Real Peace -- Contest

  

Anyone recognize this quotation?  Who wrote it?

 

 

  The means to real peace. No government admits any more that it

    keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest.

    Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes

    the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's

    own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be

    thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of

    means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring

    an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest

    just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also

    keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a

    cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a

    harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are

    now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad

    disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition,

    however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed,

    it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have

    said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a

    hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army

    as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for

    conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people,

    distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development

    of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the

    heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free

    will, "We break the sword," and will smash its entire military

    establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself

    unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of

    feeling -- that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on

    a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists

    in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts

    neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from

    fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and

    twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared -- this must

    someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. Our

    liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for

    reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work

    in vain when they work for a "gradual decrease of the military

    burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest

    will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of

    war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of

    lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud -- and

    from up high.