Enlarge image
A dove over the besieged Kharkiv on May 1: A catastrophic exceptional situation
Photo: Ken Cedeno/UPI Photo/IMAGO
Almost all observers of the horrific war in Ukraine agree on one thing: Putin must not win.
Its means of violence, destruction, murder and killing must not triumph over the people's right to self-determination, over human rights, democracy, pluralism and freedom of expression.
I fully share this view.
Meanwhile, I am deeply concerned about the means we are trying to use to prevent Putin's victory.
I don't mean so much the tanks and guns, but rather the intellectual and political means.
In an epoch-making speech to the Bundestag on February 27, Chancellor Scholz spoke of a turning point.
What is it?
If you listen to the leading politicians and opinion makers in SPIEGEL, "Zeit" and other leading media, you get the impression that what they mean is that the age of disarmament, of negotiations, of treaties, of peaceful rapprochement through trade, of diplomacy and of cautious confidence-building is over once and for all.
Finally, so it seems, so it sounds, even the peace-loving Germans are coming to their senses and realizing that weapons and armaments, tanks and rockets are the means of securing peace and thus the way into the future, not talking, negotiating and trusting.
Is that so?
Are violence, tanks and rockets the means of the future?
Is this the turning point?
Then this means: Putin has achieved his goal.
Putin won.
From now on people will be armed, all efforts to limit armaments such as the INF Treaty and other agreements belong in the bin, all negotiation formats such as the Minsk Agreement (which unfortunately no one has ever really tried to enforce, not even the West) were just a mistake.
It would mean: from now on we will only speak to Russia and ideally also to China in the language of violence and strength.
That would mean waging war against Russia, even if not directly, the turning point should not go that far, but indirectly, through the heroic Ukrainian fighters.
But anyone who says that the time for disarmament and negotiations is over can not only rely on tanks and artillery, they must also arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and they must not shy away from chemical weapons and biological weapons, because the Russians cannot be trusted, the Chinese neither, negotiations and contracts belong to the time before the fall of the Wall.
It really doesn't take much mental power to realize that this path will plunge humanity straight into the abyss.
On the one hand because the destructive power is increasing and after our experiences with men like Putin and Trump we can no longer have the slightest doubt that it is only a matter of time before a fanatical, irrational horde presses the button here or there or until an unintended spiral of escalation will be set in motion, which was the original goal of the disarmament agreements to prevent, which are now being suspended in rows by all the major nuclear powers.
On the other hand, because none of the major problems facing humanity – the climate crisis, pandemics, species extinction, growing inequality – can be solved in this way;
on the contrary, they will all intensify in a new age of cold war and rearmament.
In view of these realities, one can only look in amazement at the almost euphoric enthusiasm with which even former peace activists are now calling for weapons, armaments, the military and confrontation and for the end of all cooperation with the enemy.
What they don't see or don't want to see: They involuntarily make Putin the winner.
They willingly give up the weapons and strengths of the West without a fight.
Negotiate, forge compromises, build trust - everything is gone.
Our means of choice is now also violence.
Putin's logic has won, his language has triumphed, the fight is now being fought with his means.
Icy darkness and hardness
Of course, I know that argument alone is too simplistic.
Putin's tanks cannot be stopped with words and sunflowers, nor with offers of negotiations.
Asking Ukraine to surrender to save our moral certainties or our old way of life is cynical.
Nobody can want that.
And supplying Ukraine only with light weapons that can delay suffering and defeat but cannot stop it is just as cynical and irresponsible.
So it may be right to supply weapons in this situation, even heavy ones.
This is a responsible-ethical decision in a moral predicament between "diabolical powers" in a political polar night of "icy darkness and harshness," as Max Weber put it in his speech on politics as a profession.
But Weber left no doubt that such a decision can never be ethically clear and unambiguous, that it inevitably makes us guilty because we are caught in an ethical dilemma of existential importance.
Anyone who now acts as if violence were the only ethical thing, the morally imperative, and as if anyone who still doubts it must undoubtedly be a scoundrel, is already playing Putin's game, adopting his attitude.
I am convinced that in the long run mankind can only be saved by a pacifist attitude in which the ultimate ethical consequence is the iron will to die oneself rather than kill others - because every war is barbaric and goes hand in hand with war crimes ;
everyone.
But one cannot and never expect such an attitude from others ,
especially
not from well-heated offices and lecture halls.
But it must be clear that such a delivery of arms, if it has to be, such a de facto entry into war, can only be and remain a catastrophic exceptional situation, a one-off, horrific relapse into an archaic state.
But anyone who uses this barbaric relapse to hastily proclaim a new age of violent means and also to enshrine it in the Basic Law will make Putin the great winner.