Lama Dalai - A Call for Revolution A Vision for the Future

My beloved brothers and sisters, my dear young friends.

You, the youth of today, are the generation born at the beginning of the third millennium. Our century is not yet twenty years old; it is still young, like you. The world is ageing at the same pace as you, and it will be what you make of it.

I am appealing to you having observed you keenly for some time. I have enormous faith in your generation. For several years I have organised meetings with you, both in India and on my travels to Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan. In the course of multiple exchanges with young people from all over the world I have grown increasingly convinced that your generation has the capability to transform this dawning century into an era of peace and dialogue. You have the means of reconciling our fractured humanity both with itself and with the natural world.

Nonetheless, the potential for renewal exemplified by your generation is encircled by the shadows of the old world: a dark chaos of pain and tears. You must stand up to the wilful opposition to knowledge that is at large today, which is fraught with danger, where hatred, selfishness, violence, greed and fanaticism are threatening the very future of life on earth. I know that you have the persistence and strength to take on the future, and that you will succeed in drawing a line under the willed ignorance that you have inherited.

My young friends, you are my hope for humanity. I want to state it loudly and clearly so that you hear and respond to my message. I am confident in the future, for you have the capacity to lead humanity towards a renewed form of fraternity, justice and solidarity.

I am addressing you with the knowledge I have acquired through experience. I am eighty-two years old. At the age of sixteen, on 17 November 1950, I lost my freedom, when I took my seat on the golden throne in Lhasa and accepted supreme authority, both secular and religious, over Tibet. At the age of twenty-five, in March 1959, I lost my country after it was forcibly annexed by the Peoples Republic of China. I was born in 1935, and have lived through many of the horrors of the twentieth century, the century that experienced the worst bloodshed in human history. However extraordinary human intelligence is, instead of serving, cherishing and protecting life, it has too often turned its ingenuity to destruction, even harnessing the force from which the sun draws its power. You were born into a world in which arsenals of atomic weapons have the capacity to destroy the planet dozens of times over.

Your grandparents and parents lived through two world wars and multiple conflicts that wrought bloody havoc on our world, and caused the deaths of 231 million people in the last century. Humanity was swept up in a tsunami of unprecedented violence, fed by fanatical nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and ideological indoctrination. I was alive at the time of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, the nuclear firestorms in Japan, the Cold War, the wanton killing of civilians in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Cultural Revolution and famine that caused the deaths of 70 million people in China and Tibet.

You and I have seen conflicts flare up in Afghanistan and the Middle East, devastating regions that were once the historic cradle of humanity. We have seen the images from the Mediterranean; its waves carrying the corpses of children, teenagers, women and men who drowned as they tried to reach Europe in the hope of a better life and of being able to help their families survive.

You and I are witnesses to the imminent breakdown of the earths ecosystem, an alarming decrease in biodiversity, and the extinction of a plant or animal species every twenty minutes. We are silent witnesses to the massive deforestation of the Amazon the destruction of the last great lung of our planet as well as the acidification of our oceans, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, and the melting of the ice packs in the Arctic and Antarctic. At the Third Pole, Tibet, the retreat of 46,000 Himalayan glaciers threatens to dry up the great rivers of Asia, sources of life for one-and-a-half billion inhabitants. Of all this you are only too aware. You were born into this world, and are growing up knowing about this spiral of destruction on a global scale, the result of war, terrorism and the ransacking of our natural resources.

Dont let yourselves be gripped by mean world syndrome. If you do, you run the risk of giving in to despair, of failing to notice that a global momentum for peace is gaining ground, thanks to an increasing emphasis on education in democracy and human rights. Never forget that genuine reconciliation is possible! Look at Germany and France. Since the sixteenth century these two countries have fought some twenty wars, climaxing in a paroxysm of barbarism in the two world wars of the last century. In 1914 and 1939, in Paris and Berlin, military convoys bore young soldiers to the front. They were your age, and had no idea of the atrocities that awaited them on the battlefield and in the mud of the trenches, or of the horrors of the death camps. A decimated generation of young men, grieving families, millions of orphans, countries in ruins, civilisation on its knees.

Yet it is precisely in these formerly warring nations that the desire for peace has won out against hawkish patriotism. The visionary leaders Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman laid the foundations for the European Union, buoyed by their consummate belief in fraternity and solidarity. Other political leaders have carried on their work, based on the principle of dialogue, in order to heal the wounds of so many people caught in the crossfire of conflicts all around the world.

The European model gives me genuine hope for your generation. Its dynamic of peace embodies the new reality in which this century is heading, a dynamic that even the rise of nationalism in certain member states will not be able to halt. As you know, there are already many organisations based on the European Union model being established in different regions around the world. You too can play a part in helping these countries advance towards increased integration in order to minimise the risk of conflict. You too can play a part in promoting democratic values and basic freedoms throughout the world, helping different countries make inroads into ungovernable areas on every continent. I urge you to consider how you can be involved in increasing this spirit of union worldwide.

Young Africans, you can help strengthen the African Union, which is bringing together all the countries on your vast continent. Young Americans and Canadians, you can build a North American Union. Young people of Latin America, a Latin American Union; and the youth of Asia, an Asian Union. On an international level, this will give the UN a far greater chance of bringing to life the beautiful slogan in the preamble of its founding charter: We, the peoples of the united nations.

Allow me to share with you an unforgettable memory from November 1989, almost thirty years ago. You may not remember that at the time Germany was divided into two hostile states that were separated physically by a 100-kilometre-long, three-metre-high concrete wall. It was known as the Wall of Shame. Peppered with watchtowers, it divided individual families as well as an entire nation.

I happened to be in Berlin at the very moment when tens of thousands of young and enthusiastic demonstrators broke through the wall with their bare hands, knocking down frontier posts one by one, entirely peacefully. The whole world held its breath. Young people were changing the course of history. In both East and West Germany, this generation turned its back on ideological confrontation, affirming its desire for German reunification, a reconciliation made possible by a politics of transparency, set in motion in 1986 by my friend Mikhail Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union. He refused to give the order to fire on the demonstrators and later declared that the fall of the Berlin Wall had avoided a Third World War.