Weapons, warriors, heroisms, supreme sacrifices, battles: they talk a lot, I begin to fear too much. It is certainly not illegal to ask men, when they have to respond to an abuse, a criminal invasion, to fight and be heroes since this is a necessary way, the only one left to induce the good of the Cause, motivations that fall within the their experience, from which the acts of will arise. One of the most adequate means to combat passivity in the face of abusers has always been to preach the moral obligation to be courageous, to fight with weapons in hand. Yet I have the impression that we are going dangerously further and that the foundations are being laid for yet another militarist intoxication, which can re-emerge the seduction of war especially among the younger generations. And that we are about to enter, if we are not already in it, in the period of the ossification of intelligence.
I seem to glimpse a planned exploitation, even in countries of sure democratic faith, by the ruling classes of some forms of collective exaltation. We are preparing for a world frozen by permanent mobilizations among the Blocks for which, as in the 1950s, psychological, propaganda, cultural methods and systems of mobilization and organization are needed: that is, that set of rules and practices that constitute the true background , not choreographic, of militarism, of warmongering ideology. That would be the fault (and not the lesser one) of the aggressor Putin. But also an indirect favor that we would have rendered him. Making us similar to him.
We exemplify and ask Socratic, humble questions. Don’t you find that we are obsessively talking about weapons, ours, theirs? The morale of the Russians is reassured with the launch of the missile that no one can intercept capable of giving birth to dozens of atomic bombs at the end of its flying gestation. We are in the norm of the imperial internal propaganda. But we are no less: arms arms arms as the Ukrainian minister admirably summed up. That now counts: the perfect anti-missile, the naval torpedo that no armor can resist, our fighters more top gun of the old Russian bric-a-brac, tanks are compared as once the merits of racing cars were compared.
Until recently, Western industry was challenging robots, artificial intelligence, devices to reduce human fatigue, even cancel it, to heal it, to make communications even faster and safer. Today sophisticated “excellences” for killing are exhibited, such as those produced by Mr. Krupp who, at the time of the Kaiser, had posted the General-Regulativan internal order of permanent warfare: “… as in the army all march together against the enemy, so in these factories they will all be united as in one man when the time has come to beat the competition …”.
Yep, the competition. Catalogs are proudly produced that once performed as if they were pornographic publications: here our guns shoot farther, our mines are more devious and cruel, missiles crumble even the bunkers.
Drones that should have long been banned as illicit and criminal weapons because they make war easier and at zero risk, have become humanity’s new scientific frontier. Everyone produces, everyone buys, in Ukraine everyone uses.
We thought, as Westerners, that we had missed out on that extraordinary scientific creativity which is the history of the West, and also the origin of its world power. We reassure ourselves, in killing we are always a palm ahead. The war industry whose survival was justified a little in a low voice, with a hypocritical expedient, citing the always high percentage offered to the totem of the gross domestic product, now becomes pride, necessity, national security. Those who continue to discuss it will soon risk the accusation of sabotage. The qualities of the weapons offered to the Ukrainians are exalted, which do not disfigure those of other more important benefactors: the Italian quality. We risk regretting the good times, even very recent ones, in which we discharged our moral debt with more peripheral assaults by providing four bolts and taking the opportunity to ventilate the premises of the arsenals.
This industrial-warrior revival that rounds balances alas never in red would be nothing if it were not accompanied by something more perfidious, the reappearance of the Old Lie, the regurgitation of disgusting nonsense, of seductions that seemed buried in residual rights. We speak lightly of the war, of the need for him without ever having tasted the pornography of death and the crudeness of his perversions. Without realizing that her strength of attraction thus shines, she is offered a purpose, a meaning, a dignity, a cause, a quarter of nobility. It is a fatal mistake.
I say this while listening to interviews with the so-called fighters of the international brigades, who fight and unfortunately die with the Ukrainians. Of those who are on the side of the Russians, I imagine the propaganda of the other side will give just as broad and interested testimony.
In the enunciation of primitive concepts, honor, duty, above all a perfidious irrationalist tradition resurfaces, a rambling D’Annunzio out of time: with the voluptuousness of being a hero, the cult of warlike morality, the I live the fire of the struggleand other concoctions that inflame the petty bourgeois rebels of all times.
The drug of war unfortunately works well beyond the alchemy of willing sorcerer’s apprentices. Look at the Russians, their ferocious war. It takes nothing to enter the opaque realm of activist nihilism, where the legionaries wrote “viva la muerte” on the walls of the occupied villages of Andalusia; where no one talks about peace anymore so as not to be accused of being a coward or a defeatist, life is a continuous duel, a life dedicated to the wolf. And war, if it involves us directly, is basically the continuation of an original, eternal order.
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