Only the dead have seen the end of the war / Plato
Opening speech on March 19, 2022 / Denkmal-Kultur-Mestlin / Hundrich

There are 1000 + 1 reasons to start a war.
If there is no plausible reason, this reason is invented.

On September 1, 1939, since 5:45 we shoot back, Hitler declared,
justified with these words the invasion of Poland and the II World War began.

Wars are everywhere in the world, but – do wars make us smart – cleverer? Does our wisdom help us to prevent wars?

Richard Ned Lebow was born in that war, in 1941.
He was the only survivor of his family, smuggled from France to the United States by the Jewish resistance in 1942.

Richard Ned Lebow devoted his entire life to a single question:
Why are we at war?
To answer this question, Richard Ned Lebow, has meticulously studied all wars for centuries, since the year 1648. His answers challenge all the classical assumptions that wars are due to rational reasons, to logical thinking, to power and to the pursuit of security.

Wars, he says, are the result of grievances. He says nations are like people, motivated by the quest for recognition and, are motivated by human needs.

War is violence – exercised by states, to achieve a wide variety of, political goals. War – is a product of the state system.

Many years ago I read the sentence attributed to Plato:
„only the dead have seen the end of war“.

These few words affected me deeply, in a certain way – shook me, since it contains nothing else than „peace is an illusion“, an extraordinary gift, unattainable for the living people.

Wars… are political affairs, I said at the beginning,
Peace… is also – a political affair.
Herbert W.H. Hundrich / 19. März 2022