Dreams & Ideas From Robert Muller
For A Better World

Robert Muller's Acceptance of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's 2002 World Citizenship Award

Home | Dreams & Ideas| Decide To| Documents | Good Morning World | Publications | Listservs | Robert Muller

Title: Robert Muller's Acceptance of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's 2002 World Citizenship Award
Author: Robert Muller
Date: 24 October 2002
Keywords: Jimmy Carter Congratulations, 10 Dreams for a better world for the 21st century

Robert Muller's Acceptance of
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's
2002 World Citizenship Award

 

 

Letter Of Congratulations From Jimmy Carter

 

JIMMY CARTER

October 24, 2002

 

To Dr. Robert Muller

Rosalynn and I are pleased to congratulate you on receiving the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's 2002 World Citizenship Award. Since your prizewinning essay on world govenance, written 54 years ago, you have devoted much of your life to the peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations, directly assisting three secretaries-general. Your schools and books emphasize the increasing importance of global education. Your courageous leadership for peace is certainly worthy of this fine recognition.

With warm best wishes,

 

Sincerely,

Jimmy Carter (signed)
Dr. Robert Muller
Chancellor Emeritus
United Nations University for Peace
Costa Rica

Robert Muller's Acceptance of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's 2002 World Citizenship Award

24 October 2002

 

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

19th Annual Evening of Peace

Dear David Krieger, Frank Kelly, your Excellencies President and Mrs. Robinson, and beloved brothers and sisters,

If anyone had told me 50 years ago, during World War 11, that I would be still alive and stand here today to receive your prestigious World Citizenship Award in presence of my beloved wife Barbara, my son Philippe and two of my grandchildren, Robert and Christina, I would have never believed it.

I joined the United Nations in 1948 as a young man who had been in a German Gestapo prison, a French Resistance fighter and saw the most horrible atrocities of war and destructions. I come from Alsace-Lorraine, a province of France bordering Germany, where my grandparents knew three wars and changed nationality five times and my father was once a German and once a French soldier. Almost all my male schoolmates of the year 1939 were killed in German or French uniforms.

If this has happened between two highly civilized, white countries, how could I expect white and black countries, communists and capitalists, rich and poor nations, thousands of ethnic groups, religions and languages to be able to live together in peace? Surely there would be sooner or later an incident that would trigger off another world war. Well, there was no third world war.

In the disaffected armaments factory in Lake Success where the United Nations was first located, and where I was an intern, a British delegate asked me what I was doing there. I answered: " I came here to work for peace, because I do not want my children and grandchildren to know the horrors I saw in World War Il." He commented: " I pity you, because you will lose yourjob. This organization will not last more than five years." Well, it celebrates today its fifty-seventh anniversary.

I was also told in Lake Success that decolonization, the priority item on the agenda of world affairs would take the UN a hundred years to solve. Well the UN did it in forty years. I was told the same about racial discrimination, apartheid, human rights, women's rights, the Berlin Wall, the cold war, the absence of whole China from the UN, and there were other examples. Your honoring tonight President Arthur Robinson of Trinidad and Tobago for his role in the creation of an International Criminal Court is one of these examples.

Let me in the brief fifteen minutes given to me tell you what my dreams and objectives are for this century and millennium:

  1. we must absolutely make this planet at long last a true paradise
  2. we must eliminate from it all nuclear, biological and other weapons;
  3. transform all militaries into peace and police forces;
  4. stop wounding and destroying our Mother Earth unnecessarily
  5. eliminate the remaining excessive poverty on the planet
  6. make out of all humans a united, world family
  7. see the birth of a new, political, peaceful world order; why not a World Union like the European Union ?
  8. attain a life of fulfillment and happiness for all humans
  9. achieve humanity's harmony with the Earth and the heavens
  10. be the ultimate success of the universe and God.

In order to achieve that, we must

see the world with global eyes
love the world with a global heart
understand the world with a global mind
merge with the world and the heavens with a global soul achieve our own inner and outer peace, harmony and happiness.

 

And please, dear brothers and sisters, I beg you, I implore you to write down your personal, own ideas and dreams for a better world. I listened to my wife Barbara, from Santa Barbara, who on 14 July 1994, at a conference at La Casa de Maria, told us that there were 2000 days left to I January 2000 and that we should write down one idea a day to reach a total of 2000 on New Year's Day of the new millennium. I listened to her, reached 2500 ideas in 2000 and a week ago in your beautiful, inspiring city of Santa Barbara a total of 5000, 4000 of which already published by Barbara. And it is here that my friend and author Douglas Gillies wrote and releases tonight the first volume of my biography before I am dead! I also want to thank Dyanne and Anita Routh for making the gift of my biography available to each of you tonight.

Since my grandfather taught me to play the harmonica in order to celebrate harmony, allow me to play to you the Ode to Joy of Beethoven in the words of which the whole humanity becomes one, wonderful, peaceful, cooperating family of brothers and sisters on our miraculous planetary home in the vast Universe.

" I do not know any artist or poet who ha glorified nuclear missiles."

index.htm