"It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended"
About this Quote
A war that can be ended but isn’t stops being a tragedy of circumstance and starts looking like a moral choice. Durrenmatt’s line lands with the cold click of a trap: “inhuman” doesn’t mean merely cruel in the abstract, it means a deliberate violation of the minimum duties we owe one another once the exit is visible. The sting is in “continue.” Not start, not stumble into, not get dragged along by history. Continue. That verb assigns authorship.
Durrenmatt, a Swiss playwright steeped in postwar Europe’s evasions, understood how institutions launder responsibility. His work keeps returning to the same bleak mechanism: systems that claim necessity while quietly feeding on inertia, pride, and profit. “Could easily be ended” is doing accusatory work here. It punctures the favorite alibis of wartime leadership - complexity, inevitability, national honor - and replaces them with a simpler indictment: if peace is accessible, refusing it becomes a kind of dehumanization, both of the enemy (reduced to targets) and of one’s own people (reduced to expendable resources).
The line also carries an uncomfortable subtext about spectatorship. Switzerland’s neutrality, and Europe’s broader post-1945 reckoning, raised a question Durrenmatt never lets off the hook: who benefits from delay? The phrase “inhuman” can read as moral outrage, but it’s also a diagnosis of how humans behave when accountability is diffused. Once ending is “easy,” prolonging war stops being strategy and starts being character.
Durrenmatt, a Swiss playwright steeped in postwar Europe’s evasions, understood how institutions launder responsibility. His work keeps returning to the same bleak mechanism: systems that claim necessity while quietly feeding on inertia, pride, and profit. “Could easily be ended” is doing accusatory work here. It punctures the favorite alibis of wartime leadership - complexity, inevitability, national honor - and replaces them with a simpler indictment: if peace is accessible, refusing it becomes a kind of dehumanization, both of the enemy (reduced to targets) and of one’s own people (reduced to expendable resources).
The line also carries an uncomfortable subtext about spectatorship. Switzerland’s neutrality, and Europe’s broader post-1945 reckoning, raised a question Durrenmatt never lets off the hook: who benefits from delay? The phrase “inhuman” can read as moral outrage, but it’s also a diagnosis of how humans behave when accountability is diffused. Once ending is “easy,” prolonging war stops being strategy and starts being character.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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