Between Morality and Reality: The Misguided Path of German Peace Yearning

November 19, 2025

A critical essay on selective blindness, ideological comfort zones, and the inability to name perpetrators and victims in the face of the Russian war of annihilation against Ukraine.

Preface

While this text is being written, Russian rockets are hitting the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil – one of many cities under attack. Civilian buildings are burning, people are dying. No military target, no strategic benefit – just terror against the civilian population. It is a pattern that has been repeating daily for three years.

Meanwhile, initiatives continue to form in Germany that want to demonstrate for an "immediate ceasefire." They appeal to both Putin and Zelensky as if both were on the same moral level. As if Ukraine could simply stop fighting – and everything would be fine.

This essay attempts to open eyes – and to explain why this often fails.

It pains every Ukrainian to the core: friends, relatives, and acquaintances are injured, displaced, tortured, or killed – and there is no end in sight. No one wants this war. No one wishes for suffering, death, or destruction. But there is no alternative to defense.

Especially because many well-meaning people in the West believe that one should not "add fuel to the fire" and that "weapons have never brought peace," one thing must be stated unequivocally:

If Ukraine had no weapons, there would be peace – the peace of the subdued, the deported, the missing. The peace in the cemetery.

Peace and freedom are not natural states, not gifts, and not moral dividends of well-meaning appeals. They must – unfortunately – be fought for and defended. Not with slogans, not with wishful thinking, but with resistance. With courage. And sometimes with acts of heroism that no one would choose, but which are necessary if a people is not to be wiped out.

The German Paradox: Pacifism Without Contact with Reality

The German peace movement has a long history – marked by sincere ideals and some successes. But in light of the Russian war of aggression, it reveals a shocking inability to grasp reality. Some of its representatives cling to reflexes that have nothing to do with the present. The result is a moral paradox: precisely those who want to advocate for humanity miss the victims and show understanding for the perpetrators.

But it is no longer just about the classic peace scene. The problem runs deeper: in the German middle, among well-meaning but shockingly poorly informed citizens who perceive themselves as empathetic and morally sensitive – and yet ignore fundamental realities. This attitude shapes large parts of the public debate, comment sections, and private conversations. It does not stem from malice, but from a historically grown blindness.

The consequence: a collective loss of reality in parts of the population. Aggression is psychologized, perpetrators are relativized, victims are patronized. Instead of understanding the war, it is pressed into politically convenient templates – and thus distorted.

This is not naive – it is dangerous. And it costs lives.

The Historical Privilege as a Cognitive Prison

Germany never had to defend its freedom itself. That sounds harsh, but it is simply a fact: The Federal Republic received peace, democracy, and security not through its own efforts, but as a result of an international order created and secured by others. Deterrence, nuclear balance, US presence, and NATO structures were not the result of German peace policy, but its prerequisites.

This historical privilege has become a mental trap. Those who have never experienced what it means to have to defend themselves consider peace to be the normal state – and violence to be a misunderstanding that can be resolved through patience and good words. The comparison with the GDR does not hold: A society that was oppressed by its own state has no experience of collective democratic self-defense against external aggression.

Germany lives in a self-constructed illusion: that peace simply happens if one thinks peacefully enough. An illusion that is only possible because others fight and die for German security.

The Longing for Moral Purity: When Ethics Blinds

Part of the peace movement follows a deep desire for moral unblemishedness. War is inherently bad – so everyone who fights must be wrong. This way of thinking is understandable but fatal. It abstracts from the perpetrator and the victim and replaces analysis with equivalence.

The pattern is well known:

• Aggressor and defender are placed on the same level
• Peace appeals are directed at both sides – which factually benefits the perpetrator
• Violence is interpreted as a symmetrical phenomenon, even when it is clearly asymmetrical

This attitude relieves those who adopt it. One can feel morally superior without having to acknowledge reality. Ideals obscure the view: information that does not fit into the worldview – deportations, mass graves, systematic torture, the annihilation of Ukrainian identity – is ignored or relativized.

This blindness is not malicious. It stems from the desire to see the world as less cruel than it is. However, it has consequences: Those who do not recognize injustice cannot fight against it. Those who do not name the perpetrators absolve them. Those who do not see the victims deny them solidarity.

For those affected by aggression, this is cynical luxury. Compassion without a sense of reality becomes a danger.

Post-imperial Amnesia: The Silence About Russia's History of Crimes

In parts of the German public, a stubborn narrative exists: Russia is difficult but indispensable; dangerous but rational; brutal but somehow explainable. This attitude is a reflex from the Cold War – a projection that refuses to recognize the openly imperial and often genocidal character of Russian politics.

Russia had the "fortune" of being on the winning side in World War II. This historical fact led to it – unlike Germany – never being forced to confront its own history of crimes. Yet this history runs like a red thread through the centuries: from the violent annihilation of the Republic of Novgorod in the 15th century, where an independent, European-oriented urban culture was destroyed, through the systematic subjugation and extermination policies in the Caucasus involving expulsions, mass killings, and forced assimilation of entire peoples, to the Stalinist famines and deportations – the Holodomor in Ukraine as a targeted extermination campaign, the deportation of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and many other peoples.

All of this is not a historical coincidence, but an expression of a colonial-imperial system that sees violence as a central instrument. Those who today pretend that Russia is merely a misunderstood security actor continue this narrative.

Yet this part of reality is ignored in German debates. Instead, people speak of "Russian security interests" as if they were a natural right – and not the rhetorical costume of a state that has practiced expansion, subjugation, and extermination for centuries.

Ideological Captivity: When Old Patterns Stifle the Present

Many German peace activists argue within an ideological framework that was established during the Cold War: US mistrust, NATO skepticism, the hope for détente. These patterns are so deeply entrenched that new realities barely penetrate.

Russia's current imperialism is viewed through the lens of the Cold War – as if it were the same state, with the same motives, the same structures. The old tools are being brought out: "dialogue", "negotiations", "security interests". Yet these words lose all meaning when applied to an actor that operates torture chambers and violates international law.

The ideology remains. The reality is made to fit. This is intellectual complacency, disguised as principled fidelity.

The Illusion of Simple Solutions: Escaping Complexity

From this ideological stagnation arises another phenomenon: the desperate search for simple answers to complex crimes. Part of the German peace movement clings to the idea that the horror could disappear through catchy formulas. It is a reflexive ducking away from reality – a mental emergency brake that is pulled as soon as reality becomes too uncomfortable.

This desire for simplicity is not an expression of special morality, but a symptom of intellectual exhaustion. A reflexive "There must be a simple solution!" replaces analysis with wishful thinking. It is the attempt to extinguish a sea of flames with a damp handkerchief.

Those who speak of "mutual responsibility" in the face of torture chambers, deportations, and aggressive wars do not have peace in mind, but their own spiritual comfort. It is the need to smooth over the world so that their own conscience is not challenged. Moral comfort, however, is not a political concept.

Clinging to simple slogans – "Everyone should just stop shooting" – is not an expression of love for peace. It is an intellectual retreat, a shortcut past facts, history, and consequences. Those who think this way confuse the world with a fairy tale book.

Peace does not arise from simplification, but from the ability to acknowledge the brutality of reality and confront it. Anything else is self-deception.

Living without existential threat: Morality without cost

These psychological and ideological patterns ultimately root in a privileged reality of life, where peace is taken for granted. Those who have never feared bombings, never received a conscription order, never had to flee from enemies, confuse abstraction with analysis and moral appeals with strategy.

The German peace movement has learned that one only has to shout "Never again war" loudly enough – and then nothing happens. This experience is a privilege, not a model. Other countries have never had this experience. For them, it holds true: If you do not fight, you lose your home, your family, your freedom, your life.

Germany lives in a world without existential threat – and projects this reality onto others who have long been living in a different one. This is not empathy. It is projection.

Emotion instead of analysis: When feelings replace the truth

All these mechanisms – historical blindness, ideological reflexes, the need for simplicity, the privileged reality of life – culminate in a final, decisive problem: The peace movement thrives on emotions: compassion, empathy, fear of escalation. These feelings are legitimate and important. But they do not replace reality. Those who advise capitulation out of fear of escalation confuse caution with responsibility. Those who pressure Ukraine to concede out of compassion become complicit with the aggressor.

A sharpened perspective recognizes: Peace does not arise from ignoring violence, but by stopping it. Those who pressure Ukraine to concede may subjectively want peace – objectively, they promote oppression.

The crucial point is: Peace is not the absence of weapons, but the absence of oppression. Those who do not understand this risk playing into the hands of the wrong people.

Conclusion: The choice between desire and reality

The German peace movement – and large parts of German society – could become a force that demands just peace, protects victims, and clearly names aggressors. But for that, they would need to overcome their historical blindness, reflect on their psychological patterns, and question their ideological reflexes.

This is uncomfortable. It means giving up cherished certainties. It means acknowledging that peace sometimes has to be fought for – by those who deserve it, against those who want to destroy it. It means not confusing perpetrators and victims.

Ukraine knows from bitter historical experience what it means to surrender to Moscow defenselessly. The Holodomor of the 1930s – the artificially induced famine that cost millions of Ukrainians their lives – happened not despite, but because of the lack of organized resistance. The historical lesson is brutally clear: defenselessness against imperial Russian violence ultimately means annihilation. Ukraine is not fighting out of a lust for war, but out of necessity. And it shows daily what price this necessity demands.

Ukraine shows day by day what it means to truly defend freedom – and what price that demands. Every day, families mourn fallen sons and daughters, mutilated bodies, and destroyed lives. Every day, parents must protect their children in basements from rockets, people are driven from their homes, and the wounded must live with pain that will never go away. And yet there are also those people who have made their decision and say: "I do not want my children to fight this battle. Therefore, I must finish it." They are university professors, teachers, journalists, businesspeople, or ordinary people who have realized: "If the only alternative is my own annihilation, I must fight!" – and they conduct this fight with dignity while others look away. The Ukrainian armed forces are today the only protection that the civilian population has – and every Ukrainian knows that. Without them, there would not only be no freedom, but also no security, no home, no life.

The world is not a wish concert. It is what we make of it. And sometimes that means: fighting to make peace possible. To understand this, old reflexes must be overcome – especially here in Germany!

 DUOD Board