Peace and security is not won by war,
 nor is prosperity won by force. 

War can be defeated by building peace, by eradicating the causes for war, by creating a human world designed for human living. The issues of war and peace are ultimately not political issues, they are human issues. History has taught us that. There was a time when after nearly eighty years of warfare, by which half of the population of Europe was killed, society came to its senses in 1648 and called it quits. The Treaty of Westphalia that arranged this peace should have established peace forever. Still, we seem to want to try anew, again and again, what we have already proven to ourselves to be an utterly useless exercise of horror. 

We are human beings. Shouldn't we rather behave like human beings? Surely, this project is not a political issue, but one that is under our control. Since all wars of the last century were fought for economic imperial reasons, let's deal with those issues and redevelop the world economically. It has never been a human quality to steal from the poor, no matter how easy this may seem. It has always been the human way to help one another, and support one another for a richer life for all. 

The time has come to reassess ourselves as human beings, to put aside our greed which actually threatens us more severely than war, and learn the art of relating to one another as people of a common humanity. Although we have rarely achieved this in the past, if ever, it seems we should give it a try. How else will we ever cleanse the world of its tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that all the great nations of this world own between them and threaten to use in willful orgies of mass destruction? Should we not rather build one another up, so that we all have a beautiful and human world to live in?

Rolf Witzsche