Politics and peace: past and present

We must not let 2023 pass into history without emphasising once again that politicians and states not only have fundamental tasks and duties: They must also fulfil them. The breach of law committed in our countries by politicians and the state when they invoke “reason of state”, “emergency rule”, “exceptional distress”, or other such constructs opens liberal and democratic constitutional states to the gravest dangers. As a rule, such invocations not only conceal a breach of the law and a regression to absolutist conditions; they also signal increasingly aggressive policies of power and war.

Political ethics, as formulated in the context of natural law¹, for example, assigns politics and the state the foremost tasks and duties: the safeguarding of internal and external peace. Politics and the state should guarantee that the people living in the territory of the state can develop their personalities with equal rights in freedom and dignity and live and work together in solidarity.
  Our politicians and our states have effectively repudiated these responsibilities. Too many of them think that political ethics entail unrealistic ideals. Reality forces politicians and the state to pursue a policy of power and, therefore, also of war. Peace is merely a utopian notion far from reality. Ethics and morality have no place in (practical) politics.
  However, a look at the past and present shows that there have been and still are well-known politicians who wanted and want to act in the spirit of political ethics and who have acted and continue to act accordingly. As a result, they have become beacons, personalities who provide orientation – even if they were and are threatened with violent resistance and their plans could not and cannot be realised immediately.
  At this point, we would like to recall the peace speech given by US President John F. Kennedy on 10 June 1963 to professors and students at the American University in Washington.² It should also be remembered because today, 60 years later, we are looking almost in vain for such speeches, let alone actions, from politicians in the Western hemisphere. At present, we are likely to hear comparable thoughts and sentiments only from other parts of the world.

Kennedy, Khrushchev,
and the Cuban Missile Crisis

John F. Kennedy gave his speech slightly more than six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved. The world had “just lucked out” of a nuclear war, not least because it was not the Hawks in the U.S. and the Soviet Union who prevailed, but those on both sides who argued in favour of seeking a peaceful, negotiated solution and avoiding a loss of face or even a humiliating defeat for the other side.
  Recently released documents from Moscow³ show that, even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the American president had sought contact with Nikita Khrushchev, then the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and that both had endeavoured to ease bilateral relations and disarmament. Khrushchev had repeatedly spoken of the possibility of “peaceful coexistence” between the two nuclear powers in the years before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  Kennedy was not allowed to follow up his words of 10 June with many political steps. Less than six months after his Washington speech, he was assassinated, on 22 November 1963 – probably also because of his peace efforts, as documents now available strongly suggest.⁴

“The most important
topic on earth: peace”

I will note here only a few key ideas. At the beginning, the US President emphasises that he is concerned with “the most important topic on earth”: “global peace”. He then defines what he means by peace:

What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

Kennedy then states why peace is so important to him, especially in his time:

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

What is more:

Today, the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles – which can only destroy and never create – is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

Another, real peace is therefore “the necessary rational goal of reasonable people”.

War is avoidable.

Kennedy spoke out against blaming the Soviet Union alone for the lack of peace and declaring the impossibility of peace. Instead, he called on the citizens of his own country to reflect on their own attitude to peace:

First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

Policy of many small steps.

According to Kennedy, his ideas were not a fantasy, but a realistic view of the global political situation and the fact of competing world powers:

I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will […]. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.

He then adds:

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbour, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbours. So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.

Respect for your counterpart

Kennedy does not deny that he rejects the political system of the Soviet Union. But he also says, “But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.”
  And he adds:

[…] And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland.

Common interests

Finally, and with these passages my review of Kennedy’s peace speech should end, he says:

Today, should total war ever break out again – no matter how – our two countries will be the primary target. […] All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the Cold War, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies, our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle, with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons. In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. […]
  So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

Opposing the policy of war

Simply referring to the peace speech Kennedy delivered 60 years ago last year will not bring about a reversal of the policies and programs of today’s politicians and other supporters of war. On the contrary, there are still too many politicians and representatives of other social “elites” on both sides of the Atlantic who reject serious peace negotiations and instead favour a continuation and expansion of the war in Ukraine – and not only there. Examples include statements by President Biden to the U.S. Congress on 6 December, the speeches by the German Social Democratic leadership at their party conference on 9 and 10 December, the guest article by Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Green foreign minister, published on 10 December in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, and an appeal by 70 German politicians and other supporters of war published in the weekly Die Zeit on 14 December and calling for the war in Ukraine not to end. The propaganda lie that Russia is threatening Europe’s freedom is always at the centre.
  This is the current political reality in a West, whose “elites” want to make us “fit for war”. But that shouldn’t stop citizens from thinking about whether Kennedy wasn’t right in 1963 – and whether he wouldn’t be right today. Citizens can oppose the escalating war policy of our “elites” – and they can take up and support the worldwide peace initiatives that exist today, including those from the political sphere – even if it is the supposed “enemy” who formulates them.
  We citizens do not have to follow the drums of war. Surveys repeatedly confirm⁵ that this is actually the case. It is very good when passive disagreement is followed by peace-promoting activities – each person in his or her own way.  •

¹ cf., e. g., the works of Johannes Messner, for example, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Modern World. B. Herder, 1949. Revised ed., 1955
² https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/John%20F.%20Kennedy%20-%20American%20University%20Commencement.pdf
³ cf. https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2023/russland-bezweifelt-die-offizielle-version-des-kennedy-attentats/ of 20 November 2023.
⁴ cf. the very informative 2021 film by Oliver Stone: JFK revisited: Through the Looking Glass.
⁵ see, for example, “Germany is losing international influence. Survey by the Körber Foundation shows Germans’ view of foreign policy”. https://koerber-stiftung.de/presse/mitteilungen/deutschland-verliert-an-internationalem-einfluss/ of 27 November 2023