What we want

The following Manifesto is worth reading and sharing with all your friends.  I invite to leave comments!

Manifesto for the Movement for a Free Earth

What we want is not to be normal but to be true.
What we want is not only to fight against the old system but to create a new system.
What we want is the full liberation of love and sexuality from fear.
What we want is to strengthen our will in the conscious decision to serve peace – outside and inside.
We won’t be able to handle the challenges which we will face with only our own power. What we want is to cooperate with the greater forces of life.
What we want is to experience the original form of humans living together: Community

We want these words to become a reality by building concrete life models.
The world has come to a point where it is not enough anymore to point out the change that needs to happen… We must be that change.

To be this change we follow three guidelines in our daily life:
Truth
Mutual support
Responsible participation in the community and in the world

All of this will only succeed in the long term with a base of humanely functioning, grounded community. We cannot realise the highest goals if we are not able to found functioning communities which can survive. Ecological humanism needs new social structures. A new culture arises by reconnecting with the eternal laws of love and community.
There are definately many ways to reach this goal but there is only one key to open the gate: Rediscovering trust.

We dedicate our life to peace work.
The education of a peace worker includes education in love. This is a high task with a high goal. But there cannot be peace on earth as long as there is war in love.

May we, the youth of all countries step out of our pasts and enter into the possibility of a new era of planetary thinking, planetary friendship and planetary joy. May the young people from Toronto, Sydney, Nairobi, from San Francisco and Kiev come together. May we celebrate our new world community in Colombia and with the Zapatistas in Mexico, in Bethlehem and in Tamera. May we draw and actualise the information and forces from the code of life that will lead us to a future worth living on a wonderful planet.
We will do it, the “Movement for a Free Earth“ is underway.

Movement for a Free Earth
Tamera/Portugal, May 2009

There is a model to look at

Patch Adams participated in the Easter Conference in Tamera, which brought together 30 peace workers, leaders and visionaries from all over the world in order to deal with the possibility of changing the world. In a short interview Patch described his deep impression from Tamera community, his love to the people and to the ideas he encountered, and his wish for a future cooperation. You can watch this beautiful interview at Youtube

Tamera was founded by Dieter Duhm, Sabine Lichtenfels and other visionaries in 1995. Together they developed this place in order to demonstrate how a humane future could look like. It is not at all finished.

We want to use Patch’s moving statement in order to invite you – sponsors, creative artists, radical scientists, youth activists and love adventurers – to support this new perspective for a future without war. Leave a comment! Start talking about these ideas in your circles!!

Pacifism is the Reconciliation of the Human Being with himself

Today at the anniversary of the uprising in Tibet I want to quote some words by Dieter Duhm about pacifism and nonviolence. They are the deepest words I could find. I want to dedicate them to all those who lost their lives in the years of occupation and suppression and I also want to dedicate them to those who survived and still follow the path of nonviolence.
“Violence is the eruption of blocked life energies. Pacifism does not mean to gently appease violence, nor does it mean overcoming conflict through appeals for peace. True pacifism is the radical and intelligent commitment of the human being to the liberation of all life energies and creative forced that are present in him. Pacifism means taking an uncompromising stand for all living beings An uncompromising stand for achieving inner truthfulness and freedom – for pacifism is the reconciliation of the human being with himself.“
(Dieter Duhm: Towards a New Culture)

The Middle East is about more than the fate of two peoples

by Dieter Duhm
The Middle East is about more than the fate of two peoples. If peace is achievable here then something new will have been achieved for human kind. In this war the potential conflict between all of humanity is revealed. Peace in the Middle East is not only of regional importance but also of planetary significance.

(more…)

If we want to put an end to war …

“…we need to end it at the point of where it is created each day anew: in our daily living conditions, in the constant stress of mindless and monotonous work, in the methods of profit maximizing and distribution, in offices and factories, in schools and families, in the tragedies of love, in our ideas about being either man or woman, in sexuality and love and in the cages of our professional, social and sensual life which are all far too small.
Do we want that the youth of the world no longer goes to war?
If so, we need a higher aim in life, a life worth living and better opportunities to put the power of the youth into meaningful action.
Do we wish to end the worldwide sexual violence?
If so, we have to create living conditions under which sexual joy is experienced without violence, without humiliation and without unnecessary restrictions.
Do we want to free the world from despotism, betrayal and lies?
If so, then let us build up concrete conditions under which despotism, betrayal and lies have no longer an evolutionary advantage.
Not only dreaming, talking, wishing, appealing, but building it up, really doing it!

The world will only turn to the better when we demonstrate that it is possible.”

(Excerpt of  “The War Society and its Transformation”. A Manifesto against War. By Dieter Duhm. )

Full text…

Call for Conscientious Objection

by Dieter Duhm

You have no enemies. People of another faith, another culture or another color are not your enemies. There is no reason to fight against them. Those who send you to war do not do for your interest, but for their own. They do it for their profit, their power, their advantage and their luxury. Why do you fight for them? Do you gain from their profit? Do you share in their power? Do you share in their luxury? And against whom do you fight? Did your so called enemies do something to you?

Cassius Clay refused to fight in Vietnam. He said the Vietnamese did not do anything to him. Or you, GIs. Did the Afghanis, the Iraqis, the Iranians and so on, did they do something to you? Or you, young Russians: Did the Chechenyans do something to you? And if yes, do you know what kind of cruelties your government committed against them? Or you, young Israelis: Did the Palestinians do something to you? And if yes, do you know what your government did to them? Who fabricated the injustice you are about to fight against? Do you know what powers you serve when you drive with tanks through conquered areas? Who, for heaven’s sake, fabricated the injustice for whose pretended abatement youth are sent to war? Your governments, your own legislators, the rulers of your own country fabricated it.

It is fabricated by corporate groups and banks, the arms industry and militaries which you serve and whose war commands you obey. Do you want to support their world? If you do not want to serve their world then ignore war service. Ignore it with such insistence and power that they stop recruiting. “Imagine war was declared and nobody showed up.*” No one on earth has the right to force another person to go to war. If they want to draft you into war service, then turn the tables. Write to them and tell them where and when and in which socks, underwear and shirts they must report in. Tell them in no uncertain terms, that they must go to war themselves from now on if they want to fulfill their dirty objectives. Use your connections, your media sources, the power of your youth, and your power to turn the tables. If they want war they must get into tanks and dugouts themselves, they must drive through mine fields and they can get cut by shrapnel themselves.

There would no longer be war on earth if those who fabricate these wars had to fight the battles themselves, and if they had to experience in their own body what it means to be mutilated or burnt, to starve, to freeze to death, or to faint from pain. War is the opposite of all Human Rights. Those who lead war are always wrong. War is an active cause of endless disease: crushed and burned children, bodies, torn to pieces, destroyed village communities, lost relatives, lost friends or lovers, hunger, cold, pain and escape, cruelty against the civilian population – this is what war is. Nobody is allowed to go to war. There is a higher law behind the laws of rulers: “Thou shall not kill.” It is the moral duty of all courageous people to refuse war service. Do it in large numbers, and do it until nobody wants to go to war anymore. It is an honour to refuse war service. Live this honour until everyone recognizes it.

A soldier’s uniform is the fool’s dress of slaves. Command and obedience is the logic of a culture that is afraid of freedom. Those who agree to war, and even if it is only to obligatory military service, are themselves guilty of complicity. To obey military service goes against all ethics. As long as we are human beings we must put all our effort into stopping this madness. We will not have a humane world as long as military duty is accepted as societal duty.

The enemies are always the others. But think about it: If you were on the “other” side, you yourself would be the enemy. These roles are exchangeable. “We refuse to be enemies.” The tears shed by a Palestinian mother for her dead child are the same as the tears of an Israeli mother whose child is killed in a suicide bombing.

The warrior of the new era is a warrior of peace.

One has to have the courage to protect life and to become soft inside if our co-creatures are treated with harshness. Train your body, strengthen your heart and stabilise your mind to achieve the soft power which prevails against all resistance. It is the soft power which overcomes all harshness. You all come from the love between a man and a woman. So love, worship and foster love! “Make love, not war.” This was a profound sentence from American conscientious objectors at the time of the Vietnam War. May this sentence move in all young hearts. And may we all find the intelligence and the will to follow it forever.

* From the Poem “Imagine War Was Declared and No One Showed Up” by Bertolt Brecht

Gaza: There is only One Limit

Some days ago I received a letter by an Israeli peace activist about the situation in Gaza:

“…children were found cowering in their home near the dead bodies of their parents, probably for days, as ambulances could not reach them, despite strict international laws about the free movement of medical crews.”

Wait a moment, before you continue reading. Let this information reach your heart.

Do we know what a child is? At night? Next to the body of his murdered mother?

Something in me becomes very calm and decided. I do not want to argue any longer about international laws or the concrete background of this specific crisis. I cannot. I also do not want to send out another call to sign a petition, another appeal for peace, another meditation and prayer. I cannot.

I only feel the wish to UNDERSTAND. What happens today in Gaza is beyond logic, beyond human law, beyond arguments and beyond emotions … and it has happened yesterday in Ruanda, in Colombia, in Vietnam and … tomorrow … it may happen in my community and in my neighbourhood.

I know that the destruction is carried out in the name of governments, corporations, banks, military, arms industry, intelligence agencies, … but these groups could not  impose their will on the rest of the world if there were not human beings ready to follow, to obey, to carry out their instructions.  So I end up with the question: Who is the human being?

I quote Dieter Duhm:

“Imagine that we, as hermits, crawl out of a cave after carefully resolving to live henceforth in the world and seeing it as it truly is, without interpretation or judgement. Nothing would strike us as more monstrous, more contradictory, and more incomprehensible than the human being, unless we had prematurely explained or defined him with our embryonic powers of understanding. If we make a cross section through our history to date, or through everything that is happening among people and between people and the rest of nature at this moment on our planet, then there is only one limit to what the innocent eye can see: the limit of how much horror it can endure seeing.
The human being: it is he who built the pyramids, it is he who destroyed cities down to the last child and the last cat, who sang hymns and erected cathedrals, who roasted people with other beliefs over burning coal and turned those of another race into soap. The human being hated out of love and murdered in devotion, preached love to the neighbour and produced Napalm, loves peace and now prepares its own annihilation.”

Who is the human being? What is the mistake?

Let us come together and THINK how to heal ourselves and humanity and so to put an end to global war.

Do we know what war means?

“Do we know the unbearable pain of people who suffocate beneath debris, who are crippled or burnt? This and nothing else is war.

The economic, political and military power cartels know that children die, freeze and starve as a result of their policies of conquest – and yet they continue to follow them. They know that families are torn apart and communities are destroyed – and yet they do it. They talk about peace, freedom and democracy and kill all freedom fighters who stand in their way. They have constructed a world of consumerism that results in slavery, despair and collapse on the other side of the world. Behind the figures of the stock market, there is the suffering of innumerable people and animals. Can we continue to enjoy our privileges and limit our efforts to words? We need to find real ways to free the earth from war.

We indirectly contribute to the war because we do not have the time to understand what is really going on. Our culture is arranged so that nobody has the time to understand what is really going on. We are a part of the war because we participate in a civilisation which generates war everywhere. War is a component of our civilisation, our economy, our consumerism and our ideas about life. Our own Western society lives from the armament and weapons trade, from war against nature, from war against villages and farmers in the “Third World”, from war against love, from war against our mental/spiritual anchors and homelands of humankind. This war claims its victims in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Latin America and Palestine, but it also claims its victims where there is supposedly peace and democracy: in the offices and factories, in schools and families, in love relationships and ruined marriages, in the situation of homeless youth, in the sexual misery of the youth, in organised child abuse and finally in the hopeless situation of people who cannot handle the lies of the existing culture any longer and who can no longer cope with the mechanisms of existing conditions.
And are not the slaughterhouses, the fur farms and the animal laboratories a part of the daily war as well? Is it really necessary for the progress of a culture to be linked to such an amount of suffering in the animal world?

There is a solution. We can recognise it if we look at the whole of contemporary life on earth from a greater mental and spiritual distance.“

(Quote of the book “Future without War” by Dieter Duhm)

Gaza, Ruanda, Colombia … endless chain of violence. And: “There is a solution”. I pray for all victims and perpetrators that this solution will soon be known in the world. This is the background of my work and my motivation. War has to end. Please take the time to learn more about this solution and help spreading it! This is my deepest wish for 2009.

When will and vision come together at such high levels…

I just returned from a journey through the U.S., mainly through California, moved and almost overwhelmed by the beauty of this country and its nature, by the political commitment of many of its inhabitants, by many deep talks and meetings. For a long time America was known as the land of opportunity, and in some respects it still is. But the urgent question remains: How does it go on, for this country and for all others?

I would like to quote from the book “The Sacred Matrix” (link to amazon.com) by Dieter Duhm:

“We humans have the intelligence to build computer-guided weapons and space stations. We are about to send tiny submarines through arteries and nano-canons containing information into sick tissue. All this is no longer science fiction. It shows us the great possibilities that arise when will and vision come together at such high levels. It is also a question of will and vision whether or not we will invest the same amount of intelligence and effort in the human area and in finding a new order for our life on earth that no longer collides with the original order of life and of the universe but resonates with it.

We have the possibility of stepping out of our hardened cocoon of fear and armoring, choosing the Sacred Matrix for our further existence. This is not a never-ending task, for the Sacred Matrix already exists as a blueprint. We actualize it by seeing it, perceiving it, and accepting it. There is a deep connection between perception and actualization. Interestingly, the English word for this connection is “realize”. It is through our perception that latent possibilities are realized or called into existence.”

The dawn of a new era

Tomorrow, Oct 1st, a group of around 500 people will start a peace pilgrimage through the rainforest of Colombia, led by Padre Javier Giraldo (Colombia), Sabine Lichtenfels (www.the-grace-foundation.org)  and Benjamin von Mendelssohn (www.prvme.org). The participants are inhabitants of the peace village San José de Apartado, but they are joined from people all around the globe. They come from Israel, Palestine, Europe, USA and other countries of South America. (More information: www.grace-pilgrimage.com)

I want to greet them with a quote of the book “Future without War” by Dieter Duhm:
Sun Bear, a native American tribe elder said once: “Sometimes I dream that I am at a place where small groups of people are approaching over a hill. We all embrace each other and call out: “Brother, sister, you have survived!” All “isms” have disappeared. We no longer say: “Which religion do you belong to? To what do you belong? None of this is of importance anymore.”
I see a new generation of pilgrims from all countries travelling across the earth. They are not bound to any nation, language, race, culture or religion, to riches or possessions. They help in areas of crisis, they visit holy sites and they are on the way to centres, to new anchorages. They encounter each other at campfires, in barns or hostels, share their bread and develop a new quality of community, hospitality and willingness to help. In this way a young world citizenship of a new kind and beyond all institutions will come into existence – a different type of globalisation will take place. This development is supported by the emergence of completely new centres spreading slowly across the earth. We call them “Healing Biotopes” or “Peace Villages”. They serve the pilgrims both as hostels and as places to study and work in. In these centres concrete research is conducted, facilitating the development of a technological, spiritual and social basis for a non-violent world society. The centres stay in touch with each other through the growing flow of pilgrims. They are aware of each other, they are on the same path, and they have taken on responsibility for the future of the planet.
The beginning of a new culture, the dawn of a new era.

May the youth of all countries step out of their pasts and enter into the possibility of a new era of planetary thinking, planetary friendship and planetary joy. May the young people from Toronto, Sydney or Nairobi, from San Francisco or Kiev come together and meet. May they celebrate their new world community in Colombia or with the Zapatistas in Mexico, in Bethlehem or in Tamera. May they draw and actualise the information and forces from the world code that will lead us into a future worth living on a wonderful planet. They will do it, the “Movement for a free Earth” is under way!