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