Are we riding the war?
Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
When we read of prestigious think tanks that exclaim: “the war has changed everything!”, The French “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” may come to mind. I am referring exclusively to the rhetoric of public discourse produced by the climate of a call to arms, without allowing me to touch the political, strategic or military aspects of something as serious as a war, of which I know nothing, of which I think I can learn little from the means of war. mass information and of which the aspect I consider here is certainly marginal.
From a certain point of view, war works like the development bath in photography, which makes visible the images deposited on the photosensitive support. It does not cause any surprises but eliminates any doubts. For example, after two months of wars in Ucràina, who can still doubt the "inclination to anticipate (even more than to satisfy) the wishes of the princeps" that Luciano Canfora (to name one) attributes to Italian journalism? Moreover. In the warlike climate it is also difficult to distinguish journalism and journalism: the differences between a Corriere della Sera , a Repubblica , and a Neue Zürcher Zeitung , can still be perceived in terms of style, attention to words, sense of proportion, but the substance is the same: there is war, there is the enemy and there are ours, and in this case there is not even the effort to "anticipate the wishes" because the identification with "ours" is total, automatic and pervasive far beyond the limited media world.
In these circumstances, the best journalism is engaged in collecting and narrating the most evocative aspects of the strong points of the narrative of its part: the heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, the massacres of civilians by Russian missiles, the insane cruelty of "Putin's war" (to choose from "criminal", "murderer", "butcher" and finally "genocidal") of which the whole of Russia would be only an extension: and certainly, of brutal, atrocious aspects and so on, the war of Putin will not be stingy, as no wars are, not even those where the killing of civilians is used to define "collateral damage". So far we are in the norm of media campaigns that are not only legitimate but sacrosanct, which in addition to involving also a risky work on the ground, satisfy an effective demand.
In this respect it cannot be said that Italian journalism excels, not because Italian journalists are less good or less courageous than others, but because Italian publishers have long since decided that it is not worth investing in reports, investigations and the envoys (that of “envoy” is now more a qualification matured through seniority than a professional qualification, naturally with the due exceptions). As a whole, in Italy there is a tendency to "live on income" on the effective interventions of Volodymyr Zelensky in the parliaments of Western countries and on the work on the ground of newspapers of other countries, as well as on the "experts" always ready to offer their prophecy.
Where Italian journalism stands out is in the incessant compilation of rankings that include anyone who claims to give voice to distinctions in the choral execration, without ifs and buts, of the tyrant of Moscow, a bit like what has been done in the last two years for the "No vax", a category in which intellectuals were also included despite having all the available vaccinations, who however believed, mistakenly, to be able to publicly express reservations on the way the green pass works and on the effectiveness of other measures adopted to counteract the pandemic (with enviable candor the long-time "courier" Beppe Severgnini would have explained to a scientist, on the small screen, that certain things do not matter if they are true: they are not said in the mass media: I have not heard my ears but "if it is not true it is well found").
This time even Lucio Caracciolo entered the viewfinder, who has been a geopolitical scholar for several decades by profession, is paid precisely to analyze with the utmost professional detachment the issues of geopolitics which are often wars and has never given any reason for to be suspected, even remotely, of sovereignty and / or populism; but in the fervent climate of recent weeks to earn the stigma of the “Putinversteher” a vocal imprint not sufficiently altered by indignation is enough, and it must be admitted that Caracciolo expresses himself with a self-control that is currently unacceptable, apparently.
For a few weeks, to give themselves a tone, some have used the term Putinversteher (those who include Putin) dusting off eight years later the word used by Mathias Brücker and Paul Schreyer with transparent irony in the book Wir sind die Guten – Ansichten eines Putinverstehers oder wie uns die Medien manipulieren (We are the good ones – Opinions of a Putinversteher or how the media manipulate us). The president of the Anpi was also treated by Putinversteher because pacifism, which on other occasions has covered Italy with the colors of the rainbow, to the applause of the media and all authorities, has today become a form of intelligence with the enemy . Refined left-wing periodicals that are received only by subscription and normally offer first-rate content, write of the resistance opposed by the Ukrainians to the invasion of Putin's "fascist superpower" ("autocratic" or "dictatorial" is too little) while the war it is underway and probably not only we in the public are not in the best position to understand what is happening, beyond the fact that an invasion is underway.
It will not be a "cowardly outrage" that of the media but it is objectively something reminiscent of writings visible until a few years ago on the walls of dilapidated houses: "believe, obey and fight" or, if you prefer, "whoever is not with us is against we". Other than pacifism. Whoever does not take a position is at least "objectively" an ally of the enemy. To be honest, and here the reference is not to the media but to our Prime Minister, also enunciating the alternative between freedom and air conditioning (to urge the people to accept the prospect of a rationing and / or higher cost of electricity) it doesn't sound very different from that "without the grease the cannon does not fire" sadly known to those who had children or grandchildren who wrote from the front during the Great War.
Even if we boast a fair amount of know-how in this area, this does not mean that such attitudes are our local exclusive. Boris Johnson, deservedly known for his nice bronze face, has outdone himself by accusing the Church of England of criticizing Her Majesty's government's plan (transporting illegal migrants to Rwanda) with more hype than that reserved for condemning the Russia (more pertinently, Johnson could have complained that Denmark had not raised any criticism when, less than a year ago, it entered into an agreement with Kosovo that offered to "host" a number of foreigners in its prisons. detained in Denmark and destined for possible expulsion, but evidently the Church of England in the United Kingdom has more audience than Denmark or Kosovo).
Not that the campaign of sacrosanct hatred against Putin is limited to our country, to give just one example days ago the Spectator , venerable and venerable conservative English periodical published a caricature of Putin with a deformed face and, instead of the skin, one layer of small skulls: a rather macabre way of taking part in the media lynching of the Moscow autocrat who remains such (that is, it remains a lynching) whatever the responsibilities and faults of Putin himself and in any case everyone deems to qualify them.
Hate campaigns are of course part of the war, but the point is that no Western country, to date, is part of this war. As The Economist noted, with all the weight of its authority, "Giving Ukraine heavy weapons does not mean NATO is at war with Russia." Apart from the slightly truffle-like flavor, from azzeccagarbugli, of the argument used by the weekly, it seems that precisely this circumstance of not taking part in the warring war induces a sense of guilt that can be alleviated only with the repeated manifestation of hatred at the guilty party. The alternative hypothesis is that hatred finds fertile ground in resentment and concern over the rising cost of living, which is blamed on Putin and his war, even if it started many months earlier and is obviously multiplied by economic and economic warfare. media with which the real antagonist of Moscow, the current Washington administration, has pushed Western allies, especially Europeans, to react to Putin's war initiative: which of the two hypotheses is "preferable" from the point of view of collective psychology, I ignore it. The fact remains that this hunt for the Putinian also malgré lui , in order to expose him to public derision, betrays a distant but not very distant national custom, that of mass denunciation (cf. Eros and Priapo by Carlo Emilio Gadda, Garzanti, 1990).
Nor can it be considered a surprise that once again the European Union has revealed itself for what it essentially is, the economic and social leg which, together with the military leg of NATO, constitutes that Euro-Atlantic coalition headed by Washington even if both organizations have their "registered office" in Brussels.
No sensible person has ever been able to believe in the fiction of the EU understood as the materialization of the "unitary dream" of the European people, at least in the last 30-35 years, but the "revealing" effect of the war from this point of view has been particularly effective: if on the one hand Zelensky badly slammed the door of Kiev in the face of the head of state of the most populous member state of the union, Germany, wanting to accuse Frank-Walter Steinmeier, former foreign minister, a previous pro-Russian policy or not sufficiently anti-Russian in Germany, on the other hand the president of the EU Commission, speaking of Ucràina, said: "There is a feeling of belonging, they are part of ours and we want them to join us", ignoring the detail that the admission of new states members requires the unanimous consent of the European Council in which each member state participates with one vote.
But the noteworthy circumstance, even if not unprecedented, is that no one has allowed himself to lead Ursula von der Leyen back to respecting her own competences. We have already had repeated occasion to note how, faithful to its role as the "economic-social leg" of the Euro-Atlantic device, the European Commission preferably orientates itself according to the wind blowing from Washington: this had already been seen icastically when, after the referendum "South American" by Alexis Tsipras who risked taking Greece out of the Euro in July 2015, the long tiramolla between Angela Merkel's Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who proposed a period of "freezing" of the Greek economy outside the currency common and Jack Lew, Barack Obama's Treasury Minister determined to prevent Greece from leaving the Euro, invited (or more likely self-invited) to follow Greece's negotiations live with Merkel, François Hollande, the Commission and the ECB, ended with the total defeat of Schäuble.
Last but not least, the war climate impoverishes, depriving them of their history and consequently of their emotional charge also specifies very important words, and so it happens that Joe Biden says that those of Putin's armies are not war crimes but also "genocide" , for an official to correct him by noting that "Genocide includes the goal of destroying an ethnic group or a nation, and so far that is not what we are seeing" and then move on to other topics. Speaking of genocide like this, en passant, is a sign of the feverish time we are living in, which does not allow us to weigh the words, not even the one, "genocide", which America has refused to use for a century about the extermination of one and a half million Armenian subjects of the Sultan of Constantinople, and with Biden she "resigned herself" to using in a declaration of 24 April 2021 which ends with an unequivocal sentence ("the American people honor all the Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago ") but points out that we do not want to blame but to ensure that what happened will never be repeated and in any case we carefully avoid mentioning the one who was the universal heir of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, that is Turkey. It is obvious, if I may express a personal opinion, that the head of the by far most powerful nation on the planet (as well as any head of state) should always express himself with this attention only, but I fear that by now the Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day, pondered for over a century and then formulated by weighing every word and every comma, is an exception worthy of entering the anthologies.
From the rhetoric to which one must now get used to, I quote below a remnant that I find particularly representative, an excerpt from an editorial by Christian Rocca on Linkiesta :
“First Joe Biden, now Emmanuel Macron, it is really a beautiful Liberation from populist fascism that is celebrated today.
Two large popular victories with which liberal democracy finally took back its destiny and, at least temporarily, rejected the most devastating global broadsides of the enemies of the open society.
After the years of darkness, which began with Brexit and continued with Trump and then with the defeat of the Renzian referendum and the rise of the subversive movements of the right and left, particularly in Italy of perfect bipopulism, the republican and constitutional front of the The West has resumed the leadership of the free world, threatened by Vladimir Putin and the alliance of authoritarian regimes first with hackers, aid to anti-system parties and the manipulation of public opinion, thanks to the digital bug offered by the business model of social networks , but now also with tanks, genocide and imperialist and nuclear threats to Ukraine and Europe ”.
There is everything, in these lines, after the joyful incipit for Emmanuel Macron's statement, there is also the "free world", the "republican and constitutional front of the West", a scoop, the news (implicit , of course) that the "Renzian referendum" would have been defeated by the black wave of Brexit and Trump: I seemed to remember that in reality that referendum collided with the wall erected by the best minds of national progressivism, who accused Renzi, and not in a manner of speaking, of wanting to introduce a worse regime than the fascist one in Italy, but maybe I get confused.
It is the climate of the new (not so) cold war that even prestigious American scholars predict, starting with Robert Kagan: many but not all. Even in a place that cannot be more establishment, such as Foreign Affairs , there are those who raise argued objections, reject the idea of "riding" Putin's war to settle scores with the Putin regime and Russia itself, others who write even the "Fantasy of the free world". Without anyone running the risk of being called Putinversteher.
In the heart of the world hegemonized by America, debate is still allowed, and above all it is practiced. Even while a war is underway that affects him (the heart) very closely. In the suburbs it is different. You have to know how to be satisfied.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cavalchiamo-la-guerra/ on Sat, 30 Apr 2022 06:55:14 +0000.