Only the deads have seen the end of war. 2022

Only the dead have seen the end of war / Platon
Opening speech on March 19, 2022 / Denkmal Kultur Mestlin / Hundrich

There are 1000 + 1 reasons to start a war.
If there is no plausible reason, this reason is invented.

On September 1, 1939, since 5:45 a.m. they have been shooting back, Hitler declared, justifying the invasion of Poland with these words, and the Second World War began.

There are wars all over the world, but do wars make us wiser?
Does our wisdom help us prevent wars?

Richard Ned Lebow was born during that war, in 1941.
He was the only survivor of a family that was smuggled out of France to the United States by the Jewish resistance in 1942.

Richard Ned Lebow devoted his entire life to one question:
Why are we at war?
To answer this question, Richard Ned Lebow has meticulously studied all wars for centuries, since 1648. His answers challenge all the classic assumptions that wars are due to rational reasons, logical thinking, power, and the pursuit of security.

Wars, he says, are the result of grievances. He says that nations are like people, motivated by the pursuit of recognition and human needs.

War is violence - exercised by states to achieve a variety of political goals. War - is a product of the state system.

Many years ago I read the sentence attributed to Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war".

These few words touched me deeply, in a way - shook me, because they contain nothing else than "peace is an illusion", an extraordinary gift, unattainable for living people.

Wars... are political matters, I said at the beginning, so is peace.