In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of

Hear, O listeners, the words of Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, the wandering witness of empires and the chronicler of truth: “In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.” These words cut deeply, for they remind us that not all bloodshed is born of the same fire. Some arises in the heat of frenzy, when nations are swept away by banners, songs, and pride. Others, darker still, flow from the cold machinery of power, where death is not an accident of war, but a planned harvest.

The First World War was the eruption of passions long stoked in silence. Nations, bound by treaties and rivalries, stumbled into a storm none could control. Millions of young men marched to trenches, driven by duty, fear, and the call of national honor. The killing was monstrous, yet much of it sprang from the whirlwind of nationalism, that sudden fever that blinds reason and makes even slaughter seem noble. It was not the deliberate extermination of a people, but the madness of nations drunk on pride.

The Soviet case, as Kapu?ci?ski warns, bore a different character. There, death was not born of battlefield chaos but of calculation. Under Stalin’s reign, policies such as the Holodomor starved millions, not by accident, but by decree. Whole classes of people—the kulaks, the dissenters, the inconvenient—were condemned as enemies of the state and swept into prisons, gulags, and graves. This was no sudden madness, but a system, a design, a structure built to break human life as one breaks stones beneath a hammer.

And to this we must add the shadow of the Holocaust, invoked by Kapu?ci?ski as the darkest mirror of such systematic murder. The Nazi regime, with icy efficiency, built camps not for war but for annihilation. Families were torn from homes, herded into trains, and delivered to death as if they were cargo. It was not the frenzy of the battlefield, but the deliberate, bureaucratic orchestration of genocide. The lesson of these horrors is plain: when killing becomes system, when hatred becomes law, humanity itself is betrayed.

Consider the testimony of a survivor, Elie Wiesel, who as a boy was carried into the gates of Auschwitz. He told how the world became silent as he watched children cast into flames and mothers separated from sons. For him and countless others, the wound was not only loss, but the knowledge that this was no accident of war—it was the intended work of men who had chosen cruelty as policy. His life, devoted to remembrance, stands as a living answer to Kapu?ci?ski’s warning: that systematic evil must never be excused as mere war.

The wisdom of these words is that we must discern the origins of violence. To know whether bloodshed arises from the passions of a moment, or from the deliberate schemes of power, is to know how to confront it. Wars may end when passions cool, but systems of murder endure until they are shattered by justice. If we fail to see the difference, we risk repeating the same blindness that allowed gulags and camps to flourish in silence.

What, then, must we do? We must cultivate vigilance, not only against the fever of nationalism but against the cold cruelty of ideology that sanctifies murder. We must defend truth when rulers cloak death in the language of necessity. We must teach our children to recognize the signs of systematic evil—propaganda, dehumanization, the silencing of dissent—lest they awaken too late. For to remember the past is not only to honor the dead, but to guard the living.

Therefore, let Kapu?ci?ski’s words stand as both remembrance and command. When the passions of nations flare, resist them with reason. When systems of cruelty rise, oppose them with all your strength. For the measure of a people is not only in how they fight their wars, but in how they guard against the cold machinery of murder. Let this wisdom be passed down like a flame, so that never again shall humanity stumble blind into frenzy, nor march obedient into the abyss.