This Will Blow Up!

A German military officer with years of experience from international peacekeeping missions asks his two sons, both in their late teens, if they would be willing to fight for Germany if it were attacked. Both answer that they would not, without hesitation. The father poses this question at the moment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and after Chancellor Scholz’s centre-left government changed Germany’s long-held and restrained defence policy and significantly increased the defence budget. Virtually the whole world has chosen to provide an enormous amount of public funding for defence and thus destroyed the last vestiges of the peace paradigm. Slovenia is no exception.

 The sons of the German peacekeeping soldier said no not only to the defence of the country, but also to the initiatives to reinstate compulsory military service. There is an increasing number of countries where this is either a part of the daily agenda or already actual practice, for example, Croatia. Once the armament begins, the draft becomes inevitable. Why did the peace paradigm collapse? Why did we, with such ease, accept the militarisation of the society when it doesn’t provide us with an increased sense of security? The project that will be created in a theatre whose emblem is a dove, the symbol on peace – although the theatre has shown a fair share of arms in its productions – will build upon three topics: the question of what is the schoolchildren’s attitude to war, desertion as a social and political question, and the pink-red pistol drawn by the Italian graffiti artist Blu on the erstwhile façade of the Rog Factory as a message of peace.