Easter marches and Ukraine war: pacifism is helpless

You are reading an excerpt from the weekday newsletter “The Other View”, today from Oliver Maksan, editor in the Berlin office of the NZZ. Subscribe to the newsletter for free. Not resident in Germany? Benefit here.

With the Ukraine war, the German Easter marches are moving forward for the first time in years back into consciousness – and with them their intellectual helplessness. Recently, the events have only been wrested from their shadowy existence by obligatory reports on the evening news of public television.

As in the past, the Easter marchers have no answer this year as to what to do if fundamentally correct calls for peaceful conflict resolution do not work. With the Russian attack on Ukraine, however, this speechlessness becomes a moral problem. The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” makes intuitive sense. But those who do not comply must be discouraged from continuing to kill. States cannot therefore act in a pacifist manner if they want to fulfill their duty to protect their people both internally and externally.

Remarkably one-sided

In principle, of course, demonstrations for peace are legitimate. Who doesn’t yearn for him in these times? Also, nobody in a democracy has to commit to the policies of the German government or the West. And one should not overlook that numerous calls for individual Easter March initiatives condemn Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine. But not all. The one-sidedness of the Berlin appeal is remarkable: Nowhere is Moscow named as the aggressor by the authors. Instead, NATO appears as the great evil. The governments of the western countries must, it says, “stop further NATO expansion to the east and hold no provocative NATO maneuvers on the Russian border”.

The FDP member of parliament Alexander Graf Lambsdorff is therefore right when he describes this peace movement, which in part confuses cause and effect, as Vladimir Putin’s fifth column. As a consequence, the peace activists take care of Moscow’s business even if they condemn the Russian attack but do not explain how a non-violent negotiated solution is to be achieved in the face of the aggression. A Ukraine without external military support would not have survived the Russian invasion for three days. The country would now be a Russian vassal state.

In addition, there was never a lack of talks before the start of the war. Until the eve of the war, Western politicians made pilgrimages to Moscow. And years of hope for “change through trade” haven’t stopped the aggressor Putin from waging war against the sovereignty of a neighboring country – a war that, by the way, has already claimed around 14,000 lives in the East since 2014. And even today, under American leadership, NATO is acting prudently in principle. The image of the belligerent West promoted by pacifists simply does not correspond to the facts.

Reagan brought Moscow to its knees

In addition, the Russian war is not only aimed at Ukraine, but also at the European security order that was established after the Cold War. Like the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia can only be put in its place from a position of Western strength. It is therefore correct that Germany wants to continue to participate in the nuclear protective umbrella of the USA within the framework of NATO. And it is just as right that the Bundeswehr should be put in a position with 100 billion euros to be able to make its contribution to the defense of the country and the alliance in the first place. Anyone who demands the opposite, like the Easter marchers, is acting irresponsibly.

But they might know better. It wasn’t the demonstrators in Bonn’s Hofgarten who prevented the cold war from turning into a hot one in the early 1980s with their protests against NATO’s double-track resolution. It was the west’s defensiveness under the leadership of American President Ronald Reagan that ultimately forced Moscow to its knees and to negotiate. The German peace movement is doing everything these days to be once again wronged by history.