldn’t it? It’s over. The West has one narrative on everything.

And that’s why I call it the military industrial media academic complex. Contrary to before, the media are now under wonderful control from a US point of view. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve lived it and through it in Denmark where I was born, and used very frequently. Never today. And Sweden where I’ve lived 55 years, never used. Whereas as it is everywhere else, particularly in Chinese media, of course, they love what I say. And they are more free. And you can criticise China more in Chinese media and try Chinese journals and newspapers than you can the West today.

It’s somewhat interesting, you know, to work with different cultures and being at different places. I see things that very few other people see. And I make it a point that whenever I am censored in the Western world, I tell it on my blog or on TFF’s homepage.

You know, the classical thing is, called up from Swedish television. “We’ve heard that you’re somewhat critical to NATO membership”, that’s with way after Sweden had joined. Yes, I say, “good, even 700 kilometres south of Stockholm, you heard somebody say that you’re critical now. And what are your arguments?” And I give five, six, seven arguments against NATO membership. And there’s dead silence in the other end. I say, “hello, are you there still?” And the woman says “this was interesting”. Meaning she’s never heard these arguments in the editorial offices, really broadcasting. The end of the discussion is “I call you tomorrow to discuss when we can set up an interview with you”. Then nothing happens.

You know what they did then? They took their China correspondent in Beijing, who is not the sharpest knife in their drawer. And she said, “China is very interested in Sweden joining NATO”. And they use a person who sits in Lund. And then they cut in a little thing I had said on Chinese television, maybe the membership of NATO, the decision to join NATO for Sweden “was the most counterproductive or stupid thing”, whatever I now said at that point, decision in foreign policy since 1945, because we’ve had 200 years of successful neutrality in this country without war involvement, without being hit by war, which now has increased very much.

But the long story short is, they don’t do an interview with me. They put in what I say in Chinese media and thereby I am characterised as paid by the communists in China, which I’m not. So I mean, this is the way it goes. I’m just giving you one little example of hundreds. I’ve literally had hundreds of cases in that direction the last 20, 30 years. And today, as you can see, I’m not particularly depressed about it. I just find it totally remarkable.

And of course, other people don’t know the story of that one. So that one, of course, is one I tell because those who see that little clip on Swedish television that Oberg is quoted by the communists but not interviewed in his own country, is people cannot know that I was interviewed and there was an agreement that I should be interviewed and they never came back. You see, this is the kind of thing that happens again and again.

So long story short, you have now this media and academic also and the academics as a priesthood explaining why we must have more weapons or doing doctrine studies or whatever. And that, of course, is finally my word to you is that’s a result of there being no free research. You’re talking with somebody who is a free researcher. There are not that many left in this field.

And the reason is that all of these institutes are government financed. Now that was fully possible years ago to be government financed and have different views and come up with critical analysis. This is no longer possible in this field. I’m not talking about economics or whatever. I don’t know about those. But in security, peace, etc., international relations field, that is not possible anymore. You either follow the party line, the government line, or you’re out.

And that’s why we chose, you know, 40 years ago, we’ve existed in 40 years now, said no government money here. We had a government support for two or three years in the 1990s. 40,000 USD from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm. Now, you know how that was ended? It was ended after I had spent four years of my life being a mediator in the Kosovo conflict. And with my colleagues writing quite a lot, speaking to CNN and BBC and everybody, why NATO should not bomb, because we developed a plan for a negotiated solution for three years. The only peace plan that had existed for Kosovo.

Now, then came a letter and I was there doing the bombing, something I’ll never forget. It was not a small bombing. It was pretty hard. Then came a letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that unfortunately this year they could not support us. But I should apply next year as a director of the foundation because it was an annual grant you would get and you would report how you spent the money and then you would apply for the next year. It was not a permanent thing. And since then, of course, we never got anything.

We have applied one or two years. We knew we would not get anything because this was probably done on order from the US. This little foundation had too much influence. Talked with everybody, was a mediator at top level. And so we also, were not surprised. But what they thought was probably that if they withdrew those 40,000 USD, we would close down. That was pretty naive because we have always been people financed in the bottom. This was an extra sum that permitted us to have a secretary and other helpers and do things a little bit more smoothly.

But we have never been dependent on any money from the government. And since then, we now have a policy that we will not receive from any government in the world. Nobody’s going to tell us what we do. Nobody should tell people what they should do for peace. It’s an open discussion, free research, free education. And everything we have on our website. Between 9,000 and 10,000 documents produced over 40 years is free of charge for everyone. And it will be there after we are dead and gone. It’s already secured. That’s how you do peace research today.

Sadly, these are the conditions. But you have to, instead of closing down and saying, okay, I’ll drink red wine and have fun and play golf for the rest of my life and be damn bored. We keep on doing these things and we have 50 people around the world who love to do what we do.

Virgil Hawkins: Very inspiring. But I can see how, I think it’s clear, yes, that the money aspect sort of encroaches on the possibilities of peace research. But let’s just go briefly back to the media because I think you gave the impression that, go back in time 30, 40 years, and there was still room for dissent. There was still room for those sorts of other opinions, and that has shrunk and disappeared. Now, if we’re talking about commercial media, they are not necessarily, basically they’re not reliant on government money to do this. Of course, we can imagine elements of nationalism and a sort of general closeness to power, which seems to impact all media around the world, regardless of how democratic one might sort of portray oneself. But what would you think might be some of the factors behind why that sort of space that is allowed for dissent and just for sort of common sense peace talk has shrunk?

Jan Oberg: Well, I’ve always been most disappointed with public service because they have a law. They’re run by governments. They are supposed to have diversity, to do source critique. It’s their obligation to have many views on a thing, interview many different experts and whatever and let the people find out through discussion what they believe in.

When it comes to the commercial media, I can just say, well, they have to sell it. It’s very difficult to do, probably to do, make profit on media today because there’s so many. I mean, I’m so old, would you believe it that I can remember that when there was only one TV channel, it was black and white in the 50s when I was a child. And there were a handful of newspapers belonging to different parties and that was it. Now you have, I don’t know how many thousand or millions of media you have around the world doing completely different things 24 seven.

And the mind-boggling thing is, they basically say the same. If I was a businessman and trying to sell a product, I would find something that was original and different from everybody else so that I could have a new market or a spirit, a kind of new idea of how to be a media. If you look at the, you take a 10 largest newspapers in Sweden every morning, it’s the same stories from the same news bureaus, from the same sources interviewing the same people at state institutes. I mean, the lack of creativity is, you know, slightly funny actually. It’s absurd theatre because they all believe that they are best and they have, you know, the news, the news before everybody else and all that. So I don’t understand.

But the commercial ones have to earn money through ads and through the click economy. And I’m just happy to say I left that long ago. I don’t care how many who are clicking yes or like on my Facebook page or to what we publish. And we’re not big in that sense. We reach a lot of people, but it’s completely different. My criticism is mainly of the public, so-called public services that have stopped being a service to the people.

And let me add if I may just very quickly when this idea of one narrative, I want your viewers to know, I told you I was a Danish citizen, I am, not because I love Denmark anymore for its policies, but because I have a Danish passport and grew up there, of which I’m happy. But long story short, in all the 1980s, from 80 to 90, I was a member of the Danish government’s commission for security and disarmament. All the political parties were sitting there, the leading journalists, the leading military people, top flight guys, and the advisors and those who ran the use of defence, foreign affairs and the prime minister’s office.

We were all sitting there meeting once a month discussing security. We were publishing big books. Of course, with scholars among the scholar group. One study we made was Scandinavia or the Nordic countries as a nuclear free zone. At that time Denmark was an NATO member. We had such a broad spectrum from people who strongly believe in everything military and traditional politics in the loyalty with the US, etc. And there were people like little me and a number of others who were increasingly sceptical about just following NATO policies, etc. But it was natural and we had serious discussions and everybody listened to everyone.

I have a lot of fantasy and imagination. I don’t have it to believe that such a body would exist in today’s Denmark. You wouldn’t believe how narrow it has become. You would not believe how narrow it has become in terms of intellectualism. It almost disappeared. I’ll give you a quote. Prime Minister Mette Fredrickson on her way into the synagogue in Copenhagen to commemorate the one year October 7 attack on Israel. And she says to a journalist, “if we don’t look up, Hamas will also come and take Denmark”.

The journalist did not say, excuse me, what are you saying? And you have statements like this. I mean, this is of course one of the more bizarre ones. But to give your viewers an impression. That is the level. That’s the thing you can get away with saying in front of a camera and nobody questions it. Nobody asks the day after what the heck did the Prime Minister say.

Virgil Hawkins: What changed in Denmark? What do you think has narrowed it to that degree?

Jan Oberg: Those who call themselves social democrats are no longer social democrats, just by name. The social democrats were a party in Scandinavia that were carrying the embryo of a new society of welfare, equality, women, justice, people’s high schools, intellectuals who participated in politics. That was one of the reasons we developed the idea of a welfare state. It was because ministers invited authors, film people, etc., to discuss the good society. So they were open to have an inspiration from many and different, not only from marketing bureaus or from other political parties or something like that. They took in people from society.

And so that in a way, and of course social democrats were about uplifting those who were underprivileged, the labour union movement and all that. And it was global solidarity. We had the Vietnam War and the labour unions were against it. Bullying by the US was not what the social democrats accepted in the 1970s and 80s, for Christ’s sake.

And so you can say that social democratic movement was so successful that when it had achieved these goals, it had nothing more to give the world except clinging to power. That’s what they did. That’s what they did. They have absolutely nothing interesting to say about the future society. They have no vision. And a Swedish author, P.O. Enquist, whom I just knew peripherally through his wife, who was a theatre person and a person of Danish culture. And he said in one of his books or interviews, the Social Democratic Party in Scandinavia is a party that no longer has a story to tell.

You know, I think that applies to a hell of a lot of parties and movements and stuff today. What is it you want to tell? What is it you struggle for? And not just against. They were against poverty. They were against injustices, etc. Fine. And they walked on the other leg too and said we want a welfare society. We want a culturally vibrant society. We want international solidarity. We want a better world. We want peace. That’s what the Social Democrats said of that time. Think of all of them. And Anga Jorgensen, Bruno Kreisky, Willy Brandt, they were all in that movement and they knew what war was. Willy Brandt was a refugee in Norway during the war.

Now all this is gone. And in that sense, we have no Social Democratic Party anymore. I wouldn’t even remember of it, but because I’m an old man. I can see these things, how they have changed completely. There’s no vision. There’s no ideas. There’s no determination to achieve something new. The newness comes today from China, and other societies. It doesn’t come from the West. West has lost vision. And the Social Democrats in particular has lost every vision they actually had historically.

And so I think that’s one reason you muddle through on pragmatism. And you have no principles anymore. You have no ideologies anymore. You have nothing that voters can make you accountable for. You just say things. Small statements on X or Twitter, and then you have said something important. You tell what you think to the people by using Instagram. It’s pretty poor nowadays. It’s pretty poor.

And that’s one of the advantages of getting older. I can compare back in time. Somebody who’s 25 today has nothing to compare with, nothing to do about it, but I’m 75. And I remember how things were before. And I know what they were able to do. And I know my own country, my own culture. And I can see it, how it has changed. And I must say it doesn’t make me happy to see the change.

Virgil Hawkins: And I mean, Denmark is of course just one piece that is sort of representative of a larger sort of trend, isn’t it? Whether it’s throughout Europe.

Jan Oberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just talked about Scandinavia because I’m here, I suppose. But I also think that it’s important to say this because most people out there in the whole world, when I go around here and there, people still think that Scandinavia is something very special and different. It is not. It’s like any other mainstream country that it doesn’t think for itself anymore.

Sweden stopped thinking for itself when all Olaf Palme was killed. I know exactly what happened with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Everybody who worked for or with or thought the things he thought, or looked at the world the way he did, were slowly but surely marginalised and pensioned and getting out of the system. And somebody else took over.

And then you had the submarine affairs, which turned out not to be Russian. They were Russian submarines, but they were American psychological operations. And that’s well known from studies of Ola Tunander. Ola Tunander was a master in security politics. He’s the only one who has written this book about the submarine that was an American operation. And that book was never reviewed anywhere important in Swedish media.

So, you know, the whole thing here is, there’s been a long-term pressure. I mean, a NATO membership is not something that just happened because of Ukraine. That was a drop that made the Swedish people, by the way, that’s not true either because only 47% of the Swedish people were for NATO membership when it was decided. What came afterwards, even worse, that was the establishment of 17 American bases in Sweden without public discussion. Signed in Washington a binding agreement about 17 military bases in Sweden, a binding agreement for 10 years that was signed in Washington. And half a year later was endorsed by the Swedish parliament. If you call that democracy, I prefer dictatorship.

Virgil Hawkins: Well, yes, I think you’ve portrayed a very sort of dark picture of the way things are going.

Jan Oberg: At the moment, at the moment, yes, that’s not the future.

Virgil Hawkins: No, no, and that will be my final question to you. The way forward, you know, what can we do about it?

Jan Oberg: Well, what cannot be done about it, everybody can do something. I used to say I don’t believe in peace movements, but I believe that every human being is a potential peace movement. Do something every day, big and small. Be active, read and learn. Don’t believe in politics. I mean, there’s still good heart of people in the peace movements who think, oh, we must write a letter to the minister and all that.

You know, I’m sorry I’m too old for this. The only thing that really changed the world is mass mobilisation, intellectually, morally, and in the streets, not on the social media. It is people doing what they do in France now, not the violence, but those who are good hearted and are sick and tired of the situation, or in India complaining about the educational system. And, and I think they kind of, the Gandhian mobilisation, you know, we need some salt marches, if you will, in today’s society.

It’s the only thing politicians will listen to. It’s not that you speak their language, but that you force them to understand your language, and you force them by non-violent means. That is, better ideas. You know, politicians are not bothered by criticism. They criticise each other. They’re criticised by the media. Sometimes they are criticised by you and me. Oh, politicians should do something else, I think. But if you come up with better ideas and say, hey, rather simple ways of solving the Ukraine conflict, if you think a little bit differently.

If you, in other words, come up with better ideas, then you get really hated. Because the worst you can do to a politician is not to criticise, it is to say, hey, you’ve not been thinking this through. Very simply twist your mind and you will see that there, and then people will react when you get that reaction: “Why didn’t I think of that myself before”, you’ve achieved something.

So the whole thing is to give people an inspiration, that things can be done differently. And that’s where we back to what I said in the beginning. A doctor who cannot come up with ideas for treatment is a lousy doctor. If you go to a doctor and the doctor says “you have cancer”, that’s a diagnosis, prognosis, “you’re going to die within six months”. And then the patient says, “but doctor, what can be done to save my life?” And they say, “I have no idea. Next patient”. That’s not a doctor. It doesn’t define a doctor to do that.

And it doesn’t define a peace researcher who sits and talks about military and geopolitical issues or whatever at length. That resembles talking about the cancer cells at length, but talking about the cancer cells does not heal the patient.

So long story short, the twist, and that was Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King’s and everybody else’s sensible strengths. They had visions about the better society and they worked for something. You know, the queen of Peace Research, Elisa Boulding, more people may know her husband, Kenneth Boulding, but Elisa Boulding was a very dear friend of mine. Well, they both were, but she was particularly close to me in the way of thinking. And she said, “you will never get people to work for something they cannot imagine”.

So help people imagine a better society. Twist their minds to say, what would a world without nuclear weapons look like? How could we spend all the money or at least a big part of all the money that is now wasted on armament and warfare, and that only create hatred and insecurity? How could that money be spent more constructively for development, for solving global problems?

I know I’m not saying something new. What I’m saying is that far too few people are doing this seriously, also in politics, and particularly in the media, and certainly not in the research world. It is to make people think constructively about the likely, the possible alternatives to just continuing what we do today.

And that’s why you are met again and again. If you say, “I think I have an idea as to how we could solve the Ukraine war first. Stop the war, solve the conflict”, which is by the way between NATO and Russia, not between Russia and Ukraine. The conflict, I distinguish between the conflict and the violence. But that’s a long story. If you want to do peace, you have to attack the conflict, not the violence on the first hand. But let that rest here. But the response you get from many people also in power is, “oh, that is really romantic. Oh, that’s really naive. Oh, do you really believe that? That’s not realistic”.

You know, when people say that, you’ve said something important. Because they begin to understand that they don’t have a monopoly on defining what reality is. You know, I’m looking at the potential reality. So my idea is simply, be constructive, be positive, come up with creative ideas, share them with whoever bothers to listen, and let people think for something. You cannot make peace by being against weapons. That’s one step. The next step is to be for something. You cannot make health just by combating diseases. Health is to be convivial, to feel enchantment, to do all these things that you like to do and be open to cooperation and to be a person who is helpful to others. That’s health. Health is not just to not have cancer or a fever.

All this is too narrow thinking. Too narrow thinking. But those who run the world would like you to have their own narrow thinking. And some of us who are free thinkers, free intellectuals, can actually think a little bit better. Sorry to be arrogant like that. But I think I’m thinking better about the future than most politicians in today’s Europe. Because alternatives are fully possible. The biggest line we are living with is that there are no alternatives.

My response is there are only alternatives to continuing what we’re doing in the West at this moment. 12% of humanity, who has lost it completely, and the other 88% of the world is rushing ahead with the Belt and Road Initiative, with cultural exchange, with development, with eradicating poverty, and doing constructive things. And we sit in this little, you know, self-navel-gazing intellectual media, political world in the West, and think that we should run the world. I mean, we should become humble.

And that’s one of the things that Hans Jonas, that I referred to earlier in terms of global ethics, is again and again hammering in: the more power you have, military not the least, the more humble and the more careful you should be. We have stopped being careful and humble in the Western world. We think we are the rulers. We’ve thought that for 300 years and our time is over. The best we can do now is to join the rest of the world, become one among many in the multi-polar, multi-nodal world that is coming.

I don’t know, I mean, it’s inconceivable to me how people cannot see it. We’re heading towards a fantastic new world with cooperation, with multi-cultural interchange. The Belt and Road Initiative today counts 145 countries started by Xi Jinping’s speech in Kazakhstan 13 years ago. It’s the world’s and history’s largest cooperative project. Who are the only ones not participating in the Western world? I mean, I’m not saying it’s better in all kinds of ways. I know it has lots of problems. I’m just saying we are self-isolating and self-destroying. That’s what we’re doing because we refuse to see that we’re part of something bigger.

It’s a holistic thinking that any peace researcher, any philosopher would say is obvious, but it’s not obvious to those who run the present Western system. And the saddest thing about that is it will hit innocent people. It will hit, I mean, sentiments be spoken, it will hit my children and my grandchildren. They will not live in a good Europe, my friend. They will not live in a good Europe. We might avoid a war, but the economy is down the drain. The innovation is down the drain.

The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) surveys tell you that people cannot read or write, young people cannot read and write the way they could before. Where can they read and write? In Vietnam and in China and other Asian countries, but not in the West anymore. You know, what the heck are we doing? We’re spending billions and billions and trillions on armament in our part of the world in which there are deeply urgent socioeconomic needs. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I refuse to legitimate it. I have to speak up against it. It is not right what is going on. Oh, you might say that’s a moral statement. What’s wrong with morals and politics? Do we think we can run a good society without talking about ethics? I don’t think so.

Virgil Hawkins: Okay. Well, Jan Oberg, thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for your thoughtful answers to these questions. I look forward to that sort of hopeful, positive world that you spoke of.

Jan Oberg: Let’s look forward to the discussion at least about it. I don’t have the solutions. I just think I have a little bit of an idea how to get there.

May I end, which I do with my public lectures and as many of these media conversations with a quotation that has meant a lot to me from George Bernard Shaw, who allegedly said, “most people look at the world as it is and ask why. What we should do is to look at the world as it could be and ask why not”. I think that summarises my thinking. It’s very close to Gandhian thinking.

We started out talking about the Article 1 of the United Nations Charter. That is the most Gandhian document governments have ever signed. That peace shall be established by peaceful means. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It is what Gandhi said. It’s that goals are the means in the making. Take the right steps every day. Do the right means every day and you will get to the goal. But you cannot shortcut the way to peace by armament and warfare.

These things have been said before. I’m saying basically nothing new. So thank you for listening to me anyhow.

Virgil Hawkins: Thank you so much.

Jan Oberg: My pleasure. Thanks and good luck.