david Readers of this blog know that I believe that in order to move from the culture of war to a culture of peace, we must develop a new order of world governance in which the United Nations is based on cities or regional parliaments rather than the present system of Member States. This is because … Read more
What is the appeal of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen? Why have they able to get so many votes? A superficial response is easy: Voters are angry and fed up with the present political system and they will vote for whoever best shares their anger and damns the present political system. The more the … Read more
Each March in CPNN, we celebrate International Women’s Day and the annual meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and we see how women are a force for peace. There is a deep historical reason for this. As I found in my one foray into anthropological studies, women were excluded from war very … Read more
Once again, as described in this month’s CPNN bulletin, we are seeing mass demonstrations against corrupt and repressive government policies, which leads us to the question of their historical significance. I am reminded of mass demonstrations which I have experienced over the years in the United States: the gathering for civil rights at the Washington Monument … Read more
The events reflected in recent CPNN bulletins concerning the voting split in the United Nations and the results of last fall’s elections, remind me of turbulent periods of the 20th Century and raise the question if we can learn from what happened then. The rise of populist and potentially fascist parties last year remind one of the rise … Read more
I have long believed that we are at the point of human history where we can make the transition from the culture of war which has dominated us for 5,000 years to a new culture, a culture of peace. As I prepare the CPNN review for 2016 and compare it to the CPNN review that … Read more
Let me start by quoting this month’s CPNN Bulletin. “We’ve seen two shocking election results recently: the defeat of the referendum for the peace accords in Colombia, and the election of Donald Trump in the USA based on a racist and xenophobic campaign. What does it mean? It means that voters in the two countries … Read more
The years I visited and worked in the Soviet Union and later Russia gave me a useful view of the laws of historical change. I watched from within as an empire crashed. The crash of the Soviet empire, foreseen a decade before by Johan Galtung, was first an economic crash, and then secondarily to that, … Read more
We know all too well the failures of the United Nations. At this moment of history, its failures include the wars and potential wars everywhere in the world, including the potential of a catastrophic nuclear war. As we have stated previously, as long as the United Nations is run by the Member States, it will not … Read more
History does not progress at an even rate, but by long periods of slow development punctuated by sudden revolutionary changes, as described by dialectical philosophy. The news in CPNN this month illustrate the slowness of the development of the culture of peace. The development of the peace process which led to this month’s signing of a peace … Read more