Discovering a pacifist society

in memory of luisa fernanda solarte

who will always be in our hearts

if we had to do a minute of silence by each one of the deads that had been produced by the violence during this year in colombia, we should be in silence for several hours. if we thought about annual deads, it would be thirty thousand minutes of silence. the decade would force us to be quiet up but 300.000 minutes. by them we would have to remain dumb during 208 days. it is very possible that this is what the violent ones want.

as “doctors without borders” in the acceptance of the nobel prize said: "we are not sure that the words save lives, but we are sure that silence can kill".

peace and word

a slow stroll through human history lets us see with optimism that at times of great convulsions, crisis and war, in many corners of the planet opens good sense windows, rises love and appears men and women who refuse to think that to kill it is the answer. the testimony of intelligence, registered in the words of peace by the nobel prizes makes the hope clear,

" in three thousand years humanity has only managed to live thirteen days without war"

those thirteen days would have to become a hope, an oasis in where one would approach to calm the thirst of power, ambition and victory. in those small and infinite oasis, the humanity finds the key to nondestruction. those islands of happiness, those territories of fertility are not a time or moment in history: they are present and we have the obligation to discover them in our daily lives and in the values that have been hidden by the frenetic race of what is called progress.

in the same way when rains announces a beautiful harvest and fill the heart of farm laboures with hope, the word and the action of the pacifist men and women fill with optimism the life. that responsibility on what we say and what we do is the most powerful virtues of the pacifist and it is feared by the violent ones. the murders of gandhi and luther king show that, for violent people, being pacifist is one of the worse threats. it seemed that not to arm itself full of weakness the violent one. it seemed that the pacific action questions deeply the fighting spirit.

but if arms, death and silence are the armas that the violent ones have as their greater treasure, the word, as expression of the reason and the essence of human communication, is for the pacifists the only way to obtain the life in community, in society.

as humans, language unites us. from it, intelligence is developed, advanced and constructed. like humans we have the possibility of communication, of interaction, of interchange. we become humans in our relation with others and with them we extend the sense of life. only in a dialogue between human beings is it possible to discover a pacifist society. a society without violence. it is possible to affirm that this society has never existed, but not to be able to dream it is as cruel as to think that violence is the only exit. that the pain produced during war and the horror is surpassed by time. that the victim and the tragedy are diluted in forgetfulnes. resignation before dead of innocent people is resignation of a pacific society. we cannot continue believing that the violent death of so many human beings is human. to accept it, is to eliminate the possibility of living humanly.

from the pain, the desire of revenge or the resignation cannot arise. it must arise a human, pacifist power to affect the violent ones. to transform his thirst of death into desire of justice. a power whose only weapon is the word. the reasons to arm itself cannot continue being the reasons to assassinate, either the reason to arrive at the deepest human misery, nor the reasons to defend privileges or injustice. if men fight for justice, that fight must be peaceful. that fight must be political. human dignity is more important. the respect for the life of a single individual is the respect for the whole humanity. as kofi annan affirms: "a genocide begins with the murder of a single man: not for what he has done but for whay he is. a campaign of ethnic cleaning begins with a single fight between neighbors. poverty begins when a fundamental right to education is denied to every boy or girl. what begins with the failure to maintain the dignity of life, very often finishes in a catastrophe for whole nations". the failure in the conservation of human dignity is a political failure. it is born from the imposition of the ideas and interests of one to another. the failure in the recognition of other cultures is not only a fact that fights against human dignity, it brings the germ of genocide, the idea of submission.

discovering a pacifist society

although the discovery of a pacifist society can be as far as its conquest, we know that the right to the life and justice are not utopias: they are human duties that cannot be delayed. they must be constructed collectively. without lies, arms, or force. a world of justice can have neither the submission, nor the lost of liberties, nor the use of the arms like principles. to construct the right society through the force or by despotism or authoritarianism is the less right of the options. it goes against human dignity.

it is necessary to extend or to transform ideas that encourage war. it is more human to affirm that the state must have the monopoly of the intelligence, that to blindly accept one of the forces that has fully shown its failure. the one who arms himself to create a state with the same conception is an eternal prolonger of war. those who promise a better state through the arms, promise the same hell with another uniform and other words.

life cannot be violent in the same way as justice cannot be delayed. it is just to advance freely towards a society wished by the way of agreements. this is what is undesirable for the violent people. the fair way must be to find intelligent ways to respect others, with their different religions, their different forms of living or dreaming. it would be unfair to silent the differences and to establish the empire of force.

it is unhuman to think that the way to obtain our freedom is by making people enslaved. to reduce the world to a single political, or social or cultural vision, or to a single hegemony is to increase the possibilities of a catastrophe, to declare war on reason. it is not only a warlike confrontation, it goes much further: it is a frontal attack of humanity against barbarism, of culture against stupidity, of those who try to introduce once again man in caves. we think that the human life and animals are the greater patrimony of this small planet. indeed: the struggle for survival can be done through the defense of the life. from here, active defense of pacifism brings optimism to human species. we know that man and women are allied to life, also, we know that ambition defeats continuously good sense, that it is permanent source of hatred and animosity, the dark world of the ambitions pollutes succesfully the spirit of the men and nations.

it is necessary to watch with total critical attention the educative proposal, the speech, about ambition as source of success. we would find here many of the evils that drown us. there can also be found the key to understand the bad things: silence is competition between human beings not always more defeated. millions die of hunger in countries in the south, millions die violently in useless confrontations in the middle of the terror and of hatred, many commit suicide thinking that death is better than life, millions are sunk in the misery so that few thousands enjoy the artificial paradise made by money.

peace is not only absence of violence or death. it is much more, it is the scene of the political life and a culture that recognizes its own conflicts, solves them by the agreements. indeed: peace is the recognition of human rights in its most full meaning, from the sanctity of life, to the rights of the human being to the education or health. but it is necessary not only to understand but also to accept that the fight for human rights cannot be violent. it is contradictory and unprecedented that in name of human rights and justice, some people forces other human beings.

the violation of the right to life for the profit of other rights is neither comprehensible nor acceptable. nor is it to think that justice can be delayed without violating the human rights. the human weapon for finding justice is nonviolence and that means pacific action and pacifist pedagogy. the challenge of warmongering thought that has rooted in the spirit of the modern states and has spread to political paradigms. it is necessary to begin to debate with political sincerety in order to obtain a fair society. but not only a single local society, it is more and more urgent to build a world where justice is the motor of development. the extreme situations in the present life of the planet make us think that as humans we have the commitment to start dreaming and to believe in different things than the promise of consumerism, the promise of a paradise in other peoples. the problems of the misery do not give delay, this planet is a planet with hunger and too much desire for power. but as humans, we cannot wait for great biological mutations to reach justice. we cannot hope that the technological development saves us from misery.

development cannot be reached on the base of that culture, it will have to be through the culture of solidarity and freedom or to be condemned to be unequal and unjust growth. it is not only to find a balance between the production and the consumption. it is not audacious to think that humans could live with much less if we diminished the ambition and transform the thought that privileges the possession over cooperation. it is not either an adventure in the ship of the utopias to be able to get to dream human beings who fertilize the planet with kindness, joy and enthusiasm and who find great satisfaction with the idea to cooperate in building a better world.

if we could diminish the thecnology of life and recharge the technological development with a sense of life and humanity, it would be possible to perceive other sources of justice and friendly production with the planet. but although the acceleration of the technological development seems a cruel paradox it seems to allow a gap between rich and poor and also the spirit of conquest and the reduction and submission of towns by others. the useless fiction of a wealthy society pushes to an idea of consumption and untenable depredation. men seem to have prevailed as an inventor and has failed as a human. in the words of albert schwitzer "man has become superman. he is a superman because by his own accord has nonsingle intrinsic physical forces but that he also governs, thanks to scientific and technological advances, latent forces of nature, that he already is able to use. nevertheless the superman undergoes a fatal fault: he has not reached the level of super human intelligence with wich to balance his superhuman strength. and he needs this intelligence in order to use this vast force only with reasonable aims, not for destructive and homicidal aims."

schwitzer noticed when he received the nobel peace price that the over estimation of our strength and of our creativity could, draw a social mentality that would also generate nonsingle destruction not through the war but through an economic model that is nourished with selfishness at any cost, almost ingenuous individualism that makes us think of the human being as an individual that fights in a frenetic race to survive.

the proposal of a new new of changing a mentality is not new, it was also the intention of schwitzer when he related: “if peace arrives or not, it depends on the direction that takes the mentality from individuals to the nation" but that wild race to impose a competitive mentality has been transfered successfully from individuals to the nations. we must find in this race the opportunity to take a break and think with caution and prudence, if this competition between nations would not create an immense cemetery of cultures. nations that are not interested on having unequal conditions or on sharing that mentality will be devasted and so will be a great part of the patrimony of the human culture and the vestiges and keys to obtain a better life. life cannot be fed by cruel values or destruction. although victory seems ironic a bitter taste in ones mouth nor can submissivness may leaves us defeat.

we would have to open the floodgates of the heart to understand the pain of others and from this, to initiate a construction of which the dalai lama proposes; like sanctuaries of peace of respect for others and nature. respect would be the first cause of action and a pillar for the creation of life in community. to respect to one another is not to affront ones confidence, nor is it to break loyalties created from friendship, nor to make speechs with seduction and political demagogy. the challenges of pacifists are not transfered to the duties of the state nor to the political commitments of groups. the pacifist mentality forces us to daily respect. like father and son. like neighbor to friend. to be violent to one of your resemblances is too great an event to be diminished. to betray a friend can be the origin of a profund crack.

human conflicts will always exist, but to solve them through violence in its different forms is an attitude contrary to humanism. discovering a peaceful society means to accept humanity like a a peaceful source of thought.

humanism and pacifism are natural brothers, they are both born like an oasis of optimism in the desert of warlike thought. they are opposed in a radical way to the warlike language. life will always be a conflict between what we woulfd like and what we wishe. it is also a conflict between the heart and the mind, between the spirit, who dreams about freedom, and daily life filled with temptations, with traps that move us continuously away and for an implacable form of the pacifist way. the rapid way we have developed has allowed us to know that technology can reach the highest levels, but it also has at the same time, not made us perceive, as luther king said in 1964: “to survive today, we must eliminate our spiritual and moral failings.”

if there isn’t a proportional growth of the soul, the increasing material powers grow more dangerous. when the “outside” of the man’s nature subjugates the “inside” dark storm clouds begin to form in the world. it is not a magical nor tragic thought, it is a realism that, forty years ago, announced the moments that we are living at the moment. they are bound to a monetarist moral and to a conquest spirit that prevails even after the failures of the xx century. it is not the technology, which has submerged us in to war but it is the prevalence of the fighting spirit of many of those who lead the world.