As the world commemorates the horrific nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 79 years ago, the threat of nuclear disaster remains ever-present today.
During the weekly online meeting of the International Peace Coalition on Friday, August 9, 2024, Steve Leeper shared his journey of dealing with this tragedy.
Steve Leeper, the first American to serve as chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation and president of the international organization Mayors for Peace, is the recipient of the 35th Kiyoshi Tanimoto Peace Prize. The Peace Center Foundation recognized Mr. Leeper for his work in both the United States and the A-bombed city of Hiroshima, focusing on the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Full Transcript:
I went to Hiroshima in 1984. Everything I know about peace and international politics I learned by working for Mayors for Peace, which is the campaigning NGO of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What I learned by building Mayors for Peace from 500 city members to 5,500 cities is that 90% of mayors don’t do anything unless someone with money or some group that controls lots of votes persuades them do it. That’s how I have come to believe that political leaders are not a useful target of peace activities. We need to address and raise grassroots, global public consciousness.
After the bombing of Hiroshima, Professor Ichiro Moritaki was in bed for five months recovering from his injuries and thinking about the new weapon that had just flattened his entire city in ten seconds. He ended up losing his right eye but arrived at two major insights that have strongly influenced the peace movement in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Japan. First, like many hibakusha, he realized almost immediately that the atomic bomb was not a threat just to Japan. It was a threat to humankind. So he declared that the deep meaning of the bomb is that human beings can no longer resolve conflict through contests of destructive power. All conflicts must be resolved through dialogue, negotiation, and the search for truth and solutions that benefit all parties. And Hiroshima has been saying this since 1947.
His second insight was that we live in a civilization of power and unless we graduate to a civilization of love, we will use our new weapons to kill ourselves. In other words, the atomic bomb terminated our ability to solve global problems through the pursuit of dominance in a social structure that makes life good for winners and bad for losers. To survive, we will have to build a society that seeks to make life good for everyone, including our plant and animal relatives, the soil, the water, the air, and the ecosystems that keep our planet habitable. This is known in Hiroshima as peace culture. I’m not going into detail on this because I assume everyone on this zoom basically understands and agrees. The question is, how can we raise global public consciousness to the point where humanity as a whole rejects the current culture of violence and forcefully demands a culture of peace.
Some say and I agree that global consciousness is evolving away from competition and toward cooperation, but most of us are here today because we perceive an urgent crisis. The global power hierarchy is shifting. After centuries of dominance, the US and Europe are growing weaker, while China, Russia and Asia are growing stronger. Even among chimpanzees and dogs, when the alpha male gets weak, the pack experiences an increase in violence. The last time the global human hierarchy shifted as dramatically as it is shifting today was when Germany, Italy, and Japan entered the competition for colonies. That competition led to WWs one and two.
In Hiroshima today, most people seem to feel we are still in the post-war period. I don’t. I think world war three has already begun. If so, keeping this war from building to a nuclear climax has to be our top priority. But unfortunately, the forces for peace are not even in the game. Peace is extremely weak right now for a long list of reasons, but the decisive one is that we peace people are unwilling and/or unable to cooperate. We compete. We compete for funds. We compete for fame. We compete for followers. We compete to have our ideas accepted. We compete for access to high ranking diplomats and politicians, even though the diplomats and politicians we deal with today are symptoms, not the disease and certainly not the cure. We work in narrow silos based on the ideas, tactics, strategies, people and organizations we like. We refuse to work with anyone we don’t like or anyone who has offended us or whose ideas are different from our own.
The war culture is based on competition, but warriors are far better at cooperating than we are because their cooperation is based on money and rank. Peace activists compete, but we are all leaders with very few followers, and we have no widely accepted process through which to pursue broad based agreement and the resolution of internal conflict. We are great at letting 100 flowers bloom, but we are not good at getting any of our flowers noticed by the global public. I could go today to a department store in Hiroshima and do a survey of shoppers and I assure you that very few will even have heard of the TPNW. In fact, as soon as they detect that I want to talk about nuclear weapons, most will avoid me like the plague.
All of this has been prologue to two brief assertions or proposals. First, all the peace, environment, and social and economic justice activists in the world need to get together and cooperate to design, fund, and implement a massive PR campaign even bigger and more effective than the fabulous campaign run in the 1990s by the international campaign to ban landmines. We need to spend five to ten million dollars a year for two or three years convincing the people of the world at the grassroots level that the war culture is obsolete, evil, and obscenely selfish and dangerous. People, not diplomats or mayors or even presidents, but people need to see that the competition between the US and China is a giant expenditure of time and money that humanity can’t afford. We are all Earthlings. We have to reject war completely along with all leaders who promote war and the military. We should elect and follow leaders who are committed to and capable of discussing, researching, and at times, arguing in a civilized, well-mediated, truth-seeking manner about how to keep Earth habitable. We need leaders who understand that selfish competition for hegemony, dominance, power, and wealth is destroying our society and our life-support systems, but humanity will follow leaders like that only when the majority of us understand that violent competition with the weapons we have is stupid to the point of being potentially fatal to all of us.
My second point is that the campaign for peace culture and human survival must start with abolishing nuclear weapons. Studying shorinji kempo, I was taught that, when fighting a larger, stronger opponent, you have to hit him in a vulnerable pressure point. The most vulnerable pressure point on the body of the military-industrial complex is nuclear weapons. No one, not even the people making tons of money from them, actually wants a nuclear war. If they did, we would already have had one. Everyone in the war business knows that a nuclear war would be the end of civilization and very probably the extinction of Homo sapiens. Again, this is not a hard case to make but we are not making it loudly or efficiently enough to get global public attention.
Nuclear weapons are the easiest global problem we face. Nine nations could solve this problem in a week if they wanted to, but only a dramatic shift in public consciousness will make them want to. To graduate to a peace culture, we will have to raise global public consciousness in myriad ways, but if we are unwilling or unable even to lay down our doomsday machines, what chance do we have of solving the far more difficult problems related to CO2, the petroleum age, class war, inequality, our population, dwindling resources, radiation and other toxic pollution, plastic in everything, epidemics, and AI? All of these problems will require unprecedented cooperation, which is simply impossible as long as we are fighting for dominance and threatening to blow the planet up rather than talk to the enemy.
My main point is this. There are millions of things we need to do to make the world a safer, more comfortable, healthier, happier, and more sustainable place, but we will not do any of them if we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, if we do get rid of nuclear weapons, that one step will be the physical manifestation of humanity’s willingness to cooperate for survival. That one step will open the door to all the other areas of cooperation we need to get into with urgency and with every bit of our collective will and wisdom. So I believe the top priority for the International Peace Coalition should be a massive campaign focused like a laser on the abolition of nuclear weapons, and we need to get started soon. The details are beyond the scope of this talk, but the first step is to get all of us wanting to get together to do what needs to be done to have a powerful impact on global public consciousness. Thank you.
The International Peace Coalition is a project of Helga Zepp-LaRouche and The Schiller Institute
Video: International Peace Coalition #62
Speakers:
- Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder Schiller Institute
- Col. (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell
- Dennis Kucinich, former Congressman, Independent Congressional Candidate OH
- Jack Gilroy, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi, Ban Killer Drones
- Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
- Steven Leeper, Chairman, Peace Culture Village, Former chairman, Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, Former US rep, Mayors for Peace
- Prof. Steven Starr, Professor, University of Missouri, expert on nuclear war
- J.R. Heffelfinger, Director at Runaway Horses, ‘8:15 Hiroshima’
- General Discussion period, 3 minutes each
