{"id":53262,"date":"2025-12-15T20:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T20:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/metta\/?p=53262"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:03:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:03:27","slug":"those-in-power-are-terrified-of-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/metta\/2025\/12\/those-in-power-are-terrified-of-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"Those in power are terrified of peace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometime in the mid 1950s a dramatic version of \u201cThe Diary of Anne Frank\u201d was performed in Berlin. When the curtain went up, nobody moved. The audience was stunned. It was too soon after the event. The horror of Nazism had ended, but signs of it could still be seen everywhere. For most Germans, the wound was too raw.<\/p>\n\n\n

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When I was in Heidelberg some 40 years later, I attended a reading by novelist Jakov Lind, who had hid out and barely escaped detection as a Jew in the Netherlands and even Germany itself right through the war. His talk was all about literature and he never mentioned his harrowing experience (which I appreciated), but at the end of it one of the German students, prodded him, \u201cTell us how it was under those<\/em> Germans (unter den<\/em> Deutchen).\u201d As I recall, Lind didn\u2019t take the bait; but what stood out for me was that student\u2019s attempt, perfectly understandable and perfectly legitimate, to radically disassociate himself and his generation from the still fairly recent atrocities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are elements of this situation that may be useful for us today. After all, if we are perfectly truthful, we have some atrocities of our own. I\u2019m thinking not so much of the climate situation, which receives most attention, but of the revelations in a recent book by my friend Jim Douglass, \u201cMartyrs to the Unspeakable,\u201d about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcom X. Summing up his recent interview with Douglass about the book, Robert Ellsberg concluded that the four brutal assassinations were done, \u201cto strike down those whose message of peace and justice threatened the national security state.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would say that even \u201cjustice\u201d is secondary. King, for example, did a great deal for racial justice, but he was not killed until one year to the day after he gave his powerful speech denouncing the Vietnam war at Riverside Church in New York. JFK likewise was most probably killed because of his famous overture of respect and cooperation with Khrushchev (imagine what that cooperation could have done for the world!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in a lighter, but still quite cogent vein we might consider the satirical \u201cReport From Iron Mountain\u201d <\/em>by Leonard Lewing in 1967, depicting the \u201cthreat\u201d of peace to the prevailing order \u2014 i.e. the national security state. This book was protected from being taken too seriously by fantasy and humor. It\u2019s a time-honored method: think of the fables from Aesop to la Fontaine. But it makes the very serious point that everything from our economy to the sense of meaning for many people depends on war. The elite who control the present order, be they in government, the military, or indeed in crime, are terrified of peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Place in juxtaposition to this dark fact the observation of St. Augustine in \u201cThe City of God,\u201d where he wrote that \u201ceven on the level of earthly and temporal values, nothing that we can talk about, long for, or finally get, it’s so desirable, so welcome, so good as peace\u2026 Peace is so universally loved that its very name falls sweetly on the ear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We thus find ourselves being in the grip of a group of people who are driving civilization in the exact opposite direction of our deepest longing. They are able to wield power far out of proportion to their small number by controlling the narrative that controls the thinking of the majority. Hence they are controlling our destiny; as the B\u1e5bhad\u0101ra\u1e47yaka Upani\u1e63ad, a text from ancient India, declares, \u201cas our thought is, so is our deed; as our deed is, so is our destiny, whether good or ill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If all is not lost, it is because as William Cullen Bryant said, \u201ctruth crushed to earth will rise again.\u201d That is, there is an inherent power in truth that will come out at some point, even if we\u2019ve done our best to conceal it. And of course, men acting against their own best interest are far more vulnerable than they may appear. In Shakespeare’s \u201cKing Lear\u201dthe villainous Edmund says, “Where I could not be honest, I never yet was valiant.”\u00a0This tension is in fact showing up in a phenomenon for which we have now a name and scientific evidence: \u201cmoral injury,\u201d the internal harm we cause to ourselves when we harm others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n