What is Secure Tolerance?

The demographic crisis >

International terrorism >

The environmental crisis >

Crisis of values >

Mass starvation >

Terrorism threat >

Islamic extremism >

Holocaust >

Nuclear crisis >

New invasion >

Militant Islamism >

Environmental crisis >

Neo-fascism >

Nuclear crisis >

The economic crisis >

However, is unlimited tolerance admissible? What is tolerance without restrictions on the proliferation of nuclear weapons outside the legal field, on terrorism, including international terrorism, on racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, extremism in any form and so on? Can there be no restrictions on migration processes that have already reached global proportions? Of course, not. Tolerance should meet security requirements. That is why we introduce the concept of “Secure Tolerance”, which is after all the aim of this message. Secure Tolerance must be promoted in the public mind and practised in the most democratic way, that is, through law-making. In this way alone will the promotion of secure tolerance be permanent and irreversible. There is no better field in which to implement this project than the European Union because that in itself is a product of tolerance shown by twenty-seven nations for each other and because it is fully exposed to all the challenges of the day. Three crucial factors, among others, however, determine the promotion of Secure Tolerance: – Education, above all primary education (we may be too late forever if we start to teach this difficult new language of communication to children over five years of age) – Secure Tolerance is inseparable from the need to develop techniques or practices of Reconciliation in society, which, in turn, are based on the legal (in or out of court) recognition of the historical truth of the event (the Holocaust). The Nuremberg Tribunal is the best example of how to foster the memory and the historical truth of the main catastrophe of the twentieth century. – And last but not least, there is still another factor: Secure Tolerance and Reconciliation techniques should be formalized in a code of laws, both national and supra-national, the making of which, once started, is never to stop. Meanwhile, Secure Tolerance and Reconciliation are just as mutually complementary as analysis and synthesis. Even if pressed by the political situation and his or her own doctrine, any modern politician should have the right to say: “I personally don’t want to have anything to do with my opponents, but under the Law of Secure Tolerance I am duty bound to follow the spirit and the letter of this law for the sake of development.” It would be expedient for the European Union, with the possible involvement of the USA and Russia, to form a Centre (University) to make Secure Tolerance and Reconciliation laws and rules (techniques) that would encompass all lines of research and education in this sphere. The world we live in, our entire civilization, is going through more than one crisis simultaneously. The first is the so-called crisis of world order. Just a little more than twenty years ago, following the collapse of the world Communist system, mankind seemed to have no alternative to the global assertion of liberal democracy. However, reality proved far more complex than forecasts of “the end of history”. Political diversity spread through the world like a bush fire. This is no sign of a crisis in itself, but following the breakdown of the Yalta–Potsdam system no new world order that would be recognized as legitimate by all nations has ever taken shape. As a consequence, our world has not become more secure: simply, instead of one grave risk of a Third World War we now face a growing multitude of new challenges and diverse threats. They are increasingly more difficult to neutralize or contain; moreover, frequently it is really hard to recognize and rate them by importance, impact and the need for urgent response. Admittedly, that has happened in large measure because the community of democratic nations was not ready to face up to new challenges, to the substitution of the ideas of aggressive nationalism and religious extremism, primarily militant Islamism and the “universal Caliphate”, for the ideology of worldwide communist expansion. Western political, business and intellectual elites made the erroneous presumption that with the demise of Communism the main problems of global development would be “technical” rather than political and that nothing would stand in the way of human progress led by the democratic community of Western nations, and failed to recognize new dangers. Values such as freedom, human dignity, human rights and justice that form the foundations of Western democracy began to be viewed as a given against the background of universal euphoria. In practice, however, they began to be overshadowed by runaway consumption, which, multiplied by modern technological capabilities, became one of the main causes of the world economic crisis which broke out in 2008. Politicians and political institutions – governments and parliaments – have inadvertently created a virtual world, a world far apart from the real world of real people. As a consequence, crooked politicians have wormed their way to power, corruption and mercenary lobbying practices have risen dramatically. Public political activity has subsequently declined. A broad mass of the people, primarily young people, became severed from political life and excluded from decision making on crucial national and local problems. Although to a large extent this is true of both post-Communist countries and developed Western democracies. As a result of the runaway growth of incomes of top world businessmen, primarily financiers, politics is becoming elitist and new social and ethical gaps have opened up in society. Belief in the values of Western civilization is on the wane: principles such as the integrity and professionalism of civil servants and businessmen, the State as a hired servant of civil society and the separation of powers as a guarantee against bureaucratic arbitrariness are no longer sacred. These adverse developments undermine the moral and political leadership of the Western community in the eyes of the other – larger – part of humankind, strengthening the positions of political groupings that advocate the ideas of a “special road” or “special order” for their people and even groups of nations and faiths. To this end, inhuman misanthropic values are being preached every now and then to provide an ideological foundation, and archaic geopolitical dogmas of the mechanistic balance of power, spheres of influence and struggle for lines of communication, markets and raw material sources are being unearthed. One more crisis, the one in the economic and financial sphere, seems the most burning issue and hence is in the focus of attention, requiring no extensive comments. Perhaps, the only thing to be added here is that it will be overcome and, moreover, will make it possible to attain still higher structural and technological levels of development, including in the consumption of natural resources and the preservation of the environment and climate. The demographic crisis, with the populations of many developed countries shrinking, is accompanied by uncontrollable migration from overpopulated poorer countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America to the USA and Europe, including Russia. Processes such as the fast growth of closed ethnic communities living by their own laws, and their higher birthrates, are already causing acute social tensions in host countries and carry the seeds of dangerous conflicts. Developed democracies, with their human rights and freedoms, humanism and political correctness, tolerance and rigid restrictions on state security powers, have proved defenceless against the new “invasion of barbarians”. The latter are medieval in mentality, values and behavioural standards and hate the societies that have sheltered them. At the same time they make clever use of democratic freedoms and guarantees to undermine European civilization and conquer it from within. The niche formed in the democratic state self-defence system is being occupied by Neo-fascist politicians and organizations, radical nationalists and militarized racists who, in their turn, are jeopardizing European democratic accomplishments made through suffering during centuries of despotism, fanaticism, revolutions and wars. Nature, which we have shamelessly exploited for ages on end, has finally rebelled against us. The environmental crisis calls for a huge financial investment, and most important, a radical restructuring of social consciousness. It is a dangerous delusion to think that Man is the paragon of creation. Man is but a link in the living chain and owing to his intellect can and must protect it carefully. International terrorism is a phenomenal crisis posing extraordinary risks. It is a new reality of the twenty-first century, one which has plunged the world into a state of permanent war. The bloody traces of this war are to be found everywhere − in New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai and Moscow. The crisis of values, which is partly a consequence of the crisis of the world order, in large measure, demonstrates the limited opportunities offered by civilization, which is intent only on material consumption and the “glamour” of capitalism. In such a system millions of people lose sight of meaningful human existence and fail to find a sensible and appealing cause in life. The result is the catastrophic spread of drug addiction, moral degradation and crime. With access to ICT, young people in the poorer countries have en masse realized the extent of their exclusion from Euroatlantic civilization and the impossibility of enjoying its benefits. And, the simplest solution (one usually funded with petrodollars) is to destroy it. It is this motivation that underlies the increasingly destructive manifestations of anti-globalism. This tragic list of crises can be supplemented with shortages of food and drinking water, mass starvation in many countries, man-made disasters and dangerous new epidemics and pandemics. Nevertheless, in spite of the formidable nature of all these crises, they can be resolved in principle or, with reasonable policies, and the resulting damage can be reduced to acceptable levels. 515At the same time all these crises, however serious, overshadow in our mind the most important crisis, one which we all fear but will not face up to. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas called that syndrome ignorantia affectata – “cultivated ignorance” – since knowledge makes life harder to live. However, there is in fact one single crisis which, if not averted, will be impossible either to control or contain and whose consequences cannot be cleared up. What I mean is a nuclear crisis with the actual use of nuclear weapons. The risk of such a crisis is quite real. There is a critical mass of aggressive authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations in the world which will go to any lengths to assert their right to existence. If a human being can be used as a delivery vehicle for explosives, if one can sacrifice his or her life to kill others, why not annihilate humanity as a whole? The nuclear crisis is the only one that carries irreversible consequences and threatens the very existence of the human race on our planet. The risk of this crisis is also rising because humanity is for many reasons no longer aware of real threats while, on the contrary, overreacting to insignificant or even imagined threats. People are more interested in English Premier League results than, say, in the fact that Iran is a mere 300 to 500 days away from obtaining enough uranium-based explosives to develop nuclear weapons. A certain “monetization” of the public mind is taking place. Many businessmen have become oblivious to the European and American experience in cooperating with Nazi Germany of the 1930s and the 1940s. Hundreds of European companies are now cooperating with nuclear weapons-hungry Iran, just as Nazi industrialists and scientists built crematoriums, produced arms and all but brought Hitler close to the nuclear bomb and appropriate delivery vehicles by 1945. It took a different force and a different mindset that would be no “servant of blind will” to stop Hitler and his collaborators. That was the coalition of the anti-Hitler Allies. That was the mind of the great anti-Nazi physicists, including those from among the Jews who knew of the fate of the European Jewry, wholesale genocide, and the possible scale of a future nuclear catastrophe for Europe and the rest of the world. Moral counterweights and civilization’s instinct of self-preservation thus worked in the mid- twentieth century. A number of states are straining today to obtain nuclear weapons. To survive, the totalitarian regimes are again ready to put the world on the brink of catastrophe. North Korea was the first to treacherously avail itself of the fruits of peaceful nuclear cooperation within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and then, under a thought-up pretext, withdrew from the treaty, developed and tested nuclear weapons, and is now developing long-range missile systems. After many years of secret activities banned by the treaty, Iran has followed suit and is now openly beefing up its nuclear potential. It has put into operation another uranium enrichment plant and has been flaunting bans under UN Security Council resolutions. Iran is increasingly getting closer to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and missiles of an ever- growing range. Iran’s possible withdrawal from the NPT or continued violations of the Treaty with impunity will terminally undermine the nuclear non-proliferation system. The Iranian nuclear bomb is bound to trigger a chain reaction of “nuclear club” expansion. A considerable number of states both in the Middle East and elsewhere will get nuclear weapons. Many of these countries are unstable and balancing on the brink of radicalization of ruling regimes and civil war, which is fraught with the disintegration of power institutions. This dramatically lowers the threshold of nuclear weapons use in regional or internal conflicts with a high probability of escalation to the global level in the near future. An even greater threat is that in the current course of developments international terrorists will inevitably get access to nuclear materials and explosives. Al Qaeda and other extremist Islamic organizations make no secret of such intentions. A primitive terrorist nuclear explosion on a Hiroshima scale not only in Tel Aviv but also Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin or Tokyo will kill hundreds of thousands of people and transform the entire civilized world into a hostage of terrorists. This will put an end to our civilization the way it has been over the past five millennia or so.