Pacifist Awakening

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