AUTOGRAPH FOR PEACE

Interactive dialogue on peace for sustainable development

It offers an opportunity to establish a platform for a widespread interactive
activity.

Join in - Lets work for peace.

“Peace has to be created, in order to be
maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength,
Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination,
and the triumph of principle. It will never be
achieved by passivity and quietism.” - Dorothy
Thompson:

Project Resource
Autographs such as above that document the insight of active minds are
powerful ideas, equally forceful as the person who gives it; they denote
authenticity, clarity, truthfulness, honesty and strength. They are words of hope,
courage and inspiration that serve the process of growing up and education
through life.

Handwritten or signed by its author, aside from its antiquarian or associative

value, autographs may be an early or corrected draft that provides valuable
evidence of the stages of composition or of the "correct" final version of a work
indicating the processing of great minds. Manuscripts of the ancients are rarely
older than the 6th century AD and more often belong to the 9th and 10th
centuries. Before the invention of printing, scribes made copies of original works
although some manuscripts of chronicles appear to have been actually written by
their compilers. The affixing of a seal normally validated official documents of the
kings in early times. The hallmarks of individualism became more important with
the invention of printing. All these form a part of our heritage. The powers of such
autographs that focus on the reality of peace are the resources.

Participation
Everyone around the world can make a difference through interaction with others
in a dialogue across all boundaries of age, science, sports, films, literature, fine
arts, religion and politics. A purposeful dialogue for peace to combat against
misconceptions can help to focus on real issues by filtering out the misleading
noise generated by the media. It will in itself be a self-fulfilling exercise.

Action
Put on record powerful quotes with a note on the authorship and the issue of
peace that it highlights past or present.
 Example - 1
“I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am
willing to die for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals
above a nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I
think to be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains
can penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire,
without reference to some dictator's code to tell me what the national
canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a
society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race.” –
Dorothy Thompson,

Dorothy Thompson 1894 - 1961. A suffragist while studying at Syracuse

University she became and was involved in the campaign to obtain the vote for
women. A freelance writer and reporter, she was appointed head of its Berlin
bureau in Germany of the New York Post. Noted as the best reporter of her generation seen in any country
by her peers. As a cub reporters in Berlin in the 1920s, she chronicled the rise of the Nazis for American
newspapers, became the first American correspondent to be expelled from Nazi Germany. After
interviewing Adolf Hitler in 1931 she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany. The
German Foreign Ministry, on Hitler’s order, actually established something called “The Dorothy Thompson
Emergency Squad,” whose job it was to translate and monitor every word she wrote against the Nazi
regime. “There was a lot of fussiness connected with the preparations,” she remembered about her
encounter with Hitler. “Not, somehow, what one would expect from a man to whom The Deed is
everything. … I’ll bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks his tea.” The Nazis altogether she regarded
as “a lot of wavy-haired bugger-boys,” “pink-cheeked mediocrities” making “a fetish out of brotherhood”
and in thrall to a homoerotic exaltation.

“He is formless,” she wrote about Hitler, “almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a
man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised,
insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

“Looking at Hitler,” Thompson said, “I saw a whole panorama of German faces; men whom this man thinks
he will rule. And I thought: Mr. Hitler, you may get, in the next elections, the fifteen million votes you
need. But fifteen million Germans CAN be wrong.”

Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her "Little
Man" remark.

"I still believe he is a little man," she replied. "He is the apotheosis of the little man." Nazism itself, for
that matter, was "the apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its forms." This remark anticipated by
many years Hannah Arendt’s more famous comment about “the banality of evil,” but the idea was the
same. Dorothy Thompson regarded the outcome of World War II, as “the disaster of the
Peace,” She threw her lot with the Palestinians, as against Israel. The creation of the Israeli state, she
feared, was “a recipe for perpetual war.”

Called the second most popular woman in America, after Eleanor Roosevelt. Her thrice-weekly column,
“On the Record,” originating in The New York Herald Tribune, was syndicated to more than 200 papers in
America; she was heard nightly on the radio by tens of millions of people; and during just one week, in
1937, she was obliged to turn down 700 invitations to speak to them in the flesh – at rallies, conventions,
clubs, forums, dinners, commencements, "roasts" and so on. Thompson lost her job with the New York
Tribune after endorsing Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third term. Books by Thompson included New Russia,
(1928), I Saw Hitler! (1932), Anarchy or Organization (1938), Let the Record Speak (1939), and The
Courage to be Happy (1957).

EXAMPLE - 2
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and
incorporated into our common life.” Jane Addams:

Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the
twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist. In those
days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and
therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should
generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them. President of the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams served as president between 1915 and 1929, and as
presiding officer of its six international conferences in those years, and as honorary president for the
remainder of her life. Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, Miss Addams was attacked in the
press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she found an outlet for her
humanitarian impulses as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women
and children of the enemy nations. She wrote about it in her book- Peace and Bread in Time of War
(1922).