For yours and our freedom
I believe that the success of civilization don’t measured in the technical progress, but in the humanitarian progress. The indicator of greatness isn’t a size and power of machines that civilization can create, but, for example, is the relation of the strongest representative of civilization to the weaker. And even deeper — how important are the concepts of “the strongest” and “the weakest” for this civilization.
Therefore, for example, I do not like the Kardashev scale of civilizations — it measures the development of civilization by used energy.
I want to consider two, perhaps, the most well-known anti-war initiatives, which, incidentally, occurred almost simultaneously: the hippies against the war in Vietnam in 1967 and the demonstration of Soviet dissidents against the entry of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968. The striking synchrony of these events requires a separate examination, but within the framework of this text I leave these arguments behind the brackets in favor of the manifestation of those meanings which for me are particularly important.
A critical feature of these actions is that they called for an end of violence elsewhere on Earth. It’s pretty obvious to stand for peace when the war comes to your house — any person, depending on their beliefs, or with weapons in their hands, or with a poster will go out on the street against this violence. Actions against violence on the other side of the globe is an action solely from values. The values that manifest the awareness of the whole world as their home.
The “home” for which a person feels responsible, ends outside the border of his apartment for many people. For another— his entrance, city, country… Consideration of the whole Earth as a space of its responsibility, when violence that takes place far and doesn’t affect you in a pragmatic sense — shows the leap at the level of humanitarian values - the maximum expansion of its area of responsibility.
It is about the logic of dividing people into “they” and “us”, which is successfully constructed by propaganda of different countries, when people of another country/ethnos/culture are presented as unworthy of protection and sympathy, and even subject to destruction. And actions against the war coming to your house does not break this logic, even on the contrary — often this propagandistic logic uses the plot “enemy at the gate”. Only with the transition to the level of protection of values in another part of the world that does not affect us, manifest values level of civilization manifest itself — that it was able to expand the space of its responsibility to the entire planet.
So what is the point of such demonstrations, which, it would seem, did not lead to the cessation of concrete military operations? It is precisely that stopping a particular war does not change the logic of the system (although it is also a very desirable result, since it reduces suffering), but in the long term it is actions at the level of value change, the breakdown of the “us-they” propaganda logic that are effective. The well-known slogan of the 1968 demonstration “For yours and our freedom” illustrates this idea.
As for modern times, war is certainly not the only danger, not the only global challenge, but military crises are inextricably linked, I think, to others. The barrier of the complexity of the systems with which one can work in the current dominant logic of hierarchical management, the crisis of the identity of man and societies, associated with new technologies that destroy familiar identities. In addition, in discussions about the images of the future, without which it is impossible to work with global challenges, as always there is a stretch of ideals against the methods in which it would seem that the 20th century should finally put an end, but it arises again and again. Together, these factors — indiscrimination in the methods of achieving ideals in conditions of pressing barriers of complexity and identity — I consider the actual cause of many wars and conflicts.
That’s why I’m going to the No More War Festival in Sweden in August this year. This festival is an initiative to bring together people to manifest that we want to build peace between our countries instead of increasing militarisation which is currently happening, particularly in the Baltic Sea region. We want to showcase international friendship and ability to cooperate, and the same time to create a space for learning, for new important connections and deeper insights.
The festival is an interplay of music and educational seminars, of fun and learning, of art and experience exchange. Camping, bonfires and nature as the platform; music, dance and body practices as tools to bring us together and understand each other and ourselves; insightful workshops, seminars and role-plays as pieces of your learning path. You are welcome here.
The place and time are not random: No More War Festival will be held prior to a big Swedish military exercise Aurora 17 for NATO troops taking place two weeks later across the road from the festival. A perfect time and place to manifest that the safety is in peace, dialogue and cooperation, not in increasing militarisation.
