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Analysis of reality - free from enemy pictures
Peace mural of Kabul, Afghanistan
Kids' Guernica Peace Murals show that children do not attempt an analysis with the paint brush of merely reality, but they do also of their wishes to experience a reality free of violence. They examine what is possible.
In the Afghanistan mural this is clearly indicated by three facets:
- the plane has no insignia i.e. flag to show which country is responsible for dropping those bombs
- weapons of wars are put through a meat grinder out of which come tools of education. (That reminds of Janusz Korszak, the Polish children doctor and later director of an orphanage who perished with his 200 orphans in Auschwitz, since he wrote a story for children about them transforming a factory producing weapons into one producing chocolate)
- the mural can be divided into two halves with the left one depicting war and the right one a peaceful landscape with two children looking into that landscape while holding hands
Thus the amazing thing to be realized when looking at these peace murals is that they are free of an enemy picture and therefore expression of hatred when the children paint wishes for peace.
Instead the children tend to go beyond the immediacy of enemy pictures used by armies to justify the going to war and in order to have someone to shoot at. They make with their paint brushes a much clearer analysis of violence. It begins with the innocent question but why drop a bomb on us? What have we done? As can be seen in the Kabul, Afghanistan mural, they show a plane dropping bomb but without any insignia on it. There is no indication given as to who send that plane. It is not a Russian or American plane, just a technological means of bringing destruction.
By refusing to paint an enemy picture they express a wish to understand the incomprehensible: why men and women resort to technical means of destruction when the problems can be resolved, as suggested by the pupils of Dubai, once people start to negotiate and to talk with each other.
Indeed, Kids Guernica attempts to touch upon a deeper understanding as to what it takes to make peace a liveable reality. It favours that people calm down rather than become aggressive towards each other. The collaborative learning process allows the children to find ways to work together. By making these experiences they discover new possibilities to resolve conflicts which seemed till then not to be resolvable.
The peace murals say above all one thing, namely not to leave people alone and therefore exposed to but one option, namely war as the only way to settle the dispute and thereby determining by force who is right.
As Constance de Volney pointed out when advising the French Assembly after the French Revolution what to include in the constitution in order to avoid in future war, there is a need to overcome a basic fallacy used often by religion. They base their claim of being true by pointing out that people are prepared to die out of belief in that religion. The blind boys in India when doing the mural ask why religion is usually linked to war as is the case with priests blessing weapons of destruction and troops before they start to march.
However, the truth is not found by dying for it. It is only people who keep their cultures alive that they can question the truth of their own and that of other cultures without being offended. Questioning is really the art of living honestly with the others by no one pretending to have found the absolute truth which cannot be challenged by others. Out of such dialogues can follow a critical notion of peaceful coexistence.
Over and again history has proven that the option of war is not at all an option compared to people talking to each other. But for that to take place, people need empathy for each other. Here Kids' Guernica follows the insight that adults compared to children usually tend to loose this understanding of others due to their fears becoming greater than what they could imagine to be doing together. Hence the peace murals which the souls of children have touched, can free the adults in their imagination. As Takuya Kaneda points out, only once adults are freed in their imagination, then they can recognize and understand the fears and pains of others.
Without such an imagination in play, no intercultural dialogue would be possible and reality perceived as if a given fact, not to be changed but standing there like the wall which encloses nowadays the Palestinians or else has become the border between Mexico and the USA.
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