Alexander Kluge: "The victor is not the one who wins the battles"

War is back in Europe. A conversation with Alexander Kluge about evil and the possibility of peace.

Interview: Peter Neumann

[This interview published on 3/1/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2022-03/alexander-kluge-krieg-ukraine-europa-frieden/komplettansicht?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nachdenkseiten.de%2F.]



Alexander Kluge: Author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, 90, has repeatedly addressed war in his works

Author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, 90, has repeatedly dealt with war in his works © Jürgen Bauer

"The victor is not the one who wins the battles"

DIE ZEIT: Mr. Kluge, you have repeatedly reflected on war in your books, films and interviews - suddenly it is back in Europe. What situation do you see?

Alexander Kluge: They say that if you skate on thin ice, you won't break in unless you keep skating as fast as possible. We live in different realities and they are fragile to each other. It is a sheer misfortune that there is an open war going on here. No one is in control of a war. There is not a single value in the world, material or ideal, that justifies war. This does not mean pacifism, I am not a peace preacher. But war is unpredictable. The only thing that remains absolutely uncontrollable is war. Disease can be cured, war cannot.

ZEIT: And yet war is now our reality in Europe.

Kluge: The misfortune that one of the victorious powers of 1945 is carrying out an occupation here gives me enormous food for thought. There's no way we can claim an overview position for ourselves: as if everyone could be a judge, everyone could be king in this matter. Of course, it also struck me as bizarre how Putin is sitting there with Macron and Scholz at that long table. Or the way he was talking down to his own intelligence chief. But is it theater, is it display of power like in the 18th century, is it craziness, or calculation? I'm not in a position to judge. As a lawyer, I know that jurisprudence, the judgment of perhaps twenty lines, is often preceded by thirty pages of facts. And we don't have that.

ZEIT: What do you suggest instead?

Kluge: You have to reset the whole apparatus. And on both sides.

ZEIT: "Resetting" - what exactly do you mean by that?

Kluge: It may sound remote in the current situation, but you have to go back to the starting points of the confrontation. The alternative to war is an intact security structure, something whole, just as war is a whole. One must locate the point that allows both sides to reach an understanding. Winner is not who wins the battles. The victor is the one who makes a peace. Let me give you an example: International law came into being around Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, when an eighty-year war between the Netherlands and Spain and, at the same time, a thirty-year war in Central Europe were brought to an end in a negotiation process that lasted five years. The decisive aspect of this Peace of Westphalia is the establishment of the so-called "normal year". It is agreed that the Protestant and Catholic estates should remain or be restored as they were on January 1, 1624. This is the point of intersection of the pain line for all parties, the only time in the Thirty Years' War when one side had not won more than the other. The point is equidistant for all parties to the conflict from their desires. This point is a small possibility space. Finding and negotiating this space of possibility was the key to peace.

ZEIT: What does that mean in relation to the war in Ukraine?

Kluge: First of all, no politics or speech of self-certainty. In the current debate, each side, each body claims to have the overview. But there is no such thing. We speak with the great war theorist Clausewitz of the "mists of war." As soon as war breaks out, everything is indeterminate. This nebulousness, this indeterminacy, is the challenge to which we must respond. And that's why we can't win any security structure with a psychologization of Putin or with a moral attitude that we all share in the West. The malice is well distributed on both sides. Immanuel Kant once said very nicely: even a world of devils, provided they apply the rules of reason, could found a republic. Don't get me wrong: I am not indifferent on any issue. I judge very well. I love freedom and self-determination; you can make me a revolutionary of 1789. But I know that I am not the ruler. My basis of judgment is: where would be the point, even for a madman or an evil one, where he can agree on the basis of reality.

Best of Z+:

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ZEIT: It seems incredibly difficult to define such a "normal point."

Kluge: If you measure the gravitational relations between the earth and the moon, you will find the abaric point. "Barus" is Greek and means heaviness, violence, "a-baric" is the "non-violent point". At this point, the gravity of one celestial body balances with that of another. A balance arises. There you can transport the library of the Vatican, it remains eternally there circling. There are few abaric points between political powers where one can communicate in an objective way. But there are.

"We need mediation"

ZEIT: So a "just peace," a peace that is more than just the absence of violence, cannot exist?

Kluge: The hope for a just peace narrows the space of possibilities. War is a monster. Its first element is, as I said, its nebulousness. The second is: War is as mutatively gifted, as evolutionarily gifted as the virus. And especially wars, in which no one can win, change non-stop their place, their shape and their capacity for cruelty. Clausewitz called war "a veritable chameleon" - and he was right. When war seems to stop in one place, it starts again in another. One has seen this in Syria. It changes shape, but it doesn't end. The idea that one country or one ruler wins any wars is erroneous. Hannibal wins battle after battle - and his republic loses the war. Napoleon wins all the time - until the battle of Leipzig. That is to say: both are very great victors, and have never actually been victorious. When a war breaks out, it is not the thoughts of how to win it and how to trump what the opponent does that are interesting. That only leads to increase and mutations. After all, you can't shoot the virus with guns, as Macron said at the beginning of the pandemic: we are at war with the virus. That is just as nonsensical as the view that you can defeat war through war. You can only end war by finding the small possibility space where peace would be possible.

ZEIT: You don't think sanctions against Russia are the right way?

Kluge: Every tamer in the circus knows that if he gets too close to the animal and irritates its safety zone, he will be bitten. That's a little further away from the body in the case of the bear and a little closer to the body in the case of the lion. Strangely enough, there is something very similar between political powers and their phantasms. These are virtual animals. We need to start re-spelling the political alphabet again. By this I mean that where the conflict arose, the antidote must also be sought. International law arose from the bitter experience of the Thirty Years' War, which would not end. From the experience of the Second World War came the experience that victorious powers must not come into friction with each other. On the day of Hitler's death in Berlin, the veto right in security law was invented in San Francisco. Great powers are not allowed to directly wage wars with each other. This was the stable element in the Cold War, which, incidentally, had enough highly dangerous moments. Experiences from 1648 to the present day, even back to the never-ending Peloponnesian War, are part of the political alphabet. Strange as it may sound, it is precisely now in the crisis that we need to define its elements. Just as war is holistic, so is the security architecture. The political is not, as is often believed, the deciding. In an antagonistic, plural world, you can't decide. No one can. You can only negotiate or wage war. But it is precisely in war that one cannot decide. War is a demon that cannot be controlled. In war, nothing can be decided. No one can win. Whoever wins, crashes.

ZEIT: The images of war that we get to see are characterized by a strong masculinity: The Ukrainian president has swapped his suit for a mud-colored sweater, Wladimir Klitschko sits at a machine gun and defends his country. Is there a new aesthetic of war?

Kluge: That's exactly what I find so dangerous. The aestheticization of war is a misapplication of the imagination. Aesthetics means to distinguish. We must train the faculty of discernment as precisely as possible. In place of aestheticization, with full empathy and emotion, the discernment necessary for this must be sharpened in our publics. One would actually have to have, in addition to every translator between English and Russian, an interpreter who would say what that means in Russian and what that means in English. That would be a kind of referent for historical experience. And if we did that thoroughly, we would be able to communicate. A machine gun with Klitschko behind it, on the other hand, is nothing more than a poster.

ZEIT: Negotiations are always in the offing - would that be the possibility space you mentioned?

Kluge: That would be an enzyme for a possibility space. We need mediation. Violence against violence does not work. You can't even touch war, because it's infectious like a virus. We need a point where the parties to the conflict stop fighting for a moment. Günter Gaus has said that there is a lot of experience also in people's weaknesses and in their mistakes. Mistakes have their reason. If we examine this reason, we gain a wealth of experience. That would be better than constantly judging and judging. And on this level of experience, which is not a common one to begin with, but can become one, we can search and dig and collect and would find that there is a great deal of common ground from which to build a spacecraft called the Abarian point.

Thank you old wise man , old smart man , for your lonely voice of wisdom in a hysterical crazy world that seeks its salvation and sanity in rearmament and militarization , in the fundamentalism of war and will only reap escalation .

rat los #2 - 2 days ago

Pacifism is out for the first time since I can remember. Most chats remind me of internationals, Mr. P. has thoroughly worked out his enemy image, peace is out, either the Ukrainians can hold on for a long time or someone else should stop him. The goals, which he wants to reach, he puts already further, withdrawal of the NATO, the nuclear weapons etc.. That presupposes a war with NATO. We, on the other hand, only see peace if we eliminate P. The rules of war are insane, the reasonable peace is not achievable even by submission. But if Ukrainians give up because they can't do anything, we have to accept that too.

Seriousness #3 - 2 days ago

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Cuba and the Ukraine crisis

by Klaus Joachim Herrmann

[This article published on 2/14/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, Kuba und die Ukrainekrise | Linksnet.]

When Russia and the United States will sign a new declaration on ending the Cold War can only be dreamed of," Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary confided to Komsomolskaya Pravda. Its correspondent had recalled February 1, 30 years ago, when Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin did just that at Camp David. They proclaimed an era of "friendship and partnership." On the almost-forgotten anniversary, Dmitry Peskov complimented the questioner, "Dreams are not what we are paid our salary for." The Cold War, declared over, is not only darkened past, but bitter present as Cold War II. Farewell to illusions.

History repeats itself after all. What as the Cuban Missile Crisis left the world balancing on the precipice is exemplified by the Ukraine crisis. Starting in 1959, the USA stationed nuclear-tipped medium-range missiles in Italy and Turkey aimed at the USSR. The latter responded with medium-range nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba in 1962. In the struggle for power and influence, one superpower tried to get as close and dangerous as possible to the other. Soviet missiles on Cuba then, Ukraine and more and more NATO allies with US missiles on the border with Russia today. Barely any warning time, less security. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended with a withdrawal on both sides - and U.S. assurances that it would not attack Cuba militarily. A success for both adversaries and the world. A pattern?

"There is no security for Europeans if there is no security for Russia," the French president dares to admit. For his dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, Zeit Online slaps him down: "Emmanuel Macron is thinking one size too big." Forced to abdicate was the German navy chief, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach. He ventured the insight that it was "nonsense" that Russia was "interested in a small piece of Ukrainian soil." Putin wants respect, he said, and he "probably deserves it." Russian demands for a legally binding end to NATO's eastward expansion and its retreat to 1997 positions were headlined in Russia's Kommersant with the slogan "Forward to the Past." The offer that neither side should harm the security of the other could also be seen as a lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The camps are fortified. The U.S. is calling and the transatlanticists are willingly stepping up. On the other side, three old friends, Russia, the People's Republic of China and Cuba, are moving closer together again - rather an unintended side effect of geostrategic proportions. Of all partners, the smallest proves to be the most experienced in this ice-cold confrontation. Cuba has been besieged by the superpower USA with relentless vindictiveness for more than half a century. Even in times of a murderous pandemic, it is even to be cut off from medical supplies. It succeeded in developing its own vaccine against Covid 19, but imports of syringes remained banned. A truly lethal punishment.

Sanctions and embargo are euphemisms for a medieval brutal siege. "The U.S. blockade against Cuba, which has been in place for 60 years, is the longest and harshest in human history and has so far caused - conservatively estimated - damages in Cuba amounting to more than 138 billion U.S. dollars," protested the German solidarity organization Netzwerk Cuba against this "blatant violation of human rights." On February 3, 1962, superpower President John F. Kennedy had imposed a total blockade on the insubordinate island state with its eleven million inhabitants. Washington's tightening of the blockade follows just as regularly as its condemnation by the UN General Assembly.

But some do dare: In 2021, according to Havana, the island received some 135 shipments of donations from 40 countries. From Russia came more than 70,000 protective suits, three million syringes, and 200,000 masks. Russia and the PRC also face sanctions and their tightening. But it makes a difference whether these sanctions apply to an island in the Antilles or to the largest and most populous country in the world. But if they are not successful in one case, how should they be in the other?

Western spokesmen of sanctions under the sign of "value-based" policy and respect for human rights punish some and let the others go. But the torture prison in Guantanamo is not a Cuban but a U.S. facility far from any law. When U.S. President Joe Biden laments structural racism and "a stain on the soul of our nation" in the face of deadly police violence, he is referring, mind you, to his own nation, not the multicolored Cuban nation. An archaic electoral law from the days of the Wild West is supposed to prevent undesirable results in the United States through the shamelessly tendentious drawing of electoral districts and the exclusion of voters. There is no need for the loudly lamented alleged influence of the Moscow Kremlin if the manipulation lies within the country's own system.

But Putin is always guilty. He is charged with malice for what comes from his own Pandora's box. Striving for world and supremacy, fabricated pretexts for wars, murders, espionage, cyber attacks and so much more. But the phony war on Iraq, the destabilization of the Middle East, drone assassinations, the NSA's global and immoderate cyber snooping on even its closest allies all stem from the U.S. arsenal. Putin would certainly not be asked if he thought Biden was a murderer. Biden or whoever in the White House is the good guy and his leader.

For, as Professor Noam Chomsky, probably the world's best-known critic of U.S. policy, puts it, "Whatever the world may think, the actions of the United States are justified. Because we say so." This principle, he said, was enunciated by eminent statesman Dean Acheson in 1962. At the time, he had lectured ,the American Society of International Law that "no legal problem would grow out of the United States responding to a challenge to its 'power, position, and prestige.'"

The Forward, in a review of his book "Who Rules the World?" summarized that for political thinker Chomsky, the United States was "the leading terrorist state." Countless assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, support for the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua, invasion of Iraq - including serious human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo." Torture, Chomsky writes, is "the least of the many crimes" of which the United States and other great powers are guilty. Worse still are "aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation" emanating from Washington.

The West's anger and contempt, however, are directed in moral complacency at the enemy in the East. In order to be credible as a concern for human rights, the vociferous demand for the release of Kremlin critic Alexei Nawalny from camp detention also included an energetic commitment to the founder of the WikiLeaks disclosure platform Julian Assange. The whistleblower of U.S. war crimes is being mercilessly hounded and threatened with 175 years in prison. Both have challenged the state in their own way. Just as charged as someone who murders from a pistol in Berlin's Tiergarten park from a bicycle were those who do such things by the tens of thousands with high-tech drones in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Those who condemned the Soviet invasion of the country in the Hindu Kush and rearmed the Afghan resistance should not subsequently go to war there themselves. The West should have learned from the Soviet Union's defeat. For the West was also forced into an ignominious retreat.

The current confrontation does not bode well either. Half an hour of war has already taken place. Fortunately, only at the Bloomberg agency on February 5: " The headline 'Russia Invades Ukraine' (Russia Invades Ukraine) was inadvertently published on our website at around 4 p.m. today. We deeply regret the error." The day before the hoax, Bloomberg TV had conducted an interview with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is not known for moderation. That carried the dramatic headline, "'Real Danger' of Russia Invading Ukraine, NATO Chief Says." For a nervous hand on the Red Button, Stoltenberg and Bloomberg's evocation of the real danger of a Russian invasion could have already brought on a war.

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Head and shoulders

Putin has staked everything on the blitz invasion of Ukraine, now his political survival in Russia is at stake.

From Rubicon's World Editor

A war changes the political landscape in radical and unexpected ways. By invading Ukraine without coercion, President Vladimir Putin has made a mistake of historic proportions that will call into question his own survival as Russian leader as Russians come to understand that he has plunged them and their country into an unwinnable war.

By Patrick Cockburn

[This article published on 3/4/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/um-kopf-und-kragen.]

Moscow is seeking the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the surrender of its army. "We want to prevent Nazis and those who use methods of genocide from ruling in this country," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "Right now, the regime in Kiev is subject to two mechanisms of external control: first, the West, led by the United States, and second, neo-Nazis."

Talks would begin only when the Ukrainian army lays down its arms. These are maximalist goals, unlikely to be achieved by 190,000 Russian troops. For these are under orders to overrun and pacify a country with a population of 44 million, nearly three times the size of Britain.

Stubborn resistance

Although the war is still in its infancy, it is no walk in the park for Russian forces, which are facing fierce resistance. It will be difficult for the Russian army to gain control of cities, towns, and highways and hold them in the face of attacks by regular and guerrilla forces in the large parts of Ukraine that Russian troops cannot take permanently.

It is possible that Russian commanders hope to find local allies in the Russian-speaking population, which they believe has been subjected to genocide. Russian television apparently showed a map distinguishing between Russian and Ukrainian speakers. All indications, however, are that pro-Russian sympathies are far lower today than before a pro-Western government took power in Kiev in 2014.

For Putin, who once had a reputation for being good at calculating risks, this is an extraordinary gamble. To accuse the Kiev government of being neo-Nazi and to call for the demilitarization of Ukraine is to install a pro-Russian regime backed by a permanent military occupation.

This is something the Soviet Union would have struggled to do in its heyday - and Putin's Russia is far less powerful.

Convincing Russia's political elite

Even trying to pull off such a program will require significant Russian sacrifices, something Putin will have to explain to the public back home. He will also have to convince Russia's political elite how he intends to win a war against strong local opposition backed by most of the world's major powers.

His answer to the question of whether Russia is an isolated pariah state is the not entirely undisguised threat to use nuclear weapons against any foreign state that interferes with his struggle in Ukraine. This kind of deterrence, however, is a frightening prospect for the Russians, who suddenly find themselves potential targets of nuclear retaliation - a threat that was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Previous Russian military interventions under Putin have been carefully calculated, but successes in Chechnya and Syria may have made the Russian leader overconfident. He regained control of Chechnya after invading it in 1999, but the country is small, could easily be isolated from the outside world, and the opposition was fragmented. Ukraine is more than 30 times larger and has open borders with the West that can only be closed by sending tens of thousands more troops.

And this protracted campaign of repression, which, as with all military occupations, is bound to involve atrocities, is to take place before the eyes of world public opinion. Western governments will supply the resistance with weapons and money and will be determined to ensure that Putin does not succeed. Sanctions may only have a long-term effect, but then it will probably be a long war that many Russians see as wrong and futile from day one.

Crazy or evil?

So why did Putin do this? Explanations that he has gone mad or is planning to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic.

A more compelling reason for taking this extraordinary risk is hubris, an occupational disease of those who have been in power too long - in Putin's case, 22 years.

Such leaders trust too much in their own judgment, while their advisers seem like courtiers who keep their posts because they know how to kneel before their leader and pay homage to him at every opportunity.

The arrogance and ignorance of power does not only afflict authoritarian rulers like Putin. Tony Blair didn't seem to know much about Iraq from the time of the 2003 invasion until today. According to his memoirs, David Cameron prides himself on knowing nothing about Libya, a country he helped invade in 2011. Political leaders of all stripes visibly relish the role of warlord, and that includes Putin.

Leaders are also aware that success on the battlefield benefits them politically at home. It was an advisor to Tsar Nicholas II who told him that "what this country needs is a short, victorious war." The result was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, in which the overconfident Russian army and fleet suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan. When news of this defeat reached home, it triggered the protests and uprisings of 1905, which in turn prepared the ground for the 1917 Revolution.

I have always marveled at how recklessly governments start wars on which their own survival depends, without considering the consequences of failure.

Unpleasant as they may be, wars often foster democratic change and discredit existing leaders and institutions. They are democratic because wars cannot be fought without mobilizing large numbers of people who must be encouraged to believe that they are fighting for a just cause.

It is not just politicians who fail to recognize that wars turn apolitical people into political actors. I recall a conversation with a senior American journalist in Washington just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He explained some American plans for a post-Saddam Iraq. "I don't think the Iraqi people will like that," I said. "Who cares what they think?" he replied. "Who cares?" A year later, with snipers and bombers targeting their soldiers, Americans cared a lot - but by then it was too late.

Regimes can survive many failures, but military defeats or bloody stalemates are too obvious to hide, and their casualties are too numerous to ignore.

Could Putin have a trump card up his sleeve with which to outmaneuver his many enemies? It's hard to imagine what it could be, because he has staked everything on a decisive victory against Ukraine - and much of the rest of the world. If he fails to do so, as seems very likely, his political survival will be in doubt.

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist and has been a correspondent in the Middle East since 1979, first for the Financial Times and since 1990 for the Independent. He was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting in 2005 and the James Cameron Memorial Award in 2006. His most recent book, War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran, was published in the summer of 2020.

Editorial Note: This text first appeared under the title "Putin has Gambled Everything on His Snap-Invasion of Ukraine, Now His Political Survival in Russia is in Doubt." It was translated by the Rubicon volunteer translation team and proofread by the Rubicon volunteer proofreading team.