A Memorial for Peace

Films like „Time Bandits“ and „Brazil“ by Terry Gilliam or an exhibition by Ai Weiwei can, in this sense, also take your breath away and, in the best case, put things into perspective. How often we get worked up over the small hurdles we have to clear each day, instead of meeting them with composure. Inhaling art intensely can certainly help us master everyday life more calmly. Tax returns, rude fellow road users, history-forgetting politicians … So what. Great, but also small miracles on stages, in museums or wherever they may occur, can heighten our appetite for life, if we manage to carry the power of these experiences with us, to keep them in memory and, in the best case, to preserve them in our hearts until the next cultural high point.

Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 was one such performance. Above all his version of the American national anthem – distorted, dirty, accusatory. What erupted in those four minutes of unbridled, concentrated power was spectacular. No pyro, no laser show. One man, one guitar – that’s it. The critique of the existing power relations, the rape of other countries by the hegemon America, the revulsion against the Vietnam War, Hendrix tells all of it in four minutes of guitar solo. The performance became a memorial for peace and justice and remains to this day a desperate primal scream against war and destruction.

It is precisely this power we should become aware of as we enter the next round of national and international peace efforts. Political institutions can no longer be relied upon. We know that. So we should act accordingly and stop pretending, again and again, that elections would change anything. No government, and this has been true for decades, has any interest in its citizens. We know that too. That the „Orwellian inversion“ – war is peace, peace is war – is now stated and lived out so bluntly, is, in its radicalism, only consistent. A further step toward totalitarian structures, we know that too.

This heap of desolate marionettes in the service of Big Pharma, Big Tech and the arms industry will contribute nothing to making this world more peaceful. We have to take that into our own hands. So let us give them as little attention as possible.

Art can be an important building block for voicing new visions again and again. This holds true despite the fact that trust in the guild of cultural creators has suffered greatly since 2020. Rightly so! But they existed and they exist: the upright ones, who combine talent with a message. There are the great names, legends like Roger Waters, Joan Baez or indeed Jimi Hendrix, who are impossible to imagine away from the DNA of the peace movement.

But there are also less well-known, no less gifted, wonderful musicians and artists who do not mince words in carrying their message out into the world.

In my next Friedensnote I introduce the artist Alais Clay from Colombia, whom I got to know in Mexico at the congress THE PEOPLE’S RESET – she is one of those. Alais, like all the other musicians I met there, created, without words, merely through her being, an awareness of how we all tick alike, as different as we may be, once we have decided in favor of the red pill.

If, beyond that, we should manage to remain open to the other person despite all the wounds and disappointments of recent years, to see the human being, not their function, and thereby to demonstrate that empathy is possible precisely in everyday life, then we have already gained a great deal.

Then one thing becomes ever clearer: we do not need the political institutions, for they harm us more than they benefit us.

Let us do it the way one of my most important heroines of the last century always recommended: let us make the world the way we like it!

Free of fear, decentralized in everyday life, networked nationally and internationally, with humor and an appetite for analog life – that way we will surely reach a state of contentment, of joy, perhaps even of euphoria, that could carry us through the coming years, more quickly.

Let us go on the attack, again and again, always peacefully, with the sharpest swords we have: openness, humor and heart.

A small addition on my own behalf

One topic that has been almost forgotten and has for years received little social attention is the neutrality of a country; it can be a path to peace. Not like Switzerland – better. For even though Switzerland itself sends no soldiers to Afghanistan or to other war zones, it nonetheless earns good money from international conflicts. To get this necessary debate going, Uli Gellermann, Arnulf Rating and I asked 35 authors to give some thought to this topic. You will find the result in the book „Deutschland neutral! Mit Sicherheit für Frieden“.

With contributions from Wolfgang Bittner, Amalia Bredehorn, Mathias Bröckers, Dietrich Brüggemann, Diether Dehm, Roberto De Lapuente, Wolfgang Effenberger, Tino Eisbrenner, Jens Fischer Rodrian, Lisa Fitz, Jürgen Fliege, Uli Gellermann, Rolf Gössner, Ulrike Guérot, Gabriele Gysi, Madita Hampe, Oskar Lafontaine, Albrecht Müller, Hermann Ploppa, Dirk Pohlmann, Arnulf Rating, Nicolas Riedl, Hauke Ritz, Alexa Rodrian, Walter van Rossum, Werner Rügemer, Michael Sailer, Wolfgang Schwarz, Ekkehard Sieker, SIERA, Kayvan Soufi-Siavash, Uwe Soukup, Markus Stockhausen, Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff and Flavio von Witzleben.

Order the book:
Deutschland neutral! Mit Sicherheit für Frieden