Do Humans Evolve in Spite of War and Conflict, or Because of It?

BOHM DIALOGUE

Vol. 7 | July 17, 2022

Ghayath Almadhoun, Mieke Renders, Julia Ovcharenko, Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski

Berlin, Stockholm—Lund, Kalmar County—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv

Summary

The participants discuss their relationship with Berlin, Kyiv, and Vienna, and how these are affected by one’s status (guest, refugee, resident of a specific neighborhood). Cities of the future. The culture of global human values is discussed; homo sapiens vs homo criminalis. Do humans evolve in spite of war and conflict, or because of it? What are the necessary steps in bringing about a better future? How can the condition of criminality best be understood and prevented? Cosmopolitanism, philosophical and bodily practices of responsibility are identified as possible steps towards greater preparedness for future shocks. 

Key words

city urban culture refugees war human evolution homo criminalis agency responsibility practice of philosophy

Timecode

09:35 cities and cultural practices

14:51 refugee identity

18:52 the nature of discrimination

23:57 relationship with cities

26:44 cities in wartime

30:04 Neukölln

32:05 Berlin vs. Germany

34:19 role of dialogue

36:37 global human culture

42:58 homo criminalis

46:53 the force of destruction

55:24 the problem of violence

01:07:23 the need for new books

01:11:50 the force of circumstance

01:22:55 war as a force of change

01:29:13 need for practice of philosophy

01:31:52 personal responsibility

Participants

C — Chris Keulemans
D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
G — Ghayath Almadhoun
J — Julia Ovcharenko
M — Mieke Renders

THE DIALOGUE 

[01:49]

G: In 2012 I made a poetry film called The Celebration in which I used the images of Berlin. I think my relationship with Berlin is really complicated.

I love Berlin so much. For me it has the most cosmopolitan multicultural diversity in the world now. New York is far and expensive, and London makes you tired. In Istanbul there is no English culture scene, and Damascus for me is destroyed. But the main thing is that Berlin gives me hope that we will rebuild Syria or rebuild Damascus. This city was totally destroyed. Berlin was one of the most beautiful cities in the world before the war. Some people say it was more beautiful than Paris, and now it’s not so beautiful because the Marshall Plan rebuilt it very fast to the level that I can hear my neighbors when they have sex every day because there’s no isolation in walls between us. It’s really ugly from the outside, but it’s so beautiful under the ground. 

I was born as a Palestinian in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus called Yarmouk. We Palestinians ended up paying with our land as a solution for long history of racism and antisemitism in Europe. As a result of this racism happening in Europe, I was born in Damascus as one of 13 million Palestinian refugees. Berlin was responsible for that, so my relationship with it is like the relationship with the trigger. But the most important reason for me to be here is that I want to be a witness. It’s 100 years after the 1920s Berlin. It was so modern, with sex and open revolution, and 13 years after that we know what happened: the Nazis came to power. I want to witness what is happening a hundred years later, and if the right wing comes to power and history repeats itself, I want to be here to see it. I choose Berlin. 

C: Demyan, it’s interesting to hear this. I don’t think we ever spoke really about your relationship to Kyiv, you were not born and raised there but you’ve really chosen that city.

[04:59]

D: We talk, we explore it. We build a dialogue platform with people, we understand people through dialogue. We also understand people through the pauses we share with them. The same thing about the cities. If I feel the silence in the city, then this city is in me, and I’m in this city. All our relationships with these cities and people take two things: dialogue and pause or silence, and the pause is most important for me.

C: You explained to me that you experience this period as a pause in the way that musical composition also depends on pauses. Can you explain a little bit about that?

D: War pushed us to a pause. But now we are talking, and the melody sounds again. Now we see the part after the pause. But if we want to understand how this melody is built, maybe after the war we need to pause again for understanding, for listening to this melody. The melody—these texts, and these dialogues, and these meetings we created—we need to understand and read this silence. We need a poetic language. Yulia, what about maybe you and Kyiv.

[09:35]

J: For the last ten or maybe 15 years I understood myself as a person who is really into urban studies and urban development. Most of my artistic practices and my cultural management work were about cities. How can we develop cities through culture, through art bringing people together? How can we become really sensitive to the spaces where we dwell? And I loved to explore cities. Every time you come into any city is like meeting a person with a really complicated character, and I was interested in that. But the war changed my approach to cities. I am in Vienna, I understand that the city is beautiful, it has a lot of cultural heritage, and I feel nothing. All feelings are in Ukraine with all the cities that stayed there. I wouldn’t say I loved them because in many cases they are horrible, built in the soviet past or they have bad influences of industrial times. They are not livable, so I liked to make them livable, I used to see my goal in that. How can we make a space livable if it’s not really easily changeable in a physical or architectural way? Perhaps the people can make a difference, perhaps if we organize our cultural practices in different ways, we can change the city. That’s maybe what you Ghayath see in Berlin. The walls are still there, the space is there but people are different and they make this difference. And it’s really flexible.

Now I am in Vienna and for me it means nothing. I had a wonderful month in Vienna just before the pandemic started, and it was a really great experience but it was like from my previous life. I study the history of Vienna, the imperial history or the period after the Second World War when Vienna was occupied by soviets. You can still feel their presence here, — it’s all there and I cannot unsee that. This is different from museums, cultural heritage. I’m surprised when I see people not noticing that or not taking that into account, this ignorance that I meet in people. They love their comfortable life so much that they don’t want to know about wars. For example, the Syrian refugees on Lesbos Island that have stopped there during the pandemic and Europe doesn’t know what to do with them—it’s there in people’s minds, but it is not in their actions. It’s like “it’s not our responsibility if someone else is responsible for that”. War changes your vision of places a lot, as well as the vision of who you are. 

Ghayath, in your interviews you talked about being a foreigner or being a migrant, the changes with the war. When you choose to come, as a guest, you feel to be accepted and welcomed as the guest. But if you come because you are forced to, this same relationship with locals changes. It also makes you think differently about the cities where you might stay and how to choose.

[14:51]

G: You are right. I’ve been a European citizen for a long time now. I’ve been Swedish for a long time but I always say I am a refugee. I was a refugee for a time, and that will not cover all my life. It’s not a political decision to say I’m a refugee; it is because I was born as a refugee in Syria. It was so difficult to understand when I asked my father and my mother. My mother is Syrian, and I asked my parents what it meant that we are refugees, why we are Palestinians, not Syrian, and why we are not in Palestine, all these questions from a five-year-old. With the time this question fell to the background of life, and life became more important than the description of this simple thing. I always refer to Hannah Arendt’s “We, Refugees.” She tried to describe the Jewish refugees in New York, and how all of them don’t want to be refugees, and they change everything on paper, on signs. They always try to say we are immigrants, we are not refugees. For me, it’s a little different. I was born as a refugee and I will continue to be a refugee until the Palestinians have equal rights like the rest of the world. It could be the one-state solution, it could be two, it could be five, or twenty, two hundred—I don’t care. I care that all people have equal rights. Until that moment I will continue to be a refugee. As long as there are people who live under apartheid in Gaza without electricity and water, I will continue to be a refugee. 

I noticed after the war in Ukraine that not all refugees are the same. Most Syrian intellectuals I meet think what happened to the Ukrainian refugees is great, and that should be the norm. I find that it depends on where you are from, what your religion is, what the color of your skin is, your gender, your class and all these things.

D: It’s true. 

[18:52]

G: It’s not easy to be a black African Refugee these days, but if you are Ukranian you could cross Europe without a free ticket.

J: And it feels absolutely strange.

G: It should be like that; this is normal. It’s what people do now. I don’t want to be naive, of course. My encounter with watermelons made me think about discrimination. I went to buy a watermelon during the lockdown last year. I found a watermelon from Spain, and I was so happy. I said okay, this is Mediterranean, I grew up in Syria, that’s Mediterranean, too, so I took the Spanish watermelon. And then I found another watermelon, from Greece. I said, okay, this is even closer to Syria. When the Greek had a civil war, they didn’t go to London or to Stockholm—one million came to Syria, it’s only two hours to Damascus. So I took the Greek watermelon. And then I found a Turkish watermelon. Turkey has a border with Syria, and they are Muslim, so I dropped the Greek watermelon and took the Turkish one. Then I realized I was discriminating against my watermelons, and I understood that this is a part of our life, our culture. I’m sorry I’m racist when it comes to watermelons. But this made me understand why people from Poland say Ukrainians are not much different, we could understand them, we have the same food. I don’t support that, but I understand. People in Poland felt they could welcome all the Ukrainians, and previously they refused to accept 900 refugees in 10 years. They said once they would accept these 900 if they were Christian. But sadly Assad was not bombing Christians. They forgot that there were 60 000 refugees from Poland in iran and there were villages in Syria that had 700 Syrian and 3 500 Polish refugees in 1943. 

[21:59]

C: It’s all true and I fully agree. I didn’t know the watermelon story though. I’m a little bit shocked now that you are being racist.

M: I’m even a worse racist because I’m comfortable. I come from Belgium and we have the best fries, the best chocolates and the best beers in the world.

G: Actually you do.

C: Mieke, I want to get back to the question about cities, and then I would like Demyan or Julia to explain a little bit what we’re trying to do with these dialogues. Mieke, I was thinking about your experience with cities because for four years you were directing the Trans Europe Halles network, which was for a large part about transforming cities through the arts, like Julia said. And then you left that position and you moved into the countryside, so you’re having your own pause right now. 

M: Yes.

C: I would like to hear that story first.

[23:57]

M: I was listening to your conversations about cities and I realized I have a love-hate relationship with cities now. I used to love cities. The vibe, and where there’s people, there is a lot of arts, and there’s a lot of audience, and things are experimented with, there are these creative bubbles. It’s super nice but at a personal level I got disgusted by cities. I’ve had too much of cities. I’ve lived in New York and Amsterdam before I moved to Sweden and now I’m living in the countryside. And it’s super silent. You don’t hear anything and it’s so healing for the soul and the mind and the body. 

I’m in a big pause indeed and I have no idea where it’s going. I have no plan, just know that this is very good for me at this moment in my life. The cities became toxic for me in a sense. There is never a pause, there is never greenery around you. Now when I go to cities I notice so much noise, and distraction, to the eye and to the mind, all the shopping, capitalism, consumption. It’s distracting from something else. Life. I don’t know.

C: Do you have thoughts about cities in the context of what we were discussing earlier, cities as a witness to history, cities as triggers of war and mass migration? Cities that are vulnerable today if we look at Ukraine or Syria? And cities as a place of refugees and migrants?

[26:44]

M: A city is a stronghold in many senses, but also very vulnerable. You can’t grow your own food, for example, as you do in the countryside. A pandemic, one virus can wipe out a city, a bomb, water poisoning, whatever. On the other hand, I love to be in New York for a while because it is full of people that have such a drive in life. Everybody has ideas, inspiration, and passion, and an enormous drive but after two and a half years I was so tired of this continuous input. It’s a balance act I think. 

C: I think it’s good before we go deeper into these questions, for Demyan or Julia, also to introduce what we’re trying to do with these dialogues. Because now we have two new guests. 

M: But one moment, please. I have someone knocking on my door.

C: Life in the countryside is always so busy.

J: And if someone’s knocking at your door, you are open to that. If someone is knocking at the door in the city, it might make you afraid of uncertain guests.

G: The police.

J: Or the police.

G: In Berlin the only people who knock at the door are the police and sometimes, the post. If it’s during the day, it’s the post, but at night it’s definitely the police. There’s no way anyone would show up without an invitation. So it’s the police coming to say, please your party is too loud, the neighbors are complaining. 

C: Of course this never happens to you but…

[30:04]

G: No, I was very lucky with this apartment. There are shops below it, and a hotel above it, so you could party all you want. I am 43 years old, and I’m the oldest person in the building, and that’s just typical for Neukölln. There are no Germans in this part of the city; my building has Canadians, Australians, maybe three Americans, Jewish people, Arabs, Turks. I am the oldest and the scariest one, so they always ask me if it’s ok before they have a party, and everyone took care of me during the pandemic, because I was in the risk group. 

G: These people are 23-25, so yes, I’m the only one likely to call the police about a loud party. But this represents something very important. Kreuzberg, Neukölln, and some parts of Prenzlauer Berg are becoming places where there are artists from all over the world, a huge number of them. There’s really no comparison with any other place in the world. And we feel like a safe zone, so we call it the Ring, the Ring of Berlin, where S42 and S31 S-Bahn go. This is Berlin, and the rest is Germany.

[32:05]

G: If someone is coming to visit, we make the distinction: we ask, are you coming to Berlin or to Germany? Germany is the worst place you could ever be, you know the history. And then you have Berlin where two months ago I saw a German here in Neukölln, and I don’t know if he was lost or drunk. We are in a bubble. The city we want to have in the future needs another 1 million foreigners at least in the coming ten years. We need a decision from the government, for the parliament to decide that Berlin is a cosmopolitan city. If Berlin became a cosmopolitan city, the laws would be different: everything would be in English, you could choose English or German even in the telephone or the tax office. 

J: So that’s maybe what the future could look like?

C: We should talk about the cities of the future. That’s also something we’re trying to do in these dialogues.

J: Absolutely.

[34:19]

J: Exploring the present to think about the future—that’s kind of the way we are going. These dialogues are just open conversations with people from different cultures for all of us to understand what is now, what’s happening to the world, from all our points of view. Crises like pandemic or climate change or wars bring us together, and they make us even closer. We see the dialogue as the only way to be together and to listen to each other, talk about how we see our present and how we imagine our future. 

C: The two of you are trying to look beyond the war and also to try to imagine a future which corrects some of the mistakes of the society you live in today. Not just come out alive after the victory but also to create something that is better than today. Is that the idea behind these dialogues?

[36:37]

D: Yes, it is. And when I say culture I mean the culture of humanity as a whole. Often we talk about different cultures—for me, these are subcultures. We need to understand what the values of this global human culture are. Then we can understand how culture was able to produce criminals and bring to wars. We also want to care about the climate and universal values. I see how modern politics tends to narrow everything down to a single nation or country, and I don’t like it very much. It’s not the way to the future. 

C: You are living in the capital city of a country that is trying to defend its rights as a nation, but you want to look beyond that, you don’t want to be trapped inside one nation state.

D: That is correct. Neither do I see conflict between religions or philosophies; we have a global philosophy, just like we have a global psychology, anthropology, and sociology. I want to understand how to fix this moment when we are united in this understanding or we don’t understand it yet. Right now, at this moment, the five of us understand each other, but what about the citizens in our cities? Beyond this dialogue lies a global culture with global values. Julia knows, I have this radical position: I think in this global culture we have homo sapiens and we have homo criminalis who choose wars, who enjoy destruction. Their motivation is not political, or economic—it’s about values. It’s about another type of life.

J: So perhaps culture itself is a better way to organize our being together, and there is just another type of people who want to go against it who don’t want life to be organized in some positive way.

D: And it’s about the environment. A homo criminalis only becomes a homo criminalis after he commits a murder, kills another person. There’s a change that happens then and it is irreversible. 

C: When you cross that line. 

[42:58]

C: On this very small scale, a few people every week, we are trying to create a circle of people who believe in a global culture with global values. We might be able to grow this circle, we might be able to speak, and to publish, and to reach out to more like-minded people, but what to do with the homo criminalis? And this is of course the booby trap of our conversation. Because we can be optimistic and idealistic and we can work hard towards expanding the circle but what to do with the homo criminalis. 

J: That’s one of so many questions we are working with. If we are just a tight-knit community of like-minded people, we can believe that’s enough for changes, or we are enough—but what if it’s not? We may believe, the whole western civilization, western culture, is now leading the world and it’s bringing us to the best future ever. We believe we have the best version of the future, but then we just forget millions, billions of other countries, people, cultures who see themselves in a different way and who even feel offended by this western-centric position towards them. And that leads to more aggression instead of respect and understanding. 

M: Maybe as the homo sapiens criminalis and the homo sapiens emotionalis is a duality like the dialogue and the pause; the light and the dark. If there is no night, you don’t see the light; if there is no criminal person, you don’t see the good-hearted value-driven person either. I’m not saying this is what we need. As humankind, why are we running straight into our own disaster? Why are we human doings instead of human beings? When we act, we destroy. We have to go back to our centers, just be, and then we will be kind.

[46:53]

G: Why are we searching for happiness and joy and desire? We smash a lot of things.

M: Yes.

G: To all my friends in Syria, as I say in the poem, if we were in the visual world, all the people I know are either dead or war criminals or dead war criminals, I swear to God. Because when you are under siege for 10 years with bombing you have no choice not to be involved. In our evolution from homo erectus to homo sapiens a lot of fighting was involved. I don’t want to be the only one who is not optimistic, but I think war is the thing that makes us who we are. We are who we are as a result of long evolution which was mostly fighting. I will be honest with you, we can’t fix it. I like your solution, Mieke, to go to the country, but people 200 years from now might not even have nature to escape to. 

D: So, what do you think? Do we evolve in spite of wars or because of wars?

G: I think the homo sapiens evolved as a hunter and a fighter. Look at the children in any patriarchal society, look at how they play: with weapons, they fight. War is a really complicated thing. But I also think it’s a game for the big people. 

J: I think it’s still culture. When we come into this world, we absorb the knowledge of black and white, good and evil. We take it as a given. I am sure the really great civilizations existed before us and they disappeared for different reasons. But even if we accept that people are not able to respect and love each other, that conflict is unavoidable, what is our responsibility then? How do we keep humanity alive and not disappear at all? We have so many discussions about the painful deaths of millions of people. We can really suffer from big disasters or we could make things more balanced, we could survive with less loss.

[55:24]

M: One of the questions is why are we attacking and killing other human beings? Of course the whole ecology is a system where everybody kills each other. But why are humans attacking their own kind? 

C: And I think this is what Demyan was referring to earlier. Ghayath, you say homo erectus survived because we learned how to move, run, hunt. But Demyan is talking about homo criminalis—the people who attack each other. This is something you’re struggling with obviously right now in your daily life but also in the questions of how to get to the future. Sometimes I think your solution to get a more decent future is to kill all the homo criminalis first.

M: Then you become a criminal yourself.

J: This may be the hardest question. What should a community do when it sees someone violating other members’ rights? Isolate the criminals from society? But then there is not much hope that the person will change. Or execute the criminal? Killing the criminal was for a long time the easiest practice of dealing with people who violate others’ rights. Now, how do we get to a world in which criminals simply do not emerge? What does a person feel, what is the psychological condition of becoming a criminal? Is it fear? What motivates aggression? 

G: I see what you mean. In this future world, are we allowed to lie? 

C: Why are you asking?

G: Because like if we are allowed to lie to survive, then we are allowed to kill to survive. Let’s say we’ve evolved into a society without the urge to own things we don’t use. We’ve arrived at that moment, and somebody, for example, vladimir putin decides to come to our country and kill us. And the only response for us is to stop him and then we go back to the human rights that every person has the right to defend themselves. But then you will find yourself a criminal like him. The only way to stop a criminal is by criminal act, sadly. And I really don’t believe it when Emmanuel Kant says we were not allowed to lie. We could make any plan we want and then a person like vladimir putin comes and damages everything, and occupies another country. It’s simple like that.

C: Demyan, I think this is a dilemma you’re thinking about a lot. And we started by describing the place where Mieke chooses to live; by Ghayath campaigning for Berlin as an independent world city. So we have people here who are trying to create something outside of this criminal reality, but you’re right in the middle of the capital city of a place where the biggest criminal of the world is trying to occupy you. Do you have a choice or do you need to become a criminal yourself?

M: What would the world look like if there were no borders? Because I think lots of wars nowadays are about borders… 

C: Which are created by people who need borders in order to use their weapons.

M: Exactly, and it’s a self-feeding cycle. 

D: We need great new books for humanity. We have great books of some religions, great religions, that are the main books for some communities. But we don’t have books about global culture yet. We don’t have bestsellers about these questions. We have a few papers, books, and institutions on the margins. I believe in the arts, of course. I believe in philosophy, and arts with philosophy. So, for example, maybe in the next 12 months we can create one book and share it broadly. Maybe not even a book—an essay. We know from history how one manifest united people, and stopped people, and created new understanding for people. If we believe that people can write and can read, then it will be possible.

[01:07:23]

C: This is beautiful, of course. I think we will agree and especially coming from somebody who is stuck at home now for a few months in a city in a country where you cannot leave, you cannot cross the borders. You believe in a world without borders. And if your answer is new books about this global society, books are made by people, books don’t appear out of nothing. Then we’re back at the original question about how to deal with people who write and read the wrong books.

J: Maybe we do start with those right questions. Not with answers immediately but the right question that forms the projection of the mind, focuses on some specific way how to think. If we believe in our intelligence, thinking is just the first step, thinking and imagining.

C: Based on today’s conversation, can you name a question that has popped up here that we could use?

D: I like questions more than answers, but now I see that when we talk about global culture and we talk about popular mass culture and mass understanding, we need answers. And we have these books with answers. The Bible, for example, is a book without questions but only answers. And the Quran, of course, too. I don’t see great books or great essays or great memoranda crossing civilizational borders. 

C: Again this reflects the nature of the people who write the books. Ghayath you’re somebody who lives by creating books. What do you think? 

[01:11:50]

G: I have very strange thoughts and feelings about this planet. I remember 30 years ago they decided to build the James Webb space telescope. It cost all this money, and the first image they released from it was the same as from the Hubble telescope but with less quality. It did not affect me at all to see how small we are in the universe. 

You could make any plan and it’s not about your plan, it’s the things that happen. In 2010 I interviewed a survivor from the Holocaust, and he told me that he lost 80 people. That was the most shocking fact for me, that one person could lose 80 people. I didn’t know 10 years after that I would lose more than 300 between relatives and my brother and two uncles and everyone I know. In Syria we lost two to three million people. We were able to put in the report, 750 000 killed by Assad. I was not able to put in my two uncles and my brother, and this shows you the report captured fewer than one out of four. And the dictatorship remains in power. There are 17 million refugees; 11 million inside Syria without homes living like nomads, and six million outside Syria in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and some in Europe. And the world supports Assad explicitly, as with russia, iran, Venezuela, Brazil, or under the table. Barack Obama blocked selling weapons to the Syrian opposition. The United Nations decided to stop counting the deaths in Syria officially eight months after the revolution. The Security Council sent the group to investigate the chemical attack, but this group was not allowed to mention who perpetrated the attack, so nobody could name Assad a criminal. When we took the file of Assad to the criminal court in Laha, Sweden, my country voted to make a veto and cancel the decision in March 2013. This is why I say I’m not optimistic. In 2015 the Syrian Revolution liberated 85 percent of Syria, and Assad remained with 15 percent. And then vladimir putin came and he did something he had done before in Chechnya and succeeded. When putin was losing in the war with the Chechen fighters, he discovered he should not fight them but instead could kill their families and their children and rape their wives. He went to Grozny and began to kill their families. They surrendered. 

And this is what he did in Syria in 2015. He entered, and told the Assad regime to bomb the civilians. In the first week, he killed my uncle. He threw a 250 kilo TNT smart-weapon on my grandfather’s house and killed my uncle Salah, he’s a poet and a French citizen. We found only his leg.

In less than two months putin’s strategy destroyed most of Syria and killed most of the civilians, so the fighters surrendered, and he got all Syria back to Assad. And after that I have only one way to deal with this man: to use his weapons against him. He came from nowhere, knowing nothing about our country, why we wanted to liberate it from these 50 years of dictatorship, and he killed us and destroyed everything because he had the power to do so. This is why I’m not optimistic. Because you could do all kinds of thinking and creating, but it’s not about you: someone else can come and determine what happens. 

I was born as a refugee in Syria because England decided to give something it didn’t own to some people who didn’t own it. putin and iran came to Syria and destroyed it. I felt the only way to survive is by using the language of this war. Books are great and I continue writing them, but I can’t go to Syria and I haven’t seen my parents in a long time. The Syria I know doesn’t exist, it’s destroyed. It exists only in our memory, and we will die with our memory. This fact is really tough. 

When putin decided to enter the war in Syria, he asked the United Nations to give him the targets that he should not bomb. They gave him a list of hospitals and schools, and he bombed them all in the first week. 250 hospitals. Not every enemy is like this. 

C: And he’s doing the same now in Ukraine?

G: The moment he begins to lose, he will stop fighting the fighters and he will do what he did in Grozny, what he did in Aleppo and Damascus. He will go and kill their families and civilians and they will stop fighting him. This man has no morals.

J: We know russia very well, but nobody in Europe listened to Ukraine when it was warning about the danger. Economic interests came first and they stayed first. If russia continues—and it will continue if it’s not stopped—if it joins efforts with iran or other countries that are against the western culture, we can only imagine how many cities get destroyed in European countries. putin it’s not just one person. Behind him there is a system, and this system has grown from centuries of unpunished violations of human rights. I don’t know how to transfer the experience, and you, Ghayath, you don’t know how to transfer your experience, so sometimes words are not listened to. I don’t know what has to happen for people to understand that criminals should not be allowed to act with impunity. 

[01:22:55]

G: I really like what you say in this sense. Wars change our destinies and create us. The Holocaust survivor I interviewed has children who would not have existed without the Holocaust. I have a poem called “Israel.” I wrote it in 2010 and I published it in my third book. It says the same thing: “Without Israel my father would not have been thrown outside Palestine, he would not have gone as a refugee to Syria, he would not have met my mother, I would not have existed, so I am a result of something I don’t like called Israel.” This is how I see the planet: a city like Berlin is more cosmopolitan after each war and revolution. In 1970, people arrived from Chile after pinochet; in ‘79 people arrived from iran, and then they began to arrive from Iraq and iran both, and from Somalia, and then Kosovo, the Palestinians, the Syrians, and now the Ukrainians, and the city is more cosmopolitan now. The Ukrainians bring their food and music—you can already see it. We will meet them, we will be friends with them, we will learn new things from them. There’s one million Syrians in Germany, and you can’t deny that in most of the bars you go to in Berlin, one of the musicians is Syrian. Life will continue. It’s anti-nationalist and that’s good. I’m a result of many things.

C: You are a result of choices made by others, and it’s an answer to the question Demyan asked before: do we develop in spite of war or because of war? Ghayath has not turned into a fighter; Mieke has not turned into a fighter—at least not with deadly weapons—and Demyan, you continue to conclude that you have no choice but to be a warrior of light.

D: Because the homo sapiens need more responsibility than homo criminalis. Right now, it is very important that we think about new books. And yes, we need to think about practice: how can we become warriors of light? It’s about body practices too, of course. For example, in Ukraine there are new programs about life without smoking, without alcohol. Ukrainians are practicing that right now. Months ago in Kyiv I saw people smoking and drinking every night and…

J: Dealing with stress like that.

D: But right now, since two or three days ago, we have new rules.

J: Regulations? Oh really?

[01:29:13]

D: We have new regulations about alcohol, smoking and so on, about tactical medicine. Right now millions of Ukrainians became these warriors of light, but I see it’s not enough. We need practice of philosophy, we need new texts. We have many stories from this war right now from our writers, for example, from our journalists but we do not have philosophical essays yet. 

J: What can help people be not only reactive but proactive? How much knowledge and how much skills do we need to proactively create the future and the day after tomorrow? People react emotionally to something they don’t understand and it’s absolutely reasonable, because so many shocking things happen when war comes to your peaceful life. But it also speaks about what we lack, what we didn’t want to know before, what we haven’t learned or what we haven’t done in our lives—everything that kept us unprepared. I’m thinking of shocking future events that may happen—how can we be prepared for them, knowing everything we know and setting the right questions to know more.

[01:31:52]

C: What I find very interesting is how the responsibility keeps popping up, the clear-eyed realistic view on what’s going on in the world, pretty hopeless situation, very violent situation and yet we’re not giving up on responsibility, it’s probably the only choice we have. I don’t know, Demyan, if we’re going to produce this book that it will be read and understood all over the world because it asks universal questions. But in the meantime we have a few examples here of how we can survive to get there. 

J: What can we do with our lives now so that the next generation would get a better life after our results? 

G: I always say to my European friends who help me, either I cook for you lunch or dinner, or I will help you when you become a refugee in Syria after the third world war begins in Europe. 

C: What do they choose?

G: Everyone chooses both. 

J: It’s very valuable to talk to both of you, Mieke and Ghayath. One of our projects is titled Philosophical Garden. We would very much like to have a garden and good talks in it. We are still in a city, and war has interfered with all our plans, but it has also highlighted how important our plans were. We really hope that we can go deeper. Let’s see how we can develop together. The intention is there, in our minds, our hearts. Let’s see how we can create our world.

Questions 

1. Consider your relationship with the place where you live. What brought you there? What ways of knowing have you developed because of living there? 

2. In a democratic society, what is the proper response to aggression or violence? How do you view existing responses? What are their advantages, and who/what elements of society do they benefit?

3. What body practices do you have in your life? What practices would you like to develop? What are the steps you can take towards this goal? Who could support you in this pursuit? 

Resources

Almadhounm Ghayath and Marie Silkeberg. “The Celebration.” Moving Poems. The Best Poetry Videos on the Web. 6 June 2014. https://movingpoems.com/2014/06/the-celebration-by-ghayath-almadhoun/

Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” In The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. Schocken Books, New York. 2007.