People for Peace (Netherlands)
On May 2, 1945, the Red Army conquered Berlin. On May 8 and 9 (depending on the time zone), Nazi Germany officially surrendered. However, Japan’s capitulation was still pending. Although Japan’s surrender was in sight, the US was the first and only country in history to use nuclear weapons during a war. At the time of the American atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US could only foresee the complete medical and certainly mutagenic consequences for the affected population to a limited extent. However, with the ‘wisdom’ of hindsight, the nuclear
threat has not disappeared but has actually expanded since then. This while today the possibility of a nuclear response to a nuclear attack cannot be ruled out and the consequences of such an event would be catastrophic.
We are now living in Orwellian times in which war is peace and peace is war. A nuclear threat to bring peace, can you imagine? If you ask me, we are in the era of the clouded mind.
In his book “How do we learn peace” from 1967, Master of Arts Steven C. Derksen spoke about “the relative delay of the subjective mind, the lagging behind of our social insights, morality, mentality and thinking habits in the rapid development in the economic and especially technical field.” There’s more to that, such as the fact that the level of propaganda in the current time, in the current education, does not do the development of the ability to think logically any good, resulting in an increased chance of acts of war due to misunderstandings.
Derksen advocates peace education in order to promote peace. So―as in the Netherlands―no willingness to die and emergency packages but just the opposite.
… Nowadays we also have the threat of AI. The idea that the rapidly developing AI will eventually gain independent access to nuclear energy is certainly not unthinkable.
By using clear guidelines, the development of robust control mechanisms and using international cooperation, this danger can probably be curbed reasonably well, but not completely eliminated.
But also consider that the enormous amount of electricity needed to provide AI data centers with sufficient power for the many AI operations is partly obtained from nuclear energy. That does not make the danger any smaller.
… Than there was a next round of negotiations bet ween the US and Iran last weekend. Despite that, Israel, together with the US, sought the attack on Iran in advance that same weekend, so despite the negotiations. In this way, Iran must continue―or start―to develop nuclear weapons for the sake of its own security…and the dangerous nuclear spiral moves further upwards. We still have a lot of work to do to turn the tide.
So I don’t want to claim that every war can be prevented, but, to return to S.C. Derksen’s book, the crux of peace education ultimately lies with the teachers, he rightly states. And with that the theme grabs its own tail, the intention to want to teach and preach peace, leads the minds into the mindset of preventing wars. And every prevented war is one… Because, to conclude with Derksen’s words from 1967, when he complained about the lowering of the admission requirements for teachers: [we are] in the age of atomic bombs and mass indoctrination.
