A few questions to the Italian pacifists
The Notepad of Michael the Great
[…]
Let's imagine that a ceasefire is reached, perhaps thanks to a wink from Xi Jinping to his counterpart in the Kremlin, who never ceases to stir the specter of a planetary conflict. Ukraine would be left with its urban and industrial ruins, its civilian infrastructure destroyed, its devastated territory, its thousands of dead, its dismembered families, its gigantic reconstruction problems. In this context, what are the conditions for a just peace? Here the donkey falls. Can they disregard the withdrawal of the invading army from the oblasts annexed by a farce referendum and the reparation of war damages? They can, but only if you agree with Erasmus of Rotterdam's adage, according to which “the most unjust peace is better than the most just war” (Querula pacis, 1517).
We must not be scandalized. The dawn of the new pacifist movement in Italy symbolically saw the light on September 24, 1961. On that day the first "March for peace and brotherhood among peoples" took place from Perugia to Assisi. Conceived and organized by Aldo Capitini, it intended to combine the three historical cultures of twentieth-century pacifism with the verb of Gandhism: social-communist, catholic and radical. From the struggles for the recognition of conscientious objection, then introduced by law in 1972, to the support of the no-global movements in the turn of the century, its guiding light has always been the same: all wars are the other side of neoliberalism. and "the nuclear threat looms over the planet", as stated on the platform of the demonstration. Yes, but who is it today who threatens? His name is never spoken. On the other hand, can one seriously believe that, by yielding to the blackmail of a tyrant, he would become more indulgent? Exactly the opposite would happen, and the countries that have known the heel of the USSR know this well.
“Vim vi repellere licet”, it is legitimate to reject violence with violence, is a principle already present in Justinian's Digest (533). It is accepted by every juridical system and by every moral doctrine, except precisely by the doctrines of nonviolence. With an even extensive interpretation, it was also accepted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, wanted in 1992 by John Paul II as an expression of the conciliar magisterium. "Opus iustitiae, pax" (Isaiah 32.17) was his episcopal motto. And, since peace can only come from justice, Pope Wojtyla will go so far as to say that "there are cases in which armed struggle is an inevitable evil which, in tragic circumstances, even Christians cannot escape (Homily on Heldenplatz in Vienna, September 10, 1983). For his part, a champion of secular thought like Norberto Bobbio, even in the years in which he denounced the nuclear arms race with anguish, recalled that "pacifism is not only invoking peace, praying for peace, giving testimony of wanting peace [ …]. This is ethical-religious pacifism, which is consciously inspired by the ethics of good intentions. Opposing absolute nonviolence in every form, even the smallest, of violence. Offer the other cheek. Better to die like Abel than to live like Cain. It is no longer possible to distinguish just wars from unjust wars. All wars are unfair. [But] is it not true that the impotence of the meek man ends up favoring the bully? In a situation in which, in order to observe the principle of nonviolence, all states were willing to throw down their weapons, the only one who refused to do so would become the master of the world "(The problem of war and the ways of peace, preface to the fourth edition, il Mulino 1997).
Gandhi 's conception of nonviolence, to which the Turin philosopher referred, has received disparate interpretations over time. It was welcomed with enthusiasm (as well as by Capitini) by Giorgio La Pira. Instead she was dismissed as a utopian by Jean Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon, and even as a reactionary by Herbert Marcuse. But what nonviolence are we talking about? The question is crucial. The Mahatma has always distinguished non-violence as a belief (“non-violence as a creed”) from non-violence as a tactical choice (“non-violence as a policy”). The first is that of the strong (or "satyagraha"), which is based on the moral rejection of violence and which requires audacity, self-denial, discipline and a profound faith in the goodness of one's cause. The second is that of the weak (or passive resistance), used by those who do not feel resolute enough to take up arms. The latter, in turn, should not be confused with the nonviolence of the coward, the result of pure cowardice or petty selfish interests. Although – he writes in his Autobiography – "violence is not lawful, when it is used for self-defense or to protect the defenseless it is an act of courage, far better than cowardly submission" (AliRibelli Edizioni, 2019). In this sense, Gandhi's position, as Marco Pannella had well guessed, who also took his effigy as a symbol of the radicals, cannot be identified with the absolute pacifism of Leo Tolstoy, who even contemplated "the refusal to kill one's fellow men ". After all, Hannah Arendt echoed him, if Gandhi's nonviolent practice "had clashed with Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, pre-war Japan, instead of the British Empire, its outcome would have been not decolonization , but a massacre ”(On violence, 1970).
When the supreme values of democracy and freedom are at stake, there should be no room for third party positions. You have to choose which side to take: either here or there. To take up a metaphor dear to Julien Benda, between Michelangelo who accuses Leonardo of his indifference to the misfortunes of Florence, and Leonardo who replies that the study of beauty occupies his whole heart, the partisans of peace should have no doubts in siding with him. sculptor of the Pietà. A caustic and disenchanted aphorism by Giuseppe Prezzolini says: Italian citizens are divided into two categories: the crafty and the foolish. In our case, the fools are those who believe that peace cannot be the "graveyard of freedom" (Kant ). The clever ones are those who assert that on the altar of future peace “even the freedom of a people can be sacrificed [temporarily]” (Robespierre). Among the fools and the clever ones today there are the "neneists", a third category not foreseen by Prezzolini.
The term "Neneism", coined by Roland Barthes, consists in establishing two opposites and weighing them against each other in order to reject both: I want neither this nor that. It is a magical process, explains the prince of French semiologists, through which one equates how embarrassing it is to choose to get rid of a reality that does not correspond to one's prejudices. From yesterday's “neither with the State nor with the Red Brigades” to today's “neither with NATO nor with Putin”, our most recent history is full of neneists. Pale stunt doubles of Romain Rolland author, shortly after the start of the Great War, of Au-dessus de la mêlée ("Above the fray"), do not have the courage to assume the main responsibility that Bobbio always attributed to intellectuals: that to prevent the monopoly of force from becoming the monopoly of truth as well. On the contrary, they often preach "neither here nor there", they believe that their task is not to get their hands dirty, to look with aristocratic disdain at the dogs that fight; and perhaps to continue to speculate, predicting misfortunes, on the outcome of the "special military operation". They are those scholars who, professing to be neutral, believe that they "float on the waves like the lords of the storm, and are rejected, without realizing it, in an uninhabited island" (The doubt and the choice, La Nuova Italia, 1993).
There is a distant episode that tells a lot about today's “Neneist” pacifism. Vietnam, My Lai village, March 16, 1968: a company of American riflemen exterminates several hundred unarmed civilians, mainly the elderly, women and children. The soldiers also indulged in the torture and rape of the inhabitants. The commander of the company, Lt. William Calley, was sentenced in 1971 to forced labor for life (a sentence commuted by President Nixon to detention in a federal prison). The My Lai massacre outraged US public opinion, which reacted with massive mass demonstrations for the withdrawal of its troops from the occupied territories. The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship lies here. Even the former can be guilty of horrendous crimes, but it has the antibodies, starting with free information, to fight the virus of violence and infamy. But there is also a difference between then and now. At that time the pacifists (both Social-Communists and Catholics) fought strenuously against American imperialism, and demanded the surrender of the aggressors as a condition of the end of the war. Now the pacifists (both former Social Communists and Catholics) do not fight, or fight very lukewarmly, against Russian imperialism, and demand the surrender of the attacked as a condition of the end of the war. In short, out of the teeth: pacifism without ifs and buts is driven above all by love for peace, or by hatred for the West?
The community of believers is not a monolith. The pope himself was surprised by the invasion of the Donbass. Since it took off, its message has gone from the enunciation of a radical pacifism to the Ukrainian banner waved in St. Peter's Square, to the "bitter necessity" of armed resistance admitted by Cardinal Pietro Parolin. In the Vatican as in the people of the parishes, the dilemma between resistance and surrender re-emerges that the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer resolved by choosing the former and paying the price in the Flossenburg concentration camp. Other faithful, on the other hand, are in favor of the second. However, this tension between pacifist Christians who accuse other Christians of being "warlike" is not unprecedented.
In October 1939, Emmanuel Mounier published an essay entitled "Les Chrétiens devant le problème de la paix" in the magazine Esprit. Published for the first time in Italy in 1958, it has just been reprinted by Castelvecchi (I Christians and Peace, introduction by Giancarlo Galeazzi, introduction by Stefano Ceccanti). Its context deserves to be briefly summarized, because it is “de nobis fabula narratur”. On 29 September 1938, Hitler met the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini in Munich. The next morning they signed an agreement that allowed the German army to complete the occupation of the Sudetenland. Britain and France communicated to the Czechoslovak government that it could either resist the Nazi invasion alone or surrender and accept the deal. Abandoned by its allies, Czechoslovakia quickly threw in the towel. Upon their return to their homeland, Chamberlain and Daladier were greeted by cheering crowds, convinced that a disastrous military conflict with the Third Reich had been averted and that its hegemonic ambitions in Europe had been appeased. In March 1939, Hitler broke the agreement by annexing the whole of Bohemia and Moravia.
With a clear allusion to the "betrayal of Munich", the Catholic philosopher of "personalism" writes: "This pacifism, in September 1938, did not have at heart the justice of the Sudetenland, nor that of the Czechs, nor that of the Treaties, nor that of the their victims, nor the injustice of war, but he had only one obsession: that his dreams as a pensioner would not be interrupted. […] Peace is compromised not only by warmongers but also by cowards […]. Is this the behavior that befits the faithful of a religion whose cornerstone is a God made man on earth? ”. These are noble words, the expression of a "Christian realism" sidereally distant from the political realism exhibited in imaginative peace plans by some domestic maître à penser. For one of the many paradoxes of which republican history is full, it fell to a post-fascist woman to underline that "those who believe it is possible to trade Ukraine's freedom for our tranquility are wrong" (Giorgia Meloni, inauguration speech to the Chambers).
*The paper
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/qualche-domanda-ai-pacifisti-italiani/ on Sat, 12 Nov 2022 06:36:56 +0000.