I
I just heard about the death of Mikhail Gorbachev on the news.
And if I have to write through a day and a night at my desk…
I will do it to commemorate with everything I have a person who – like few others in my lifetime – with his thoughts, his actions, his courage and his heart, gave the world impulses that could have made it better .
It’s sad and tragic and at the same time blatantly unfair that he didn’t succeed.
On the contrary: first he lost the practical opportunity to continue his political work as President of the Soviet Union to a mediocre but willing assistant of geopolitical and economic-neoliberal interests of the USA named Boris Yeltsin.
Then he lost his beloved wife and companion Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva (“With her death the most important part of me died”).
And since 2007 at the latest, he has had to watch how his convictions, his ideas, suggestions, his far-sightedness and his forecasts on politics and world events, which he continued to publicize through his own foundations and international organizations, were increasingly surrounded by the howls of triumph and war of Western media and politicians were marginalized away. Despite all this, his worldwide commitment did not diminish.
He spent the last few years seriously ill in his house in Moscow.
At the end of his life he saw his assessments – coldly dismissed – escalate into the very situation he had been warning about for the past twenty-five years. A world political situation that is darker, more hopeless and more dangerous than it ever was during the Cold War. Worse still, it reminds the historically educated of the days before the First World War in 1914.
Mikhail Gorbachev is one of the people who shaped my political thinking and the term “hope”, i.e. the idea that there is something beyond the monolithic realpolitik, which is based on the assertion of one’s own interests through structural (i.e. system-ideological) and factual (i.e. military and economic) violence is based, a different way of living together on this earth may be possible.
For me, he comes first in a spiritual family (…Martin Luther King, Olof Palme, Willy Brandt/Egon Bahr, Petra Kelly, Eugen Drewermann, Dalai Lama…), without whose existence I would very likely have had no life-affirming ideas about the possibilities of political action in a pacifist perspective.
I do not have the talents, the vocation, the strength and the constitution to act publicly as a political personality on behalf of this spiritual family. But I feel that I belong to it out of the deepest human conviction and will never betray it in my personal ethics and attitude as well as in my artistic work – come what may.
Today is another sad and thoughtful day in my life.
II
Dear Mikhail Sergeyevich,
I bow to you in the greatest gratitude, admiration, loving sympathy and great sadness.
I send my deepest condolences to your family and all your close friends, companions, collaborators and supporters.
And finally my – for biographical reasons – special spiritual connection with the Russian people.
You will always be in my heart – as you will live on in the hearts, thoughts and prayers of millions of other people in the world family.
Sincerely yours
Harald Blüchel (Himmelpfort/Germany, August 31, 2022)
I have a dream:
that in your memory, dear Mikhail Sergeyevich, the world’s leading politicians would come together in a neutral place for impartial, serious, serious talks.
Without preconditions.
An initiative to start all over again.
Stopping the stimulus-response spiral.
to come to your senses.
to become capable of dialogue.
Pay attention to the fears of the other side.
Acknowledging and explaining one another’s mistakes and asking for forgiveness.
Allowing the other side to save face.
meet each other.
develop trust.
Out of responsibility before the human family and the entire planet –
and not in front of the respective sponsors, clients, followers, profiteers and loudmouths.
What about that?