War

Let’s start (again) from where we began when the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out: all wars are meaningless, every human life is unique, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable – from a Christian perspective, sacred. This is what we thought and still think on a Christian basis. And, when it still mattered what the West thought, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born through this.

Yet murders happen daily in the world, in many places the death penalty is a tool of justice, and there’s no continent where some people don’t try to defeat others with weapons. People kill people, individually and collectively disregarding human rights.

Thou shalt not kill, the Lord forbade in the sixth commandment, but I will kill, His creature shrugged, what can you do about it?

And this is really the most important question: what can we do about it? We can moralize, of course, and we should, we must say that this is not right. Taking the life of your fellow human is not right, even those who don’t believe in the Christian God know this.

But what can we do to prevent it?

Globally: nothing substantial. We can nail The Universal Declaration of Human Rights to every city wall, it won’t have much effect. If we don’t have the power to enforce these rights, that document remains just dead letters, good for frontline soldiers to wrap their food in, or stuff into their boots instead of foot wraps.

Not that much of the world has considered this as a guideline until now. And this has become quite clear now.

Something has changed since that Saturday morning. The Hamas terrorists, with their civilian victims and brutality, sent the message that in their eyes, a human being of a different religion is not of the same value as they are, the lives of people of other religions don’t matter. And this message is shouted by pro-Palestinian anti-Semitic protesters. It can’t be put more simply than how the crowd taking to the streets in Western cities puts it. Yet their leaders don’t understand. They don’t understand because, since the established practice of religious tolerance, they assume that religious war is not possible. At least not here.

Yet since Saturday, this is not a possibility, but a bloody reality for Western civilization.

Europe wasn’t dealt cards in this game, or more precisely, we threw in our cards before the stakes were made.

NATO is mostly a lame duck in this story because of Turkey.

Joe Biden, the President of the United States, said in vain the other day: “To anyone who’s thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t!”

“Yeah, sure,” the Taliban nod in Afghanistan, then quote, “You have all the watches, but we have the time.” Since they never thought that history had ended, time is indeed working for them.

Notes:

Historical and current events references:

Russian-Ukrainian war: Refers to the ongoing conflict that began in 2014 and escalated in February 2022.

Hamas attacks: Refers to the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel, which led to a significant escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Political and international organizations:

NATO: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance of Western countries.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A landmark UN document adopted in 1948, setting out fundamental human rights to be universally protected.

“Thou shalt not kill”: The Sixth Commandment in Judeo-Christian tradition.

The reference to “the end of history” alludes to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of ideological evolution after the Cold War.