(Translation of the legal novel by the famous Greek lawyer, defender of conscientious objectors during and after the colonial regime)

Sometimes it’s simple coincidences, encounters made seemingly by chance, that turn our whole lives upside down. The one experienced by Minas Destounis, a young Greek man barely 18, radically changed the course of his life. Promised a bright future, one day he found himself behind prison bars. Humiliated, tortured and isolated, he never regretted his chance encounter. On the contrary, it was the best thing that could have happened to him. From now on, he could live with the respect of his conscience.

“Billions of dollars are spent every year, and a large number of renowned international personalities are constantly busy in pseudo-advice for peace and disarmament commissions, in order to achieve what my client has already achieved – disarmament. But why are they doing all this? Because three thousand years of human history have taught them that when mankind is armed, the only thing it succeeds in doing is flooding every corner of the earth with innocent blood.”

Thanassis REPPAS was born in 1938 in Fanari, Olympia, and showed talent as a writer and poet from an early age. A law graduate from Athens University, he worked for many years as a lawyer, while continuing to write short stories, essays and plays.

The present book was written in 1979 and published the same year in Greek under the title Pour motifs de conscience. It was his experiences as an advocate for conscientious objectors that motivated him to write this work based on true events. More recently, the book has been reprinted and translated into various languages under the title Pour ne jamais connaître la guerre (Never to Know War Again), thus expressing the theme and purpose of this work even more satisfactorily.