From Vietnam to Ukraine: from Yankee Go Home to neither NATO nor Putin
The Notepad of Michael the Great
“With the other America for peace in Vietnam!”: With this title the PCI newspaper l'Unità announced, on November 27, 1965, the beginning of a vast popular mobilization against the American invasion. The choice of date was not accidental. On the same day, in fact, protest marches were scheduled in numerous European countries and an impressive march of American pacifists in Washington. Its promoters included Albert Sabin, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller and black leader James Farmer. In Rome, a vigil at the Adriano theater attracted the support of politicians of different orientations, trade union, cultural and religious organizations. Dozens of scholars, writers and artists responded to the appeal of the promoting committee (first signatories Eduardo De Filippo and Luchino Visconti), including Norberto Bobbio , Giacomo Debenedetti, Walter Binni, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini. On the other side of the Atlantic, the New York Times published the famous "Call of the Forty-Six" in December. Alongside those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Heinrich Böll, Simone de Beauvoir, Margherite Duras, Max Ernst, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, there were also the signatures of eight Italians: the filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni, Cesare Zavattini, Francesco Rosi, the sculptor Giacomo Manzù, the writers Alberto Moravia, Ignazio Silone, Lorenza Mazzetti and a democratic, cosmopolitan and heretic anti-communist like Nicola Chiaromonte.
As Francesco Montessoro points out in a precious little volume to which these notes are indebted, beyond the fascination exerted by the indomitable Vietnamese resistance, at that time a certain Third Worldism was in vogue seduced by the revolutionary-type processes underway in Cuba and Algeria, in China and, indeed, in the Indochinese peninsula (The myth of Vietnam in the Italian culture of the 60s, Sissco editions, also available in pdf). In 1967 Moravia dictated benevolent italics on the thought of Mao Zedong, and at the XXVIII Venice Film Festival, in the same year, films with evocative titles such as "The Chinese" by Jean-Luc Godard and "China is nearby" by Marco Bellocchio competed. . Furthermore, Italo Calvino had agreed to write a pamphlet against the Vietnam War for a British publisher, in which he stated that the Vietcong guerrilla "of all the partisan struggles of our century is the most widespread and the most supported by the inhabitants, the most ingenious ". For his part, the musician Luigi Nono, participating in a famous meeting at the University of Rome in April 1967, expressed equally radical opinions.
The following month, the magazine Rinascita hosted an article by Marcello Cini, professor of theoretical physics at Sapienza. A member of the PCI, but later one of the founders of the newspaper Il Manifesto , he was part of the Russell Tribunal delegation sent to North Vietnam to document the devastation caused by the “Yankee” bombings. In reality, his accounts did not describe the struggle to reunify a nation divided by the logic of opposing blocs as much as the original character of the socialist society that Ho Chi Min was building. Sensitive to Maoist suggestions, he concluded that "on the part of the workers' movement of the western capitalist countries […] support for Vietnam must go beyond the dutiful protest against injustice and generous solidarity with an attacked country, but it must become aware of the close interdependence that binds all the struggles for socialism in the world ”.
Even in secular and progressive circles that were not prejudiced against anti-Americanism, the anti-colonial demands that were spreading in the countries of the Third World were welcomed with sympathy. Community , the magazine commissioned by Adriano Olivetti, had already published in the spring of 1963 an appeal by liberals from overseas in favor of peace. A culturally similar role played Il Ponte , a monthly linked to what had been the Florentine Action Party, and around which famous figures such as Piero Calamandrei, Tristano Codignola, Giorgio Spini gravitated. Under the direction of Enzo Enriques Agnoletti, the monthly stood out for the first-hand information it provided on the international campaigns that were being organized at that time against Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy. In this cultural milieu the names of Danilo Dolci and Aldo Capitini stood out. The first, clear figure of a pacifist linked to Capitini himself, committed against the mafia in Sicily, became a member of the Russell Tribunal in 1966 and the following year organized a peace march in Vietnam that crossed Italy, urging the Moro government to distance yourself from American aggression. Even more clear are the positions of Aldo Capitini, the organizer in 1961 of the first "march of peace Perugia-Assisi". Anti-fascist and democrat, pacifist and non-violent, animated by a profound and free religious spirit, Capitini wrote some articles in 1964 in which he praised the deeds of Vietnamese Buddhists, for whom "suicide becomes the ultimate attempt to protest by choosing between death of the other and one's own – as if at the top a death takes us to change the situation – one's own death ”. The recognition of such a value to the extreme manifestations of the protest of the bonzes led him to indicate neutralism as the only and desirable prospect for a possible peace.
The Vietnamese question appeared relatively late in the leftist journalism which aimed to free itself from the hegemony of the PCI. Only in the first months of 1964 was it dealt with in the columns of the quarterly Quaderni Piacentini, translating some letters from South Vietnamese fighters. On the other hand, a talented Sinologist, Edoarda Masi, in 1965 had published in the Quaderni Rossi , the Turin periodical founded by Raniero Panzieri, "Revolution in Vietnam and the Western labor movement". An essay, later published by Einaudi in 1968, which would have profoundly influenced the debate on the meaning of the Vietnamese revolution, interpreted as a sign of the irreversible crisis of the capitalist system. On the other hand, the bimonthly Quindici, linked to exponents of the literary avant-garde such as Alfredo Giuliani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Angelo Guglielmi and then, among others, such as Nanni Balestrini, Alberto Arbasino, Umberto Eco, considered the Vietnamese question as crucial for understanding that youth rebellion which, on both sides of the Atlantic, praised Che Guevara, Mao, Fidel Castro.
In Italy, during the pontificates of John XXIII and Paul VI, the request for renewal of the Catholic world arising from the Second Vatican Council had opened a lively debate on the commitment of the believer in society and politics. In a context of albeit cautious dialogue with Marxist culture, the Vietnamese conflict became a sort of watershed between the pro-American positions of the leadership of the DC and the exponents of "dissent" led by Giorgio La Pira. Trained at the school of Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain and Luigi Sturzo, deployed on the Dossetti left, the former mayor of Florence played an important role in the pacifist movements that fought against the danger of a nuclear war. In 1959 he went to Moscow, in 1964 to the United States and, the following year, he met Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. On his return to Italy, he was the bearer of his message which was delivered, through the Foreign Minister Amintore Fanfani, to the Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
The same ecclesiastical hierarchies and Vatican diplomacy did not fail to pay close attention to the development of the revolutionary tensions that swept through Asia and Latin America. In the encyclical "Christi Matri" (September 1966), Paul VI exhorted all the belligerent parts of Vietnam to "fair negotiations". An invitation aimed at blunting the extremist and traditionally pro-American attitudes of Vietnamese Catholics, who in the 1950s had expressed a very questionable figure such as Ngo Dinh Diem, supported by Cardinal Spellman, the protagonist of a harsh anti-Communist crusade. In a subsequent encyclical, the “Populorum Progressio” (March 1967), Pope Montini disavowed the presumed legitimacy of armed rebellions: “The temptation to let oneself be drawn dangerously towards messianisms laden with promises, but makers of illusions, becomes more violent. Who does not see the dangers that derive from it, of violent popular reactions, of insurrectional agitations, and of slips towards totalitarian ideologies? ”. But their condemnation was then tempered with these words: "We know that the revolutionary insurrection – except in the case of an evident and prolonged tyranny that seriously undermines the fundamental rights of the person and dangerously harms the common good of the country – is a source of new injustices, introduces new imbalances, and causes new ruins ”.
Of completely different opinion was the periodical Testimonies . Home of radical Catholic circles, linked to the experience of the Isolotto community, the Florentine monthly became the seat of heated discussions on various ecclesial, ethical and political issues, including precisely that of violence justified by "just reasons". Commenting on the "Populorum Progressio", its leader, Father Ernesto Balducci, stated: "The Church cannot fail to recognize total equality of civil and ecclesial rights for all peoples and all races, but, by virtue of its actual situation, it cannot fully recognize those rights, for fear of losing the human guarantees of its very survival ”. Balducci then urged the Church to carry out courageous gestures: "How can we become heralds of peace and meekness to the Negroes, the Vietcong, the guerrillas from all over the world, we who in the past have justified wars waged for a just cause?" . And he concluded: “Thus we find ourselves, for having sinned against the absolute imperatives of faith, to appear in solidarity with the rich and oppressive peoples, and not to have sufficient moral prestige […]. I find the sign of so much anguish in me, a convinced supporter of non-violence, when, faced with some extreme situations these days, I find myself wondering if violence is not the only way imposed by love ”.
Far more prudent were the positions of Catholic Civilization . The organ of the Italian Jesuits did not skimp on timely information on the Vietnamese question, without, however, any particular emphasis. The articles, always anonymous, were included in the “Foreign” section of the “Contemporary Chronicle” column: a low profile location. In these articles, of moderate and substantially pro-American inspiration, the author usually gave a detailed account of Washington's humanitarian aid to the Saigon regime, considered an essential tool to pave the way for negotiations. A thesis destined to be blatantly denied by the progressive resurgence of the conflict, which ended on April 30, 1975 with the fall of Saigon.
Despite all its ambiguities, blunders, reticence and ideological ambitions, in short, the Italian progressive intelligentsia did not hesitate to "get its hands dirty" on the Vietnamese question. Thinking of his commitment today to the Ukrainian one, the comparison is merciless. Thanks to the sounding board offered by television talk shows, the media stage is now successfully trodden first and foremost by the intellectual "neneist". Coined by Roland Barthes, the term neneism 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, specifies 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 first responsibility that Norberto Bobbio attributed to intellectuals: that to prevent the monopoly of force from becoming the monopoly of truth as well.
In the present time, where the supreme values of liberal democracy are at stake, there is no room for third-party (read: anti-Western) 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 self-styled partisans of peace should have no doubts in siding with the sculptor of the Pietà. There is a verse from the Bellum Civile by the Latin poet Lucano which reads: “Victrix causa deis placuit / Sed victa Catoni”. Its meaning is: Caesar's cause won because it was supported by the gods, while Cato the Uticense lost for having espoused the cause of republican freedom. Does this mean that the vanquished are always wrong just because they are vanquished? But can't today's winner be tomorrow's winner?
*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/dal-vietnam-ucraina-da-yankee-go-home-a-ne-con-la-nato-ne-con-putin/ on Sat, 17 Sep 2022 05:29:02 +0000.