The Price of Blood – how quickly the language of war becomes socially acceptable again

He was regarded as the antithesis of Europe’s old power politicians. Emmanuel Macron – young, eloquent, educated, European. The president who wanted to build bridges, not trenches. The man who wanted to lead France into the 21st century. And now he too speaks of the “price of blood”.

How quickly words change. And politics with them.

Only a few years ago, terms such as diplomacy, mutual understanding and European cooperation sounded like the foundation of the future. Today, people are once again talking about rearmament, a war economy, deterrence – and now, quite matter-of-factly, about blood. As if it were a sober budget item. As if one only had to repeat the term often enough for it to lose its horror.

The price of blood.

A phrase that comes surprisingly easily in air-conditioned conference rooms. People in tailor-made suits sit there discussing strategies, while others later wear uniforms and are allowed to pay the bills. After all, blood is always someone else’s.

Of course, it will immediately be explained that everyone has misunderstood it all. That it is only about deterrence. About readiness for defense. About values. About freedom. About Europe. It sounds noble. It sounds responsible. It sounds almost heroic.

There is only one thing it does not sound like: peaceful.

Ironically, every justification for more weapons is that they are supposed to secure peace. Every new armaments program allegedly serves de-escalation alone. Every billion-euro budget is a peace project. And when the “price of blood” is finally invoked, it is, of course, also in the name of peace.

One cannot help wondering: How many more speeches about peace will it take before no one notices that the vocabulary has long since come from the history books of past wars?

Europe once wanted to be a continent that had learned from its history. Today, it seems to have learned above all how to put old terms into modern packaging. Rearmament becomes “resilience.” Arms buildup becomes “strategic autonomy.” Readiness for war becomes “defense of values.” Marketing really can work wonders.

And Emmanuel Macron? Of all people, the president who so often presented himself as an intellectual now resorts to language that recalls past eras more than the Europe of the 21st century. Perhaps that is the real shock. Not that a president wants to defend his country – that is part of his office. But that even those who once stood for dialogue now choose words that make a state of emergency seem normal.

Peace rarely dies with a bang. It often disappears sentence by sentence.

When politicians begin to speak of blood, citizens should not applaud. They should listen very carefully. For blood is not a rhetorical device. It has names, faces and families.

And whoever invokes its price should never forget that, in the vast majority of cases, they do not pay it themselves.

Andreas M. Brucker