Guadalupe/2003
Theme: Education for peace from the masonic point of view
Gran Logia del Norte de
Columbia
Barranquilla, Colombia
AT ABOUT THE IMPOSSIBLE
Iván HERRERA MICHEL 33°
Gran Canciller
Dear brothers,
First of all, allow me to relay some characteristics of the dimensions of
the present violence, which is the main cause of death on our planet.
Each year more than one million six hundred thousand people die of violent causes in the world - according to a report from the World Health Organization presented in Brussels in October of 2002-. 35 people die each hour as a result of armed conflicts. Each minute a person dies as a victim of an attack. Regarding women, half of those murdered are attacked by their present husband, a previous one, or a boyfriend. In some countries this number is up to 70%. And as if that was little, each 40 seconds a person commits suicide. This means that violence at home or by armed conflicts is not a private matter of families or of remote countries, but it is now found implied in all humanity. This anomalous, functional, and structural situation of violence has become a human pathology with character of devastation. It is because of this that we should seek the origins to present a feasible proposal in accordance to our formation and Masonic values.
The first thing observed is
that humanity is not symmetrical in its worries about how to favor a process
of maintaining peace for our planet. A present example can illustrate this:
Last year, the Center of Investigations of Emari in the United States
concluded that the preventive campaign against AIDS in that country saved
one million and a half infected people and consequently saved $11 million
dollars in medical costs along with an important decrease in pain and
suffering. In the meantime, we all observed with stupor the fight of
Africans and Brazilians two years ago against the international pharmacists,
the World Organization of Commerce and some governments of North America and
Europe, to force them to offer drugs at reasonable prices to millions of
infected people.
Africa is a continent where
more than 12 million children have lost their parents by AIDS. This is
equivalent to the infant population of the United Kingdom. Africa has 80% of
the HIV-positive children of the world and in some of their countries, the
cities are becoming ghosts towns and the economies are paralyzed. A study
headed by French Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most important social
investigators of the present time, determined that there is a real relation
between poverty and AIDS.
According to the United Nations just 3 billion US dollars would make
possible a real war against AIDS in Africa - half of this money for
prevention and the other half for basic aid - a modest sum in comparison
with 52 billion US dollars that the United States spends each year in
fighting obesity among its citizens, and the same amount of money that the
U.S. army annually contributes to Israel.
And here is another example of how violence is generated in armed conflicts thanks to the double international standard. Israel convinced the world, or at least that is what it seems, that it is engaging in a war of self-defense and that its own existence is being threatened. It is not as if the Palestinians had an army as powerful as the Israelis, or that the Israeli cities are in danger of being besieged. All the western governments act as if they ignore that the Palestinians do not even have armed forces. They also act as if they do not know that the essence of the conflict situates in the spoils from five decades ago in 78% of the Palestinian territory, and the bloody, military occupation of the other 22%. This is in addition to the annihilation of its human and cultural rights, its economy, the removal of the foreign investment and the destruction of its national infrastructure.
Under the protection of the international silence to the ignorance of 37 Resolutions of the UN, 23 of them objected by the United States, the invaders built a wall, a great deal more opprobrious than that of Berlin, to surround all the nation. It seemed more nowadays that we can find the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews six decades ago in this present genocide of Israel on the Palestinians, planned and executed in front of the viewers of the entire world. Naturally, before similar aggression, Palestinian dreamed with a new Salah al-Din appearing to free Jerusalem of all those that pretend to be Young Men Crusaders, Templeries and Teutonics.
Osama Bin Laden, of whom Reagan affirmed was "The equivalent morale of the Parents Founders of America" for helping expel the Soviets of Afghanistan. One day he decided that the United States should be gone also. Then he became the number one public enemy of the world. In name of that threat some western countries with large resources of power organized and executed the first parody of the Crusade of the third Christian millennium. This brought devastation to the Afghans, who at this time should desire the return of the Taliban and the Russians.
The United States,
considering that it is its duty to defend its economic interests in the rest
of the world, finances internal wars in Indonesia, Cambodia, Cyprus,
Philippines, Southern Africa, Iran, Bangladesh and in various South American
countries. Again, hundreds of thousands of people die.
When Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile, Kissinger declared "We
do not have to accept the irresponsibility of a town", and organized an
overthrow that ended with the murder of Allende, and the establishment of a
dictatorship that killed thousands of people and brought a massive exile of
Chileans.
Last year, the European Economic Community approved daily aid of $2,5 dollars per cow in its territory, while at the same time the FAO announced in Rome that 800 million human beings went to bed hungry that day, and 1.300 million of people survived with less than one dollar a day.
Drug-dealers prompt a global commerce of drugs - produced in the third world and sold in the first one - that represents 8 percent of the world commerce, and the Criminal Gross Product, included the prosper illegal sale of weapons, reaches 15 percent of the same one, of which 50 percent should be laundered before being returned to the legal economy. The total of money laundered originating from drugs is comparable to the sum of all the investments carried out in the emerging countries. Those moneys are found conveniently placed, and very safe, in the fiscal paradises of the Island of Man, The Bahamas, Liechtenstein, Swiss, Luxembourg, Monaco, Gibraltar, Holland and Cayman Islands.
To understand a little about the reaches of the double standard morale of the international financial system and of these fiscal paradises, as well as the business ethics of the governments that maintain them, we can cite as an example the most nearby one, and also, the smaller one. Here nearby, in the middle of this beautiful Caribbean sea that surrounds us, the small Cayman Islands are found. Although the Cayman Islands only have 35 thousand residents, it possess 20 thousand companies registered and 507 foreign banks- of which only 106 are found physically present. Over there, almost twice of France's national budget is negotiated.
It takes a lot of work to imagine that on the total amount of money property of dictators, corrupt politicians, criminal and mafias of the entire world that is found placed in the fiscal paradises of European countries depends in good measure the solidity of the European economy, the good health of the Euro, and its monetary availability of assets, while the illicit this money generates maintains the majority of humanity immersed in poverty, hunger, illnesses and malnutrition. Logically, it is very far away the day in which the banking secret of the one that maintain the economies of these countries be prohibited, and the repatriation of the stolen capitals of the poor states be ordered or be included inside the crimes against the humanity. The international concealment of the economic results of drug trafficking, the corruption, and the illegal sale of weapons is promoted by the efficient financial complicity of the developed world.
We would be able to continue citing cases to illustrate how violence nowadays is found answering a social, cultural, and economic aggression. It can be seen that violence is very human, although not justifiable, when after nine centuries of cruelty of West against the Middle East, a Moslem wrote his mother with pride before shooting Pope John Paul II that he was "going to kill the chief of the Crusaders", or when after American bombardments against Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, the villages of Korea, Hanoi, Beirut, Panama, Tripoli, Kabul, Baghdad, Belgrade, etc., horror came also to New York and Washington.
Today, the great majority of governments are aligned in this collective luck of insanity and surely it is because those governments do not have, or do not want to have, another alternative. And they are neither heads, since this state of dependence is fruit of an alienating dynamic that comes to us since Europe wanted new wealth and possessions out of its borders . First, during the X and XI centuries western Christianity was directed towards the Middle East, and then, at the beginning of the XIV century, towards Africa, Asia and the Americas. Neither the beauty of the arts, the majesty of the European architecture, its lofty literature, magnificent dramas, beautiful comedies, the force of their dramas, the sound of its languages, the sublime of its painting, nor its extraordinary sculpture was what Christianity imposed in the world since then. Very on the contrary, it was the superiority of its arms, the cunning of its conquerors, the enormity of its greed, the magnitude of its corruption, the gravity of its treasons, and the amplitude of its racism, what formed the world of today.
How to explain the usurer management that is given to the credits directed to poor countries, and the conditions that are submitted to those countries from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where only 7 nations of the 182 that conform those organizations decide who, when and how much to lend? How to explain the extreme poverty that their demands produce? They almost managed to break the countries of southeastern Asian in 1997, and they do not feel sorry with the suffering of Africa and Latin America, and to have Argentina in bankruptcy.
How to explain that the Pan-American Bank of Development and the African Bank of Development have fallen in the hands of these same 7 powerful countries of the world, all extra regional, that do not offer possibilities of development but to those in the complex geopolitical chess game that obey them?
How to do so that the most powerful economies of the world do not suffocate the real capacity of the UN, or of the Organization of American States, suffocating financially in order to transform them in docile instruments?
How not to expect that there would be a violent reaction in a world that interacts with these violent conditions? And concerning us ¿How can we Masons help from the perspective of a progressive education with planetarium characteristics and social vocation, harmonious with our value system?
We, to the edge of the impossible, have a proposal for a global peace, equal and stable: to educate the richest and powerful. This means, to educate the Americans, the British, the Germans, to French, the Japanese, the Canadians and the Italians, which conform the called Group of Seven, since they are the ones that make the important decisions for the ones that need the decrease of hunger because of it depends, the illnesses, the drug addiction, the drug trafficking, the exclusions, the stability of the planet, the ignorance, the hatreds, the racism, and a large number of iniquities and social discomforts.
We propose that we concentrate on this Group of Seven, since within this group the rules and the content of the "new world order" are set, the existence of the economic blocks is legitimized and the orientation of the globalization is imposed; because everything seems to indicate, in this setting, that the international community depends on the military, technological, financial, political, and economic predominance of the U.S.A, the European Community and Japan. This singular influence includes so much of the paradigms, as to the social forms of organization, the foreign policy, the democracy, and the definition of the State in the frameworks of the processes of accumulation of capital, and in the code of its foreign affairs.
The Group of Seven represents more than 50% of the world production, 64% of the exports and 55% of the global imports. The United States, with a budget for its armed forces that was increased for the year 2003 to $542,000 million dollars, maintains the military predominance and the political and ideological leadership in the world - with this sum the Sub-Saharan Africa could supply themselves all the needs in education, health and road infrastructure. The United States' National Gross Product (NGP) equals to 75% of the total world production and more than 40% of the total production of the Group of Seven. It possesses more than 60% of the worldwide production of food, it controls the production of the energy market, and it maintains developments in biotechnology, information systems, space and military technology. US foreign debt is expressed in its own currency and the amount of the debt only represents 10% of its National Product. The majority of industrialized countries, including Japan, produce fundamentally for the American market.
With these data it is impossible not to miss the U.S. supremacy in the Group of Seven, in which are set and conditioned the new North and South relations, the new bipolarity without mediations among the first world and the second world under the American leadership, and the consequent marginality that generates lack of opportunities for the third world.
The application of the politics of these powerful countries is affected and exercised through the transnational businesses, the international lobbies of large private banks, and the main world media enterprises. The macroeconomic, regulatory, nature exercise it to utilize institutions and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Organization of Commerce, the Organization of Countries for the Cooperation and the Economic Development, the European Commission, the Club of Paris, and the United Nations Organization. And in the Latin-American environment there are the Organization of American States and the Pan-American Bank of Development. The curious thing of the case is the direct relation that exists between neo-liberalism and jails: the greater neo-liberal politics there are in a country, the greater prison population.
To impose its conditions, the G-7 counts with all economic, political, technological and financial power, along with the sufficient military force to determine the new necessary correlation of forces for the construction of the "new order", and it does not possess scruples in its armamentistic career. The United States, for example, which possesses the major world arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, was opposed two years ago to the adoption of a Protocol of Covenant on Biological Weapons, and is blocking any advance in forums as of that of the No Nuclear Proliferation and the Chemical Covenant of Weapons. But the Seven are very jealous when some of the 200 countries that exist on the planet want to have a small part of the chemical, nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction that the Group of Seven possesses in abundance.
If we want to educate so that democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, universality of men, mutual respect, and tolerance reigns - whose absence produces high levels of violence - we owe first to create a context in which these values could be easily taken advantage of and in which there is no danger that its introduction would become new horses of Troy that drive to renewed forms of colonialism on the part of those who possess the greater responsibility in the construction of the social indicators.
An education from the Masonic system of values should be applied to powerful towns so that they choose leaders who understand that the spiritual systems of Asians , and the traditions of Amerindians, Australian, African, Polynesians, etc., are different, but not inferior to the Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and to the economic Calvinistic ethics; that they do not control tendency to the economic violence, and that they should not consider their moral or culture superior to others; that their interests abroad are represented by the possession of the natural resources of other towns; that their unfair economic pressures cause severe social disruptions besides the rupture of the instruments of government; who are not insensitive to the pain that is caused; who conceive international relations in a cooperative and open framework; who reject the force, the preventive attacks and the economic isolations against the towns located beyond their postmodernist borders.
In conclusion, leaders should not mythic themselves, and understand that violence and insecurity, as a boomerang, always returns to who throws it.
Thank you.