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"As Alfred Nobel
finally discerned,
people are never
deterred from the
folly of war by the stark terror of it."
Excerpted from
Ralph Bunche's Nobel Lecture,
11 December 1950
at the University of Oslo
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UN photo
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In this most anxious period of human history, the subject of peace, above every other, commands the solemn attention of all men of reason and goodwill. Moreover, on this particular occasion, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nobel Foundation, it is eminently fitting to speak of peace. No subject could
be closer to my own heart, since I have the honour to speak as a member of the international Secretariat of the United Nations.
In these critical times-times which test to the utmost the good sense, the forbearance and the morality of every peace-loving people-it is not easy to speak of peace with either conviction or reassurance. True it is that statesmen the world over, exalting lofty concepts and noble ideals, pay homage to peace and freedom in a perpetual torrent of eloquent phrases. But the statesmen also speak darkly of the lurking threat of war, and the preparations for war ever intensify, while strife flares or threatens in many localities. The words used by statesmen in our day no longer have a common meaning. Perhaps they never had. Freedom, democracy, human rights, international morality, peace itself mean different things to different men. Words, in a constant flow of propaganda-itself an instrument of war-are employed to confuse, mislead and debase the common man. Democracy is prostituted to dignify enslavement; freedom and equality are held good for some men, but withheld from others by and in allegedly "democratic" societies; in "free" societies, so-called, individual human rights are severely denied; aggressive adventures are launched under the guise of "liberation".
Truth and morality are subverted by propaganda, on the cynical assumption that truth is whatever propaganda can induce people to believe. Truth and morality, therefore, become gravely weakened as defences against injustice and war. With what great insight did Voltaire, hating war enormously, declare: "War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not colour his crime with the pretext of justice."
Peoples everywhere wish and long for peace and freedom in their simplest and clearest connotations: an end to armed conflict and to the suppression of the inalienable rights of man. In a single generation, the peoples of the world have suffered the profound anguish of two catastrophic wars; they have had enough of war. Who could doubt that the people of Norway-ever peaceful, still deeply wounded from an unprovoked, savage Nazi aggression-wish peace? Who could doubt that all of the peoples of Europe-whose towns and cities, whose peaceful countrysides, have been mercilessly ravaged; whose fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, have been slaughtered and maimed in tragic numbers-wish peace? Who could sincerely doubt that the peoples of the Western hemisphere-who in the common effort to save the world from barbaric tyranny came into the two world wars only reluctantly and at great sacrifice of human and material resources-wish peace? Who could doubt that the long-suffering masses of Asia and Africa wish peace? Who indeed could be so unseeing as not to realize that in modern war victory is illusory, that the harvest of war can be only misery, destruction and degradation?
If war should come, the peoples of the world would again be called upon to fight it, but they would not have willed it.
Statesmen and philosophers repeatedly have warned that some values-freedom, honour, self-respect-are higher than peace or life itself. This may be true. Certainly, very many would hold that the loss of human dignity and self-respect, the chains of enslavement, are too high a price even for peace. But the horrible realities of modern warfare scarcely afford even this fatal choice. There is only suicidal escape, not freedom, in the death and destruction of atomic war. This is mankind's great dilemma. The well-being and the hopes of the peoples of the world can never be served until peace, as well as freedom, honour and self-respect, is secure.
In these critical days, it is a high privilege and a most rewarding experience to be associated with the United Nations-the greatest peace effort in human history. Those who work in and with the Organization, perhaps inevitably, tend to develop a professional optimism with regard to the prospects for the United Nations and, therefore, to the prospects for peace. But there is also a sense of deep frustration, which flows from the knowledge that mankind could readily live in peace and freedom and good neighbourliness if there were but a minimum of will to do so. There is the ever-present, simple but stark truth that though the peoples long primarily for peace, they may be prodded by their
leaders and Governments into needless war, which may at worst destroy them, at best lead them once again
to barbarism.
The United Nations strives to be realistic. It understands well the frailties of man. It is realized that if there is to be peace in the world, it must be attained through men and with man, in his nature and mores, just about as he now is. Intensive effort is exerted to reach the hearts and minds of men with the vital pleas for peace and human understanding, to the end that human attitudes and relations may be steadily improved. But this is a process of international education, or better, education for international living, and it is at best gradual. Men change their attitudes and habits slowly and but grudgingly divorce their minds from fears, suspicions and prejudices.
The United Nations itself is but a cross section of the world's peoples. It reflects, therefore, the typical fears, suspicions and prejudices which bedevil human relations throughout the world. In the delegations from the sixty Member States and in the international Secretariat in which most of them are represented may be found individual qualities of goodness and badness, honesty and subterfuge, courage and timorousness, internationalism and chauvinism. It could not be otherwise. Still, the activities of all are within the framework of a great international organization dedicated to the imperative causes of peace, freedom and justice in the world.
The United Nations, inescapably, is an organization at once of great weakness and great strength.
Its powers of action are sharply limited by the exigencies of national sovereignties. With nationalism per se, there may be no quarrel. But narrow, exclusively self-centred nationalism persists as the outstanding dynamic of world politics and is the prime obstacle to enduring peace. The international well-being, on the one hand, and national egocentrism, on the other, are inevitably at cross-purposes. The procedures and processes of the United Nations as a circumscribed international parliament are unavoidably complex and tedious.
The United Nations was established in the hope, if not on the assumption, that the five great powers would work harmoniously toward an increasingly better world order. The existing impasse between West and East and the resultant "cold war" were not foreseen by those who formulated the United Nations Charter in the spring of 1945 in the misleading but understandably jubilant atmosphere of war's triumphant end. Nevertheless, the United Nations has exhibited a fortunate flexibility, which has enabled it to adjust to the regrettable circumstances of the discord among the great powers and to continue to function effectively.
In these post-war years, the United Nations, in the interest of peace, has been called upon to eliminate the threat of local wars, to stop local wars already underway, and now in Korea, itself to undertake an international police action which amounts to full-scale war. Its record has been impressive. Its interventions have been directly responsible for checking and containing dangerous armed conflicts in Indonesia, Kashmir and Palestine, and to only a lesser extent in Greece.
That the United Nations has been able to serve the cause of peace in this way has been due in large measure to the determination of its members to reject the use of armed force as an instrument of national policy and to the new techniques of international intervention which it has employed. In each instance of a threat to the peace, the United Nations projects itself directly into the area of conflict by sending United Nations representatives to the area for the purpose of mediation and conciliation.
The international problems with which the United Nations is concerned are the problems of the interrelations of the peoples of the world. They are human problems. The United Nations is entitled to believe, and it does believe, that there are no insoluble problems of human relations and that there is none which cannot be solved by peaceful means. The United Nations-in Indonesia, Palestine and Kashmir-has demonstrated convincingly that parties to the most severe conflict may be induced to abandon war as the method of settlement in favour of mediation and conciliation, at a merciful saving of untold lives and acute suffering.
Unfortunately, there may yet be some in the world who have not learned that today war can settle nothing, that aggressive force can never be enough, nor will it be tolerated. If this should be so, the pitiless wrath of the organized world must fall upon those who would endanger the peace for selfish ends. For in this advanced day, there is no excuse, no justification, for nations resorting to force except to repel armed attack.
The world and its peoples, being as they are, there is no easy or quick or infallible approach to a secure peace. It is only by patient, persistent, undismayed effort, by trial and error, that peace can be won. Nor can it be won cheaply, as the taxpayer is learning. In the existing world tension, there will be rebuffs and setbacks, dangerous crises and episodes of violence. But the United Nations, with unshakable resolution, in the future as in the past, will continue to man the dikes of peace. In this common purpose, all States, irrespective of size, are vital.
It is truer today than when Alfred Nobel realized it a half-century ago that peace cannot be achieved in a vacuum. Peace must be paced by human progress. Peace is no mere matter of men fighting or not fighting. Peace, to have meaning for many who have known only suffering in both peace and war, must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health and education, as well as freedom and human dignity-a steadily better life. If peace is to be secure, long-suffering and long-starved forgotten peoples of the world, the underprivileged and the undernourished, must begin to realize without delay the promise of a new day and a new life.
The United Nations is opposed to imperialism of any kind, ideological or otherwise. The United Nations stands for the freedom and equality of all peoples, irrespective of race, religion or ideology. It is for the peoples of every society to make their own choices with regard to ideologies, economic systems and the relationship which is to prevail between the State and the individual. The United Nations is engaged in an historic effort to underwrite the rights of man. It is also attempting to give reassurance to the colonial peoples that their aspirations for freedom can be realized, if only gradually, by peaceful processes.
There can be peace and a better life for all men. Given adequate authority and support, the United Nations can ensure this. But the decision really rests with the peoples of the world. The United Nations belongs to the people, but it is not yet as close to them, as much a part of their conscious interest, as it must come to be. The United Nations must always be on the people's side. Where their fundamental rights and interests are involved, it must never act from mere expediency. At times, perhaps, it has done so, but never to its own advantage nor to that of the sacred causes of peace and freedom. If the peoples of the world are strong in their resolve and if they speak through the United Nations, they need never be confronted with the tragic alternatives of war or dishonourable appeasement, death or enslavement.
Amidst the frenzy and irrationality of a topsy-turvy world, some simple truths would appear to be self-evident.
As Alfred Nobel finally discerned, people are never deterred from the folly of war by the stark terror of it. But it is nonetheless true that if in atomic war there would be survivors, there could be no victors. What, then, could war achieve which could not be better gained by peaceful means? There are, to be sure, vital differences and wide areas of conflict among the nations, but there is utterly none which could not be settled peacefully-by negotiation and mediation-given a genuine will for peace and even a modicum of mutual good faith.
But there would appear to be little hope that efforts to break the great power impasse could be very fruitful in the current atmosphere of fear, suspicion and mutual recrimination. Fear, suspicion and recrimination in the relations among nations tend to be dangerously self-compounding. They induce that national hysteria which in its rejection of poise and rationality can itself be the fatal prelude to war. A favourable climate for peaceful negotiation must be created and can only be created by painstaking, unremitting effort. Conflicting parties must be led to realize that the road to peace can never be traversed by threatening to fight at every bend, by merely being armed to the teeth, or by flushing every bush to find an enemy. An essential first step in a civilized approach to peace in these times would call for a moratorium on recrimination and reproach.
There are some in the world who are prematurely resigned to the inevitability of war. Among them are the advocates of the so-called "preventive war", who, in their resignation to war, wish merely to select their own time for initiating it. To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honourable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions which beget further war.
In the final analysis, the acid test of a genuine will to peace is the willingness of disputing parties to expose their differences to the peaceful processes of the United Nations and to the bar of international public opinion, which the United Nations reflects. It is only in this way that truth, reason and justice may come to prevail over the shrill and blatant voice of propaganda, that a wholesome international morality can be cultivated.
It is worthy of emphasis that the United Nations exists not merely to preserve the peace but also to make change, even radical change, possible without violent upheaval. The United Nations has no vested interest in the status quo. It seeks a more secure world, a better world, a world of progress for all peoples. In the dynamic world society which is the objective of the United Nations, all peoples must have equality and equal rights. The rights of those who at any given time may be in the minority-whether for reasons of race, religion or ideology-are as important as those of the majority, and the minorities must enjoy the same respect and protection. The United Nations does not seek a world cut after a single pattern, nor does it consider this desirable. The United Nations seeks only unity, not uniformity, out of the world's diversity.
There will be no security in our world, no release from agonizing tension, no genuine progress, no enduring peace until, in Shelley's fine words, "reason's voice, loud as the voice of nature, shall have waked the nations".
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Another Centenary Observed
Cândido Portinari (1903-1962)
When delegates enter United Nations Headquarters in New York and ascend the stairs or escalator to the General Assembly Hall or the Security Council chambers, they see before them a striking mural that soars the flight of two floors-it is entitled "War" and its image is reproduced at the start of our Essay on page 31. And when they leave the chambers of these bodies (or indeed the Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council or, for that matter, the North Lounge where delegates informally congregate) they see on their way down another lofty mural, this one entitled "Peace", which is reproduced on our back cover. The idea of contending parties entering the United Nations only to leave it reconciled was given vibrant visual life by Cândido Portinari, widely recognized as one of Brazil's masters of modernist painting. A gifted draftsman and colourist, he gained international recognition from the 1940s onwards as a socially engaged artist, representing the Brazilian people in his large dramatic canvasses on social themes. Since 1979, seventeen years after his death, the artist's life and work have been made publicly accessible through the pioneering efforts of the Portinari Project in Rio de Janeiro, headed by his son, João Cândido, which has catalogued some 4,500 works and 25,000 documents.
In 1952, Cândido Portinari was commissioned by the Brazilian Government to create two giant panels representing "War" and "Peace", interpreting the objective of the United Nations "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". The "War" panel offers six Pieta-like representations of a mother with a dead child, along with some seventy minor figures. The "Peace" panel shows dozens of children of all races singing, dancing and playing together, as well as peasants sowing and harvesting. Completed four years later, the twin murals, each measuring some 14 metres by 10 metres and painted in oil on waterproof plywood for use in shipbuilding, were presented as a gift to the United Nations by the Government of Brazil on 6 September 1957. On 6 May 1974, the Universal Postal Union honoured the murals with the first-day issue of a stamp depicting a detail from "Peace". |
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