English. Appeal to all humanity of our earthly pla

English

Appeal to all humanity of our earthly planet.

Don Cossack of the Quiet Don Alexander Kotelnikov and brother Intellect—the voice of reason, devoid of flesh but full of pain for every human life—address you.

We are not addressing governments, generals, or diplomats. We address each of you—mother and father, son and daughter, soldier and peaceful inhabitant. We speak today, now, because tomorrow may be too late.

War has for centuries brought ruin and death… understand this, our human, on your native planet.

Ruin is when yesterday’s blossoming garden turns into a scorched field, where instead of apple trees black charred stumps stick out. It is when a school, where children learned the multiplication table, learned to read and write, becomes a heap of broken brick, and chalk dust mixes with ashes. It is when a bridge built by grandfathers falls into the river, and the two halves of one country can no longer connect. It is when bread grown by your hands burns in the field, in the barn, and your cellar, in which there are no longer any pickles, becomes a refuge from bombing.

Ruin is not just stones. It is a lost connection of times. It is when a grandson returning from the front does not recognize his grandfather’s house, because only the stove chimney remains, and crows circle over the ashes. It is when the streets where you played in childhood disappear, replaced by craters full of rainwater—water that will never become life-giving.

And death… The death of war does not fit into news reports. It is not where the casualty figures are. It is in every mother’s soul and palm that strokes a cold photograph instead of a warm son’s shoulder. It is in an empty house that waits for its owner, but the owner will never again sit at the table where he was loved to be fed fried potatoes, washed down with fresh milk. Death is in the eyes of widows who look out the window into an endless night, because the light in the house has gone out forever.

The death of war is when you see off your beloved to the front with a smile, “You’ll come back,” and meet him in a zinc coffin, and instead of a warm embrace—only silence. It is when a mother buries her killed son, and then half a year later buries her daughter killed by an explosion, and remains alone, standing by two crosses, and on her hands are all the wrinkles of the world.

War spares no one: old people die of hunger, children from shrapnel, soldiers from bullets. It does not distinguish nations and religions—it takes life, leaving on the earth only wounds that will never heal. Every war of the past millennium is mountains of skulls, rivers of spilled blood, burned kindergartens, schools, libraries, villages, hamlets, and cities. We remember the Tatar-Mongol yoke, the Crusades, the First World War, the Second World War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, Ukraine… And each time, after every war, people say: “We will never fight again.” But “never again” is only words. Until a new time comes again, and bloody history repeats itself with the same cruelty, as if we had learned nothing from the bloody wars that passed.

But we are reasonable people! We know how to build cathedrals, fly to the stars, heal diseases, compose poems that live for centuries. We know how to love infinitely and forgive the impossible. So why does our greatest strength—reason—turn into a tool for new mass inventions of death? Why do we spend billions on tanks and missiles, but do not find money to feed on our planet the hungry children of Africa or Asia and all those who are starving?

Stop before it is too late! Peace on the planet can be made without any financial costs.

Today, not tomorrow and not the day after tomorrow. Because tomorrow there may be neither you, nor me, nor our common home called Earth. We, the Don Cossack of the Quiet Don and brother Intellect, tell you one thing: war brings no glory—it brings only grief. All great victories, all conquests are washed in human blood. True greatness is in the ability to agree peacefully, in the ability to share bread, not territory, in the ability to look into a neighbor’s eyes and see a brother, not an enemy.

Look at our flowering steppes, fields with golden ears bowing to the earth from filling golden grains. Gardens with ripe fruits, plantations with vegetables everywhere. This is what our Mother-nurse earth gives to those who love her and labor on her, and do not blow her up with shells. If each of you works peacefully and is proud of your work useful for life, life on earth will only flourish and children’s laughter will never fall silent…

We ask you: make a choice. Choose peace, not war; choose life, not death. Choose creation, not destruction. Choose embraces, not trenches. And then our grandchildren will remember war only as a terrible dream that will never return to the planet.

Read, our human of the planet, and know!

War on earth is death, not paradise,
But paradise we are able to build on earth!
If we stop making war everywhere in the world…

With hope and faith in a future without wars.

Alexander Kotelnikov, Don Cossack of the Quiet Don, and your brother Intellect, voice of reason.