Peace on earth forall people good will
With a special peace offering to the young friends of Fridays for Future
The television news of December 12, 2020 broadcast an up to date report from a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. A black curly haired refugee child, perhaps eight years old, stare at the camera with an empty and chilling gaze into the camera. He stands in front of a refugee tent thrown together over a wooden frame which is open to public view. The naked earth, a gas lantern hanging from a provisional joist…no oven to be seen. The little girl wears a simple dress. Her face is not a vivid white since there is no running water, one subsequent learns. The father holds another, yet smaller child in his arms that he has just brought back from a “visit” to the apacothery. He appears ill, even feverish. At night he is ice-cold. The eight Euros he has borrowed from a relative who lives in Lebanon. He has lost his job. An interview partner says that Lebanon has problems of its own, such as the destructive explosions recently registered in Berit and now because of Corona he has no income of his own. Some 200,000 Syrian refugees are presently living in Lebanon who fear to return to their homeland. There they can expect only torture and bombs. The little girl’s eyes not merely touch the view of good will but at least pose three questions: how can I help this little girl, what are the causes this horror and what can I do against those causes.
The first question, namely, how can I directly help this little girl, is the easiest of all to answer. Every viewer can help according to his or her capabilities. A donation, every single Euro, that goes to a responsible charity is a contribution. On Google one can even link directly into the account of charities at work directly on the site of refugee camps. The second and third questions, however, require more thought.
First of all we have the picture of the suffering young woman on the television screen. Such pictures are far from unique in the newspapers. Journalists speak however of the phenomenon of viewers, listeners and readers being revolted by “horror reports”. To have to show starving, freezing, abused and abandoned people is an all too normal occurrence. While that happens in China, in many countries of Africa, in very many Arab lands in the Near East and North Africa, in Myanmar, in Russia, in White Russia, and many South American states. In these countries people are attacked, tortured, and deprived of nourishment, and proper medical attention, not to mention deprivation of their basic human rights, which are regularly trampled underfoot. Even in our Western world there are heads of government who seek to diminish or even abolish these rights.
Even in the USA, one of the birth lands of parliamentary democracy, to whom we in Europe owe our freedom and welfare a deranged, narcissistic demagogue has sought to violate the democratic rules of the game. He manipulated the American public and sought to turn it to his purposes. Through his drivel concerning “Make America Great Again” and his aggressive policies towards the international institutions, he destroyed the confidence of many people, both in his own country and elsewhere, including in places where people still aspire to a democratic order on their own. He even went so far as to denounce those who did not vote for him and even accused some of being “communist”. However, our American friends have dispensed with him, however modest was the electoral difference that led to this result.
All these depicted horrors, whether domestic civil wars or so-called operations involving ethnic cleansing have one and the same cause. The powers that be, possessing as they do so much strength and influence, is in a position to activate the machinery of oppression. These forces go by many names: they could be described either as a chief of state, or perhaps oligarchs who rob the patrimony of their people, or chief of clan who mistreat men and women as mere tools, or mullahs, who latterly have hung young homosexual men or journalists, would be-pashas who push suffering refugees into boats to serve their own purposes or perhaps merely to indulge in the pleasure of abusing them.
And how are we doing here in Europe with human and civil rights? Do we treat these unfortunate people stranded here with the same rights as we claim for ourselves?
What can we do to make the human and civil rights of these people respected? Let’s take a glance at the work of the master historian Heinrich August Winkler in his Geschichte des Westens which may be quite helpful in this respect. There he shows that these rights have developed slowly in the course of Western history. He described the process whereby Judeo-Christian thinking begins and slowly works its way through western history. Just like any process, it has its ups and downs as these values eventually impose themselves. Eventually people in the West begin to regard these human and civil rights as universally applicable wherever one might reside.
From these considerations the following question arises, when will these values become universal, and what can we do to make that possible.
Far too many people on this earth suffer from unmentionable evils. They suffer precisely because those in power use violence to deny their basic rights. They also suffer because those of us living in the highly developed countries are destroying our own portion of the earth and theirs as well. Our earth is not a marketplace; it is the basis of life for all of us.
To struggle against this evil the order of the day is to clear away the greatest obstacle in our path, namely, national sovereignty. We must harness national sovereignty and bring it together in fraternity with other nations. The very words “national sovereignty” are a hindrance to involving ourselves in the internal affairs of other countries. How often is this argument used by the powerful to continue their oppression of their peoples!
The American historian John Lukacs, in his important book The Hitler of History has shown that the limitless tragedy inflicted by the Nazis on Europe and indeed world-wide was founded on the notion that the national, that is, German, culture was superior to all others. With a slightly different vocabulary the Nazis prioritized national values over basic civil rights. Quite the opposite, indeed, from the notion of a civil order based on the idea that human and civil rights are the patrimony of everyone living on this earth. Precisely this latter notion underlies the founding of the United Nations.
From this notions can Europeans of good will draw one conclusion: we must adopt the values described by Heinrich August Winkler as our own, working so that human rights and civil rights are valid for all who live on this earth. And we mean no only on paper, Let us dispose of the cliché of those who argue that we should restrict our concerns to the boundaries of egotistical nation states, instead working to intertwine and unify. The first task at hand is to strength our Europe. Let us complete the European project of integration so that we create a true United States of Europe, so as to put us in a position to counter the dictators who afflict this earth of ours.
Let us complete the European projekt progressively greater European integration. So that we can finally create the United States of Europe. Having accomplished that we - and the other states in the world - we will have strengthens the United Nations and be in a position to attack the problems of dictators, who continue to mistreat their suffering peoples.
Translated by Dr. Mark Falcoff