"A strange disease has broken out, the soldiers cannot die", is a key sentence in Viktor Ullmann's anti-war opera "The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death". Ullmann's opera is based on his own war experiences during the theatre of war in the valley of the river Isonzo and became a witness of the war with gas, my grandfather had to serve as part of the special forces of the k.u.k. Wehrmacht (Imperial and Royal Defence Forces) to comb through the gassed positions of the by gas murdered Italian soldiers. For Ullmann, this experience led him to a lifelong preoccupation with the subject, from 1917 to 1944 he worked on his anti-war opera, on 18th of October 1944 he was murdered with gas at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The 20th century should teach us that war doesn't solve any problems, that weapons don't create peace or jobs, only ruins. It is a question of education to understand this. Education starts at school. Today's Russian President Putin probably gets the information about history during his school days, which fell during Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet era. In the USSR, Putin was a secret service agent, from 1992 deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the Leningrad Oblast, till today the Russian administrative districts have retained their Soviet names. In his understanding of history, Putin sharply criticizes 20th century Russian politics from the revolutionary Lenin to the reformer Gorbachev, omitting only one, Brezhnev, whose era was the best for the people living in the USSR. But fact is that Brezhnev used censorship and military force to end the Prague Spring in 1968, to invade Afghanistan in 1979 and to stage martial law in Poland in 1981 as a policy named as limited sovereignty. To enforce this 2022 model in the sovereign Ukraine, military force will be used based on the role model of the illegal occupation of Iraq in 2003 by US-american and british forces, a war crime for which US President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair have never been held accountable. 

Herbert Gantschacher is Director, Author and Producer