3rd May 2022

My dear and beloved father has passed away. I am devastated. He was so much more than a father to me. During my adolescence, he saved my life, later, he was the pillar and achor in my life, and, most importantly, my life's mission for dignity grew out of the extraordinary courage with which he overcame the agonising traumas he suffered from war and displacement — he overcame them with loving compassion.

I began staying at my father’s side in 2010. I spent as much time as possible in the house of my parents to be of help to them while my father was caring for my mother. After her passing in December 2018, I began to synchronise my life with his to the last detail, particularly after the coronavirus pandemic started to unfold in the spring of 2020. At that point, I halted my global life completely and cared for him day and night. One could say that the timing of two difficult factors — father care and the coronavirus — coalesced for me in a beneficial way. I set up my home office in his living room so I could be close to him while working with our worldwide dignity community using digital platforms, and at the same time finalising my book on solidarity (see the synopsis) and preparing the book 'Letter to my father'. Combining all duties and tasks meant that I worked up to seventeen hours per day during the past years.

Caring for my father was an integral part of my dignity work. He got his life stolen by Nazi Germany in the most cruel ways and I felt it was my duty and honour to give him dignity at the end of his life. He was such an exceptional man — I always felt that even a Mandela or a Gandhi could have learned something from him — therefore I wish to make his light visible with a book titled 'Letter to My Father'. He never was an 'average' citizen who just 'minded his own business'. My father went much further than 'minding his own business' — he extended his love to all of humanity and all living beings. I know few people who were as far away as my father from short-sighted neo-liberal cost-benefit calculations and as close to the Indigenous seven-generation sustainability rule. He did so with deeply caring compassion, a compassion that was not patronising but humble and dialogical, inspired by unending all-encompassing love.

With the global Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network that I had the privilege of initiating in 2001, we wish to sow a seed for a global dignity family, the very family we hope humanity as a whole may want to become in the future — no longer Disunited Nations but Globally United People for Dignity. Globally United People for Dignity is the only authority positioned to overcome 'the law of the strongest' with 'the strength of the law'.

Seeing the footage of suffering so close to him, in Ukraine, was something my father had hoped never to have to experience again in his lifetime. Already during the years when refugees from Syria and Afghanistan came to Germany, he was profoundly saddened by the fact that Europe’s politicians had not succeeded in creating more comprehensive peace in the world. ‘War is the enemy of everybody’, this was his view, war on people as much as war on nature. For him, the concept of 'enemies' did not exist, I spoke about this with him often, the last time only two months before his passing.

The coronavirus pandemic imposed many lockdowns all around the world, thus causing an 'anthro-pause'. Many hoped that this would open a new ‘Eleanor Roosevelt moment’ just as after World War II in 1948, a new moment for a major re-orientation. Unfortunately the coronavirus pandemic was not enough. The hope now is that the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine will not end in global nuclear war, but open a new opportunity for a fundamental reorientation.

Just saying 'never again' is not enough, what is needed is ‘wehret den Anfängen’, 'resist the beginnings', this was my father’s continuous warning. It is too late when the 'Hitlers' of this world, the ruthless dominators, have gained power, their ascendance must be prevented, not just individually but systemically. The way is to attenuate the security dilemma early on, more, to remove it at all levels. The inner logic of this dilemma is, ‘We have to amass weapons, because we are scared. When we amass weapons, you get scared. You amass weapons, we get more scared’. Its maxim is, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’. The result is that each period of peace is nothing more than a temporary truce, because despite best intentions, war preparations, taken as a whole, tend to produce more war than peace. Superimposing this dilemma with vicious cycles of humiliation is foolishly hazardous, particularly in a world that is so globally interconnected as now. When violence has reached the point where even pacifists feel that there is no alternative to armed resistance, it is too late.

Do we really want only the strongest to win? My father would have signed the following suggestion for a way out:
'We need Globally United People for Dignity to establish binding global rules for dignity and peace. This is the only path to peace with each other and with nature. Competition for domination and maximum profit needs to be replaced with the Indigenous seven-generation sustainability rule. True pacifism means leaving behind the tragic security dilemma so that global disarmament can become possible. Globally United People for Dignity can co-create a decent global village and nurture a planet where all living beings can flourish in dignity. This is not naïve utopia, it is necessary eutopia — it is the only alternative to collective demise'.

I have coined the phrase dignity-ism, or dignism, as a new connective narrative for a decent future for our world. Here is how I define it: 'Dignism describes a world where every newborn finds space and is nurtured to unfold their highest and best, embedded in a social context of loving appreciation and connection, where the carrying capacity of the planet guides the ways in which everyone’s basic needs are met. It is a world where unity in diversity reigns, where we unite in respecting everyone's human dignity and celebrating diversity, where we prevent unity from devolving into oppressive uniformity, while keeping diversity from sliding into hostile division. Dignism means ending past cycles of humiliation and preventing new ones from emerging. Dignism means loving care for the common good of all of humanity as co-inhabitants of one single finite habitat. Dignism weaves together all dignifying aspects of all of the world’s cultures into one decent global village.'

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