invites you to ask and answer questions covering social themes of global significance. When you ask in order to understand, when you answer in order to share, this is what we mean by dropping knowledge.
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Jonathan Granoff's
biography
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QuestionHow do we stop our governments from going to war? turboelfAnswer
Jonathan Granoff: How do we stop our governments from going to war. Nancy Reagan said "Just say no." I wish it were so simple. We have to organize, we have to educate, we have to persuade people that going to war is not the way of gaining the kind of security that we need. War has become an institution that is no longer practical. And with weapons of mass destruction, it's extremely hazardous. Because war is a breakdown of our cooperative security. War arises when the other skills that we have of law, diplomacy, persuasion, morality, and inclusion and [cooptation] don't work. Here we're in Germany, it's ah -we're in a place in which the books were burned in the 1930s, and Nazism arose out of a breakdown of social order. But let's look at what happened that were the – that built the [inaudible] of that war. After World War I, Germany was punished, its society suffered, it had social disruption, great swings of its economy, and out of that arose the disequilibrium of Nazism. After World War II, wisdom was applied to the defeated, with the Marshall Plan, and now Germany is a thriving democracy, and a responsible member of the international community, and a great trading partner with the victors, similarly with Japan. So the principle of generosity and goodness worked. And it worked after World War II. So we need a global Marshall Plan, to make war obsolete. We need an inclusive attitude toward all people in the world. If - when people have hope they don't turn toward violence. If you take away hope, violence is the recourse. And war is the ultimate expression of organized violence. And so it's violence - we need to strike at the roots of violence and build a culture of peace. This is an active endeavor that we're all trying to do. We believe here that dialogue is very much a part of that - is a pillar of that process of building a culture of peace. Interfaith, intercultural, reaching out, learning about the other, seeing our common humanity, these are the tools that will make war obsolete. Let war be thrown into the rubbish bin of history, like gender dominance, environmental irresponsibility, they belong there. But we've thrown slavery, Apartheid, and many other antiquated institutions into the rubbish bin of history. Let's do that with war.
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