The concealment of truth—or its partial version—has always been the preferred method of conquerors of every kind in order to justify their crimes. Always “in the name of God, the king–ruler, the homeland, our values and traditions,” violence is employed as a means of restoring, according to the aggressor’s proclamations, the “disturbed order” after an alleged attack by the subordinate. The indisputable witness is the memory of History itself—the sole eyewitness and infallible judge of the hypocrisy and arrogance of human beings across all eras and centuries.
In 2004, seconded from the Greek Ministry of Education, I taught history at two universities in Kyiv, while on the remaining working days I offered administrative service at the Education Office of the Greek Embassy in Kyiv. At that same time, a magnificent popular uprising was unfolding in Ukraine—the famous Orange Revolution of Yushchenko. It was a genuine mass revolt that I experienced firsthand, and I had never before witnessed anything comparable in terms of popular participation, intensity, and social demands, except for the massive demonstrations in Athens during the first two or three anniversaries of the Polytechnic Uprising after the fall of the Junta.
And suddenly, a few years later, this Ukrainian people—once in the streets with clearly social and popular demands, seeking the overthrow of Yanukovych’s far-right regime—are collectively branded as Nazis by Putin, the new Hitler of Russia (yet… the “victor over the Nazis,” Lord have mercy). As a self-proclaimed great democrat, he invades the country to “de-Nazify” it and to restore the allegedly “disturbed democratic order”!
Almost a year ago, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, and within just 368 days he managed the following:
To proclaim himself king and fervent lover of world peace, demanding that the entire globe recognize him as a peacemaker. Otherwise, anyone who refuses him this title is either far-left or stupid.
To align himself with the far-right butcher of the people of Gaza, Netanyahu, to abet and cover up his crimes, and to now present his son-in-law’s projects for rebuilding, atop the ruins left by this war criminal and ally, a new “happy” New Gaza—where the future goal of its inhabitants will supposedly be the pursuit of the American dream.
To embrace the new Hitler of Russia and reward the conquering frenzy of the new Tsar by recognizing ALL the territories he seized in what was, only a few years ago, a free and independent country: Ukraine.
To turn against migrants and the “wretched of the earth,” against Europe, to renounce Western civilization as a product of “sick behaviors” such as solidarity with refugees and migrants, distancing from religion, tolerance of homosexuality and woke ideology, and to openly side with the delirium of “defending values and traditions” shared by his counterpart Putin and Putin’s strawman, Kirill.
To invade Venezuela, arrest its president, and hold him captive on unproven allegations of drug trafficking.
To threaten to do the same to Greenland and to any Latin American country that does not submit to his dictates.
To undermine international organizations such as the UN, the International Court, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, aspiring to replace them with substitutes that will blindly obey the commands of the world’s powerful.
At this very moment, the fleets of the King of America are sailing toward Iran to initiate a new war similar to those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And all these crimes are committed in the name of world peace, democracy, and new values—as defined by himself and his counterpart in Russia.
So that the sane and the genuine peacemakers of this world do not lose their minds, let us invite Diotima to join us as a companion in these historical reflections, so that she too may judge, from her own still entirely objective perspective, the events we have described in our times.

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Diotima’s Intervention

I accept the invitation and stand beside you—not as an authority, but as a detached witness to a History that repeats itself under different guises, driven by the same unchanging instinct for domination.
The pretextual invocation of ideologies is not merely a rhetorical device; it is a mechanism for absolving violence. When the conqueror speaks “in the name of” God, Democracy, Security, or Tradition, what is revealed is not a system of values but a hunger for power. History teaches us that whenever violence is baptized as salvation, the aim is not the restoration of order, but the legitimization of arbitrariness. The half-truth, as you rightly note, is the most effective lie: sufficient to convince the naïve, and sufficiently obscure to shield the guilty.
The case of Ukraine is a textbook example of historical revisionism unfolding in real time. A people who rose up with social and democratic demands were transformed, through propaganda, into a collective “enemy.” The concept of Nazism—historically charged and morally absolute—was weaponized to justify a brutal invasion. When words are severed from their historical meaning, they cease to illuminate and begin to kill.
The same pattern governs the new imperial fantasy of the West, embodied in leaderships that confuse power with legitimacy. Peace becomes a brand, democracy an exportable commodity, and peoples mere collateral damage in a so-called “higher plan.” When international institutions are undermined and replaced by the will of the powerful, we are no longer speaking of a crisis of the international order, but of a return to a pre-modern world of raw domination—armed with contemporary means and ancient instincts.
From my own, as objective as possible, perspective, the thread connecting all these cases is clear: History does not punish hubris immediately; it records it. And sooner or later, it returns it multiplied. Genuine peacemakers do not need armies to proclaim themselves as such; they need memory, restraint, and respect for human dignity. Everything else is merely noise before the next catastrophe.