the article that you wrote not so long ago wasn't titled sweden's elites more loyal to nato than to their people and that's a pretty controversial statement what makes you say that well first of all the foundation that i'm the director of is an independent foundation that means we can say what we want we're not dependent on state money and we're not i'm dependent on corporate money and that means that we have we're doing free research and my point is that the last twenty is also basically since all of parliament died and since the e.u. membership of sweden sweden has stopped having an independent foreign policy we have come very close to nato without a formal. membership application yet this has happened basically without any public discussion there's not a wish to have a public discussion which was already chillies sweden's basic policy that everything we did in terms of common security neutrality disarmament and all that

was something that was anchored in a public discussion and the sweets would know what their country was standing for so i think this loyalty among elites is a problem because we need a public discussion a much more intensive discussion about whether to join nato or not and how we get sweden to contribute again to disarmament including nuclear evolution and formalised speaking sweden is of course and no one aligned and natural country and yet if we look at some of the recent statements and actions taken by swedish foreign minister carl bildt who played a very hawkish role i have to say in the ukrainian crisis. you know you think that sweden is a more fervently problem nato than some of nader's founding members how do you explain the sudden shift from the challenged to defacto intervention is what is good you take it up the neutrality because we are formally nonaligned in sweden bought neutrality was scrapped long ago the argument was an awfully end of the cold war. or in the dissolution of the soviet union you could not be neutral because

there were no two part is to be neutral between this of course is intellectual luncheons we could still have neutral states who would be helpful for instance as mediators in the international criminal conflict areas around the world so how did it happen well there were people who want to sweden to finally say goodbye to everything that sweden or regionally stood for and to get closer to the united states and nato this was wrong particularly by the social democratic party and prime minister goran passion. and foreign minister anna lindh at the time it was a policy shift simply yeah absolutely and i wonder how much of this policy shift this u. turn and swedish foreign policy could be really attributed to the power brokers some of the names you just mentioned but i would like to bring out the name of carl bildt once again because he's ties to the euro's military industry our well known

it's not so secret and you know he is believed to have made millions on the war in iraq because of far his previous position as a former board member at the leg meeson investment firm and. i guess he's views on foreign intervention haven't there changed much since then so i wonder if this u. turn this ship that we mentioned earlier is more institutional in nature or simply due to the influence of particular individuals well that's a combination of course i mean combine it is not responsible for the overall change will sweden's position on international affairs but at the moment of course of the last six seven years has been the foreign minister and a former prime minister two i have been surprised myself because it's not really statesmanship to compare russia with nazi germany in the case of of you crying and a very hawkish attitude also and a little founded attitude. to the question of georgia in two thousand and eight but

i do not like to see foreign policy in general as just run by individual interests and there is an inference of course from that but this is a political ideological struggle and as i said to you the if the argument is that you can't be neutral you cannot have your own policy anymore you must belong to one camp you know it's a very limited intellect that decides that but if you run operate on that assumption then you end up where you end up namely in confrontational policies what i would like to see as a peace researcher is the diffusion of this tension in europe and at the end a solid negotiated solution to various problems speed syria or you cry and bought and that's what we have to say you know if what you have on yourselves are fighter planes and a lot of militaristic equipment then that is what you choose are all the intelligent conflict resolution. to put it crudely if you only have a hammer in your toolbox you will see all problems in your home is something that

has to be hammered down sweden has this reputation of where you know democratic progressive and peace promoting society i mean if americans and russians agree on anything it is that their image of sweden as this enlightened democracy and yet. you know when you know when you talk about people like mr build again somebody who made money on the war on the killing of hundreds of thousands of individuals you know in this country of russia you know we are always criticized for corruption and democratic record but i don't think even in russia a person like this with such a track record would rise to the position of foreign minister let alone prime minister so i wonder if swedes see any problem with their newly found foreign policy direction and you know the man who spearheaded the well let me tell you this is not a swedish problem or a russian problem only it's a global problem there's something called the military in. media academic complex

this is structures outside democratic control as eisenhower said already in the fifty's and we have the same in sweden we have it in denmark i think i think it's time the world finds out that well of course scandinavian countries a democratic and real and civil welfare oriented and immigrant you know the image you say we have but if i may remind you denmark has participated in for in wars in all over the place since one thousand nine when we bombed yugoslavia we have been an occupying power for years when the present secretary general of nato and as for us moves in was a prime minister of denmark we are now afghanistan we were a major bomber together with norway in libya and we were the only country together with friends who thought that it was a good idea to follow the american idea of bombing or intervening militarily in syria lease interest on money interests they are very close allies between money people corporate people and politicians they are supported by in the majority of

the western so-called free media and there's nothing to be surprised about what i'm concerned about is that it always are small people around the world who pays the price for these policies and i don't think that we can have a democracy if we continue to have the main market the military industrial media academic complex it goes against democracy because you go out in any street anywhere in the world and what people want is peace but what they get is militarism instead and military conflict resolution which never solves the problems in the first place and you look at iraq you look at afghanistan you look at libya lucas' syria you look now wherever you turn where military has been used and war has been you know the solution things are worse today than they were before my foundation is working for the for the norm of the united nations charter which everybody has forgotten and violates from east to west north and south that peace shelby established by peaceful means the charter of the united nations is a gandhian gandhi. charter based on the idea of scrapping war abolishing

war and when humanity has problems with each other we negotiate we talk we consult we facilitate we treat each other as human beings instead of bombing each other this is a civilizational problem that is much bigger than sweden on card bills i'm sure it's much bigger than sweden and call bill that you get as you just pointed out and that sort of accident seems to be spreading all across this candy navvy and peninsula one country your neighbor finland is also discussing a possibility of joining nato and of course we're both finland and sweden these no one alignment approach was a very cost effective way off ensuring their security during the cold war does it mean the fact that they are talking publicly talking about joining nato doesn't mean that they see more today russia as a bigger threat than the soviet union oh you know well that that's a perverse that you have today that that people arguing we need to join nato today

when we don't have a cold war and we don't have a soviet union we don't have a warsaw pact whereas they could survive as neutral states when these things existed this is bizarre to me i mean this is pure propaganda the real russian military expenditures a seven seven percent of nato. now if we could survive as neutral states together with switzerland austria finland and sweden at the time without own defenses and not being part of the nato i wonder why on earth we at all need nato today when the warsaw pact has disappeared but secondly i also wonder how could we survive at that time when tension was much bigger when there were much more nuclear weapons in europe etc so i mean this is bad intellectual thinking but i tell you the ministers of foreign affairs and defense and prime ministers at least here are spending more money on spin doctors and marketing their on intellectual views than they do on listening to. some people happen to know something about

these things it's part of a propaganda war yeah i agree with you on the propaganda side of it but i think this approach is actually paying off because if sweden or finland were indeed to join nato that would provoke some sort of reaction on the part of russia at least in far as far as military calculus is concerned so there would be certain changes and then military posturing for example more troops on the border you know some of their rockets will have to be. repositioned let's put it this way so after all these imagine threat could become a very real threat at least as far as military planning is concerned well yes i don't disagree with you i have always been against confrontations humiliations speaking down to people threats and all that because it doesn't help conflict resolution there is not one minister in europe who has advisers who know something about conflicts they may have international lawyers they may have military expertise diplomatic expertise to advise them and guide them they have

nobody who knows about nonviolence come for the resolution conflict psychology or anything like that while there are tons of military academies and research centers in both your part of the world and our part of the world there is no peace academies you can go on like that there is no resources set off for creating peace by peaceful means and so what i would like to have rather than continuing a long discussion about military threats and confrontations is to say and that's what peace research is about that is like a doctor saying what how will we create health instead of continuing to have a disease that is to discuss what security and defense is the next thirty to forty or fifty years and it is not something we can provide in any country with military none of what faces humanity east to west north and south none of it can be solved by military means or fighter aircraft or satellites or nuclear weapons military is outdated it should go like cannibalism. and slavery and child labor it doesn't

belong to civilization mr totally agree here but we have to take a very short break here when we come back peace as mr oberg just pointed out is still touted as a universal value but to all fund compromised for geo political ambitions have war and conflict become policy tools that's coming out in a few moments on worlds apart. the amount. of fluid. pirtle outlook.

if it was terrible they were i'm very hard to get a problem gambler a plug that sat close up her require plugs. a little. oh i'm

. flummoxed please. mother. welcome back to worlds apart really discussing peace and security in europe and beyond with peace researcher mr over just before the break we were discussing nato

expansion plans and you can argue that this whole crisis in ukraine a region aided from you know somebody is decision to take ukraine into the majors and belive this is at least. russia's view of the problem and while so far ukraine is proving a bit hard for nader to swallow i wonder if sweden and finland could become leaders consolation prizes how likely do you think it is that sweden or famine bill join nato in the near future and doesn't really matter at all because as far as i understand swedish government is already called parading with nato without the formal endorsement of its public the last twenty is sweden has definitely in all indicators politically militarily technically it cetera moved closer to the u.s. to to nato so close that people you will hear in sweden now who say as well

why don't we get married when we are anyhow living as fiancés. and so it is presented sooner or later as will be presented sooner or later as the only option and that is why this threat from russia is needed you know most people think that you make an objective analysis of threats and then you build your defense according to what threatens you it's the other way around you have a military industrial media academic complex as i mentioned and to have that running you construct your enemy is speaking about this very close relationship you just alluded to you know these three ounce a day dynamic i think earlier this month it was rated government reach granted nato and the united states. the right to use its airspace for. you know flying missions connected to your cranes and that seems to be like a favor that you would axed and only two are very very close partner but as far as i understand the majority of this british public is still against this very cozy

relationship yes you know you're quite right there is clear hesitancy in the swedish population about the member full membership and that has to do with two things it will be very foreign and very difficult for anybody to persuade swedes that swedish troops should operate militarily have brought in a crisis situation in paragraph five of of article five of nato secondly it will be close to impossible i think to persuade sweets to accept nuclear weapons and if you join fully you become responsible for nato as nuclear policy is and as you know this is greatly great great. reason for hesitancy among the people but you can still threaten there's something called fear ology if you if you make people believe that certain countries are going to swallow

you tomorrow you can make people accept almost anything and it is that propaganda that i'm trying with my foundation and my colleagues to stand up against because intellectually it's not correct it's not truthful well i think it's also not correct on the humanitarian grounds are you just mentioned how swedish foreign policy has become more militarist but isn't that also true of the broader western approach because you know the blodgett in ukraine is not the first occurrence i mean appear to have seen similar. wars or conflicts being ignited in the balkans in iraq and libya in syria you name it and it seems that europe cannot how by being dragged into all sorts of what myers and wars has more become something that no longer scares your dad that's part of it you know if you run wars all the time here in the it becomes a kind of normal thing the other thing is that media aren't doing a great disservice to humanity by always covering war but never covering peace we

don't have conflict journalism we have war reporting we have nobody who is interested in peace building and how countries solve their problems before without too weaponry and without warfare this is a disease the drama of war is so fascinating for media and many media owned by corporations that also produce weapons and you see the circle of this media complex that i have mentioned so yes but there is one good change and that is that wars between countries has gone down statistically whereas we have an upsurge in internal violence in many countries and there you have the argument of humanitarian intervention that if you have no reason to use weapons anymore if you can't find a place on a reason to exist then you say oh we need the military to bring in humanitarian aid and stop genocide and things. that the first nonsense about this was cost of zero where the idea of humanitarian intervention was sold of course falsely because it had nothing to do with the genocide there although there were violence i was

a mediator there between. albanians for four years so i know that place quite well but there was not a genocide planned what the americans did was to build the bomb steal bases three months after the bombing of nato in ninety nine and mr over it i think you made a point in one of your public lectures that the west for some reason lacks these institutional learning you know they said billeted to analyze periods military engagements and take it and you know to take that knowledge into account while planning future military operations and here in russia we reset or have difficulties understanding why the western memory so short isn't because every new generation of decision makers believe that they are smarter than their predecessors or perhaps is it because war and conflict have become very cynical policy tools this is a tool of advancing your geopolitical i've ten days if not yes and i think you you have you have a kind of. normalization of violence you train young man in violence you have

violence in the media your violence in the entertainment world you have violence in books you are going to any bookstore in the world or still books will be about history and wars. you can go on like this we are living in a militarist culture and we don't even see that we are if you take syria if you take libya we could have solve these problems i know it's a provocative statement i'm sure we could have solve these problems without weapons but what do we do we pump in weapons from all sides and believe that that helps anybody now you have hundred sixty thousand people and millions of refugees that's a result of that mr overcast somebody who reported both from libya and syria i don't think it's a provocative statement in fact i believe and that's maybe a controversial statement to say that. media especially in the west are sort of institutionalized to promote conflict because you know from the very beginning they turn to for trade conflict

a very stark binary picture you know these are the good guys these are the bad guys we're always on the right side of history and at the end rather than trying to you know mediate on how the communities come together they and dab exacerbating the differences and promoting the conflict in the long run i think you are very right to publish in your chart touching some something which i would say is cultural deep culture deep cosmological it is part of the christian culture to divide things into two left wing right wing male female them and us and etc i've always argued you know with a little smile that we ought to have more hindus and buddhists and atheist and doing conflict resolution because they are able to see things as did not divided up into but maybe in thirty there were not two parties the serbs and the rest and yugoslavia for instance but that's how it was interpreted now we see again of confrontation and binary as you say the west versus putin and russia. and it's

always this there is only these parties there's a good guys and the bad guys and you know there is no conflict in the world where all the good signs is on one all the good guys are on one side and all the bad guys on the other this is probably ganda and this is the deep culture it is something we're not aware of is not true because i don't think that old all journalists are militarist or want war they are simply not aware that conflicts are much more complex and may have thirty parties and not two major pablo but also over all the history books exist for that exact reason to learn something from history and they've journalist decided to go to war zones i think it's incumbent on them to try to educate themselves now are you mention propaganda just a while earlier and i would totally agree with you that there is a very deliberate attempt to preserve this conflict over ukraine in black and white picture is black and white collars rather but at the same time what i think we can see both in germany and france in the united states there is this since to be also

divided in public opinion not all people are buying this very black and white picture i want i wonder if we can take that as a positive sign that some people in western societies are actually developing in antidote to all dads middle militarists rhetoric that their governments and their media have been feeding them for years oh you absolutely right and that opinion has existed all the time what our problem is that that opinion the ninety eight percent of humanity who wants peace and not weapons and war they don't get through the democratic process because the military system is outside democratic control secondly what you're pointing at here is a specific phenomenon that i think we're seeing the shias and it's a clear indication one after the other that the u.s. empire is slowly but surely going down the u.s. is going down because and you can return be in macro historians and everybody else it's going down all employers go down when they all. over militarize when they lose

legitimacy in the eyes of other people when they over extend their power and you know you have six seven hundred based facilities in under thirty countries now by the us around the world and all these of course at some point four miles apart and i take it as a very good sign and indicated that america was not able to stop a war on syria which was threatened again and again partly sang's to putin's your president say intervention and the idea about chemical design moment of syria but the nato allies did not come up and follow the us in let's have another war in syria now you crying is falling over the western policy that is falling apart also because it is hot headed it was a coup d'etat attempt in kiev by the west and all these sanctions which is now you know have no relevance in this case sanctions is not a tool it's not

a tool in iraq it was not a true tool in iran that serves any good purpose or conflict resolution so it's falling apart but i missed over it as it's falling apart and also costing a lot of lives as it cost in syria as it costing in your crank and i'm sure there will be some people will suffer from those sanctions and russia i'll be to hopefully know their great number but we all know how difficult it is to put an end to the conflict for example syria mean we mentioned this country several times throughout this program but i wonder if you have any tips on how to a white starting one because if we go back to the situation in ukraine most historians most political analysts would agree that it had all the makings all the potential conflict you know divided populations strategic geography a struggling economy and yet for more than two decades up until the last year the elites in ukraine avoided that conflict do you have any tips on how not to start

their war. yes it's very simple piece is something we can learn conflict resolution is something we can learn if we have academies if we have school education the university courses if you could take a maze in all countries in conflict understanding and conflict resolution we could phase out the military because the reason people use military falling to war is that they don't know better they are conflict illiterates they don't know there is an the sentences of peacemaking but mr oberg maybe if that's exactly the opposite maybe they have all the in the knowledge about the conflict and they're using that knowledge to. continue studying travel around the world because it seemed to me that there are people have become political categories rather than humanitarian categories and i wonder how we can make them a universal how we can make peace a universal value once again that would be put above all out of considerations including political considerations well i would be a little disagreeing with you here i think

a lot of people that's exclude those who want war and who are psychologically mentally ill who want war and like love to see killing but i think most people accept war ordinary citizens and all that they accept their politicians going to war because they don't see alternatives and therefore it's not enough to criticize wars and vet weapons or interventions what we need is somebody would say is how it should be done instead and that's what my foundation and a few others are doing we saying how it should be done instead of just trying to sizing because criticizing is a dead end if you don't have solutions ok mr overton fortunately we have to wrap it up i really appreciate you being on the show as well as there weren't that you've been doing all around the world especially in the balkans mediating among those communities thank you and to our viewers please keep the conversation going on out of you tube and facebook pages and i hope to see your again same place same time here on worlds apart.

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plays lead. the headlines on a russian humanitarian convoy is finally on the move after being stalled for three days its cargo for civilians trapped in the east ukraine conflict is undergoing checks on the border. escalates in the u.s. town of ferguson with police using tear gas military weapons on the power of arrest protests. shot dead by an officer. also the kurdish fighters attempt to push back from the islamic state amid claims all sides of the.