Patrik Baab - political scientist and journalist - worked for public broadcasters for many years and was very close to the
reality of the war in eastern Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In fall 2023, "On Both Sides of the Front - My Travels in Ukraine" was published alongside many other books.
Go on - go to war!
With these provocative words, Patrik Baab wants to force a 16-year-old to think in his emotional poem.
Baab is someone who knows what he is writing about.
Theo, as the 16-year-old is called, is a normal teenager who has decided to enlist in the armed forces.
He is representative of others his age who want to take this step.
The disastrous thing is that almost all of them have false expectations.
They have naively fallen for Bundeswehr advertisers.
They skillfully exploit young people's thirst for adventure and their enthusiasm for technology to
get them excited about a career in the Bundeswehr.
Then there is the absurd war propaganda, which does not even stop at schools.
All of this is bearing fruit.
Theo wants to do something for peace and defend his country, as he explained to TV presenter Anne Will.
"I am aware of the risks," he affirmed on her show.
But is that really the case?
Patrik Baab doubts this.
In the form of a poem, he invites him to travel with him to Donetsk.
He brutally and openly shows him the horrors of war.
His message is clear:
In any kind of military conflict, it is currently not about protecting one's country!
Rather, the soldiers are being abused by string-pullers obsessed with power and profit.
In order to achieve their goals, their helpers are throwing sand in people's eyes.
They provoke, incite people against each other and rub their hands together behind the scenes.
What the peoples are left with in the end is death, devastation, suffering and endless tears of grief.
Why don't you go - go to war!
A stirring poem, a homage to peace ...
You want to do what really counts?
Then do it!
Join the Bundeswehr!
You want to defend Western values, our freedom, like back then in Afghanistan?
Then go!
I am old. I won't stop you.
You want to know what war means? Then go!
Go to war!
You want to defend your country? Then go!
Let me tell you that the Russians are coming, that Putin will be at the door tomorrow, if we
don't keep him away from us in the Donbass today!
Believe what they tell you, for he who knows nothing must believe much, and he who does not believe
our propaganda is doing the business of our enemies!
Let them stir you up against the Russians!
Go! Close your eyes and go!
Go to where the black earth is already soaked with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians.
Go!
Grass will also grow over your corpse.
Come with me to Donetsk, where even the children learn what war means,
where this war did not start in 2022, but back in 2014, on the Maidan,
where this war started with the murders of the Right Sector, what you don't hear in school, not in the universities.
Come with me to the city, where everyone knows what it means to live in the death zone.
Where schoolchildren crawl under the table when the bell rings at recess, because they fear the next bomb scare,
and where at night, in their dreams, they a lifetime of watching death do its work.
Come with me to Mariupol, where it says on the cellar wall in white paint: Sdez Detje! Children still live here!
But the cellar is burnt out.
Nobody lives here anymore.
If you want to find out what war means, then come!
If you want to come with me to the contact line, come!
Come, if you want to look into the abyss through burnt-out window caves,
when you can't pee in the ditch because there are butterfly mines,
if you can't wash yourself for days,
when the last ration has been eaten by maggots and there is nothing else to eat ,
when you're in damp cellars with other filthy and distraught people licking the greasy broth out of the radiator,
if you only have dirty water to drink,
if you catch dysentery from this dirty, contaminated water,
when you have to shit over the thunder bar and when you can't find any grass to wipe your ass,
if you are still wearing the same underpants on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth day
and the old, hardened excrement collects in them,
when you're lying in the dirt at night in your soaked army parka and when you get frostbite
on a cot in a freezing cold shelter in winter,
when lice and fleas infest your smelly uniform,
when myriads of bugs feed on your skin, when you get scabies,
when the cold, damp mud, in which you stand ankle-deep day in, day out, turns the skin on your
foot a bluish gray and gradually rots your foot,
when the amputated, bloody trench feet lie in a heap in the dirt,
When the rats gnaw on the corpses
and the crows eat out the eyes and intestines of the dead ,
when you hear the officers' whistle,
when they chase you down the ladder with your pistol drawn, your finger on the trigger and out of the
trench into the machine gun fire, into the minefields,
when the drones fly towards you in a swarm,
when you can't sleep at night because the wounded are stuck in the barbed wire trenches, moaning and begging for their mother,
when you are writhing on a dirty sheet in the military hospital and your foot itches and you want to scratch your foot,
but there's no foot left because your leg was amputated,
if only the phantom pain reminds you that you once had a leg, where now there is only
a stump in a bandage that has bled through,
when the missiles aim at your phone and reach their target in cold geometry,
when all that remains of your armor is molten metal, when you burn up in a fireball at 1,400 degrees,
then you know what war means.
So go!
Get a taste of freedom and adventure!
Go and become a hero!
Go, when power and the media stick together like pitch and brimstone.
Give your life for those who send you there but do not go there themselves!
Don't feel sorry for yourself! Go!
Go to your death for those who give speeches to the people on TV chat shows, who stay in the stage or in the
bunker and put their own children on the last plane overseas, convinced transatlanticists as they are.
Go! If you fall, the stock market will rise! So go!
But first look at them, how they sit behind their desks in their editorial offices and stir their coffee cups,
the mouthbreathers who don't even send their kids to the ditch, take a good look at them,
the hasbardeurs and shellackers in government who want to deliver Taurus, but wet themselves at the first shotgun blast,
look at them, the armor bosses popping champagne corks while others bleed to death from their weapons .
Take a close look at them.
You just have to look these guys in the face.