feared that the economic penury into which the reparations would throw Germany would create a climate of anger that would inevitably spawn another war. “A humiliated and torn German nation condemned to economic misery,” he warned, “would be a constant danger to world peace, just as a protected German nation whose inalienable rights and subsistence are safeguarded would be a strong pillar of such world peace.” War is a bad enough destroyer of peace. But post-war acts of vengeance by the victors upon the losers only perpetuate the cycle of violence.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1927, Quidde argued in his acceptance speech that world peace could only be based on the security provided by international law and order, not by military might. His hope was that new technology would make the killing power of weapons so terrible that nations would recoil in horror from their use. That hope has yet to be realized.
5 March
Hussein Issa
September 1947—5 March 2000
Peace as Mother’s Milk
Palestinian peacemaker Hussein Issa once said that “peace and democracy education should be given to infants with their mother’s milk.” In light of the events that overtook him and his family when he was still an infant, it was a remarkable observation.
Issa was born just two months before the UN voted to partition British Mandate territory into two states, one Jewish and the other Arabic. The following year, when Israel declared itself sovereign, Issa’s family was relocated from their ancestral farm in Ramle to a refugee settlement just outside of Bethlehem. His father died soon afterwards—of a “broken heart,” according to Issa’s son Ibrahaim—and Issa grew up in abject poverty. His harsh childhood and youth inspired him to find ways to rescue future Palestinian children from the same fate. Graduating from Bethlehem University in 1980 with a degree in education, Issa shortly afterwards opened a day care center that blossomed in a few years into a primary and secondary school. It was called “Hope Flowers.”
From the very beginning, Issa’s vision for Hope Flowers was to educate children in conflict resolution and reconciliation. Recognizing that enmity between Israeli and Palestinian adults in most cases was too entrenched to allow for fruitful dialogue, he pinned his hope on their children. Separatists on either side, he believed, were misguided. Because “Israeli and Palestinian destinies are inevitably tied,” he was convinced that there was “no choice but to work together to try and forge a culture of peace.” To that end, Issa regularly brought Israeli and Palestinian kindergarten children together so that they could see beyond the stereotypes and begin to build relationships.
After coming of age in a cramped and noisy refugee camp, Issa knew how starved Palestinian settlement kids can be for glimpses of nature. So he purchased land for a communal farm where Hope Flowers students could work, making contact with the soil as well as producing fruits and vegetables to eat and sell. He also arranged regular day trips out of the refugee camp that took students into the countryside. He believed that the excursions were essential for the development of inner tranquility, which in turn was the foundation for nonviolent conflict resolution.
Issa died of a heart attack when he was only fifty-two. But Hope Flowers, now supervised by his son, continues its work of teaching rising generations of Israeli and Palestinian children the way of peace. It is the mother’s milk that will nourish them throughout their lives, and hopefully help build a less troubled relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.
6 March
Sulak Sivaraksa
27 March 1933—
Sowing Peace
At the deepest level,” says Buddhist peacemaker Sulak Sivaraksa, “the causes of suffering are always greed, hatred and delusion. At the more immediate level these causes have become embodied in consumerism, militarism, compartmentalization of thought and practice, and the separation of efforts to resolve social problems from the process of personal transformation.” His life’s work, both in his native Thailand and in the world at large, is to “sow seeds of peace” in place of the weeds of violence.
Long a voice of democratic reform in Thailand—an enterprise that has earned him death threats, arrest, and exile—Sivaraksa advocates a Buddhism engaged with the social, economic, and environmental problems of the day. He argues that the Buddhist notion of mindfulness is the key to overcoming the consumerism, militarism, and compartmentalization he believes characterizes the West and is beginning to encroach upon the East.
Aware that explicitly religious language is regarded with suspicion by many social reformers, Sivaraksa defends what he calls “Buddhism with a small b.” Stripped of “ritual, myth, and culture,” small-b Buddhism seeks to show that traditional Buddhist ideals such as mindfulness—“especially the breathing which brings us back to what is happening in the present moment. With what is wondrous, refreshing and healing both within and around us”—compassion, and a sense of the deep interconnectedness of all creation are also invaluable when invoked in political and economic contexts. They encourage a nonviolent approach to problem solving that’s quite contrary to the usual adversarial way in which governments tackle issues.
For Sivaraksa, nonviolence is an active rather than passive way of life. The key is compassion. To see and empathize with the suffering of any sentient being is to be moved to do something to help alleviate its pain. Sometimes relief isn’t possible. But frequently it is, and in those cases, to do nothing is to silently acquiesce to and collaborate in the damage that’s inflicted on the victim. Passivity in the face of suffering, in other words, can be an often overlooked form of violence. Similarly, a consumer-driven indifference to wasteful modes of production, exploitative uses of human labor, and unsustainable wreckage of the environment, is a type of passivity that in fact is violent. Buddhism with a small b seeks to awaken people to this fact.
Sivaraksa has received international recognition for his efforts, as he says, “to continually plant seeds of joy, peace and understanding in order to facilitate the ongoing work of transformation in the depths of our consciousness.” One of his many honors was a 1995 Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Peace Prize.
7 March
Stanley Kubrick
26 July 1928—7 March 1999
Satirizing Nuclear Madness
Herman Kahn’s 1960 On Thermonuclear War wasn’t exactly a best seller, but it did ratchet up the Cold War a degree or two. Kahn, a RAND military strategist, argued that a thermonuclear war was winnable. True, the killing power of such a conflict would be so great that its destructiveness, Kahn argued, would have to be measured in terms of “megadeath.” But eventually one side would emerge victorious from the rubble.
Four years after Kahn’s book, and two years after the world nearly tested Kahn’s theory in the Cuban Missile Crisis, reclusive film director Stanley Kubrick made a movie that showed just how dangerous and ridiculous the idea of a winnable nuclear war was. The film carried the bizarre title of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Of Kubrick’s thirteen films, three (counting Strangelove) were stridently anti-war—the other two were Paths of Glory in 1957 and Full Metal Jacket in 1987—but Strangelove was the best. Although the Cold War gave rise to an entire genre of apocalyptic films about nuclear war, Kubrick’s stands out as the only one that uses satire and dark humor to protest nuclear proliferation. Kubrick himself described it as a “nightmare comedy.” In terms of writing, directing, cinematography, and acting, it’s a genuine tour de force.
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