I cannot guess what exactly those who say that we must get used to coffins with our young people inside and flags on top have in mind. Just hearing this conversation sends shivers down my spine. It makes us realize that we are entering a new era and heading toward a dark and perhaps nightmarish future, jumping up from our seats in anxiety.
Everyone knows that wars never stopped. Only in “civilized” and well-behaved Europe did they stop. Of course, there was the war that broke up the former Yugoslavia. Now we are living through the nightmare of Ukraine. In Asia and Africa, they never stopped, eighty-five war zones. A hundred blows to someone else's backside are nothing, but half a blow to our own is a tragedy, as the proverb tells us. The Old Woman reads about these wars in the newspapers, sees them on TV shows and in the news. She watches them impassively as a given part of her daily life, while a few who were not impassive made speeches of support and then did not go any further. But even so, over the last 80 years, and especially the last 35, the illusion prevailed that the saying «human destiny is the constant passage through the valley of tears» might not be true. Could all this be stopped? Perhaps it could have been avoided if, through various institutions, through contact between peoples and the achievement of brotherhood between them, predatory egos, thirsts for domination, vanity, and the greed of economic omnipotence had been tamed.
Today, we see the whole of Europe surrendering once again, for the first time in 80 years, to a coordinated and rapidly escalating rhetoric of preparation for war. Whether this is due to the real threat of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe, or whether it is being used as a pretext to satisfy other interests and strategies, it is a very reckless and dangerous balancing act. Because this time, war will not only bring new children to the coffins. This is something absolutely horrific and undesirable, which rightly no one wants, not just Europeans, not all of them, of course. This must not happen, turning everything upside down. This time, a war between NATO and Russia could put all of humanity in a coffin and those who survive in a nuclear winter to the point where they will regret not having died too. Because the planet will not be viable.
Statements that herald and revive a militarism that we had mistakenly thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Words that glorify “heroism,” “duty of self-sacrifice,” and “bravery,” the destruction that humanity has had to endure since the two World Wars, or rather, the two global slaughterhouses and carnage.
This type of rhetoric, either them or us, will lead young people to militarization and familiarization with cruelty. It will lead them to accept the idea that other people, other groups of fellow human beings of other ethnicities, are enemies whom it is morally acceptable to exterminate by any means necessary, because they are the embodiment of evil. Absolute reconciliation with inhumanity and barbarism. Do they want young people who will become accustomed to the idea that they will create in their minds as a model for themselves a form of muscular and blindly submissive to authority robot?;
As if we don't know how easily we can all descend into the most extreme barbarity from one moment to the next. And the Germans of the 1930s were ’civilized“ people.
They went to operas and attended classical music concerts; they were highly respected scientists and globally recognized intellectuals. Could anyone have imagined then that a Joseph Mengele was incubating among them?.
Because all kinds of Mengeles find fertile ground to develop their activities during wars.
The lessons learned this time, at least, should have been taken to heart. But it seems that even now, they have not been.
Beyond the war, however, the fear of war serves economic interests even more, with politicians attempting to promote such horrific scenarios.
