Guest commentary by Franz Alt
04/19/2022, 00:00
Baden-Baden Published at irregular intervals goodnews4.de Contributions from guest commentators. The inner circle includes the Baden-Baden bestselling author Franz Alt, Thomas Bippes, professor for media and communication management at the SRH Hochschule Heidelberg, who focuses in particular on the topics of digitization, IT and artificial intelligence, and Helmut Höfele, first police chief inspector and district leader, who was born and grew up in the Ooswinkel in Baden-Baden.
Franz Alt is a journalist and bestselling author and lives in Baden-Baden. He is the editor of www.sonnenseite.com.
Comment: Franz Alt The diabolical meanness of human life is the omnipresence of death in the midst of life. We are all experiencing this in the Ukraine war. That is why this war is almost unbearable for compassionate and thoughtful people and can never be excused.
“Having to die and wanting to live at the same time is an impertinence”, even “a scandal”, Elias Canetti has repeatedly emphasized. How can this dialectic be endured? Through religion? No, but through practical and practiced ethics, writes the religious leader the Dalai Lama. Perhaps that is why there is so much willingness to help people fleeing Ukraine in Germany.
We can forgive many crimes, but hardly the meanness of war. This then leads to statements like that of the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andrei Melnyk, to the “Spiegel”: “All Russians are our enemies right now.” The war in Ukraine is Putin’s war and not every Russian’s war. Most people in Russia, too, know and feel that war is the disease and not the solution.
This is what Mikhail Gorbachev wrote just a few months ago in an essay in the newspaper “Russia Global Affairs”: “No challenge or threat facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved militarily. No major problem can be solved by one country or by a group of countries going it alone.” In the same article, Gorbachev, the greatest disarmer of all time, names the most important political tasks of our time: the abolition of all nuclear weapons, overcoming poverty and saving the global climate. Wars exacerbate all these problems instead of helping to solve them.
The book that I wrote together with Mikhail Gorbachev in 2016 has the current title: “Come to your senses at last – never again war”. Gorbachev was married to a Ukrainian. He often affectionately called his Raissa “My Ukrainian”. Such family ties between Russians and Ukrainians are numerous in both neighboring countries. We could not imagine in 2016 what we will experience in 2022.
Gorbachev then: “We are one humanity on one earth under one sun.” Real peace can only be achieved «under the conditions of demilitarized politics and demilitarized international relations. Politicians who think that problems and disputes can be solved by using military force should be rejected by society and they should leave the political stage.” No wonder Gorbachev and Putin could not become friends.
When I was allowed to present Gorbachev with a peace prize in Moscow in 2017, he named these three main tasks in global politics: “Disarm, disarm, disarm.” He meant Russia and NATO. He still thinks so today. When I asked about the danger of a nuclear war, he said: “A nuclear war would be mankind’s last war, because after that there would be no more people who could still wage a war.” That is his real legacy. Through his efforts, about 80% of all nuclear weapons were scrapped in the 1990s.
Who is Stanislav Petrov?
Gorbi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. A second Russian deserving of this award but not yet receiving it is Stanislav Petrov, who on the night of September 26, 1983 probably saved the world from nuclear war. The former colonel in the Soviet Army was at his workplace near Moscow that night. Its task was the satellite surveillance of the airspace and the observation of the US nuclear arsenals. He should report when US nuclear missiles fly in the direction of the Soviet Union and then start the counterstrike. This horror scenario was as realistic then as it is today.
At 12:15 am on September 26, 1983, Petrov’s computers reported: Five US nuclear missiles, each with ten times the Hiroshima yield, are headed for the Soviet Union and will hit the country in 25 minutes. Technically and rationally according to his orders, Petrov should have unleashed the counterattack. But his intuition told him: “Something’s wrong,” he told a television crew of the magazine “Galileo” 15 years later. The film is entitled: “The man who prevented World War III.” He says that that night he was “only a substitute” because the night shift was unpopular with his colleagues. Satellite surveillance had misinterpreted solar reflectors on clouds and this had to be covered up in the Soviet system for 15 years. Today he lives impoverished in a small Moscow apartment on a modest pension. In 1998 he received a peace award from the city of San Francisco at the UN building in New York. The man wrote world history.
Gorbachev’s successor, Putin, has now threatened to use nuclear weapons. I can hardly imagine what the 91-year-old Gorbachev, who is currently in a Moscow hospital with heart problems, feels. He thinks: The winner is not who wins battles, but who makes peace.
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