Ukrainians remind us of the greatest forgotten lesson of the resistance
With regard to the military confrontation between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the reference to the biblical duel between David and Goliath is recurrent, to emphasize the imbalance of forces in the field, but not always bearing in mind the conclusion of that duel, which tells us how it was won by determination. and cunning right from David. There are those who, on the mere calculation of the armies facing each other, in terms of men, tanks, airplanes, missiles, give it lost at the start, so much so that they consider a mere prolongation of the agony pursued by Zelens'kyj, a harbinger of massacres and avoidable destruction with a substantially unconditional surrender, because this and no other would be the harsh reality. Of course it could also be a way out, if it were the war between Zelenskii and Putin, but it is not, as three weeks of indomitable resistance show; it is the war between the Ukrainian people and Putin, which is capable of imposing it on 45 million men and women.
An entire people can be told to renounce their identity, accepting a surrender that is far from being considered inevitable. If the Ukrainian president goes so far as to talk about victory, he certainly does it to give confidence, but his word would count for little or nothing if it were not confirmed by the convinced participation of the entire population. There is no doubt that the conquest of the cities, even if partially freed of women and children, will cost enormously to the attacked, but certainly not less, indeed much more to the aggressors, who are perfectly aware of it so much that they take time to enter, for occupy them militarily.
History is still being written, it is not yet written. The surrender is by no means the guarantee of a minimally negotiated negotiation, Brenno's sword always weighs on the scales, the resistance rebalances the plates to a greater or lesser extent, based on how much the aggression has already cost, but above all how much it may cost further , the Russian people do not know it, but Putin and the ranks of the oligarchs know it very well and will know it even better once the sanctions are fully implemented.
The thing that disturbs is the belief by now deeply rooted in our people that freedom does not deserve life, we scream at mythologizing the resistance to Nazi-fascism, without taking into account its greatest lesson, that one can go to death with nothing else than hope to thus ensure freedom for those who will come. More than many false reconstructions and anti-fascist rhetorical demonstrations, it would be enough to have the letters of the Italian and European resistance sentenced to death read in schools, who said that if there is no certainty of winning, it is not worth fighting, even the certainty of losing, it can be worth it, leaving behind a conquered but not tamed people.
More than peaceful people we are peaceful people, under the banner of "let's arm ourselves and go", we have always been in modern history, accustomed to being conquered and dominated, but to infect the occupiers with our own ability to survive, while the resistance has always been expressed by small minorities. Nothing wrong with that, but we absolutely cannot make it a perspective with which to evaluate other people for whom the domination of a neighboring power, already tragically experienced in the past, has meant not only something very close to genocide, but the sweetening of every national characteristic, starting with the language, for which the answer is an armed mobilization involving everyone, military and civilians.
I happened to watch a film the other night, "The officer and the spy" , which recalled the well-known Dreyfus case, but with regard to what was the real protagonist, although he remained less known, the colonel Georges Picquart, called to head the Statistics Section (Military Intelligence Service of the French Army). Although charged with finding further evidence against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, already convicted of treason, he realized that the real traitor, once the artfully built ones were discarded and others absolutely decisive were found, was a French officer named Esterhazy. From here began his battle against a staff absolutely unwilling to recognize the error, due to the enormous national and international echo that the case had acquired, certainly inflated by Dreyfuss being a Jew so as to feed a widespread anti-Semitism. With an initial carrot and stick policy, Picquart was promoted to lieutenant colonel and sent on a mission on an inspection tour, then transferred to Tunisia. This was just the beginning, when the real traitor, Esterhazy, was acquitted in a trial he started to prove his innocence, Picquart was arrested for revealing state secrets, imprisoned for 60 days, disciplinarily sanctioned, only to be then again forced to jail for almost two years.
For him it was not only the innocence of an individual at stake but the honor of the French army itself which, as a military man, coincided with that of France, he alone against an entire general staff, which fed a poisoned climate such as to involve the whole system. Émile Zola, with his famous "J'accuse" , was sentenced to one year in prison. At the time Picquart did not know at all if he would win, indeed everything proved to the contrary, the imbalance on the field was impressive, at first only, but capable of arousing a growing movement of favorable public opinion, he was so convinced of his assumption that he broke with Dreyfus , for allowing his family to ask for pardon. We know very well who history has proved right: Dreyfus had his belated declaration of innocence, which, however, did not repay him for a destructive event, his life and his career, Picquart even became minister of war. I may be wrong, but it seemed to me that this great little story also contained a moral for the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/gli-ucraini-ci-ricordano-la-piu-grande-lezione-dimenticata-della-resistenza/ on Fri, 18 Mar 2022 03:54:00 +0000.