Path to Peace

On the blog Scuole per la pace (Schools for Peace) is this post of September 22, 2004, translated here from the Italian text.

"The idea that we would like to share is that peace is not an abstract, but something that should be built together and which is composed of different aspects.

Talking about peace also means dealing with some aspects of our social life, as they impact on the rest of the world, and how we can limit the impact at least in its most negative aspects.

That is why I think that talking about peace should also address these issues:
- Human rights (teaching Justice)
- Energy, production, consumption and pollution
- Conscious consumption and lifestyles
- Right to know, dissemination of knowledge, intellectual property
- Digital divide, new technologies, access to information, accessibility

And speaking about them we should try to change our behaviours, even small ones, but above all always wonder if what we have as "urgent needs" are not actually induced needs or desires of "spoilt children" which seem to us very accessible but we let other people pay for it.

We should think before acting and if it is like this, we should change our actions to make them more equitable to and compatible with the needs of those who still suffer from hunger, deprivation and violence.

Because "there is no peace without justice and no justice if we do not realize that our "advanced" lifestyle is the result of centuries of exploitation of peoples and predation of resources that do not belong to us.

There is no need for this to turn into neo-luddites or to go back to the Middle Ages (remember somebody's statements about sending Iraq back to Middle Ages? Point made, I would say ..), but otherwise you can change our consumption, reduce waste and needs.

That does not automatically give us a better world but we will be on the right track to make possible a different world!"

Words and chains

Beyond all the rhetoric with which we fill our books there is a reality that many avoid at all costs to know and do not want to take responsibility for.

It took me time to remember that slavery was abolished as I read this passage from an article in la Repubblica.

"A trip among the Chinese slaves who make copies of Smart exceeds the imagination: they work at temperatures close to zero degrees, in big sheds without heating, without gloves, without masks, without any kind of protection when in direct contact with every type of poison. Shifts are 12-15 hours a day and no distinction is made between young and old or men and women. Everyone, in any case, sleeps on bunk beds in the factory.
The fakes all end up in the United States, Canada and Europe, at an estimated rate of 100 copies per day.
There are about twenty clandestine factories shamelessly copying Smart in China. All are small and all are full of slave-workers who work in these dangerous conditions for a handful of coins.

In China those who assemble an iPod receive a salary of 40 euros. When it comes to salaries we Europeans aren't any better as in Eastern Europe "our" workers receive salaries below the poverty line. That is 380 euros per month for Poles who build a Fiat 500, 270 Euros for the Slovaks Aygò that assemble Toyota, Peugeot 107, Citroen C1 and the new Renault Twingo and just 166 euros for Hungarians who produce the Opel Agila and Suzuki Splash. "

Of course, if the American, Canadian and European free markets boycott products sold below cost, or if we individuals do not buy them...

Let's do that...

Watch the video

A page of the best Stefano Benni in "The company of Celestini" tells about the match of "let's do that", an extreme variant of streetball to be played 5 against 5.

Let's do that Naples becomes invaded by waste, so much so that you can't avoid walking in the middle of it, over it, under it.
Let's do that the Neapolitans, after 15 years of watste-crises, begin to protest against the bad government.
Let's do that the population asks for the organization of a modern system of waste management, limiting unnecessary packaging, practicing kerbside collection, treating the toxic waste, recycling empty containers, paper, wood, glass, metals and plastic, composting organic waste and, finally, dumping the remaining and safe 10% of the urban solid waste.
Let's do that the government imposes instead the cancerogenic incineration of the waste "such as it is", to which the interested communities oppose a clear NO.
Let's do that those who civilly and peacefully protest, defending their own rights and proposing good solutions inistead of bad solutions, become subdued as they are clubbed by the police forces.
Let's do that the number of citizens who protest peacefully is growing, and that there is a proportionate increase of clubbing. And that consequently there are more clubbing and more protests.
Let's do that the peaceful protest turns in rebellion...

Let's do that the populations of the Delta of the Niger see their oil fields exploited by the western multinationals, with no benefit to themselves, while they continue to live in extreme poverty.
Let's do that the trade agreements mean that Pakistan can buy technologies from Europe but it cannot sell in Europe their agricultural products in order to pay for the acquired technologies.
Let's do that for 25 years the Maldives government is one of nepotism, run by a bloody-thirsty dictator allowing torture, disappearances and repression of the dissenting voice, while the European and American tourists enjoy their holidays on the beach.
Let's do that in Botswana the AIDS is so widely spread among men and women that the average life expectancy is reduced to 40 years, but that the European and American drug companies refuse to reduce the cost of medicine (and the highest profits), preventing the poor people from being able to cure themselves.
Let's do that...
Let's do that...
Let's do that...

Justice, freedom, development!

Watch the video and read the text

This is a start and every start is difficult. It is difficult to talk about peace without saying empty words. It took me 10 years to understand what peace is, admitting that I understood it well. On how to build it, I still have confused ideas, like everybody...

I know for sure what it is not.
Peace is not a gift of heaven and is not a gracious concession of the King. Peace depends on the men, the men only, on what they pursue and on how they act towards each another. That is why we all have responsibility on it, whether we like it or not.

Peace is a fundamental human right proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1984. To build it, it is essential "the renunciation of the use of force in international relations" (Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace, UN, 1984).
But achieving this goal would be far only a step forward because conflicts and tensions not die by the signing of international treaties. Also today many conflicts are not international but intranational, between groups from the same state.

Martin Luther King in 1963, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, distinguished "a negative peace which is the absence of tension" from "a positive peace which is the presence of justice".
In the same period, Malcolm X said: "You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has freedom."
Pope Paul VI, in the encyclical Populorum Progressio, 1967, bound schrewdly peace to "the progress of the poorer nations" and to "international social justice".

Today only children and mistifiers talk peace with absolute and empty words. All over the world operators, activists and philosophers talk about justice, freedom and development.
Peace exists where there is justice, freedom and development.
Peace exists when everyone is free to develop themselves in the way they want, without having to fight for their rights.

A culture of peace

The BIPPIblog deals with education for a culture of peace.
It is not something that I invented myself.

The concept of Culture of Peace was delivered at the Congress on International Peace in Côte d'Ivoire in 1989. The Congress recommended to UNESCO to work to build a new vision of peace based on the universal values of respect for life, freedom, justice, solidarity, tolerance, human rights and equality between men and women.

Then it was discussed at the highest international levels for more than ten years in congresses, forums, conferences, committees and assemblies, a huge diplomatic effort to get the resolution 53/243 of 13 September 1999 in which the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on a Culture of Peace.

It states that "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed".
Education for a culture of peace is "building peace in the minds of men".
This educational duty "belongs to parents, teachers, politicians, journalists, religious bodies and groups, intellectuals, those engaged in scientific, philosophical and creative and artistic activities, health and humanitarian workers, social workers, managers at various levels as well as to non-governmental organizations". (art.8 of the Declaration)
All actors in the civil society are called by the highest authorities of the world to guide young people to a culture of peace, namely towards a "set of values, attitudes, traditions and modes of behaviour and ways of life based on respect for life, ending of violence and promotion and practice of non-violence through education, dialogue and cooperation". (art.1 of the Declaration)

Education for a culture of peace is giving young people cultural models that orient them to meeting and not to confrontation, to dialogue and not to fight, to understanding and not to the injury, to the right and not to the oppression, to respect for diversity and not to its demonization. Building these values in the minds of young people all together, with great patience, in every corner of their daily lives.