Today on Christmas Eve the churches will be full of peace-loving people again. They will sit in a row, look at the candlelight and look forward to their gifts. “Yes, he is coming, the Prince of Peace,” they will hopefully sing with fervor and grip their neighbors’ hands a little tighter as they greet peace. The sermons this year will once again briefly talk about the war. About the war that doesn’t want to end. That goes on and on, even at Christmas.
“Man is not made for peace,” wrote the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in his 1973 book “From the Disadvantage of Being Born.” As bitter as that sounds, the sentence seems true to us today. In the face of a war that rages relentlessly. A moment ago, an image of three young Ukrainian soldiers was circulating around the world, lying in their narrow beds in a hospital and looking desperately down at their prostheses. How many people has this war already destroyed?
As if it was a difficult construction project
The sleazy real estate agents who are meeting again these days to negotiate on behalf of their world-powerful masters about Ukraine, as if it were a construction project that has run into difficulties, have never asked themselves the question of the deeper relationship between humanity and peace. They are representatives of a way of thinking that could not be more spiritless and godless. Their thoughts run along the narrow lines of function and profit; the values they believe in are based on a single pose: wide-legged. Their most sacred word is one from the world of pimps and drugs: the deal.
Even the emphatic use of this dirty expression reflects the true face of a view that believes that it can always gain advantages through boasting and deception. As if you could really “deal” peace like a bag of cocaine. As if peace didn’t at least have to be achieved. Not to say that we can actually only get it as a gift.
Peace, that is a high word that has fallen into deep low places. In the sphere of rabid speculators on the one hand and in the world of political profiteers on the other. It is painful to see who is currently hiding behind the word “peace”. The dove of peace on the election posters of the AfD and the Left Party touches on the nostalgic feelings of an electorate who recognize it as the sign of the Peace Council controlled by the SED and want to see themselves confirmed in the retrospective fiction of a “peace state”. The dove of peace was one of the most frequently used political symbols in the GDR, which even determined the lyrics of children’s songs: “You should fly, dove of peace / tell everyone here / that we never want war again / we want peace.”
Why should I fight for this country?
Peace, that’s what many Germans want again today. What for them means above all: to be left in peace. Left at peace from the demands of a world in which dictators use violence to impose their will, democracies suffer from corruption and prosperity and over-regulation threaten to rob us of any pride in participation. Young men are now appearing on German television programs and openly asking the Chancellor why they should defend Germany when Deutsche Bahn tickets are becoming more and more expensive: “Why should I fight for this country when the country doesn’t give me the feeling that it is fighting for me?” This is how the important Kennedy sentence is maliciously turned around. Peace, that has often become an excuse these days. And a moral club. Just as the invocation of colorful diversity was intended to wipe away any doubts about limiting migration, today the desire for peace aims to put all those who speak out in favor of fighting for peace in the moral wrong.
Pacifism thus becomes a sign of a good conscience, but in reality only conceals the need for rest of a population that seems to have reached the end of its creative power and is now exhausting itself in rest. Peace, that is a great, a holy word. It does not come to us cheaply, nor effortlessly, but requires a willingness to sacrifice. The Christian faith is built on this dialectic. Christ, whose birth we celebrate today, sacrifices his life so that we can find peace. Peace – this is not a question of business, it is a question of faith. Anyone who doesn’t see this should go to the dealers.
