Let us dispense, if only for a moment, with the illusion so deftly spun by statesmen and demagogues—that those who fall upon the altar of war do so for you and me, for the safety of our homes, or the glory of our flags. The truth, I fear, is more dispiriting. These brave souls do not perish for the citizen, but for the convoluted quarrels of those who govern—men who, in their perennial quest for pre-eminence, trade the lives of others like pawns upon a blood-soaked chessboard. They die not for a nation’s soul, but for a sovereign’s pride, for a geopolitical bluff, for that all-too-human desire to prove who among them may howl the loudest across the map of the world.
The conjuring of collective frenzy, that fevered rallying of emotion, is but a carefully orchestrated theatre. It is not stirred for the sake of unity, nor for love of country, but to rouse and redirect grievance toward a chosen other—often an entire people, a belief, a history. And yet, amidst the clamour, a curious bifurcation emerges: one group perceives the pageantry for what it is—a magician’s sleight of hand. The other, perhaps wearied by the burden of helplessness or lulled into complicity by convenience, chooses a kind of wilful sleep. They do not believe the tale, but they repeat it all the same, like actors in a passion play whose script they never wrote but now perform with solemn zeal.
Speak to the clear-eyed, the rational, those whose hearts remain unclouded by ancient animosities, and you will hear no cry for vengeance, no hunger for blood. What you will hear is the simple affirmation that we were not made to despise. At our most unguarded, we confess to a longing for fraternity, not feud. Our true quarrel is not with our neighbour across the border but with the ghosts that haunt our own thinking—those inherited beliefs, tribal convictions, and dogmas so deeply woven into our identity that to part with them feels like an amputation of the self. We wear them as one might wear an ancestral ring—though it fits no longer, we will not take it off, for it is family, it is history, it is ours.
And here, in such dark hours, do we reveal our true visage. Not the polished mask of public civility, but the raw and sometimes ruinous face beneath. It is a moment of unveiling, and what emerges is not always noble. For if war is the furnace that tests the metal of our character, then the sound of our own voices—suddenly indistinguishable from those we claim to oppose—ought to shake us to the core.
Indeed, our greatest battlefield is not out there in the dust and din, but within the quiet chambers of our own selves. We are, most tragically, at war with ourselves. For were it not so, we would not so easily mirror the very cruelty we profess to abhor. We would not become a caricature of the enemy, so lost in our opposition that we begin to adopt its form.
I am reminded here of the portentous warning penned by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.” In that line lies the key to our deliverance. Not through the sharpening of weapons or the raising of flags, but through a deeper vigilance—the kind that examines the soul with unflinching honesty and says: Am I true? Or am I merely the echo of another’s hatred?
Let us remember: peace is not won on battlefields; it is cultivated in the soil of the soul. And if we are ever to see a different world, it must begin with the exorcism of the war within.
