(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Ten years ago, David Swanson established the organization World BEYOND War ('A World Beyond War'). In the same year, our organisation, Lay Down Your Arms, born. There are thousands of great organizations around the world working for peace, but Fredrik Heffermehl, who co-founded the Lay Down Your Arms foundation, saw David Swanson and his World BEYOND War the kind of peace activism he believed to be in the spirit of Alfred Nobel.
Peace in the world is no trivial task. One of the two Nobel Prize winners in literature for 1974, Harry Martinson, describes this world of ours in canto 79 of his science-fiction poem cycle Aniara (1956 in Swedish, translated into 15 languages, here in Espen Stueland's retelling):
We came from Earth, Doris' land,
a gem in our solar system,
the one place where Life has been given
A land of milk and honey.
Describe the landscapes found there,
and the days that dawned
Describe that man as gallant
his originator's shroud sewed,
to God and Satan hand in hand
in a poisoned wasteland
ran away from something worse
from man: lord of ashes.
The poem describes how man has developed expertise in self-destruction. Man had wrapped himself in his own shroud, had poisoned the land, had become the ruler of the ashes. Became king of Hiroshima. King of Nagasaki. This is the culmination of the logic of weapons.
It was here Fredrik Heffermehl thought we had failed, by not emphasizing Nobel's fight against the weapons. Lay Down Your Arms therefore wants to be a magnet that can also pull the Nobel Prize in the right direction. Happy then that this year's award goes to the Japanese anti-nuclear weapons Nihon Hidankyo (a group established in 1956).
From 1974 to 2024
Let's go back 50 years. We are writing 1974. Harry Martinson is assigned Nobel Prize in literature for this crushing criticism of his contemporaries, about how man had destroyed his own basis of existence, his possibility for the future, for the experience of beauty. A future where even God and the devil, ironically enough, are scared to get together and run away from man, as Martinson says.
1974 is the year that wartime president Richard Nixon had to resign. The United States was about to be kicked out of Vietnam. And not least: the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Japanese Prime Minister Isaku Satō for his work in abolishing nuclear tests. Everything seemed to go the way of peace. We had reason to be optimistic. Could we finally glimpse a world without wars, a world beyond war? 1974 was a good year for the peace movement.
Fast forward 50 years to 2024. The warring parties in Ukraine threaten each other with nuclear weapons. NATO's bold threats about the first use of nuclear weapons led to Russia following up this autumn by copying NATO's threats. "We can afford to be the first to use nuclear weapons," they both say now.
Has anyone ever heard NATO talk about building peace?
At the same time, we see a grotesque genocide Israel, the country that has Yad Vashem inscribed in its DNA, against the Palestinians in Gaza – while we are gathered here today.
Nuclear scientists are talking about the doomsday clock approaching midnight and closer than ever. The clock tells us that we are playing with our own destruction. There are 90 seconds left until midnight.
90 seconds to total destruction of all life as we know it. 90 seconds for man, or "the lord of the ashes" in Martinson's words, to commit self-extinction, the ultimate crime. They dare not use nuclear weapons, say Norwegian "experts" about Russia. Shall we bet? says Russia.
Lay Down Your Arms
The name of the organization Lay Down Your Arms and the award and ceremony The Real Nobel Peace Prize is not a play on words. Demanding PEACE is not primarily a slogan against the weapons industries, major powers or rich profiteers from war and destruction.
For the assembly on Litteraturhuset On November 10, 2024, with the presentation of the 'real Nobel Prize', the point was to point to Nobel's ambition to deconstruct, yes, remove, the military, the weapons and consequently their manufacturers. Precisely what he himself had helped to build up with his arms industry and technology. Which had given him enormous income, but also a guilty conscience. This is how Nobel would contribute to saving lives, not just taking them.
"If guns are the answer, we would have had peace ages ago."
It is precisely in such a time that we need men and women like David Swanson, who dare to look beyond wars, see a possible future of cooperation between people and not just be perversely concerned with enmity and images of enemies. But rather to shift the attention to Dialogue, seek alternative paths to peace, and have the courage to name the destructive forces, individuals and institutions that leave death and ashes behind. Swanson's latest book is called NATO – What You Need To Know (2024) and is written together with Medea Benjamin. Has anyone ever heard NATO talk about building fred? To build friendships? To build understanding?
A champion of peace
David Swanson, Heffermehl believed, dared to express what many consider to be the ultimate naivety in demanding an end to all wars. "If arms is the answer, we would have had peace eons ago," said Heffermehl when he launched the book The Real Nobel Peace Prize a year ago.
Alfred Nobel believed that the ultimate weapon, which he saw coming, a weapon that could eliminate all life, would not only make man the king of ashes, as Martinson envisions in Aniara, but also give man the insight to get leaders and nations to simply lay down their arms. "Die Waffen nieder", which Nobel's friend Bertha von Suttner had convinced him was the way to go.
David Swanson's book on NATO is introduced by none other than Professor Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University, which i.a. is known as the father of the Millennium Development Goals. “This book can save your life. In fact, everyone's life," says Sachs. Nothing less.
With talk shows, conferences, books, articles and films that seek ways to peace by laying down the weapons and daring to end all wars, David Swanson's many skills fulfill the idea of how a champion of peace should work, and is one that will ultimately save lives – everyone's lives.