I tell you about the massacre of Ukraine
Reading certain newspapers, the massacre of civilians in Ukraine, the destruction of cities, the bombing of schools and hospitals seem an annoying reality to be resigned to. It is not so. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali
On February 24, 2022, the large-scale invasion of Ukraine began, euphemistically defined by Putin as a "special military operation". If the latter had presented it as what it really is, i.e. a war, that same day he would have been exposed first before the UN Security Council by expelling the Russian Federation – which is arguably a permanent member with veto power – by unilateral declaration of war.
In Italian television and domestic living rooms, on social media and by certain negationist press, reality has always been placed in a doubtful form, almost as if that punitive and cowardly military aggression had somehow been provoked. What Putin trusted to be a 'blitzkrieg' that in three days would allow him to take Kyiv by defenestrating Zelensky turned out to be the most senseless special bankruptcy operation in modern history.
However, driven by a strong latent anti-Americanism and an implicit pro-Putinism, that plethora of pacifinti continued on the compliant media with the most mendacious and shameful campaign of historical mystification of the facts. On the left were the more cogitating intellectuals, who with a more or less condescending attitude invited us to understand the alleged reasons of the aggressor by dusting off imaginative non-existent historical realities, voluntary annexations that never took place and violating the principle of self-determination of peoples . Instead, conspiracy theorists, conspiracists, Trumpians and the same deniers who a few months earlier refuted the effectiveness of vaccines for Covid and the very existence of the disease have positioned themselves on the populist and sovereignist far right.
The Ukrainian resistance reminds us – and we should mention it more often – of the militancy of our partisans against homegrown fascists and invading Nazis.
Certainly we all would like the war to end soon: the catastrophic effects of that wicked and ruinous initiative materialized in the daily raids which involved the destruction of villages and entire cities in which hospitals, schools, kindergartens, shopping centers and housing; with the massacre of unarmed civilians, the forced deportation of 17,000 children (often made orphans by the same criminals who then kidnapped them) to the most distant areas of Russia.
The Russians tortured and raped women and children of all ages; they used direct and indirect nuclear threat by taking atomic power plants hostage, they caused the worst intentionally man-made environmental disaster in decades by destroying the Nova Kakhovka dam. They blackmailed the poorest and most defenseless with hunger, destroying tons of grain. They used the cold and the dark to bring down a people they already tried to eradicate 90 years ago with the holodomor, repeating one of the worst genocides in history.
Each of the aspects of the racial essence has been so evident and well documented as to induce the International Criminal Court to issue for the first time in history an arrest warrant against the President of a nuclear power. Having reached this point, a historical study of the facts is necessary – numbers in hand – on the initiative of the governments of the free states and above all of the UN and of all the humanitarian organizations. The images of bombed-out buildings, of tortured, burned and mutilated prisoners, of raped women, of elderly people covered in rags who collect what little food they can get sitting in the rubble of what remains of their homes, erased all intimacy and all memory domestic in the misery of the present, made up of the trinkets that remain are there for all to see, and place each of us before our own conscience. Living – or rather, surviving – under the constant threat of bombs and the use of atomic weapons is indescribable: let us try to identify ourselves with the feelings of that massacred people, of the "battered Ukraine" – as Pope Francis incessantly recalls it and presents it to the eyes of world
The count of children who died under Russian fire has been lost: it seems that so far there are over 500 minors whose lives have been taken in the name of an invasion that the regime and even the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church have justified as sacred and harbinger of beatifications for the soldiers who had distinguished themselves with greater ferocity if anything in a war that will not open the doors to any paradise for them – as on the contrary they have been led to believe – and it is time for the Western world and peaceful religions to distance themselves from this massacre of mankind, of the weakest and most defenceless, perpetrated in the name of God by accusing those who disagree of extremism and of immorality those who deviate from the concept of a sexual life other than that prescribed by the State. Immeasurably higher and more serious is the number of little ones stolen from their families and taken to the distant steppe or to Siberia, of which there is no longer any news or trace. Small Russified, that is, raised and 're-educated' according to the regime's principles, starting with inoculating them with hatred for a distant homeland which is portrayed as a non-existent and "Nazi" geographical and historical reality.
One wonders what ethically distinguishes this doctrine which inspires the sacred fury against the weaknesses and "immoralities" of the West from the conditions in which men and above all women live, deprived of any most elementary personal dignity, of the respect it is due to every human being, the joy and the desire to live, as happens in Afghanistan and Iran.
The evidence is clear and the implicit must be laid bare: we have to put on glasses that reveal to us the reality of the pain of misery, oppression and death for what they are.
Political, ideological and religious extremisms are a devastating scourge that we must understand without retrospective mystifications and justifications of any kind.
War, wars must end without the victims – the attacked states, peoples, civilians – being forced to resign themselves to an unacceptable submission. Tyrants do not know history because they show that they have learned no lessons from it.
Perhaps the sacrifice of martyrs sooner or later leads to a ransom but the price you pay is that of renewed, silent holocausts. It's time for it all to end, sure but not with succumbing.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/racconto-massacro-ucraina/ on Sat, 19 Aug 2023 06:19:19 +0000.