Look beyond the political fairy tales. The Russian-Ukrainian war is about people who don’t want to go to the front and don’t want to kill their fellow humans, dying.
The essence of every war is that people die who could have lived longer.
War is about orphans, about widows, about the pain of a mother losing her child. Raising a child takes at least eighteen years. Extinguishing their life takes a few seconds. This is the difference between war and peace.
Scorched cities, destroyed environment, ruined heritage remain after every war. Calculate the ecological footprint of a bomb.
War shows exactly what kind of “other god” man is when stepping into the Lord’s place: he doesn’t weigh, doesn’t judge, just shoots blindly.
It doesn’t matter what you’ve done throughout your life until then.
It doesn’t matter how much added value there is in what you think, do, say. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from, nothing that makes your life singular and unique counts. Dying in war is not your death, it’s anyone’s death.
Joseph Heller, in one of the best war novels of all time, “Catch-22”, precisely articulates what war is about: that man is material.
There’s no spirit, no soul, no precious life in the image of the Creator – only the material struggling with material, the human body is torn by bullets and shrapnel, you burn in a fire, a bomb rips out your lungs. This is all that happens on the battlefield.
War is the triumph of human reason without God.
It shows us what kind of weapons of mass destruction we are capable of producing.
With these weapons, hundreds of thousands of people try to extinguish the lives of hundreds of thousands of other people they don’t even see, but they believe that those others are out to take their lives, because they’re shooting from there to here.
Very few on the front want this. The luckier ones might survive. But in the hoped-for future peace, for the war-torn, it’s not the ‘war’ part that has existential meaning, but the torn.
And there’s no victory, on either side, that could justify so many broken lives.
Homeland Dictionary 