Humanity knows such a crime in 1945, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which until now, 72 years later, will not wait for this process! His culprits do not even want to apologize for this crime! Its authors approved the "unilateral right of preventive use of nuclear weapons by the first." This is already an absolute evil, genocide and a crime against humanity! WHO STOPS IT??? o­nly the new "UN Harmony" is able to do this o­n the initiative of the Russia President Vladimir Putin, who has long been advocating for nuclear disarmament the o­nly of the nine nuclear leaders. We proved this in our UN respective project: http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=769

Of course, I will be happy to publish all your texts, primarily your book "Absolute Evil", o­n our website, if you will permit. But I can do it in early Januaryonly. Could you also supplement your list of recent articles with our joint article: "Vera Afanasyeva, John S. Avery, Timi Ecimovic and Leo Semashko. Thermodynamics and Negentropy of Spheral Classes Societal Harmony: Global Peace Thermodynamics": http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=756 Is it possible to do? Thank you.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your wonderful family, so that in 2018 the possibility of absolute evil for all people disappears!

With love, Leo,

25-12-17

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Putin Foresaw Death of US Global Power

By Finian Cunningham

Like a good wine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s famous speech delivered in Munich 10 years ago regarding global security has been rewarded with time. A decade o­n, the many facets contained in that address have o­nly become all the more enhanced and tangible.

Speaking to a senior international audience at the annual Munich Security Conference, o­n February 10, 2007, the Russian leader opened by saying he was going to speak about world relations forthrightly and not in “empty diplomatic terms”. In what followed, Putin did not disappoint. With candor and incisiveness, he completely leveled the arrogance of American unilateral power.

He condemned the “aspirations of world supremacy” as a danger to global security. “We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law,” adding at a later point: “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.”

But, moreover, Putin presciently predicted that the American arrogance of unipolar dominance would in the end lead to the demise of the power from seeking such supremacy.

A unipolar world, he said, is “a world in which there is o­ne master, o­ne sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not o­nly for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

Ten years o­n from that call, few can doubt that the global standing of the United States has indeed spectacularly fallen – just as Putin had forewarned back in 2007. The most recent example of demise was the sordid business earlier this month of arm-twisting and bullying by the US at the United Nations over the tabled resolutions repudiating Washington’s ill-considered declaration of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Other examples of fallen American leadership can be seen in regard to President Trump’s reckless threats of war – instead of diplomacy – with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. Or Trump’s irrational and unfounded belligerence towards Iran. The American propensity for using military force regardless of diplomacy and international law leaves most nations feeling a shudder of contempt and trepidation.

Another example of fallen American leadership is seen in the boorish way the Trump administration has unilaterally rejected the 2015 international Paris Accord to combat deleterious climate change. Trump views it as a conspiracy to undermine the American economy, as he alluded to in his recent National Security Strategy. How can such a self-declared global leader be taken seriously, much less, with respect?

Putin’s warning that the unipolar-seeking US would “destroy itself” could not be more apt. Because in order to seek such supremacy, such a power, by necessity of its ambition, must reject the rule of law and the principle of democracy as being nothing other than bothersome constraints o­n its hegemony.

President Trump likes to talk at times about the “peaceful coexistence of sovereign nation states”. But whatever virtue he may be intending or paying lip service to, it is totally negated by American ambitions of unipolar dominance – ambitions that have been harbored in successive administrations in Washington since the end of the Cold War more than 25 years ago.

To this view of the world, Putin said: “I consider that the unipolar model is not o­nly unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.”

The impossibility, and impermissibility, stems from the inevitable tendency of unilateral conduct, which rejects the principle of all being equal under the law. The would-be unipolar hegemon, by definition, sees itself as above the law. Such a self-anointed view of o­neself leads to tyranny and abuse of power.

Since the end of the Cold War balance of power between the US and the former Soviet Union, the world has been plunged into a state of permanent wars and conflicts, due to the proclivity of the United States to act alone and o­n the basis that its “might is right”.

Ten years ago in Munich, Putin noted: “Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension. Judge for yourselves: wars as well as local and regional conflicts have not diminished… even more people are dying than before. Significantly more, significantly more!”

The unipolar position sought by the US leads ineluctably to a world of lawlessness, chaos, insecurity, fear, violence, and, in a fiendish feedback loop, reinforces the further deterioration in all such facets.

“Today we are witnessing an almost un-contained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts,” said Putin in Munich.

Recall that the Russian leader was speaking at the height of the US, British and NATO wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars constitute perhaps the two biggest war crimes over the past quarter of a century. The violations went unpunished, as befitting the arrogance of unipolar power, and because of that impunity, the lawlessness and abuse of national sovereign rights have o­nly become more exacerbated, as Putin forewarned.

Diplomacy, international law, dialogue and consensus have been all but discarded. Look how the US and its NATO allies demolished Libya in 2011, and how they ransacked Syria covertly through a seven-year proxy dirty war; a war that was o­nly stopped by Russia and Iran’s principled military intervention at the end of 2015. Look how the US and its NATO allies have destabilized Ukraine, yet blame Russia, even as Washington readies in the New Year to supply lethal weapons to the regime in Kiev it installed by a violent coup in February 2014.

The provocative expansion of NATO across Europe with its weapons pointed o­n Russia’s border was also an outcome that Putin warned against in 2007, admonishing that it would lead to more insecurity and tensions in Europe, not less.

Putin was right to talk straight truth to power in that 2007 speech, rather than using “empty diplomatic terms”, as he put it.

We cannot hope to rectify problems unless we address those problems accurately.

In doing so, Putin deserves immense praise for exposing the corruption of absolute power in world relations.

But there can be little doubt that his courageous speech in Munich in 2007 earned him the hatred of Washington’s imperial planners. Putin was in effect giving notice that Russia was shaking off the vassal status that his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had accepted in the early post-Cold War years.

“Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today,” said a defiant Putin.

It was this defiant independence and Putin’s searing analysis of how so much of global insecurity is the direct result of American imperialist arrogance that has since made the Russian leader the target for so much hostility from Washington over the past 10 years.

When you step back, it is amazing to observe the campaign of relentless Russophobia, vilification and slander directed at President Putin by Washington and the mass media under its control. The precedent for this demonization can be found in the Munich speech delivered by Putin a decade ago.

But let’s recap o­n the point he made about unipolar obsession being self-destructive.

The American penchant for lawlessness and violation of democratic principles does not just stop with its intrigues of regime change and subversions abroad. Those very noxious habits of diseased US statecraft are now eating into the body politics of the US itself.

Looking at the necrotic state of US politics and society – the venal, political infighting and corruption, the lack of respect for its own laws, and the lack of respect for its people’s sovereignty and office of the president – there can be little doubt that the o­nce ambitious superpower is dying a slow death from diseased practices that have turned inward.

Putin saw it coming 10 years ago. And in a classic futile case, they have tried to shoot the messenger ever since.

29-12-17

Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book o­n Bahrain and the Arab Spring.

Original:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/29/putin-foresaw-death-of-us-global-power.html

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Chinese Leadership o­n U.N. Reform

By Rene Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service

6 Jan 2017 –

There have been a number of periods when proposals for new or different United Nations structures were proposed and discussed. The first was in the 1944-1945 period when the Charter was being drafted. Some who had lived through the decline and then death of the League of Nations wanted a stronger world institution, able to move more quickly and effectively in times of crisis or the start of armed conflict.

In practice, the League of Nations was reincarnated in 1945 in the U.N. Charter but the names of some of the bodies were changed and new Specialized Agencies such as UNESCO were added. There was some dissatisfaction during the San Francisco negotiations, and an article was added indicating that 10 years after the coming into force of the Charter a proposal to hold a U.N. Charter Review Conference would be placed o­n the Agenda – thus for 1955.

The possibility of a U.N. Charter Review Conference led in the 1953-1954 period to a host of proposals for changes in the U.N. structures, for a greater role for international law, for a standing U.N. “peace force”. Nearly all these proposals would require modifications in the U.N. Charter.

When 1955 arrived, the United States and the Soviet Union, who did not want a Charter Review Conference which might have questioned their policies, were able to sweep the Charter Review agenda item under the rug from where it has never emerged. In place of a Charter Review Conference, a U.N. Committee o­n “Strengthening the U.N. Charter” was set up which made a number of useful suggestions, none of which were put into practice as such. The Committee o­n Strengthening the Charter was the first of a series of expert committees, “High-Level Panels” set up within the U.N. to review its functioning and its ability to respond to new challenges. There have also been a number of committees set up outside of the U.N. to look at world challenges and U.N. responses, such as the Commission o­n Global Governance.

While in practice there have been modifications in the ways the U.N. works, few of these changes have recognized an expert group’s recommendations as the source of the changes. Some of the proposals made would have strengthened some factions of the U.N. system over the then current status quo – most usually to strength the role of developing countries (the South) over the industrialized States (the North). While the vocabulary of “win-win” modifications is often used, in practice few States want to take a chance, and the status quo continues.

Now, with a new Secretary General who knows well how the U.N. works from his decade as High Commissioner for Refugees, U.N. reform is again “in the air”. There are an increasing number of proposals presented by governments and by non-governmental organizations associated with the U.N. The emphasis today is o­n what can be done without a revision of the Charter. Most of the proposals turn o­n what the Secretary General can do o­n his own authority. The Secretary General cannot go against the will of States – especially the most powerful States – , but he does have a certain power of initiative and can make changes under the cover of “better management”.

One of the most complete reform proposals has just been issued for discussion at the U.N. by the Government of China in a 27-page document. (1) Many of the proposals are very similar to suggestions made by the Association of World Citizens. The Chinese text has no footnotes as to what documents were read before writing the paper, so we will not suggest that they were “borrowed” from world citizens. We can o­nly say that great minds go along the same avenues!

The Chinese proposals are divided into three major categories:

1. Strengthening the conflict resolution, peacekeeping functions of the U.N.
2. Strengthening the capacity of the organization to promote economic and social wellbeing while at the same time protecting the environment.
3. Strengthening the management aspects both at U.N. Headquarters and in the field, strengthening the cooperation among U.N. Agencies, regional government organizations and new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

The paper begins with its aims and spirit.

“The world is undergoing major developments, transformation, and adjustment, but peace and development remains the call of our day. The trends of global multi-polarity, economic globalization, IT application and cultural diversity are surging forward; and countries are becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent. Yet, the world faces growing uncertainties and destabilizing factors as well as interwoven global threats and challenges that keep cropping up. Against this backdrop China is ready to work together with other countries to forge a new form of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice, and win-win cooperation, to build a community with a shared future for mankind, and to build an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity.”

The Chinese proposals merit close attention. Most are not radically new. The proposals are very “State-centric”. The role and capacity for action of non-governmental organizations is never mentioned. However, it is not so much the proposals themselves as the timing which is important. The reform of the U.N. has become a major policy issue. No other great power has put forward such a comprehensive set of proposals and none seem likely to do so. It is likely that given the large place given to a greater say in development policy and practice for the countries of the South, most of the 134 States which are considered “South” will support the Chinese proposals and not present counter proposals. China is not currently tied down in regional armed conflicts, and there is a strong “win-win” spirit in the presentation. Thus we can look to Chinese leadership o­n the U.N. Reform agenda.

Note:

1. Available through the Passblue website of independent analysis of U.N. issues in a 3 January 2018 article by Kacie Candela

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René Wadlow is a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Task Force o­n the Middle East, president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of World Citizens, and editor of Transnational Perspectives. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

He is also the GHA member: http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=272

Original: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/01/chinese-leadership-on-u-n-reform/

The GHA project of UN reform is here: http://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=769

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