Initially, it had been designed in the context of resistance against the NATO Double Track Decision.
Let me describe my view of why we urgently need to do something for peace. And I mean for the big, all-encompassing inner and outer peace.
We have to come to terms both with ourselves and our environment. And there also has to be peace between humans and nations. Both get more and more necessary in order to make a future possible at all.
In order to achieve this, we need a strong change in both our mental concepts and our awareness.
After all, it cannot be accepted that the “mental supremacy” is under the rule of persons who, for instance, believe that:
An evil man carrying a weapon can only be stopped by a good man carrying a weapon.
(NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre 2012)
If you apply this to countries, it means that
“An evil country with an army can only be stopped by a good country with an army!“
You can easily see that the concept of moral categories, such as “good” and “evil” will not help and that it is better to continue on the way of enlightenment and democracy.
Among other things, this means that we leave the monopoly on power and weapons with the society (nation) we live in. After all, we already ceded quite a bit of it to the country as part of our civilized progress.
In order to make this system work, society must be enabled to avoid a state a rule of injustice – or even dictatorship – by public control mechanisms: among other things by a clear separation of power. And it also has to repress lobby structures, because they can easily turn into a dictatorship of the capital or, even worse, a militaristic business complex.
The requirement for such peace in a country and between countries and nations (including problematic regions) is that we develop an awareness of the fact that this can only succeed if we all win our very individual inner peace.
Consequently, if you want collective peace, you need the inner peace of all the individual persons inside the collective system. In other words, we have to come to terms with our own selves. This might be quite hard, but it is probably our only chance to develop a new understanding of punishment and justice. An understanding that truly makes us bigger as a society.
Does anybody really believe prisons are the only way to achieve a peaceful society inside a country? Or is it not more like they cause the opposite? How can a society gain social peace if poverty and wealth are due to an undue polarization?
Consequently, one of the things we need to achieve is disproving some impossible philosophers, as for instance Ayn Rand (one of the important masterminds of the US Republican Party) and start a “new” enlightenment 2.0. For a start, we have to counteract any sort of indoctrination, because that is the worst enemy of an enlightened society.
This is why, through our project peace and together with Jolly Kunjappu, I try to make a tiny contribution towards stabilizing the fragile balancing act between peace and relinquishing some of said peace in favour of an alleged sense of security.
On a personal level, I also want to remind people that, wherever there is conflict, the solution without murder and death, torture and rape, is always the better way out. In fact, it is usually the only way to get stable and sustainable solutions. And I also wish to strengthen confidence and the belief that this is absolutely possible and realistic.
In other words: I would prefer to follow the metaphor of “Ghandy”, rather than the one of a tyrant.
(Written in Peking)
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
Again in a nutshell:
Being “honest to yourself” is the first requirement for “inner peace”, which again is the requirement for the “great peace”. This is why we need inspiration and impulses for “inner honesty” – which is one reason why Jolly and yours truly invite you to attend the PEACE kick-off meeting on April, 28th, at the IF Forum.
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