Marco Revelli: a cry of peace against the spell of the good against the bad

The Pontiff spoke the language of the Earth, not that of any state, the message is linked to “Laudato si ‘”, where “everything is connected with everything”

It took a Jesuit with the name of a saint deeply embodied in the human, to restore to thought its character as an antidote against the evil of simplifying obtuseness. And to the pietas the power of what saves from the cupio dissolvi that seems to have infected the world. It took a man named Francesco to call us back to the sense of a reality that does not allow itself to be enclosed in a narrative that is good only for recruitment, on one or another front, but which contains within itself an extreme (and mortal) risk. for everyone. To tell us, without paraphrasing, that even if we pretend not to have noticed it, already today «the Third World War has been declared».

And that this happened, of course, because an aggressive and frustrated power like Russia decided to cross a shadow line and attack a “brother” people; but also because none of those who could have worked to avoid it. And someone is perhaps even pleased with it, surely those who profit from the criminal arms trade, and gain fat from the death of others. While others “continued to bark at the doors” of future aggressors, ignoring the fact (or knowing it but without worrying about it) that “the Russians are imperial and do not allow any foreign power to approach them.”

Francis spoke the language of the Earth, not that of some State, or people separated and opposed to others. He has followed up on the message entrusted to him at his time Praised yes, where he speaks of a world in which “everything is connected with everything”, and the laceration of the organic unity of the living is a crime in itself. Thus indicating the only way to avoid the catastrophe of Life and Meaning, in the gaze capable of keeping everything “other than itself” within. Domenico Quirico said it in an exemplary way in these pages, when he indicated one of the essential concepts of the Pope’s long conversation in the refusal to “reduce complexity to the separation between good and bad, without thinking about roots and interests, which are very complex “, and which in their complexity must be understood if we do not want to fall into the curse of” crazy ideas “: those that have lost their relationship with reality – with the real” human “, with the primacy of life over death – and that in this sense they are “heresies”.

Of course, the zealous of the new Inquisition, the headhunters to be pilloried, the compilers of lists, will (paradoxically) read in those words the clues to that crime of “pro-Putinism” which seems to have become the only distinction between vice and virtue. And that so many dirty clothes allows you to rinse, returning nobility licenses. But if we go to the true meaning of that long conversation, the only trace of “friendship” is that towards man as such, in his naked life, the real sacrifice. of this war: the fallen soldier does not care in what uniform and the mother who mourns him under any flag. And the only real enmity is that of war, of the “human drama of war”, of the perverse use of war by those who, today, before our eyes, for “global interests of arms sales or geopolitical appropriation is martyring a heroic people ».

War has a demonic power: that of drawing into its own ferocious vortex all that is in its mortal ray, things and people, destroying life, paralyzing thought, fixing it to its own binary coordinates, either with me or against me, or in the my inhuman logic or on the side of the enemy. The Pope is among the few who possess the strength (moral and intellectual) to break this perverse circle. When he praises the “heroism” of the Ukrainian people, contrasting it with the perversion of those who use it for unmentionable but unfortunately obvious (and not univocal) interests, he breaks an evil spell. He frees us from a destiny of subordination to the power of the inhuman.