The International Day of Peace

Buenos Aires
It’s spring today in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Pope Francis is visiting the United States after his historic trip to Cuba. And somewhere on the global and local news schedules these events may figure prominently—and so too will the refugee crisis in Europe and some of the major wars that are causing it, as well as the reluctant decision of the world’s most powerful nation to (finally) start receiving more than a tiny smattering of those displaced by wars in which its foreign policy, and those of other permanent members of the UN Security Council, have figured prominently.
What you’ll hear a lot less about, however, is what is sometimes known as World Peace Day. That’s right, the annual event officially known as the International Day of Peace is today and, with unfortunately few exceptions, the world is oblivious to its existence.
The International Day of Peace is a United Nations holiday. The UN General Assembly passed the resolution creating it in 1981, and it was first celebrated in 1982. Or in other words, World Peace Day is 33 years old today. So if the human race had been doing its job in seeking ways to end war and build world peace, anyone over the age of, say, 25, would today be acutely aware of this commemoration and perhaps we would all be celebrating and giving collective thanks for the greatest worldwide peace pacts known in the history of the so-called civilized world.
Instead, I’m sorry to say, we are today much more attuned to war—which most world powers continued to glorify (as long as it’s not their people on the receiving end of the violence)—than to peace and much more aware of days marking the anniversaries of major wars than this one, which, rather futilely, seeks to bring the topic of world peace to the fore. Indeed, we are today facing the worst conditions for world peace since the Cold War Era, and the world is on the brink of the kind of circumstances that could lead to a catastrophic international conflict and that are similar to, and unprecedented since, the unleashing of World War I.
The commemoration of World Peace Day begins each year with the tolling of the UN Peace Bell at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. The bell was a gift from Japan to the United Nations Association and was cast from coins donated by children from every continent except Africa. On offering the gift to the UN, Japan—the only nation ever to have witnessed nuclear holocaust first hand—said that the bell should serve as “a reminder of the human cost of war”. The bell is inscribed with a legend reading “Long Live World Peace”, which can only be taken as irony or wishful thinking, considering that since the end of World War II, which was expected to herald a new era of global peace and cooperation, the world has known only the rivalries and power struggles of major rivals played out in the dramas of savage proxy wars staged on the battlefields of third world nations, and in which the proportion of civilian deaths to military casualties has grown ever higher, to such an extent that, today, five to nine out of every ten deaths in wars are among non-combatant civilian populations.
As donor of the UN Peace Bell, post-World War II Japan has, indeed, been one of the countries that have done the most to promote world peace. Unfortunately, in keeping with the sign of our chaotic times, the Japanese government recently announced its bid to add Japanese forces to the War on Terror coalition, a move which, on the surface, might appear defensive enough, but which carries with it the underlying possibility of reconverting Japan into yet another world-class military power. Fortunately, the Japanese public in general still holds the horrible cost of war fresh in its memory, and protests against the government’s militarization pretensions have been immediate and clear-cut.
It’s interesting to note that in the first couple of years World Peace Day was on the right track: The theme of the first event declared The Right to Peace of the peoples of the world. And the second year called for A Culture of Peace in the 21st Century. At the time, seventeen years clearly must have seemed like plenty of time in which to achieve such a goal. This was especially true since, until the year 2000 was actually upon us, there was a whole mysticism about the dramatic change in mentality that the world could expect with the dawning of The New Millennium, as if, from the end of one century to the next, some cosmic force would illuminate us and turn the human race into a wiser species that would use everything it had learned in the millennium before to create a more enlightened, more positive, more cooperative, more sustainably developed and more peaceful world.
The truth about the new millennium to date has been a bitter disappointment to those of us who advocate world peace. So true is this that last year, 2014, bore all of the terrifying hallmarks of the climate of 1914, when the planet was on the verge of the first of the two most devastating pan-conflicts in the history of the world, the two of which, fought in the first half of the 20th century, cost the lives of a combined total of over 100 million people. And 2015 has begun to show us some of the results of our folly in the form of the largest worldwide migrant and refugee crisis since World War II.
If anything, we appear more obtuse, more obsessed with war and international rivalry, more invested in the worldwide arms industry, more vulnerable to false patriotism and the glorification of war, and blinder to the deterioration of our planet and to proper conditions for healthy human life than ever before. With what we should know by now about the results of war, the consequences of environmental degradation, and the futility of armed conflict as any sort of “solution” to international disagreements, we would appear to be more bent on taking an obstinate road toward self-destruction as a species than on putting what we’ve learned to good use in creating an ever-better, more peaceful and more sustainable world in which to live.
One of the slogans of the International Day of Peace is a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that goes: “There is no road towards peace; peace is the road.” By this stage, we should surely be past the path-seeking stage and be firmly on the road to world peace and mutually beneficial cooperation.
In 2013, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed the theme of that year’s World Pace Day to be peace education as a means of bringing about a culture of peace. And indeed, if a path to world peace and cooperation exists—and I believe that through intensive worldwide activism it can—then peace education at every level is the answer, the only answer that can lift humanity from the mire of conflict and permit it to save itself from eventual self-destruction.

As individuals—common, everyday civilians with everything to lose and nothing to gain from engaging in wars with our human sisters and brothers around the world—we need to shake off the isolation and political autism in which we have allowed ourselves to be immersed. We need to stop giving lip-service to our desire for peace while at the same time shrugging our shoulders and claiming there’s nothing we as individuals can do to achieve it. We need to embrace empathy and feel in our own skin the plight of every person that war renders homeless, every would-be refugee clawing at the razor-wire walls of Europe, every abused and starving refugee child, every man, woman or child shelled, shot or torn to shreds by bombs and shrapnel, because no one today is safe any longer from the ravages of war and armed combat.
In order to achieve world peace and cooperation, we need to be willing to clear our minds, reject the siren song of “political expediency” and form a common front of common citizens for peace. We must be willing to reject calls to arms, to protest the use of force, to refuse our votes to anyone who calls for aggression, to dissuade ourselves of the fictitious idea of “the glory of war” and to unite in organizations that sponsor peace education, peaceful protest and civil disobedience as means of stripping governments of the power of murdering other peoples in our names and getting us murdered in the process.
Peace can only come with a change of mindset, and each of us has to be willing to say, “Let it start with me,” and do everything in our power to effect that change, one soul at a time.
May peace be with you on this and every day.