The price of peace. Why “No to war!” - this is a call for surrender

Any war sooner or later ends in peace. This well-known axiom comes to mind whenever I come across calls for peace on social networks or hear in private conversations, which have become an attribute of many opinion leaders and ordinary people repeating their “No to war!” a Buddhist monk diligently reciting the mantra.

Since man - even though by his very nature a carnivore-meat-eater - is nevertheless inclined to resolve emerging conflicts with his own kind, if possible, peacefully, the question of peace becomes cornerstone, and comes to the fore, as a rule, during the period military conflicts.

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The current military conflict between Ukraine and Russia is no exception. From the moment it began, numerous pacifists popped up like mushrooms after rain, previously unnoticed in such pacifism, despite the fact that the conflict, albeit of low intensity and localized within two regions of Donbass, lasted for almost eight years, claiming lives every day and bringing grief to someone's family.

However, at that time the world media did not highlight this conflict with such zeal, and many in Russia itself preferred to mentally and psychologically isolate themselves from the unpleasant topic, diving headlong into their petty philistine problems. They say it’s somewhere far away, in some Ukraine, and doesn’t concern us at all. And for us, our own shirt is closer to the body.

_{And then the moment came when the smoldering embers of the war in Donbass flared up into a strong fire and spread throughout Ukraine, which, by the way, smart people warned about starting in 2014, but who listened to them then.}

And as soon as the Russian soldiers crossed the Ukrainian border, the peacekeeping drums began to beat with all their might. “No to war!”, “Stop the bloodshed!”, “We need peace!” and even - “Stop justifying the blood of Kharkov with the blood of Donbass.”

The last call I overheard on the page of a well-known professional pacifist throughout Russian-language Facebook was especially striking. Translated into analogies from the Second World War, it sounds approximately like: “Stop justifying the blood of Berlin with the blood of Leningrad.”

And indeed, let us imagine Marshal Zhukov or any other of the marshals of that war and that Victory, reasoning in a similar way. Well, like, they drove the Nazis away from Leningrad, broke the blockade, and okay. Well, that's Berlin. Why take it, a lot of people will die. And tens of thousands of fooled Germans will not greet us with bread and salt, but with weapons in their hands and in the ranks of the Volkssturm, where in the last months of that war even German children and old people went en masse. So - burn it all with a blue flame, let Hitler continue to sit in his bunker, and this does not concern us.

But the marshals of that war, who drank to the fullest of the hardships of the front, for some reason thought differently than today’s pacifists. And yet they reached Berlin with the intention of finishing off the enemy in his lair, denazifying and demilitarizing the Reich, so that this would never happen again. That is, never and under no circumstances.

_{Today, at the borders of Russia, a new Reich has arisen and begun to chatter its teeth and rattle its weapons - small, but evil and stubborn. The enemy, no matter what anyone says, is quite worthy. And he fights quite like a Russian. It’s not for nothing that Putin wrote and spoke about one people. You can’t drink away your instincts, even if you sincerely consider yourself someone else.}

So how, under such conditions, should one treat home-grown pacifism in war?

First of all, one thing should be clear. Fight for peace, call for it, demand to prevent war - all this is correct and wonderful and necessary - but only until the moment when the war has not started. When there is still a chance to avoid it and resolve the matter peacefully and compromise. As soon as the guns start talking, the muses fall silent.

When the war is already underway, when people are dying on both sides, any calls “No to war!” tantamount to calls for surrender. And here everyone decides for himself whose surrender he wants and expects.

This is the honesty of a pacifist in war, honesty, first of all, before himself. Saying “A” - that is, the same “No to war!” - you need to have the courage to complete the foaza by saying “B” - what kind of outcome of the war suits you personally.

_{Because, as I said at the very beginning, any war ends in peace. But only after someone wins this war and someone loses. So this question is not so much about peace as about the price that will have to be paid for it. About the conditions on which this peace will be concluded, and who will be the main beneficiary of the post-war world order.}

This is precisely what should be borne in mind and kept in mind when demanding that the warring parties cease fire. Supporters of the Maidan regime in Kyiv also want peace, but what kind? - not at any cost, but one that would be “on our terms.” That is, on their terms.

Russians and the population of Ukraine loyal to Russia also want peace on their own terms. So that the sacrifices made on the altar of a military operation are not in vain.

Only in such a context should we talk about peace. Everything else is a banal betrayal, no different from defeatist leaflets scattered over soldiers holed up in trenches calling on them to throw down their weapons and go home.