A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Editorial - War continues (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Nowadays the definitions are endless: great war, permanent war, third 
world war piecemeal. But this mania for definitions appears more like 
the mirror of impotence and resignation than of the effort to understand 
the processes underway; let's not even talk about stopping the 
warmongering drift that has been affecting us for a long time now. 
Information perfectly embedded in the prevailing oppositional logic 
covers with a thick blanket any possibility of clarifying, of analyzing 
the multiple and complex dynamics, of leading back to the foundations 
that should guide the relationships between societies and groups - 
respect, dialogue, exchange, humanism. Whether it is the war in Ukraine, 
the massacre in Palestine, the devastation of entire regions under the 
yoke of arms, the daily tragedies of migrants who drown in the seas or 
are killed in the workplace, an artificial narrative oscillates between 
pietism and realpolitik, whose sole intent is to reaffirm the logic of 
domination, strengthen the ranks and mobilize public opinion. For some 
time now there has been an ongoing tendency to polarize situations 
whereby either one is for Israel-Zionism or for Hamas-Palestine: either 
one is for Zelensky-Ukraine or for Putin-Russia. In this way every other 
possibility is cancelled, the many different alternatives caged within 
nationalist, sovereignist, imperialist and warlike logics.

The war in Ukraine, the perfect product of the imperialist dispute 
between a more or less declining West and a rising Russian-Chinese axis 
in the logic of command, has become cloaked in the heroic resistance of 
a people against the vile usurper, in the defense of values of freedom 
and independence from an autocratic liberticidal regime. It is 
difficult, if not impossible, to escape from this pattern; ask yourself, 
for example, what interest the populations of Donbass would have had in 
stoking a conflict, supported by the short-sighted and false logic of 
national belonging, rather than embarking on a path of coexistence, as 
sometimes happens. What interest would the Ukrainian people have in 
taking up arms and getting killed in the name of a government that has 
pursued the path of conflict rather than that of peace, instead of 
promoting and fighting for a more just society without wars. The same 
thing of course applies to the Russian people. Unless you want to argue 
that the masses are blind and you need to guide and control them. So 
what freedom are we talking about?

Again, while the unspeakable is happening in Palestine, what we would 
never have imagined - the extermination of a defenseless population 
which we witness directly with the macabre death toll, punctuated in the 
news and in the press, without all this managing to cause even a an 
upheaval capable of stopping the daily horror, not even a jolt or a 
distancing - the public debate, not only in Italy, is occupied by an 
alleged and resurgent anti-Semitism or by the disquisition on whether in 
this case it is possible to use the word genocide. As if it were some 
registered trademark or copyright. All covered up and justified behind 
the cowardly Hamas attack on October 7th. So rather than questioning the 
reasons for a decades-long tragedy, the exasperated condition of a 
population forced to live in an apartheid regime, the simplest way was 
to start (even if it would be more correct to say complete) the 
expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. With the approval of that 
West shielded behind its presumed civilization, when its main 
geopolitical interests in that area are known to all.

The same goes for all those conflicts that bloodied vast areas of the 
world (and fatten the arms industry and support a good portion of the 
GDP of those states with imperialistic interests, including the 
disastrous Italy which plays to be the great among the greats). A long 
list that is continuously updated from Sudan, to Congo, from Yemen to 
Syria, from Libya to Iraq, to mention only the most striking situations. 
As in a new re-edition of the colonial partition of the late nineteenth 
century, the opposing imperial powers - Western bloc and Eastern bloc - 
move, trampling populations and territories, on the edge of a perennial 
conflict, so far this side of a generalized war. But as anyone who has 
only leafed through a twentieth-century history manual knows, the 
origins of the First World War were mainly colonial and economic 
rivalries, the formation of opposing blocs and the arms race. Framework 
that characterizes relations between states in a significant way from 
the war in Ukraine onwards.

Meanwhile, among the most unrecognized victims of all this disorder (or 
order that armed states and capital impose) are the hundreds of 
thousands of migrants who flee, from the most disparate places tormented 
by wars as well as neocolonialism, to cling to the hope of landing in 
civil and opulent metropolis of the West. But if they don't die along 
the way, what awaits them will be a terrible condition of exploited 
labor, invisible and dehumanized at the same time. And the examples in 
Italy are countless, the most recent one of the young Indian laborer, 
Satnam Singh, or the young Ivorian Daouda Diane, who disappeared on July 
2nd two years ago in Acate and of whom nothing has been heard since. 
Well, for all this derelict humanity the most we can feel is pity, for 
the rest the suspicion of foreigners and the fear of black remains in 
the collective imagination.

In an article, which appeared in the n. 114 of the magazine gli asini, 
Emanuele Dattilo uses the expression "regime of unreality" to represent 
the condition of today. Opinion and chatter cover reality, they design a 
world in which we are no longer able to grasp what matters, what should 
distinguish the condition of humanity.

Wars, forced migrations, the environmental and climate crisis, personal 
and social precariousness, widespread cynicism, arrogance and arrogance 
throw us into despair and impotence. But the possibility of reacting to 
all this is always alive. Dattilo, in his article, identifies it in the 
thought of Elsa Morante, Aldo Capitini and Ferdinando Tartaglia. I 
believe that our first task will have to be to desert the field, desert 
the battlefield and desert the ideological field that forces us to side 
with one or the other of the contenders in the project of domination. 
Desert the regime and re-embrace the utopian tension of transformation, 
with clarity and perseverance.

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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