As a convinced pacifist I have been criticized
several times, I could afford such a conviction only because others would pay
the price for me in the case of emergency. Actually I was a slacker who could
take the view of nonviolence only until he would become the victim of violence.
A victim, because he wouldn’t be prepared in any way against a violent attack,
he wouldn’t be able to defend himself, perhaps, in a tragic manner, wouldn’t be
willing to.
Admittedly, the logic of such a rebuke is
obvious within the conventional thought patterns but is not relevant for clear
thinking.
History of peoples and nations so far, the
history of mankind is an endless orgy of violence, of mutual humiliation and
destruction. No social order and no state
have ever succeeded in stopping this circulus vitiosus that is
escalating further by technical progress.
On the contrary, greed, ridiculous notions of
honour, revengeful stupidities and unrestrained desire for power describe the
motivations for all the cruel and contemptuous scenarios of extermination. The
combat-ready contemporaries of all epochs are just canon fodder, not one bit
more, their commanders serve as poor fools of the glorification of violence.
All combats are acting as losers as they kill
the humane.
So, whatever can pacifists loose?
Nothing!
It is a question what they can win and how.
It is concerned with de facto peace and not with
regularly mendacious letters of intent and breaches of contracts, not with
euphoric conferences which don’t have fundamental conditions because structures
of power characterize the negotiations and debates, and by no means the human
individual.
“Power is arising from emancipation” is the
demand of a cosmonomic thesis, just to break several taboos: nationalism,
racism, religions of divine election, militarism and the mentality of
exploitation. Military is taking the key function as a mean and, at the same
time, pathetic executing authority of any policy. It is based on enforced blind
obedience which is undermining all praises of civilisation and humanity, which
remains, as a permanent scandal, to be glorified as virtuous.
Nevertheless, there is a clear beginning of
softening the military anachronism, as a method of manslaughter, by increasing
efficiency of material battles, because the real decisions of global meaning will
progressively take place on the terrain of electronics and informatics.
But science and technology do not depend on
military strategies as they develop as per the principle of causality – much
more calculating and calculable than “hurray-patriotism” – even more impersonal
and more destructive. The ordered killer is just pushing a stick, pressing a
button and hardly perceives anything of the caused disaster, perhaps he will
read later a selected press-report. Or he himself will get sick, because his own
military had consciously sent him with toxic substances against the enemy.
Man is enabled to barbarity, if bogeymen and
objects of hatred will block the psyche, they are proverbial “the root of the
evil”. Once sown, the kraut grows rampantly and doesn’t tolerate pacifism
beside, choking it easily, because pacifism on such a field is defenceless, is
lost.
The only possibility for pacifism to come into
reality is the prevention of constructing bogeymen and hatred. This may seem
utopian in view of unbroken religious and ideological indoctrinations. They are
forming a person who, because of his well-intended believing, is defending
“faith, custom, homeland” against “wrong belief”, against bad habits which are
strange customs, against pluralism which means different countries, cultures
and homes.
Thus pacifism doesn’t claim any “multy-culty”,
not any starry-eyed idealistic mixture of historic cultures that cannot
peacefully coexist because of their fundamentalistic beliefs.
In the distance to daydreams, pacifism means
awakening from old provincial convictions, it faces the need of a not yet
reached new definition of a cosmopolitanism which does not deny its history
(histories) but analyses it (them) for the benefit of a cosmonomic orientation.
Pacifism characterizes cosmonomic philosophy.
The human is not his enemy. His old-fashioned
world views are outdated and irrelevant.
His peace is of this world, each reference to
“kingdom-come” describes silly empty promises.
Thus pacifism is trying to gain ground by this
clear commitment to the humane, not on the battlefield and not at all in the
God’s acre, but, to take the metaphor further, in fields and farmlands, in
parks and gardens, in cultural countryside.
Cultivating life and its space takes place as
brainpower of undoubtedly higher value than martial capacities of destruction.
Nevertheless, the global situation suffers more
frequently from destructive provincialism and is just showing to what extent
only we are standing at the beginning of a humane evolution.
It is in the nature of developing processes that
the still weaker and being fewer but higher differentiated organisms are
threatened manifoldly and have to overcome teething problems.
Sincere and consequent pacifism is at such a
stage by excluding war as a means of politics. The options therefor are lying
in more honest and more intelligent politics, strengthening the efforts for
human dignity and for less pretending diplomacy.
In democratic understanding pacifism is
cross-party, notwithstanding that the majority of political parties not only
agrees with war as always but is even creating it and stirring it up, being led
by programmatic and naïve compulsiveness.
What we hastily call “enlightenment” is
symbolizing some little plants, dominated by thistles, on a heap of debris of
war and ruins.
We are still living in the pre-humane time of the
“interim human”.
But this insight is bearing already the character of awakening.
German version
