Saturday 17 July 2010

WAR

'Just as time-lapse photography makes visible, in ever more compressed and penetrating form, movements that would otherwise not be thus grasped by our vision, so the war makes manifest in particularly drastic and unshrouded forms that which for years has become ever more dreadfully clear to us as the essence of the "world." It is not war that first brings death, nor war that first invents the pains and torments of human bodies and souls, nor war that first unleashes lies, injustice, and violence. It is not war that first makes our existence so utterly precarious and renders human beings powerless, forcing them to watch their desires and plans being thwarted and destroyed by more "exalted powers." But war makes all of this, which existed already apart from it and before it, vast and unavoidable to us who would gladly prefer to overlook it all.'
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, p.373.