CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON GEOPOLITICS PRESS RELEASE

 Westward Movement of Civilizations and Neo-Classical Geopolitics

In neo-classical geopolitics the Westward movement of civilizations is an important feature. Centrally located rivers and seas have been crucial to the rise of civilizations (for instance the Nile and Euphrates-Tigris, the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, to mention a few). Especially important have been the oceans (the Atlantic and the Pacific). These huge water areas will continue to dominate. The prediction “Age of the Pacific” is often used stating that it will be the coming focus of search for power. Here the large conflicts will arise. 

The basis of this theory is that main world civilizations have moved forward from China in the East to America in the West. In my essay “America, The Last Empire: Decline or Strength?” in the book “Information Warfare” by Winn Schwartau, 1996, there was a warning of a Pacific Era with communist China could be hegemon if Western nations did not wake up to this dangerous possibility.

I have now completed a lengthy essay for publication on the aforementioned subject (the preliminary title is Completion of Civilization in America). As an appendix I have also prepared the outline of a proposed Atlas of World Civilizations.

According to Sir Halford Mackinder in 1938 the Northern Atlantic was then the most desirable body of water on which a state could be located. It now seems the Pacific Ocean will be the most desirable body. Here we can find one of the main world civilizations, Japan, and the Western civilization represented by the nation of Australia. Also in 1938 Nicholas Spykman foresaw the irresistible rise of the Pacific Ocean as a key route for world trade. The relative position of the two oceans was according to Spykman shifting in the favour of the Pacific.

Director Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M., author, Sweden

Center for Research on Geopolitics

SECTION FOR PROGNOSTICISM

CRG offers foresight research based on classical geopolitics and national power assessment. The purpose is to interpret the signal in the information noise of the 21st century.

An important project is to produce an Atlas of Classical Geopolitics starting with presenting a preview in 2020/2021. Drafts will follow on the subject of The Ongoing World Civil War and Hegemony as well as Cartography – Maps of Geopolitics.

The online center is based in Sweden and seeks to offer prognostic for the future. It seems today as there are two future perspectives that can be expected: change that opens the world to a new future similar to what took place in 1865 to 1900. The alternative is decline and catastrophe.

Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M. is author and director. He has served as prosecutor, assistant judge, enforcement service officer and senior enforcement service officer at various times for 30 years in Sweden. His first book was published in 1971 (co-authored) and he is represented in the catalogue of the Royal Library, Sweden’s national library, with almost sixty titles of which 15 are books. 

Haggman has travelled extensively in Asia on fact finding tours from 1967 to 2001.

Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M.

Author, director

Center for Research on Geopolitics (CRG) 

www.geopoliticsresearch.wordpress.com _________________________________________________________________

Center for Research on Geopolitics (CRG), SWEDEN. 

Director: Mr. Bertil Häggman, LL.M., author, director E-mail: bertilhaggman@hotmail.com

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTED BOOK REVIEWS FOR CCR

Through 2019 I as book review editor for the Comparative Civilizations Review would bring publishers’ review copies to the annual meetings and distribute them to attendees who volunteered to review them. 

The obstacles to in-person conferences presented by the pandemic, plus an increased reluctance of book publishers to provide review copies, make a change in the CCR book-reviewing process imperative.

I expect that we are all booklovers, perhaps all the more now, each with an idea of what books, new or old, are CCR-relevant and worth reviewing.  

Please tell me which books in your library or on your to-buy list you would like to review for CCR; or just send reviews!

If I get a deluge of reviews, or a drought, I may reach out to this list once again. I hope for a reasonable balance, but better a glut than a famine!  

Please email your reviews or proposals (as MS Word documents) to me at 

dow@ucla.edu

David Wilkinson

Book Review Editor

Comparative Civilizations Review

Give Generously to the Noble Cause: Send a Child to School in India

Contribute to Ninash Foundation:  Promoting Literacy in India from 1996 to 2019

Dr. Ashok Kumar Malhotra, founder/president, Mrs. Linda Marie Drake as treasurer and members of the board of the Ninash Foundation (ww.ninash.org) are celebrating 23 Years of Promoting Literacy in India.

We believe that illiteracy among female and minority children of India is the root cause of issues like overpopulation, poverty, poor health, racial and religious conflicts in India. Through the “Ninash Foundation: A Kitchen Table Local Charity,” our team has  been promoting literacy in remote villages of India where majority of these underserved illiterate children live. For the past 23 years, with the assistance of more than 300 US college students, dozens of faculty and members of the community, the Ninash Foundation has helped build seven schools in the remote villages of Dundlod and Mahapura in Rajasthan as well as in Kuran and Sagbara in Gujarat.

Ninash’s experiment of promoting literacy among female and minority children that started with 50 underserved children in 1996 is now bearing tremendous dividends for these underprivileged children in these four villages. Now in 2019, there are more than 1800 children getting superb education learning four languages (regional language of Gujarati or Rajasthani, national language of Hindi, International language of English and Global language of Computer) in these remote villages. More than 250 graduates from these schools are going to colleges of their choice completing degrees in medicine, engineering, computers, business and other secretarial professions along with opening their private businesses. Beside promoting literacy among the neglected female and minority children, Ninash has undertaken such successful projects as: giving away more than 380 dairy goats to the  poorest of the poor villagers, water filtration for clean drinking water, funds for building roads as well as parks, playgrounds, libraries, computers, books and recreational games such as basketball, ping pong table, musical instruments, cricket set, volleyball net, carom and equipment for exercise.
This educational experiment also has had ripple effect leading to building self-esteem in the people of these four remote villages, who in turn have started new businesses and built modern houses as well as hospitals and dispensaries. Each village is growing and developing at a faster pace now to get its fair share from the growing Indian economy.

As Ninash raises more funds from compassionate donors like you during this year and future years, it will be able to promote literacy among other underserved children who live in thousands of remote villages of India. Please become a part of this compassionate team to send an underprivileged child to school in India. Open your hearts to contribute to this noble cause. Please go to www.ninash.org to donate through PayPal. Your contribution is like a giving tree, which keeps giving for generations.

NUREMBERG TRIALS FOR COMMUNISM PLANNED

Swedish retired attorney and author Bertil Haggman was on the Organizing Committee on November 7, 2019, when the Appeal for a Nuremberg of Communism (Bukovsky-Cristin document) was introduced in the Senate of the Italian Republic in Rome by Prof. Renato Cristin, Prof. Roberto de Mattei, Dr. Dario Fertilio, senator Adolfo Urso, senator Lucio Malan and Vito Comencini.

It is an international initiative which expresses an idea of recently passed former dissident Vladimir Bukovskij. He believed that Communism should receive the same historical and moral judgment of irrevocable condemnation that Nazism has rightly received.

The thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was taken as an opportunity to make concrete elaborations with the aim of initiating a process that has the meaning and value of a Nuremberg of Communism.

“Communism did not fall with the Berlin Wall. This ideology is still alive in the world, in states and parties that are openly communist and in political and cultural thought that minimizes and tries to erase the crimes of communism, as if it were a good idea which only happened to coincide with the rise of one brutal regime after another across decades and continents…” (from the Appeal).

Among the first 200 signatories of the appeal is Antonio Tajani (former president and currently member of the European Parliament, Italy), Prof.Stéphane Courtois (historian, author of the Black Book of Communism, France), Robert R. Reilly (director of the Westminster Institute, former director of The Voice of America, former member of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, USA), Mart Laar (former prime minister and chairman of the supervisory Board of the Bank of Estonia), Erhard Busek (former vice-chancellor of the Austrian Republic, Austria), Vladimir Kara-Murza (Chairman, Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, Russia) and many others.

The Platform of European Memory and Conscience joins and supports this initiative because it is in line with its goals and projects. In 2014, for example, the project Justice 2.0 – International Justice for the Imprescriptible Crimes of Communism was introduced, the purpose of which is to raise international awareness about the issue of unpunished international crimes of Communism and to contribute to finding ways of achieving international justice for these crimes. Currently the investigation of the killings along the former Iron Curtain is ongoing in Germany and Poland in cases of those Germans and Poles who tried to escape and were killed by the Communist border guards in former Czechoslovakia.

“The Platform is in fact the only organisation capable of preparing such tribunal in symbolic way, and the experience of our members seems to be crucial to do it in a legal way,”says Łukasz Kamiński, President of the Platform and one of the signatories.

The other Platform representatives and member organisation signatories include María Schmidt (director of the Institute of the Twentieth Century, director of the House of Terror, Hungary), Paweł Ukielski (former deputy president of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland, current deputy director of the Warsaw Rising Museum), Andreja Valič Zver (member of the Executive Board of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, Slovenia), Marion Smith (executive director, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, USA), Ana Blandiana (writer, president of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism from Sighet, Romania), Ronaldas Račinskas (executive director, Secretariat of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation regimes in Lithuania, Prof. Antoine Arjakovsky (historian, Research director, Collège des Bernardins, Paris, France), Wolfgang-Christian Fuchs (president, Inter-Asso, Germany),Jonila Godole (executive director, Institute for Democracy, Media & Culture, Albania), Robert Kostro (director, Polish History Museum, Poland), Gjon Radovani (chairman of the Board, MEMO Center, Albania), Florian Razvan-Mihalcea (president, Timisoara Society, Romania), Milos Suchma (president, Czech and Slovak Association of Canada), Marek Mutor (director, History Centre Zajezdnia, Poland), Dr Jarosław Szarek (President of the Institute of National Remembrance, Poland), Johann Grünbauer (chairman, Foundation History of Totalitarian Regimes and their Victims, Netherlands).

________________________________________


Appeal for Nuremberg Trials for Communism

The thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall presents us with a valuable opportunity. We can not only make a desperately-needed contribution to historical memory, but also develop and support an anti-totalitarian culture, broad-ranging and forward-looking. We take this opportunity to propose the creation of Nuremberg Trials for Communism.

The Nuremberg Trials, held from 1945 to 1946, tried and condemned the crimes of National Socialism and its leaders, handing down a definitive judicial, moral, and political judgment on that instance of totalitarianism. The trials made clear to the world that Nazism was evil and destructive to its own people, and would not be accepted anywhere in the world again. Communism, which has caused more deaths and mass suffering worldwide than Nazism for much longer, has never been called to account in a global court such as Nuremberg.

Since 1917, communist or socialist dictatorships around the world have caused more than 100 million deaths. Not only are they responsible for widespread suppression of individual liberties and incitement of class hatred, but also for the genocide and mass killings inevitable under communist regimes. As we all know, genocides and massacres are universally recognized as crimes against humanity.

Today, after the catastrophic results of so-called “real socialism” and of all the other dictatorships over time rooted in communist ideology (as today in places like Venezuela or Cuba), both historic and current events beg for a similarly final judgment – not only a verdict on the actions of individuals, but also a political and moral judgment on the inevitable results of this ideology. Communism’s crimes against humanity must be broadcast and punished.

Communism did not fall with the Berlin Wall. This ideology is still alive in the world, in states and parties that are openly communist and in political and cultural thought that minimizes and tries to erase the crimes of communism, as if it were a good idea which only happened to coincide with the rise of one brutal regime after another across decades and continents.

To push back against these apologist influences, we urge the creation of Nuremberg Trials for Communism, a global trial that scrutinizes the very real crimes of this ideology, assigns political and institutional responsibility for them, punishes its moral degeneracy, and makes clear to all communism’s intrinsic inhumanity and incompatibility with free societies.

We are well aware that such a project would encounter practical difficulties and legal limitations. Even so, we believe that such barriers will not be able to stand in the way of a historic political, ethical, and cultural trial, which we see as a duty to humanity imposed upon us by historical conscience.

In the name of millions exterminated in the past, and to safeguard future generations from a recurrence, Nuremberg Trials for Communism must be enacted as soon as possible.

Add your signature here.



Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M., author, member, Publicistklubben (National Press Club), Sweden, member, Organizing Committee Appeal for Nuremberg Trials for Communism,



E-mail: bertilhaggman@hotmail.com

The Founding of the East-Slavic Kingdom – The Gothic Hypothesis – A Research Project

The Founding of the East-Slavic Kingdom – The Gothic Hypothesis – A Research Project

The Normanists and anti-Normanists have since the 19th century dominated the theoretical debate concerning the founding of the East-Slavic kingdom. There is, however, an alternative theory proposed in the the 1980s by the Swedish scholar and archivist Dr Stefan Söderlind (1911 – 2003).
I have recently in a short article in the American scholarly journal Comparative Civilizations Review (”Svealand, Götaland and the Rise of the East-Slavic Kingdom – Response to Piotr Mutzionak” (No. 73, Fall 2016) presented this theory. The article is available on the internet at http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr.

There are influential forces in Scandinavia and Russia supporting the old and in my view somewhat outdated Normanist and anti-Normanist theories. The Söderlind theory would in my view be of benefit to Ukrainian historiography.

In my article I offered some preliminary views. The core of the alternative Swedish theory is that the Goths created a powerful First Great Gothic Kingdom in the east that lasted from the arrival of the the Goths and other East Germanic tribes in the Pontic area in the second half of the 3rd century AD. They showed great military and organizational skill and created a kingdom that reached from the Black to the Baltic Sea. King Ermanarics kingdom was destroyed by the invading Huns at the end of the 4th century AD. The Goths continued to have a seperate organization during Hunnic occupation. After the defeat of the Huns in 450 AD the remaining Goths created a Second Great Gothic Kingdom in the east that was later related to the Kyivan Rus founded in the 9th century. Gothic influence lasted to the invasion of the Mongols in the 1240s. It can be argued that the Russian empire was founded in 1480. Grand Duke Ivan III that year proclaimed Muscovy’s independence of the Mongols.
Dr. Söderlind first presented his theory in English in the article ”The realm of the Rus’ : A contribution to the problem of the rise of the East-Slavic kingdom” in journal Scandinavian Language Contacts, Cambridge University Press, in 1984.

The Gothic hypothesis can be traced back to Friedrich Heinrich Strube de Pyrmont (1704 - 1776), Theophilus (Gottlieb) Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738) and Herbert Gordon Latham (1812 – 1888). Söderlind expanded it to the Red-Blond-People hypothesis. It claiims tha the old forms Rus’ and ٭Rud’ (English red) started to spread among Slavs of the area from circa 150 – 350 AD. The Goths living in the same accepted the name for themselves around 400 – 600. It was borrowed into Arabic as Rūs. The ethnic name Goths has the same root as the ethnic names gautar and gutar in Old Swedish. The Swedish götar and gutar lived in both West and East Götaland and from East Götaland gautar/götar emigrated to the Island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, it should be added.

After having emigrated to the Lower Vistula/Weichsel are in present day Poland the Goths migrated to the area north of the Black Sea in what is today Ukraine. Some of the Goths were driven westward by the Huns. They later became famous for military achievements in Italy and Spain.
The Slavic neighbors called the ruling Goths the Rus or The Red-Blond People.

Söderlind in his original article in English in 1984 suggests the following chronology to explain the rise of the name Rus:
150 – 350 AD
The Slavic name for the Goths is formed. There are two variants from Proto-Slavic stems٭rūsŭ and ٭rūdŭ (red). It is used by the Slavs as ٭Rusi and ٭Rudi (the Red-Blond People).
Circa 450 AD
The Slavic name for the Goths is in common use in the area north of the Black Sea. That includes other East Germanic tribes like the Eruli, who settled east of the Amali Goths.
Circa 400 – 600 AD
The Goths accept the Slavic name for themselves. In the Gothic language the name is ٭RauÞs.
Circa 600 – 800
The Ancient Greeks and the Finno-Ugric tribes in the north borrow the Gothic name for the Rus: Rhōs in Greek, in Estonian Roots (which is also the word for Sweden) and Finnish Ruotsi, likewise the word for Sweden. The Arabs borrow the Slavic name for their Ar-Rus.
Circa 800 – 1100
Both Finns and Slavs start using the name of the Goths also for Sweden. The Nestor Chronicle mentioned the Rus’ being Swedes in 862 AD. In the 9th century the Kyivan Rus was founded.
More information on the project is available from Bertil Haggman on request.
Glimakra, Sweden, in July 2018

Mr. Bertil Haggman, LLM, author
Chevalier, Order of Merit, Ukraine
Member, National Press Club, Sweden
Email: bertilhaggman@hotmail.com

Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation for Global Connectedness and World Peace

Dear Readers:

Please be aware of the upcoming "Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation for Global Connectedness and World Peace" to be held from January 22 to 27, 2019.

Please contact Ashok Malhotra, a long time ISCSC member, Ereritus SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, and President of the Ninash Foundation, if you would like to present a paper or workshop on yoga, meditation, or contemplative practice in various religions or traditions, as soon as possible.

He may be reached at Ashok.Malhotra@oneonta.edu or you can visit the Ninash Foundation website at www.ninash.org

The site of the Yoga International Conference will be the Catholic University (Dharmaram College) in Bangalore, India. They can accommodate 120 people in 60 double rooms with modern facilities.