Truth and falsehood about Ukraine
“After having lived the Ukrainian reality for more than ten years, my conscience requires me not to remain silent in the face of certain distortions of the historical reality of the facts about the war in Ukraine”, Giorgio Provinciali tells Start Magazine. Here is his article
The author of the article, Giorgio Provinciali, was born in Italy and has lived with his partner, Alla, who was born in Ukraine for more than ten years. Provinciali deals with sports engineering. “After having lived the Ukrainian reality for more than ten years, my conscience requires me not to remain silent in the face of certain distortions of the historical reality of the facts about the war in Ukraine,” he tells Start Magazine. ( Startmag editorial team )
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DOES LIFE HAVE SO MUCH VALUE TO EXCEED THAT OF DIGNITY?
July 24, 1943.
Having greeted the family and observed a few minutes of silence in the church, Dino Grandi prepares to enter Palazzo Venezia to pronounce the historic motion of no confidence in the Duce, with which he allegedly caused the arrest of Mussolini and the fall of the regime.
Before his entrance he receives two Breda 35 hand grenades from a faithful lover. Recommended to pull the fuse while keeping away from the target, he replies: “Far? If Mussolini tries to arrest me, I will not be taken alive. I will unleash the irreparable, directly in the hall of the Grand Council, for the good of Italy ".
The rest is history.
The "Grandi motion" (which he had even announced to the Duce the day before) passed with 19 votes in favor, 7 contrarians and 1 abstained. On the morning of July 25, Mussolini was deposed, only to be arrested later.
There is no official record of that last session of the Grand Council of Fascism but the names of those who, with their gesture (paid for by some, subsequently, with their lives), made history remain.
February 24, 2022.
The black and white images of a History that we wanted to forget too soon have taken on color but what they document is the same.
At 4 Italian time, Vladimir Putin gives the order to invade Ukraine, following what he calls a "special military operation" to "denazify" what instead is nothing more than a country free of its right to live according to democratic rules, libertarian values and equality, guilty of identifying with a West so close but never so far away.
The machine of lies built in the last thirty years by Putin and to which not a few Italian politicians have winked in the past collapses, dramatically revealing itself for what it really is: a despotic and autarchic regime in which, by his own admission, Putin himself he sees heir to Lenin and Stalin, feeling entitled to perpetrate the same war crimes that unite him to them, succeeding in some ways in the arduous task of outclassing them.
Until now, no one had deliberately fired on hospitals, orphanages, schools and churches of a People he himself defined as "fraternal". No one ever had the courage to define part of their people as "scum, traitorous bastards to spit out like gnats accidentally flown into their mouths".
Contrasting him with the figure of Zelensky, a Ukrainian leader of Jewish origins, democratically elected. It would be him, the drugged Nazi to be weeded out.
He and also all those forty million Ukrainians willing to fight with their bare hands against the Russian tanks, firmly united with their leader in a war, this is the appropriate term with which to define it, for their freedom, their land, the founding values of a civilized and democratic world.
Putin fears democracy because it is the most harmful thing that can “infect” the minds of a people, his own, which he instead subdued with an autocratic, oligarchic and kleptocratic regime.
It was clear from the beginning that his intentions were that.
December 5, 1994.
In Budapest the memorandum was signed which sanctioned the military denuclearization of Ukraine, at the time the third world nuclear power with 1900 nuclear warheads under its belt, in exchange for written guarantees on the territorial inviolability of the latter's borders, its independence and national security. Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom guarantee this agreement, with the latter undertaking to intervene directly in the event of violation of the agreements made.
The opening of Ukraine to the West is not denied, nor therefore prevented.
Also in 1994 the establishment of Lukashenko in Belarus was "helped" by the Russian.
Subsequently, that of Viktor Yanukovic in Ukraine.
The intent is to keep two buffer states that wink at Mother Russia, in whose bosom their respective political leaders are weaned.
Having received the deliveries from Yeltsin, slowly but surely, Putin continues in the reconstitution of that Soviet Empire whose dissolution he himself still defines today as the worst scourge and error in Russian history.
We are today.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union and advocate of those trials linked to perestroika and glasnost ', now ninety-one, gives us a clear and unequivocal warning: “stop Putin. Stop it now, or it will be the end. Of everything".
Pope Francis, during his last appeal in St. Peter's Square, deliberately uses all the terms "forbidden" by Putin to define the war in Ukraine and concludes by thundering: "In the name of God, stop this massacre!"
His message, like that of Gorbachev, is addressed to all of us without distinction, but above all to those of us who have the most effective tools to put it into practice.
Speaking, weighing every word, are not only the Pope and Gorbachev but our consciences: this war criminal delirium must be stopped, and immediately.
If this involves going through rearmament, let it be rearmament.
If that involves sacrifices, we will make them.
When two important personalities, so distant but so close, agree in the judgment, their cry, together with that of our consciences, cannot and must not remain deaf.
The highest religious authority implicitly reminded us of exactly what is written in the Bible:
"Because of the violence done to your brother Jacob,
you will be covered with shame and you will be exterminated forever.
That day you were present, the day when foreigners took away his army, and strangers entered by its gates and cast lots for Jerusalem; you too were like one of them ”. (Obadiah 1: 10-15 – The Bible)
Whoever stands still is an accomplice.
We need an important awareness, we need equally important gestures, which transcend personal experience and parochialism. Certain values are universal and stateless. While waiting for the spark inside the Dino Grandi of the situation, always assuming it exists, we have a moral duty not to be intimidated if we choose to be on the right side of history.
To do this, in the meantime, it is necessary to stop raping her, history.
That the above facts continued in the pink revolution, then in the orange revolution of 2004, in which the electoral fraud with which Putin would have wanted his dolphin Yanukovic in Ukraine was unmasked, is history; a fact. Not an opinion. The Ukrainian Supreme Court (rightly) invalidated the election result, not a US coup. This must be clear, though.
And so also in 2014, during the Euromaidan, when, after yet another corrupt government piloted by Russian hands and also led by Viktor Yanukovic, people couldn't stand it anymore and took to the streets. Peacefully.
It was Putin himself who facilitated the latter's escape to Russia. The innocent population and civilians were fired from jail and mercenaries in the pay of Putin, not others. The same people who, after the fall of Yanukovic and the democratic election of Petro Poroshenko, were given the order to continue a slow and shameful subversive action in the Donbass areas. The reason is simple.
No state with internal instability can ask for membership of NATO or even the EU.
It has always been in the Kremlin's interest to keep the embers of hatred alive in the Donbass. So much so that it was the recognition of the "Republics" of Luhansk and Donetsk that motivated the Russian intervention in defense of its "brothers".
Yes, the "fraternal help". That "братская помощь" with which Russia sowed death and destruction in each of the former Soviet Republics. The Russians call it "brotherly help". That is why, today, the former Soviet Republics are the most attentive and sensitive to the sufferings of the Ukrainian people.
A Russian missile, kindly donated by the Kremlin to the Donbass separatists, shot down Flight MH17, carrying hundreds of Dutch and European passengers on board. Do we want to forget it?
So, let's stop wanting to rewrite history as we do on Wikipedia (where anyone can write whatever) and start learning it for what it really is.
Otherwise, all wikis-historians end up as wiki-virologists.
The taking of Crimea, still not recognized by the international community, was a good and good theft, following the military invasion of a Pacific country. Hearing certain politicians and journalists talk about an "American coup" is not only a huge false history but a very serious insult to those who (like myself and his family, for example) have experienced certain things for real throughout the timeline of events.
Knowing history helps us not to be condemned to relive it.
I personally contributed to the review of essays on geopolitics and history of Ukraine and I did so willingly so as not to let this important witness, passed by the hand of those who have suffered excruciating pain, not be lost. Knowing history but also learning not to express oneself by exhibiting bold and ostentatious confidence on topics towards which there are more gaps than certainties. It is the example of those who, from the bottom of an abysmal ignorance even of the language alone, reading "Слава нації!" (transliterated "Slava Nazi!") with disarming ease attaches the insulting epithet of "Nazi" to any Ukrainian, without knowing that instead the meaning of those words is "Honor to the Nation!", exactly as it is done by exclaiming: "Слава Україні! Героям слава! " ("Honor to Ukraine! Honor to the heroes!"). Ditto for the wikis-historians regurgitating essays on Stepan Bandera, or the wikis-strategists who describe in detail the Azov Battalion for what they read the day before yesterday on the last post copied / pasted.
Ignorance is pandemic.
Inciting those who fight for the founding values of our civil society to surrender, in the illusion of keeping a clear conscience, is a madness that history has already shown what it leads to. I say this to us Europeans, recalling the strenuous English resistance in the face of an enemy at the time enormously superior in armaments such as the Nazi one. I say this to the Italians, asking them if they would have suggested to the Cervi brothers and the Partisans all to succumb by raising their hands to heaven, or if in their hearts there is still a feeling towards the most beloved President, Pertini, and how he behaved when to "wake up one morning finding the invader ”was us. I also ask the Russian brothers, reminding them of what they did in Leningrad. Perhaps the most strenuous example of resistance to unequal weapons against not one but two enemies: the most formidable army in the world at the time and hunger.
Did they throw their hands up in the sky? Did they recognize superiority to the enemy? Or they resisted, to exhaustion, to the point of licking the glue off the wallpaper from hunger pangs in order to preserve the grain reserves. Have they succumbed to the German panzers? Or did they also fight with the forks? Who was the strongest in the end?
Now is the time to do. The names and surnames of those who can do something today will remain forever in the history books. It is up to them to choose how to be remembered.
Does life have so much value that it surpasses that of dignity?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/verita-e-falsita-sullucraina/ on Mon, 21 Mar 2022 10:40:30 +0000.