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John PapworthThis open letter was sent to the Swidon Anti-War Coalition on 10th April 2003 and was addressed to all who are concerned with problems of war and peace, of social justice, of environmental well-being and community integrity.
The signs point the need for a quite new political approach; not the old old story of becoming members of a giant political party with great leaders who will betray us, but dedicating ourselves to the restoration of local power in local hands so that democracy becomes a fact of life, enabling us to gain control of events whilst there is time and before we are undone.
The war danger has brought us together; it would be a thousand pities if our failure to have prevented the war should result in a fading of the spirit, a frittering of resolve and a failure to follow the obvious course of action we now need to take.
We are confronted today with a challenge: For generations we have acted on an assumption which the Iraqi war has shown to be false. We have pursued a path of striving for peaceful reform in the belief that if we campaigned ardently and persistently enough we might eventually win a majority of people to support us and, in accordance with democratic practice, see our particular reform established.
Well, at last the onset of the Iraqi war gave us what for so long many of us had worked for, an overwhelming majority across Europe, and indeed across the world, in this case for peace. By the million in the capitals of the world people demonstrated their desire for peace, but we still found ourselves involved in yet another war.
Why did the majority view not prevail? What is the lesson here? One which is surely quite fundamental to any genuinely radical political progress? The whole history of the way in which the boardroom plot to foist a single-state federal Europe on the peoples of the different countries of Europe should have warned us that on a mass basis democracy could not function, but it didn't.
The way we have been gulled into the acceptance of the virtual destruction of local government - and the consequent enhancement of central government power ought to have warned us, but it didn't.
The way our lifestyle has been fashioned by commercial forces to desecrate the sacred vitals of our natural environment ought to have warned us, but it didn't. The way our local village and neighbourhood communities have been made the cats-paw of giant retail shops and other commercial concerns ought to have warned us, but it didn't.
The way we have been persuaded to allow the concept of government control of education to be a natural and normal proceeding instead of a frontal assault on liberty ought to have warned us, but it didn't.
It must be obvious to all but the wilfully blinkered that our entire lifestyle has become a crash course of reckless disregard for human dignity, for human sensibility and decency, and for any regard for the well-being of future generations; one involving a total disregard of wise consideration of the needs of human promise in a destructive cornucopia of commercially motivated, self-indulgent excess; a process which can only end in the most monumental degrees of tragedy and social collapse.
All political parties are involved in this up to the hilt, they are in no way seeking to resist it, rather do they compete with each other in helping to dig the grave of human hopes and aspirations. Morally and intellectually they are bankrupt; to continue to participate in them in the charade of what purports to be the democratic process is simply to abandon ourselves to futility, despair and collapse.
A new start must be made, one which restores the power of judgement back into citizen hands by rejecting the mass, the artificial and the fraudulent, and by embracing the small, the local, the real and the dynamic. Power is being abused because it is in forms too enormous to be controlled even by those in leadership roles. It is not what they do which needs to be questioned, but what they are. They are just too big to be made susceptible to any form of genuine democratic control; this is the root cause of the endemic state of crisis which now has human affairs in its grip and which continues to overshadow all human prospects.
A new force is needed, one which grasps that if power is to be made susceptible to moral judgement it must be on a scale small enough to enable citizen control to be exercised. Power in all its forms in society must flow from the our local civic centres upwards; it must cease to flow from the top down, with all the artifices of manipulation and indoctrination with which it is inevitably employed. To be small, or not to be at all, that is the question.
We do not need a new party, we need hundreds of thousands of new parties, even if they share a common name, all firmly in citizen hands, all attuned not to giant boardroom concerns or to overlarge centralised power structures but to local citizen consensual moral judgement.
Let us learn the real lesson of the Iraqi war, that mass forms of organisation disempower the citizen and negate his moral concerns, and that only by the deployment of power in localised citizen hands can we secure the fruits of peace, moderation, social justice, environmental sanity and the life abundant for all our children.
THE ONE TO ACT IS ME;
THE PLACE TO ACT IS HERE;
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW;
AND THE WAY TO ACT IS WITH
LOVE, TRUTH, JOY AND HOPEThe above letter is, I hope, self-explanatory. We are living through tumultuous times in which the entire political landscape is changing. It is not too much to say we are in the midst of a defining moment of history. Which side are you on? If you would like to be part of these new moves or to maintain contact and to be kept informed please contact me at this address:
26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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