Querela pacis

"I was asked by the music commission of Europa Cantat to compose a festive Jubilate for its 2009 festival to be held in Utrecht. The composition was to be performed along with the Utrecht Te Deum, written by George Frideric Handel in 1713 on the establishment of the Peace of Utrecht. It is no doubt noble to celebrate the ending of war and the establishment of peace. However, in my opinion the end of a war is rather a reason to meditate on the causes of war and to search for ideas that could once and for all erase it from our world.

I was born in 1956, eleven years after the termination of the bloodbath of World War II. The longed-for peace brought with it a redistribution of the spoils of war and my country immediately became a part of the victorious Soviet Union bloc. As children, we often played soldiers and every boy wanted to be a partisan or a Russian soldier. Then, in August 1968, we witnessed army tanks in action, and we never again played Russian soldiers. We understood that in reality what tanks bring is death and loss of freedom. In 1981 I had to undergo military training (obligatory at that time). We were being prepared for 'Operation Krkonoše', code name for the occupation of Poland at the time when the Polish resolutely opposed the sovietisation of their homeland. They will never be able to understand how happy I was when General Jaruzelski introduced martial law. It was one of the unendurable paradoxes the postwar era brought. Paradoxes remain – today I am a citizen of a country that is sending out its soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, and this makes it bear its share of responsibility for the blood spilling in the cradle of human civilization.

Rulers have always justified the inevitability of their wars by noble goals. Since the end of the World War II not a single day has passed that would not be marked by this sort of noble slaughter taking place somewhere on the Earth. Gradually, rulers stopped listening to philosophers, theologians, artists and scientists in case their ideas and attitudes would cast doubt on this august inevitability. The Dutch humanist Erasmus Roterodamus was probably the first thinker to express an outright rejection of all the justificatory noble goals of monarchs. In his two treatises – Querela pacis and Dulce bellum inexpertis – he defined war as the ultimate evil, the only real reason for which was the greed of the powerful. According to Erasmus, the absurd killing of innocent people could not be justified by any ideology or religion. Victorious soldiers know this only too well, being unable to find any excuse for their recent murdering.

Before his death, the great Georgian writer Otar Chiladze was asked to say something to his fellow countrymen. He said that the main problem for Georgians since time immemorial had been the question of survival. However, according to Chiladze, in order to survive, they needed only two things – to retain both a clear mind and a pure heart. It was precisely a clear mind and pure heart that led the Dutch humanist to his penetrating reflections. Today, the Georgian problem is in fact not purely Georgian. Mankind will not survive if not guided by a clear mind and pure heart. Although our greed forces us to destroy other civilisations, it is obvious that it has become a true path to the destruction of our own civilisation."

Vladimír Godár