The atrocities of war

For some months now, the states bordering the former Soviet Union have been preparing for the conflict by massing troops and combat vehicles a few kilometers from the "enemy", the NATO umbrella is unfolding and flexing its muscles by merging different but firmly united flags in their intention, and also in the Italian barracks, almost hidden, the declared state is that of "maximum alert".

Strangely, however, all this is not mentioned in the daily news, while the scenes of destruction in Ukraine, the devastated buildings, the falling missiles and the blackened carcasses of Russian tanks signed with the fateful Z dominate the media scene. There is a sort of implicit contradiction in this unbalanced information which on the one hand exhibits images of the horrors of a war that demands justice while, on the other hand, it seems to forget that it would all be all of us Europeans who would eventually fight it. It is a chilling equation, but one tinged with concrete realism that we try to exorcise by cloaking it in silence. An impossible prospect that seemed to belong to distant states and nations and which has now turned into a specter knocking on our door; we all know very well that history does not teach and that it always repeats itself.

The memory of the atrocities of the war is the heritage of the survivors and is dying out for personal reasons, the last conscripts are all over fifty and are re-evaluating that experience they hated so much in their youth while the latest generations grew up in the shadow of their mother's skirt they don't have the slightest idea of what defending their "patriotic soil" means to the point of not realizing that, in a possible moment of need, they will be the ones to be called to the muster. The threat of using nuclear weapons and that of adequate responses to their possible use, bounces back between Putin and Biden as if it were a macabre game of the last survivor without a credible figure capable of mediating between the parties appearing on the horizon. What seems increasingly clear is that this conflict fuels the economic interests of many more or less hidden players in this theater of war and that the global crisis, first in the food sector and now in the energy sector, has become the real weapon that will decide the fate of the world.

After a summer marked by the relaunch of tourism, crowded restaurants and beaches and exaggerated light-heartedness, now the news dominated by the new politicians who have come out of the polls tell us of unknown poverty, of cold winters that await us, of lights that go out and of global recession, but this is only the other side of a fratricidal war that is being fought on the borders of our glittering world that is struggling to come to terms with a not very distant past that risks returning.

Michelagelo Dotta

NP Novembre 2022