January 2025
I have an elderly uncle who still writes letters to me on paper with an envelope. He lives quietly and contemplatively but remains well-informed about the world. He agreed that I could share part of a recent letter he sent me. While I don’t agree with everything he says, his views on the present and the past are worth reading. Even if he may sometimes overstate his case, he surely has a point.
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My dear nephew,
I write a few days after returning from Asia where I spent several weeks with old friends over Christmas enjoying Japanese and Sichuan food again. My trip gave me the chance to see how Hong Kong has changed since Beijing enforced its will (and the answer is not much, at least superficially), and to reflect a little on the unchanging rhetoric about the risks of war between Taiwan and China. As in Europe, there is endless talk in Asia about the chance of conflict. While the Europeans are told to fear an escalation with Russia, the people in Japan, Taiwan and many other countries in Asia are expected to fret about the existential risks posed by China and North Korea.
It is all so much nonsense. Whatever differences exist between these nations, there is no reason for people to die. There are solutions that can be found, and will eventually need to be found. Talk of war appears to be designed mostly to keep people afraid, to make them supine, and easy to manipulate.
During the last few years especially, it seems to me that the pro-war rhetoric has become louder, and that any opposition based on principle has become harder to voice. There has been a hardening of hearts, a forgetting of the past, with less reasoned comment and more unsound thinking. If history teaches us anything, these are signs that there is trouble ahead. The media in Europe is filled with posts and articles mocking and blaming Russia, while the feeds in Asia are sprinkled with opinion pieces designed to encourage a dislike of China. That small minority who love war, who profit from it, who view it as inevitable and cleansing, are gaining the upper hand again.
As you know, I am deeply opposed to all this. War is the animal force that holds humanity back, which constrains civilisation. But such thinking appears less these days, and is often actively dismissed. Already a few friends have turned away from me. Conformists never fail to heap scorn on those who choose to walk alone when the earth begins to shake, when orgies of hatred and morbid nationalism spread, like the roots of a well-nourished weed.
I flew back through Germany where I found an interesting article* written by a Russian exile, a man whose conscience had forced him out of his home country. He wrote about the rising tide of anti-Russian sentiment across Europe. It has taken on ridiculous proportions, he said. He had even come under attack for having a longing for Russian soup. Russian soups are the products of Russian imperialism, he was told, and quite seriously, because they are made from recipes stolen from colonised lands. He said that just speaking Russian is enough for someone to be reported to the authorities as suspicious, and that people are even refusing to attend concerts if they feature Russian composers.
How can avoiding something that touches the soul, which crosses human divides like that, be in any way useful? All such stupidity does is make the inevitable reconciliation between Europe and Russia more difficult. It drives a wedge into good thinking.

There is nothing new in all this of course. It is exactly what happened in the First World War, when the petty divisions stoked beforehand made peace so much harder to achieve.
It’s easy to think I’m being political, or taking sides, but that’s not so. On the stage of the world’s theatre it’s always the political problems that everyone focuses on, when the issues of greatest concern are really the innermost ideas that force humanity to sit before the judgement of its own conscience.
If we are to move forward as a species, it’s at times like these when people need to listen to the gods within them that are living and helpful, even if this brings hostility and laughter. The demands of the world and the pull of our souls are always hard to reconcile: that is our test. Yet so many people seem unable to learn even the most basic lessons. They rally to whichever flag they see, lacking any sense of measured judgement. They seem to have nothing more than a superficial understanding of history and give little thought to human purpose.
At school, I remember being asked to write an essay on war. “What good and bad aspects of human nature are aroused and developed by war?”, was the question. Of course, my answer was hopeless. I knew nothing about the virtues and burdens of war at that time, nor anything about the cycles that drive these festivals of death.
I’ve thought about that question a good deal since, and I can see that what matters most is not the behaviour of those who actually fight wars with guns and missiles, or even the politicians who direct them. What matters more is the behaviour of the supposedly neutral parties, the doctors, teachers, artists, technologists and writers, those who might be expected to think a little more deeply.
These people seem to be so easily swayed by superficial ideas. It’s these neutrals who avoid Russian soup and hungrily digest frothy articles designed to fuel their petty indignation. They fail to ask about the views of those on the other side, and swallow every conformist message they are fed unquestioningly. They embrace the idea that their latest foes have transformed themselves into aggressive brainwashed fools overnight. The literature and art of the newest target of the people’s venom is swiftly washed from their minds. These, supposedly educated and considered people, rarely take even a moment to reflect on the transition in their thinking. They fail to see what has happened within their own minds, or remind themselves what they once believed.
I find it quite remarkable, this ruinous confusion of the neutrals, this transition in their thinking. It suggests that their ideas never had any solidity, that their views and opinions, while fervently expressed, were like warm wax.
A shocking number of these societal pillars even start spewing their own hot bile, with bloodthirsty social media posts that spread outrageous half-truths and foment hatred. Can it really be the function of otherwise intelligent people to make a situation worse than it already is? Is war not ugly and deplorable enough without these blancmange-brained people pissing their tepid self-brew into the stew?
All this reflects a failure to think, a mental laziness that may be perfectly pardonable in a soldier, or in those drones who fire drones into Russia at the press of button, but it ill-becomes those who regard themselves thoughtful, who once said they believed in humanitarian action, when it was convenient for them. Now that these ideals involve hard work and some danger, now that they are a matter of life and death to those with guns, these people abandon what they claimed were their principles and sing instead the tune their neighbours and the warmongers want to hear. I find it both comic and tragic that those who once said they strongly opposed the death penalty, should quickly relegate what was best in them to ruin. What happened to their inner freedom, their intellectual conscience, to their sense of humanity? Was it never really there?
When I say these things, friends sometimes accuse me of ivory-tower intellectualism and tell me I should hold my tongue. Yet this is surely the time to speak up. Is that not what the imperatives of justice, moderation and decency demand? At some point, a conflict always comes to an end and, unless the other side has been completely annihilated, there needs to be cultural exchange again. Is it not necessary to remember that, to preserve some foundation for peace, to continuously look for ways to build bridges instead of demolishing every possible route to a better future?
The elimination of war is surely the ultimate consequence of Western ethics. The foundations of any lasting human civilisation have to be built on humanity suppressing its animalistic instincts and following spiritual impulses instead. The pillars need to be built on a sense of shame, with imagination and knowledge. The simple idea that life is worth living, and worth preserving, is what history is trying to tell us.
Of course, the politicians and the media have a lot to answer for too. Government ministers in Germany, the US, and Britain blithely talk about their desire to end the conflict while simultaneously agreeing to deliver more weapons. They tell us that the time for negotiations is not yet at hand, and blame Russia. There is no thought for balance, no love, no sense of humanity, no real thought for those people who are expected to sacrifice their precious lives.
Nothing in what these politicians say serves any sort of ideal. It is not the product of any faith, or any awareness of human need. Everything is a transaction: every perceived bad deed by the other side has to be punished by a some balancing action. Why? Why is this necessary? Is it really useful to litter Ukraine and Russia with the dead and dying, to ravage and shatter people’s lives, and char and desecrate their soils? While a few people and a few big companies profit from weapons sales, and a few politicians sit proudly for a moment on the shoulders of the neutrals, the voices of the wounded, the screams of the mad, the accusations of the mothers, fathers, sisters, lovers and children, and the cries of the hungry, go unheard.
If these neutrals could hear the other voices might that not open their minds and allow them to weigh the true worth of the wars they fuel? Were they forced to experience the misery of a single day of war themselves, on the front line, might they not stop and think for a moment?

Perhaps that is where they should be sent, so they can learn. If those neutrals could hear the voice of reality, even briefly, they would shut themselves away and weep. Then they might consider their duty to humankind, and understand that all those billions being spent, those empty victories, those trifling bits of prestige, and a thousand other things that prolong the conflict are causing untold fear and torment to so many people. Then they might find the courage to condemn this useless war, and oppose any further escalation because what has been achieved so far is not worth the cost. If they did this, then their thoughts and deeds would not be forgotten, and these weak-minded people would finally stand above their forbears in the eyes of humankind.
History shows that people have always lived at the expense of others of course, that every group fears and hates every other. So far, life has been war and so defining peace has been extremely difficult. Peace is not some sort of paradise. It is not just coexistence by mutual agreement. Peace is not the absence of war. It is something humanity does not yet know, something to discover; we still need to sense and search for what it means. Peace is a state that is infinitely complex, unstable and fragile. The faintest breath can destroy it. Humanity will find it much harder to achieve than anything it has done until now.
One of the barriers that needs to be overcome is the belief that humanity is already above nature. Only the achievement of peace can truly draw a line between humanity and everything else in the material world. Peace is the only coming-into-being that exists, the only step that raises genuinely new possibilities. Peace is about exploring the senses that lie dormant within us. Killing deprives everyone, it harms us all. Our fellow human beings are not unrelated, separate and remote. We are all part of the world and the substance of life collectively.
Efforts to identify this complex truth loom large in the history of humanity. At times understanding has grown and become strong. Today, it is weak and fading. Luminous ideas and the dark laws of human conscience appear to be absurdities, because the smiling arrogance of science and technology have allowed soldiers and economists to define progress.
Humanity’s actions today are not the result of rational considerations, despite what people believe. They stem from a passionate delight in animalistic destruction. Humanity has forgotten what it once understood better, the living substance buried within each of us that has the power to transcend everything. The world is not what is outside, as it is viewed today. That is why so many people only see enemies, danger, fear and death. It is what is inside, the light of experience and perception, the flaring up of the divine. Only that can move humanity forward.
Every death in Ukraine and Russia is a repetition of humanity’s failure to understand this. That is self-evident.
Well, those are my thoughts today. I’m seeing your brother next week and will write again when I get back.
Before I go, I also wanted to tell you about the Fosters. Do you remember them? Peter and Jeanette, both lawyers. He became a circuit judge a few years ago. At the beginning of December he was convicted for the murder of one of his assistants. She disappeared 15 years ago, with no trace ever found. I visited him in prison before I left for Asia. He says someone with a grudge against him had hacked into his laptop and left incriminating letters and manipulated images before tipping off the police. He said the evidence was so overwhelming that he was unable to build an effective defence.
As he said to me, who knows what’s true any longer?
With best wishes
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This article was inspired by Hermann Hesse’s book, If the War Goes On: Reflections on War and Politics 1946 Edition
* “Wenn sogar Suppe zur Waffe wird”, Die Welt, 27 Dez 2024