Thoughts on peace in our world;

by Charles T. Weber de Montfort "Anno 2023"

Don't wait for peace, make it!

Everybody talks about peace. But they, like us, have not made any progress in decades. We should stop talking about it and finally start acting.

Dear friends!

Now I am sitting and writing here, where so many wise men and women have already expressed their thoughts and their hopes for the future of mankind and the eternal peace, we all long for - what could I possibly say that others have not already said before me?

Talking about peace means talking about something that does not exist.?

The sentence alone sounds like a slap in the face for humanity.

Since people remember, we talk about peace and yet we fight and destroy ourselves.

True peace does not exist on our earth and has never existed, except as a goal, which we are obviously unable to achieve. As long as man has lived on this earth, he has devoted himself to violence and war, and the fragile peace we have enjoyed is constantly threatened. Just today, the whole world lives in fear of a new war that will destroy us all. In the face of this constant threat, more people than ever are working for peace and disarmament - that is true, that could be a hope.

But nurturing this hope is so difficult. The politicians of this world gather in large numbers for ever new summit talks, and they all speak so forcefully for disarmament, but only for the disarmament that the others are supposed to undertake. Your country should disarm, not mine! No one wants to make a start. No one dares to begin because each is afraid and has so little faith in the other's will for peace.

While one disarmament conference replaces another, the most insane armament in the history of mankind continues to take place.

No wonder we are all afraid, whether we belong to a great power or live in a small neutral country. We all know that a new world war will spare none of us, and whether I am buried under a neutral or non-neutral pile of rubble, it should make little difference.

Must we not ask ourselves, after these millennia of constant wars, whether man is not perhaps already defective in his disposition? And are we already doomed in advance because of our aggressions? After all, we all want peace. Is there no possibility to change before it is too late? Couldn't we perhaps still learn to renounce violence? Couldn't we try to become a completely new kind of human being? But how should this happen, and where should we start?

I think we have to start from the ground up.

With the children alone.

You, my friends, already have it in your hands to act. Seriously, with today's political attitude, you can hardly expect a broad political outlook or proposals for solving international problems.

I would like to speak to you about the children. About my concern for them and my hope for them.

Those who are children now will one day take over the business of our world, if there is anything left of it then. They are the ones who will decide about war and peace and about what kind of society they want to live in. In one, where the violence only constantly grows, or in one, where humans live in peace and harmony with one another.?

Is there even the slightest hope that today's children will one day build a more peaceful world than we have been able to? And why, in spite of all our good will, have we succeeded so badly?

I still remember very well what a shock it was for me when one day - (I was still very young at that time) - it became clear to me that the men who directed the history of the nations and the world were not higher beings with supernatural gifts and divine wisdom. That they were human beings with the same human weaknesses as I have today.

But they had power and could make fateful decisions at any moment, depending on the drives and forces by which they were governed. Thus, dripping with particular unhappiness, war could come about simply because a single person was possessed by a lust for power or revenge, by vanity or the desire for gain, or else "and this seems to be the most common" by a blind faith in violence as the most effective tool in all situations. Accordingly, a single good and prudent person could prevent disasters here and there, precisely because he is good and prudent and renounced violence. But for sure, such a person would not be able to do it alone without the help of other people.

From this I can see only one thing:

It is always individual people who determine the history of the world. But why were not all of them good and prudent? Why are there so many who only wanted violence and strived for power? Were or are some inherently evil? I could not believe that then, and I do not believe it now.

The intelligence, the gifts of the mind may be innate for the most part, but in no new-born, child slumbers something, from which inevitably good or evil to see or read. Whether a child grows up to be a warm-hearted, open and trusting person with a sense for the common good or to be a cold-feeling, destructive, egoistic person, that is decided by those, to whom the child is or has been entrusted in this world, depending on whether they show him what love is or do not do so.

"Everywhere you learn only from the one you love," and then it must be true.

A child who is treated lovingly by his parents, and who loves his parents, thereby gains a loving relationship with his environment and preserves this basic attitude throughout his life. And this is good even if the child later does not belong to those who control the fate of the world. But if, contrary to expectations, the child does one day belong to these powerful people, then it is fortunate for all of us if its basic attitude has been shaped by love and not by violence and hatred. Future statesmen and politicians are also formed into characters even before they reach the age of five "In my opinion, this is frightening, but it is true.

Let's look back at the methods of raising children in earlier times. Wasn't it all too often a matter of breaking the child's will by force, whether physical or psychological? How many children received their first lessons in violence "from those you love", namely from their own parents, and then passed this knowledge on to the next generation!

And so, it went on, "He who spares the rod corrupts the boy", it was already said in the Old Testament, and many fathers and mothers have believed in this through the centuries.

They have diligently wielded the rod and called it love. But what was the childhood of all these really "spoiled boys", of whom there are so many in the world at present, these dictators, tyrants and oppressors, these human abusers?

This is something that should be investigated.

I am convinced that in most of them we would come across a tyrannical upbringing, where someone stood behind them with a stick, whether it was made of wood or consisted in humiliating, offending, exposing, scaring.

The many accounts of childhood in literature, marked by hatred, teem with such domestic tyrants, who forced their children into obedience and submission through fear and terror, and thereby more or less spoiled them for life.

Fortunately, there has not been only this kind of educators, because, of course, parents have also raised their children with love and without violence from time immemorial. But it is probably only in our century that parents have begun to regard their children as their equals and to grant them the right to develop their personalities freely in a family democracy without oppression and without violence.

Doesn't this make us despair when voices are suddenly raised calling for a return to the old authoritarian system? Because that is exactly what is happening at the moment, in many places, in the world. People are now calling again for "tougher discipline," for "tighter reins and believes that this will prevent all youthful misbehavior, which is supposedly based on too much freedom and too little strictness in education. But that would mean casting out the devil with the Beelzebub and in the long run only leads to more violence and to a deeper and more dangerous gap between the generations.

It is possible that this desired "tougher discipline" could have an external effect, which the advocates would then interpret as an improvement. Admittedly, only until they, too, are gradually forced to the realization that violence only ever produces violence "as it has always been and always will be."

Now many parents, troubled by the new signals, may ask themselves whether they have been doing it wrong so far. Whether a free upbringing, in which the adults do not take it for granted that they have the right to command and the children have the duty to comply, might not be wrong or dangerous after all.

Free and non-authoritarian education does not mean that children are left to themselves, that they are allowed to do whatever they want. It does not mean that they should grow up without norms, which, by the way, they themselves do not want.

We all need norms of behavior, children and adults, and children learn more through the example of their parents than through any other methods. Certainly, children should have respect for their parents, but certainly parents should also have respect for their children, and never abuse their natural superiority. Loving respect for one another is what one would wish for all parents and all children.

"NEVER VIOLENCE!"

Yes, but if we now educate our children without violence and without any tight reins, does this already create a new human race that lives in eternal peace?

Something so simple-minded only a dreamer can hope for! I know that it is a utopia. And certainly, there are many other things in our poor, sick world that must also be changed if there is to be peace on earth. But in this present time of ours, "even without war", there is so much inconceivable cruelty, violence and oppression on earth, and this is by no means hidden from the children.

They see, hear and read about it every day, and finally they believe that violence is a natural state.

Don't we then at least have to show them at home by our example that there is another way of living?

"It could be, in spite of everything, with time, a tiny contribution to peace in the world on which we live".