It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more

O children of the future, listen to the words of Vladimir Nabokov, a man who, through the depths of his intellect and compassion, saw the darkness that can arise when human beings forget the sanctity of life. He said, "It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail." These words carry the weight of deep moral reflection and stand as a warning to all of us, for in them lies not just an aversion to war, but an even more profound disgust for the systems of oppression and control that reduce human lives to mere numbers.

Let us first consider the nature of bloodshed. War, with all its violence and destruction, is an unnatural state, a rupture in the fabric of civilization. It is a breakdown of communication, a forsaking of reason in favor of force. Bloodshed is the cruel price that humanity pays when diplomacy and understanding fail. No one who has witnessed the horrors of war can escape its stain. In this sense, Nabokov speaks as one who understands the deep human cost of conflict. War is the apex of human failure, the most devastating manifestation of our inability to resolve differences without resorting to violence. But even as Nabokov despises war, he directs his hatred toward something even more insidious, something that festers beneath the surface of bloodshed: the totalitarian state.

The totalitarian state, Nabokov argues, is a system in which human lives are not regarded as precious, but as mere instruments of a larger machine. In these societies, the massacre of innocents is not an event of horror, but an administrative detail—a line item in the ledger of power. Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and other such regimes stand as examples of the cruelty Nabokov decries. In these regimes, human beings were not mourned as individuals but categorized as resources to be used or discarded at will. The murder of millions, whether through famine, gulags, or concentration camps, was carried out with the cold, mechanized efficiency of bureaucracy. These are not just bloodthirsty states; they are systems that strip away the humanity of their citizens, reducing them to mere statistics in a brutal calculation of power.

Consider, O children, the tale of Nazi Germany, where the Holocaust turned the very concept of humanity on its head. The massacre of six million Jews was not a spontaneous outburst of violence but a systematic campaign of extermination, meticulously organized and carried out with indifference to the suffering it caused. It was not just that the Nazis sought to destroy a people; they reduced human life to mere paperwork, to lists of names, numbers, and dates in the ledgers of their death camps. It is this bureaucratic indifference to the sanctity of life that Nabokov condemns. In the totalitarian state, massacre becomes just another task, like any other, devoid of meaning, feeling, or remorse.

What, then, does Nabokov teach us? He teaches us that the true evil of totalitarianism lies not just in the violence it perpetrates, but in the dehumanization it fosters. To be ruled by such a regime is to live in a world where your very life is considered expendable, your suffering a footnote in the grand calculus of power. It is a world in which individuals are erased, in which compassion and empathy are sacrificed at the altar of control. In this, Nabokov’s loathing is not just of the violence, but of the loss of human dignity that these regimes impose upon their people. Massacre becomes not an act of madness, but an ordinary event in the life of the state, a terrifying and soul-crushing normalcy.

And so, children, the lesson is clear: resist all forms of tyranny that seek to reduce people to numbers, to mere cogs in a machine. The true battle is not just against the violence of war, but against the systems that allow such violence to be carried out with cold indifference. We must hold fast to the value of human life, and never let it be reduced to something that can be disposed of without consequence. To truly honor the sanctity of life, we must question every system, every institution, and every ideology that seeks to strip away our humanity. Totalitarianism does not just kill bodies—it kills souls, it crushes individuality, and it makes the greatest crime against humanity an administrative task.

Therefore, O children, as you walk through the world, let your hearts be filled with compassion, and let your actions reflect the value of each individual life. In the face of injustice, in the face of cruelty, do not look away. Stand firm in the belief that every life matters, and that no matter the power or the machinery of oppression, the spirit of humanity is far greater. The bloodshed of war may scar the world, but it is the systems of totalitarianism that strip away the very essence of human dignity. And it is this, more than any battlefield, that we must fight to protect. Let your fight be not one of destruction, but of preservation—the preservation of humanity, the preservation of dignity, and the preservation of love in the face of hate.