Renowned American journalist and Pulitzer Prize recipient Anne Applebaum called for sustained support for Ukraine as she accepted a distinguished German award yesterday, asserting that pacifism in the face of aggression often amounts to nothing more than appeasement. Applebaum delivered her plea to an audience in Frankfurt, where she was honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Accompanying her was her husband, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, who, like his wife, is a prominent advocate on the global stage for Ukraine as it resists Russia’s brutal incursion.
“If there is even a slight possibility that military defeat could help dismantle this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once dismantled the cult of violence in Germany, we should seize it,” Applebaum stated. “Some even advocate for peace by solemnly invoking the ‘lessons of German history,” Applebaum observed, as per a transcript of her speech released by the prize organization. “As I stand here today accepting a peace prize, it seems fitting to note that ‘I want peace’ is not always a moral stance. This is also the appropriate moment to clarify that the lesson of German history is not that Germans should be pacifists.
She continued: “On the contrary, we have understood for nearly a century that a call for pacifism in the face of an aggressive, advancing dictatorship can merely signify the appeasement and acceptance of that dictatorship.” Applebaum contended that the “genuine lesson” from German history should be that Germans “have a unique responsibility to champion freedom and to take risks in doing so.” Pursuing pacifism to its logical end, Applebaum argued, would “mean that we should acquiesce to the military conquest of Ukraine, to the cultural obliteration of Ukraine, to the establishment of concentration camps in Ukraine, to the abduction of children in Ukraine.”
Applebaum contributes to The Atlantic magazine and has authored books focusing on totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, including “The Gulag,” “The Iron Curtain,” and “Red Famine,” which delves into dictator Joseph Stalin’s war on Ukraine. She recently released “Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.” In 2004, she was bestowed the esteemed Pulitzer Prize. The prize jury noted that Applebaum’s analyses of communist and post-communist systems in the Soviet Union and Russia unveil “the mechanisms through which authoritarians seize power and sustain their control.”
The laudation for Applebaum was presented by Russian historian Irina Scherbakova, a founding member of the human rights organization Memorial, which is now outlawed in Russia and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, endowed with €25,000, was presented in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt—regarded as the birthplace of German parliamentary democracy—at the conclusion of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The prize has been awarded since 1950, honoring individuals who have contributed to transforming the concept of peace into reality through literature, science, or art. Last year’s prize was awarded to British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie for his perseverance despite enduring decades of threats and violence.
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