Rising to the Challenge
of Peace
by David Krieger, November 25, 2003
It is very special to be back in Nagasaki,
a city dedicated to peace. In the Nuclear Age peace has become
our most important challenge. Our task is to rise to that challenge.
My hope is that each of you will become the peace leaders that
our troubled world so badly needs.
Let me share with you a poem
I wrote, which I believe describes, at least in part, the situation
today.
| War
is Too Easy
If politicians had to fight the wars
they would find another way.
Peace is not easy, they say.
It is war that is too easy –
too easy to turn a profit, too easy
to believe there is no choice,
too easy to sacrifice
someone else’s children.
Someday it will not be this way.
Someday we will teach our children
that they must not kill,
that they must have the courage
to live peace, to stand firmly
for justice, to say no to war.
Until we teach our children peace,
each generation will have its wars,
will find its own ways
to believe in them. |
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As long as
someone else’s children can be sacrificed on the altar
of war, wars will continue. The US war in Iraq was not sanctioned
by the United Nations and is outside the boundaries of international
law. It was a war sold to the American people and the people
of the world on the basis of the imminent threat of Iraq’s
use of weapons of mass destruction, and yet no weapons of
mass destruction have been found. Many
more American soldiers have now died in Iraq since Mr. Bush
announced the end of the major combat operations on May
1, 2003 than died in the so-called major combat phase of
the war, and yet no weapons of mass destruction have been
found. Thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed and
injured in the war, and perhaps tens of thousands of Iraqi
soldiers. The web site Iraqbodycount.org, which provides
information on reported civilian casualties, reports that
some 7,900 to 9,700 Iraqi civilians have died in the war.
That is some two-and-a-half to three times the number of
innocent civilians that died in the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center, and yet no weapons of mass destruction
have been found in Iraq.
Would you join me in
a moment of silence for the innocent victims of this war
and of all wars. |
Peace
There is a
Roman dictum, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
This has been diligently followed for over 2,000 years. It has
always resulted in more war. We need a new dictum: “If you
want peace, prepare for peace.” This is our challenge.
I’d like to share some ideas that I believe
are important in a discussion about peace. These ideas can be
organized using the letters that form the word “peace.”
1. Perspective
The Nuclear Age began only 58 years ago, a mere
nanosecond in geological time. Scientists tell us that the universe
began 15 billion years ago, in the immensely distant past. We
can conceive of the life of the universe as a 15,000 page book,
with each page representing a million years. In this book, the
“Big Bang” would occur on page one and then thousands
of pages would represent the expansion of the universe and the
creation of stars. The Earth would have been formed around page
10,500. The beginning of life on Earth, the first single-celled
creatures, would have occurred on about page 11,000. And then
over the next 4,000 pages, you could read about life developing.
Only three pages from the end of this 15,000 page book would our
human ancestors appear. It would not be until the last word on
the last page of the book that human civilizations would appear.
The Nuclear Age would fall in the period – the punctuation
mark – of the last sentence of the last page of the history
of the universe.
So, in the development of the universe, of all
that has preceded us in time and on this planet, the Nuclear Age
is infinitesimally tiny, and yet it is incredibly important for
it is the funnel through which we must pass to move into the future.
For the first time in history, a species (homo sapiens)
has developed technology capable of destroying itself and most
of life on the planet.
We need this perspective of our place in
time and geological history to have a sense of how extraordinarily
rare and precious we are.
2. Education
We are all born as blank slates. We are unformed
and uninformed. It is only by education that we develop our views
and prejudices. It is only by education that we draw boundaries
that include some and exclude others. Education shapes our view
of the world. We can educate for peace or for war. We can educate
to create critical thinkers or to create individuals who will
charge into battle or support wars without thinking. Our education
largely determines our willingness to fight in wars (or to send
others to fight), or to fight for peace.
At the outset of the Nuclear Age, Albert Einstein,
the greatest scientist of the 20th century, observed, “The
splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of
thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
If we are to avoid this “unparalleled catastrophe,”
which continues to hang over our heads, we must educate ourselves
and in turn educate others about upholding human dignity for all
and finding alternatives to violence. It is helpful in this sense
to look to the lives of great peace heroes, such as Mahatma Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela and Linus Pauling. Also
among the great peace educators and leaders of our time is your
president, Daisaku Ikeda.
We must also educate for global citizenship, for
the shared responsibility of passing on the planet and life on
the planet intact to the next generation. Arundhati Roy, the great
Indian writer and activist, has said this about nuclear weapons,
whether or not they’re used: “They violate everything
that is humane; they alter the meaning of life. Why do we tolerate
them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail
the human race?” It is a question of education. These men
and these weapons should not be tolerated.
3. Appreciation
We live in an amazingly beautiful world, and each
of us is a miracle. Have you ever stopped to consider what a miracle
you are? All the things that we take for granted are such miracles:
that we can see this beautiful earth, its trees and streams and
flowers; that we can hear songs, that we have voices to speak
and sing; that we can communicate with each other; that we can
form relationships and can love and cherish each other; that we
can walk and breathe and do all the incredible things we take
for granted. If we can learn to appreciate how miraculous we truly
are, perhaps we can also appreciate that each of us is equally
a miracle. How can one miracle wish to injure or kill another?
The gift of life must be rooted in appreciation, which will give
rise to compassion and empathy.
4. Choice
We all have a choice about what we do with our
lives. We can devote our lives to accumulation of material things,
which is culturally acceptable, or we can set our sights on fulfilling
more compassionate goals aimed at building a peaceful world.
The Earth Charter, a wonderful document that was
created with input from people all over the world, begins with
these words: “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s
history, a time when humanity must choose its future.” But
humanity will not choose by a vote. The choice will be made by
the individual choices of each of us. Each choice matters.
The Earth Charter further states: “The choice
is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another
or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life.”
In 1955, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell,
a leading 20th century philosopher and social critic, issued a
manifesto in which they concluded: “There lies before us,
if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom.
Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our
quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember
your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way
lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before
you the risk of universal death.”
The two most powerful images that emerged from
the 20th century were the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion
and the view of Earth looking back from outer space. The mushroom
cloud represents universal destruction, while the view of Earth
from space represents the unique and solitary beauty of our planet,
the only planet we know of that harbors life, in a vast, dark
universe. These images represent polar opposite possibilities
for humanity’s future. Which will we choose?
We each have the power of choice.
5. Engagement
We need to become personally involved in the issues
of our time, and find our own ways to work for a peaceful future.
Among the important ways in which we can engage are by speaking
out and making our presence felt for a peaceful world. That means
opposing policies of violence and war. It means standing up for
the human dignity of everyone, everywhere. We must create a world
that works for all and we must begin where we are, but our vision
and our outreach must be global. We must ask more of our leaders,
and we must demand better leaders. We ourselves must become the
leaders who will change the world. The most important change has
always come from below and from outside the power structure.
We must become world citizens. This means citizens
of a polity that does not yet exist. By our commitment and our
vision we can create the structures and institutions that will
give rise to a Federation of the Peoples of Earth. We must transform
the United Nations into such a federation, and give life to the
International Criminal Court, which will hold all leaders accountable
for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
To fight for peace is to fight for life and the
future of our species and our planet. Our engagement and our endurance
are essential to our human survival.
My Hope for You
My hope for you is that you will choose peace
in all of its dimensions.
I believe that the place to begin is by choosing
hope. It is your belief that you can make a difference that will
allow you to make a difference. Put aside despair, apathy, complacency
and ignorance, and simply choose hope. It is the first step on
the path to peace.
Saint Augustine said, “Hope has two beautiful
daughters: anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and
courage to change them.” There is nothing wrong with anger
against injustice and you will certainly need courage to be a
non-violent warrior for peace.
You, the youth of Kyushu, and particularly of
Nagasaki, have special responsibilities to fight for a nuclear
weapons free world and to assure that no other city ever suffers
the fate that this city suffered on August 9, 1945. You must go
forth from Nagasaki and take the message of the hibakusha
to the world: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot co-exist.”
Today I visited the powerful peace statue, a symbol
of Nagasaki, in which the right hand of a God-like figure points
up toward the atomic bomb and the left hand is extended palm down
in a gesture of peace. The sculptor, Seibo Kitamura, wrote these
words: “After experiencing that nightmarish war, that blood-curdling
carnage, that unendurable horror, who could walk away without
praying for peace?”
We need you to pray for peace and also to
struggle for the triumph of humanity over these weapons of utter
destructiveness. May you be bold, may you be creative, may you
be persistent, and may you prevail!
David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age
Peace Foundation. He is the co-author with Daisaku Ikeda of Choose
Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age and the editor
of Hope in a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future.
This speech was delivered in Nagasaki to Soka Gakkai youth on
November 25, 2003.
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Readers
Comments
David,
your piece about the length of the "Nuclear Age"
is a gem. I must pass it round to my friends. I hope you
will not object to my editorial amendment: The Nuclear Age
would be ^^half the width of the dot^^ at the end of the
last sentence of the last page of the history of the universe.
"I measured the length of text on a page of a good-sized
book, and the width of the final dot. The thoughts that
move me emotionally more than any others are of the marvel
of evolution - from single-celled organisms that can find
their own food to humans who can think, calculate, take
an interest in and find out about things incredibly distant
in space and time. To destroy all that achievement and make
evolution start again from "insects and grass",
or from the bacteria at the bottom of the oceans, by apredictable
(and predicted) possible result of the inventions of our
generation would be our greatest possible disgrace.
-- Alan
Dear Alan,
You are right. In fact, it is probably less than half of
the dot. I am moved by the same thoughts. Our arrogance
in pursuing nuclear technology is almost beyond the bounds
of comprehension (as is so much more).
Thank you for this response. We will post it on our web
site with the article.
David
So the (now less than 10,000 years) projected lifespan,
of the proposed nuclear waste containment at Yucca Mountain,
is not even equivalent in time to the last word on the last
page in the billions of years of history of our precious
planet Earth. Do they think that after 10,000 years a solution
will be found, or that it will no longer be our responsibility,
or more likely (the way things are going) that humans will
no longer be around to care anyway?
-- Eli
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