We welcome you to the meeting for the construction of a world without war #NOWAR2024 at the International Peace Factory Wanfried. It is one of four meetings this weekend to advance the alliance to roll back US military influence in the world. With over 800 military bases, the superpower seeks to enforce the imperial interests of the powerful in the USA and the allied elites of other Western states worldwide, often through threats and blackmail, but also through military intervention. After the loss of their economic superiority after the Second World War, they now rely primarily on their remaining military superiority to secure their dominance.
How can we oppose and overcome?
We at the International Peace Factory Wanfried have been a member of Worldbeyondwar for several years. I am the coordinator of our association and my name is Wolfgang Lieberknecht. We formed the association to establish a networking point for the German and international peace movement in a former upholstered furniture factory.
In addition to the connections via the Internet, we consider personal meetings and personal encounters to be indispensable for building trusting cooperation for peace, especially between people of different religions, skin colours and nationalities and ethnicities. What the powerful supporters of war do with our tax money at meetings to coordinate their actions, we have to do for peace with our own resources and our enthusiasm. To be able to defend us against them.
The Peace Factory is located in the town of Wanfried. Wanfried translates as Whenpeace. It is a small town and is not located near any of the internationally known German cities. But it is geographically located in the middle of Germany and Europe. And it is located directly on the former border that divided East and West into two power blocs until 1989.
We didn't choose the name PeaceFactory just because something was once produced in these buildings. We are taking up the idea from Immanuel Kant's eye-opening essay ‘Perpetual Peace’: the cosmopolitan German philosopher of the Enlightenment drew the conclusion from history that peace is not a gift, because the powerful can use it to expand their power and do not bear the suffering of war. That is why peace must be laboriously worked for by the common people against their resistance. But the suffering of war shows us again and again that this work is worthwhile for each and every one of us and hast to be done in time.
My father was in the Second World War, my grandfather was in the First World War. Many of my generation tried to understand why they were involved in wars of aggression in Russia or France that cost the lives of millions of people, including many of their classmates.
As a child, I remember my father coming home during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and shocking us by saying, ‘Nuclear war will begin any minute.’ I later learned that this danger was real at the time and that we only escaped this war with luck and then the foresight and willingness to compromise of the political leaders of the Soviet-Union and the USA at the time, Kennedy and Khrushchev.
And I was young when US Americans of my generation were sent to war to keep Vietnam under Western control.
For over 50 years, I have devoted a great deal of my life's energy to understanding why people wage wars and how we can build a world without war.
I was lucky enough to inherit the factory and be able to bring it into the peace movement. But I just don't have the means to expand it alone, and even I never wanted to anyway. We hope that we can find enough co-builders, association members and supporters to be able to use the full potential of the buildings one day.
We have already organised a number of peace meetings here, including international peace meetings with people from Russia and Africa and the Arab world.
Years ago, after attending a World Beyond War general assembly, like today's, in Ireland, we joined the organisation and are happy to be able to organise part of the global conference here today. At first, we planned to invite more than 100 participants. But the buildings are not yet developed enough for that. Perhaps the association will find the strength to organise such a large meeting here in one of the coming years.
And large meetings for the maintenance of peace will be necessary; we need a lot of expertise and many people pulling in the same direction. For I have the impression that the political leadership of the USA and its allies would rather risk the demise of humanity than accept a world order of states with equal rights in which they can no longer subject other states and their people to their interests.
Between 1500 and 2000, a strong and dangerous symbiosis emerged in Europe that was to have an impact on the rest of the world: the development of nation states driven by national egoism, the productive capitalist-industrial revolution and the military superiority over the other regions of the world that was based on both. In order to become as assertive as possible in the developing competition between nation states, they homogenise their states religiously and ethnically. Often with violence and the enforcement of the supremacy of an ethnic or religious group. Discrimination, expulsion and flight of minorities were the rule.
The European states waged a series of conquests around the globe and subjugated the peoples. In both world wars, they turned their forces against each other and fought for supremacy of their nationstates: On cost the lives of many millions of their nations and around the world. But in doing so, they weakened to such an extent that the peoples of the world were gradually able to assert their independence against them. Today hat broken the  military domination of the West and China's has broken the their monopoly on industrial manufacturing. Adam Smith had hoped for this: the crimes committed by European states throughout the world would not be ended by an inner transformation in these states. The worldwide exchange of ideas, knowledge and products would lead to other states becoming ever stronger, so that they can force through their equal right. That is exactly what has happened.
Today, for the first time in 500 years, there is a chance that our one human family can overcome the subjugation to Western states and Western capital.
The founders of the UN wanted to achieve the construction of a peaceful world with equal rights after the Second World War and to build a just world order based on the principles of humanism and world religions.
But to this day, the privileged states and classes have been able to prevent this.
Now, if it remains peaceful, the forces that want what international law according to the UN Charter will prevail: equality of states, cooperation to create decent living conditions worldwide for all people.
We are facing a long and dangerous transformation period. We need a grassroots movement in the world to implement the UN Charter and create a peaceful transition. To do this, we also need also a strong movement in Western states to overcome national selfishness.
In Europe, we can draw on a more recent document that is now largely ignored: the Charter of Paris.
In the Charter of Paris, the Eastern and Western European states decided 1990 to work together to build a new, peaceful, democratic and social Europe with equal security for all.
 However, this charter was not implemented after 1990. Unlike in the Soviet Union, the forces of peace in the West and especially in the USA were unable to prevail. The military-industrial-congressional, media and university complex was too strong. It brought instead the neoconservatives to power, who wanted to secure for the US elite the sole global supremacy that had been achieved after the Soviet Union's abandonment of the Cold War.
 By escalating the contradictions in the Soviet Union and in and between  the Eastern European states, they first destabilised Gorbachev and then blocked the construction of the planned new Europe by expanding NATO to the east.
According to the Charter of Paris, the new Europe was planned without NATO and was thus opposed to NATO's objective: to keep the USA in Europe, Russia out and Germany down. Russian-German/Western European cooperation would have created a power that the USA would no longer have been able to control so easily.
As a result, the neoconservative dominance in the USA and the elites supporting it in most NATO member countries have brought us back to the same dangerous situation of possible destruction of Europe as in the Cold War.
And again, large sums of public money are flowing into armies and arms factories, money that is urgently needed to create social security, to safeguard the natural foundations of life and to promote international cooperation for the construction of a just world.
This failure to take the necessary measures in the interests of the military-industrial complex also drives more and more people worldwide to flee. They no longer accept a life without life security and prospects. This in turn contributes to the destabilisation of democracy in Europe and beyond.
We propose to you today to make a renewed attempt to overcome the division of Europe and to demand that politicians implement the Charter of Paris.
We propose to people all over the world that they overcome the division of the world between the major powers and between North and South by means of a global citizens' movement to implement the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Richts..
We have learned that our political representatives will not or cannot do this by themselves! Those who want it, have powerful opponents, against whom we can only jointly enforce the building of a peaceful Europe and a just and peaceful world.
 The people who want a Europe in the sense of the Charter should build a grassroots movement for it. It would have to achieve opinion leadership against the proponents of confrontation and escalation, who seek to maintain Western hegemony until the destruction of the last human being.
 We should build the new Europe and a world according to the principles of the UN Charter through Europe-wide and global networking from the bottom up, in order to show a majority of Europeans and world citizens that this is possible through practical steps and to inspire them to do so.
We ourselves must develop steps for the implementation of the two documents and elect politicians who want to advance the construction of a peaceful, democratic and social Europe together with Russia. And with China and the global south, the construction of a common world. We will also discuss this weekend how we can tackle this.
later in English:
speech by Wolfgang Lieberknecht:
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