Our choice is not between war and peace but between life with dignity or without
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of living a life with dignity over the binary of war and peace.
Subcomandante Marcos suggests that true choice lies not simply in the avoidance of conflict but in the fundamental quality of our existence. A life filled with dignity is paramount, and the struggles people face can often reduce their existence to mere survival without meaningful respect or autonomy.
In practice
During a peace rally, I quoted, 'Our choice is not between war and peace but between life with dignity or without' to highlight the importance of respecting human rights.
The word of the oldest of the old of our peoples didn't stop. It spoke the truth, saying that our feet couldn't walk alone, that our history of pain and shame was repeated and multiplied in the flesh and blood of the brothers and sisters of other lands and skies.
Always, since our birth, we've insisted on another way of doing politics. Now, we had the chance to do it without arms, but without stopping being Zapatistas; that's why we keep the masks on.
The powerful have invoked God at their side in this war, so that we will accept their power and our weakness as something that has been established by divine plan. But there is no god behind this war other than the god of money, nor any right other than the desire for death and destruction... Today there is a “NO” which shall weaken the powerful and strengthen the weak: the “NO” to war.
In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice.
She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves… They belonged to her her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and they they concerned no one but herself.
It requires an effort of logical acrobatics to believe that carnage of innocents is an instrument for freedom and elections are a symbol of deception and repression!
Human beings have always been mythmakers.
Anarchism does not repudiate the right of ownership, but it has a conception thereof sufficiently different from [others'] to include the possibility of an end of that social organization which will arise, not out of the ruins of government, but out of the transformation of government into voluntary association for defence.
Having seen the people of all other nations bowed down to the earth under the wars and prodigalities of their rulers, I have cherished their opposites, peace, economy, and riddance of public debt, believing that these were the high road to public as well as private prosperity and happiness.
The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.
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