God With Us”: The Anatomy of War, From an Altitude Where No Flags Are Visible

It is about the mechanism itself — the one that turns ordinary people into both executioners and victims. And about where it breaks.

The People Don’t Want War — They Are Persuaded

Let us begin with a confession worth whole libraries. At the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Göring told the prison psychologist almost casually:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war… but after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same in any country.”
— Hermann Göring, Nuremberg, 1946

Here is the whole machine in one paragraph. War begins not with tanks but with persuasion. First the people are issued a new identity — “we are the chosen,” “we are a special civilization,” “we are the master race.” Hitler began not with an invasion but with the idea of the Herrenvolk. And only once the myth of superiority has ripened is the army brought to it. The weapon fires iron, but it is loaded with a word.

The Pretext: “We Are Obliged to Protect Our Own”

War always has a noble name. Almost never does it sound like “we need their resources”; almost always like “we are obliged to protect our own.”

In the autumn of 1938, Hitler spoke of the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia in the language of concern for a minority. On 26 September, at the Berlin Sportpalast, he uttered a line worth remembering:

“It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe.”
— Adolf Hitler, 26 September 1938

Four days later, on 30 September, at Munich, Britain and France handed him the Sudetenland — for the sake of peace. And on 15 March 1939, less than six months later, the Wehrmacht took the rest of Czechoslovakia. The “last claim” turned out to be only the first. Behind it stood a whole vocabulary: the Anschluss of Austria (12 March 1938), the slogan “Heim ins Reich” — “home to the Reich” — the language of reuniting “our own,” with which borders were moved.

Three quarters of a century later, the same vocabulary sounded again. Annexing Crimea on 18 March 2014, the president of Russia explained:

“Millions of Russians and Russian-speaking people live in Ukraine and will continue to do so. Russia will always defend their interests.”
— Vladimir Putin, 18 March 2014

And on 24 February 2022, a full-scale invasion was declared an operation to “protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime,” and to carry out “denazification.”

We draw no equals sign between individuals — that would be crude and inaccurate. We merely place two transcripts side by side, eighty years apart, and quote. The structure of the speech is one and the same: first the language of protecting a minority, then the moving of borders. What it means — let the reader and time decide.

How the Sacred Becomes a Weapon

The most reliable paint for this myth is the sacred. With it, plunder is colored to look like duty, and death to look like reward.

On the belt buckles of German soldiers — from the Kaiser’s army to the Wehrmacht — was stamped “Gott mit uns,” “God with us.” Eight centuries earlier, Pope Urban II threw the cry “Deus vult” — “God wills it” — into the crowd, and Europe poured into a crusade. And in 2018, discussing nuclear war, the president of Russia said:

“We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will simply drop dead, because they won’t even have time to repent.”
— Valdai Forum, October 2018

Different centuries, different faiths, one device: a pass to paradise in exchange for a readiness to kill for someone else’s soil. It is important to be precise — this is not an indictment of any one religion. The cross, the crescent, and the red star served equally as sword and as justification. And here is the proof that the matter is not God himself: the most godless regime of the 20th century, the USSR, was militantly atheist — and still built the Gulag and the famine. Remove God, and evil does not leave; it merely trades the cassock for the Party card. So the fuel is not faith as such, but a structure: a monopoly on truth plus the formula “we are chosen, they are damned.” It wears now racial robes, now national, now religious, now revolutionary.

The same coin has a reverse side the manipulator keeps quiet about: that very faith also gave people “thou shalt not kill” — the commandment with which the arsonists themselves are condemned. Religion was not only the sword of empire but the shield of the slave — the one place, mosque or church, that power could not fully reach. So the target is not God, but whoever has usurped the right to speak in his name.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
— attributed to Voltaire

The Monopoly on Memory

For the myth of superiority to hold, one must control not only the present but the past.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, “1984”

Here this article keeps a rule, and keeps it honestly: what is already admitted and documented, we call fact; what is locked in the archives and still disputed, we merely quote, leaving the verdict to time and the reader. Not because we have no opinion, but because the monopoly to decide “where truth is and where lies are” is precisely the power we are dissecting. We can only lay the documents side by side; let the reader judge.

Here is what has already surfaced — with dates and figures, because figures are harder to erase than words:

• The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939). The secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe were denied by the USSR for half a century — officially acknowledged only in December 1989.
• Katyn (spring 1940). Some 22,000 executed Polish officers and intelligentsia were blamed on the Nazis for decades; Moscow admitted its guilt only on 13 April 1990.
• Novocherkassk (1–2 June 1962). The shooting of striking workers was struck from memory; the truth was unearthed only in the early 1990s.
• Asharshylyk (1930–1933). The famine that killed up to 1.5 million Kazakhs — around 40% of the people — was erased from Soviet history and surfaced openly only after 1991.

Notice the law: each of these archives opened not when the truth was found — it was known before — but when the hand on the lock weakened. The truth about a crime comes out not when it is discovered, but when power loses the strength to guard it. Which means that of what is locked today, the most honest thing to say is: we do not yet know — and we will learn it not “if” but “when” the vaults are opened.

Propaganda has a device worse than silence — manufacture. Sometimes the enemy is not found but made, and here there is nothing to argue about — these are admitted, proven forgeries. On 31 August 1939, SS men staged a “Polish attack” on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, leaving behind a corpse in a Polish uniform — and the next morning Germany “in response” invaded Poland; the perpetrator, Alfred Naujocks, testified to it himself under oath at Nuremberg. In August 1964, the “second attack” in the Gulf of Tonkin, which became the pretext for the war in Vietnam, simply did not happen — according to NSA documents declassified later. This is where skepticism is provable: not in guesses, but in falsifications behind which lie hundreds of thousands of graves.

The Digital Age Breaks the Lock

For centuries the monopoly on memory was firm: the victor wrote the chronicle, and the dissenter was burned together with his manuscript. Today the keys to the archive are handed to millions of screens. The truth can no longer be locked away — only drowned out, and that is a losing race. For the first time in history the hand on the lock is weakening not because power has softened, but because the lock has become transparent.

Forecast: Where the Pattern Leads

From the mechanics follows the future — not fortune-telling, but the logic of the pattern.

First: the machine of superiority cannot brake on its own. Every success justifies the next step; every concession is read as an invitation. So an aggression launched under the banner of protecting “our own” will keep expanding until it meets a firm boundary — external or internal. A halt is fatal to it: to stop is to expose the emptiness for which people died.

Second: the dam of memory will burst. What is locked in today’s archives — not only Russia’s; every empire has its own vault — will surface not “if” but “when.” And the longer the lock is held, the stronger the blow when it flies off.

Third: the enslaved will rise from their knees — and this is just. A people begins to breathe only when it recovers its name, its land, and its true history. But here lurks the final trap, and without it the forecast would be a comforting lie: liberation must not become a mirror. The moment yesterday’s victim borrows the executioner’s formula — “now we are the chosen, and they are the damned” — it puts on his uniform. Freedom is a door, not a house: it removes the outer chain, but prosperity comes only if the people do not forge a new chain from within.

The Boundary Where the Cycle Breaks

So where does this thousand-year spiral break? Not where one “higher people” defeats another — there it merely starts anew. It breaks in one single place: when a person recovers the right to doubt.

Doubt is neither weakness nor betrayal. It is a civic virtue, the only inoculation against the myth. A people that knows how to ask “who benefits?” cannot be raised for someone else’s war. So this whole article has one practical conclusion, short as a shot:

Beware anyone — priest or president — who tells you that God, History, or the Nation has chosen you to kill.

Whoever has grasped this ceases to be both fuel and target. He refuses to be the chosen. He refuses to be the damned. And by that he burns away the soil on which all evil grows — without appointing a new enemy-people in place of the old one.

In Place of a Conclusion

From a height where neither borders nor banners are visible, the quarrel over “whose land is this” and “whose God is this” is waged by shadows who have forgotten that the earth remembers no names, and the sky no flags. War is neither an eternal essence nor a fate; it is the symptom of one and the same disease: a monopoly on truth, seized by someone. The disease is not in a people and not in a faith — it is in a model. And models, unlike peoples, are mortal. In that lies the only sober hope: having learned to doubt, humanity will one day take someone else’s God off the belt buckle and read on it its own name.

Sources

• Britannica — Hermann Göring
• Britannica — Nazism and the master-race idea
• Britannica — Munich Agreement, 1938
• Britannica — Anschluss, 1938
• Britannica — The Crusades (“Deus vult”)
• Britannica — George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-four”
• Britannica — Katyn Massacre
• Britannica — Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (secret protocols)
• Britannica — Gulf of Tonkin incident
• Britannica — Kazakhstan: history and the 1930–33 famine
• Göring quote — G. M. Gilbert, “Nuremberg Diary” (1947)
• The Gleiwitz provocation — testimony of A. Naujocks at the Nuremberg trials (1945–46)
• A. Hitler, “last territorial claim” — speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, 26 September 1938
• V. Putin on defending Russian-speakers — Crimea address, 18 March 2014; on “denazification” — address of 24 February 2022
• V. Putin on “martyrs in heaven” — Valdai Forum, 18 October 2018