By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, April 30, 2026
Daniel Che is a pacifist who left his home in Kyiv to live in Portugal and build Peaceful World, an online peace education project illuminated by Walt Whitman, Lev Tolstoy, the Woodstock Generation, Jainism and much more. He joins World BEYOND War’s Marc Eliot Stein for a wide-ranging conversation about counterculture, anekantavada, karma and ahimsa – and also the goals of peace education, US/Israel’s war with Iran, military sadism, anger, and the relative meanings of “revolution” and “evolution”. As always on the World BEYOND War podcast, we had a conversation about antiwar activism that was unstructured and unplanned and took us to surprising places.
Along with the topics above, the names mentioned in this fast-moving conversation include Maria Montessori (who wrote “Education and Peace”), Yoko Ono, Barbara Tuchman, Roger Waters, Henry David Thoreau and Gene Roddenberry. Here is Daniel Che’s video designed to call attention to the Seville Statement on Violence, which was adopted by UNESCO in 1989 but forgotten way too quickly after.
I enjoyed this interview because Daniel Che and I don’t agree about the answer to every question we ask here, though I think we do agree about the importance of these questions. We closed with a few words about another Ukranian peace activist in Kyiv, World BEYOND War board member Yurii Sheliazhenko, who was taken from his home and tortured in Kyiv for his principled pacifism last month. Daniel Che points out that many other Ukranian people have been treated similarly.
Musical excerpt for this episode: “Enough is Enough” by SanSay.
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3 Responses
Peace,
Liked the conversation.
I don’t think that predatory people and leaders like trump, putin, and netanyahu, etc (or even the democratic party) have the well-being of the community in their hearts. I think their value system is based on personal gain which is used to justify their predatory actions. And they are able to institutionalize their unjust desires by controlling courts, police, government, media, etc making it easier for them to carry our their self-serving goals. Everybody justifies their action at the time they are doing it, even sociopaths. Some may later develop regret and change their position, but many don’t. This is a process that is thousands of years old. Kings, emperors, czars, billionaires.
And I think the masses are fed (propagandized) a false narrative by the mainstream institutions (mainstream media, school, etc) to distract them from community principles, and focus on false enemies (immigrants, minorities, Iran, Iraq etc). It is why terms like socialism, nurturing, well-being are described as weak and inferior. We honor the military, billionaires, and ‘strong leaders.’
We need an evolution. We cannot go back to any point in history and say it was just and fair. We need to move forward. And we need to do it now.
And currently the justice movement does not have enough resources to implement a truly just society, until we get enough people desire to act and support the necessary changes. But the answers have already been said, we just need to listen and find the answers. We don’t need to discover how to achieve peace, we just need more people to implement it.
More peace, less hate.
Attila
Peace!
Thanks, Attila – I think you put it very well!