WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Sicilia Libertaria 4/2023: Seneca, migrants and war -- Impressions of a dialogue between past and present (ca, de, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

   "They brought with them their children, their wives, and their parents weighed
down by the years. Some, thrown hither and thither by a long wandering, did not
choose a place for a deliberate purpose, but out of exhaustion occupied the
nearest one;... some people, in search of the unknown, the sea swallowed them,
some settled there where the lack of every resource left them. ---- These
reflections, which could suggest news events due to their surprising relevance to
current events and dramas, are taken from the seventh chapter of the "Consolatio
ad Helviam matrem", a work by the philosopher Seneca. These are the words of a
controversial intellectual figure due to his complicity with the principality but
sometimes uncomfortable, who due to conflicts with the emperor Claudius will
suffer relegation to Corsica in 41 AD. The philosopher intends to console the
mother of the painful distance from her son by citing examples that place her
personal story within a dimension of more human universality, calling to the
attention of the afflicted Elvia the past and incessant movements of peoples on
one side and the other part of the world, often driven by chance and poverty
towards uncertain goals.

Today, Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, men and women with children in tow, who
travel the Balkan route or cross the Aegean Sea in search of landing places, see
the sea as the only way to reach new lands. The fact that they are still alive,
after thousands of kilometers of walking, encourages them to resume their march
and to look to the near future with obstinate trust.

"Not everyone had the same reason for leaving their homeland and looking for
another; some were driven back by the destruction of their cities by enemy
armies; others, deprived of their goods, found asylum in foreign lands, others
civil wars forced them to move; still others the excessive density of population,
to relieve the pressure, drove them away; others expelled them from contagious
diseases or frequent earthquakes or the unsustainability of an unfavorable
territory; some were corrupted by the fame of a fertile and exaggeratedly praised
land..."

Seneca records wars among the causes of peoples' migrations. The man of our time
has turned his weapons in a premeditated way against the helpless population of
inhabited centers as an instrument of terror. Refugees of war or forced
displacement, deprived of any means of subsistence, ask for the right to have a
roof under which to recreate a new home, a new semblance of life. To deny it
would lead to a serious "ignorance" towards human rights whose value is
supranational.

Territories overpopulated and burdened by an unbalanced distribution of natural
resources cannot satisfy the multiple needs of a population in constant search of
what is necessary to live and, at the same time, of a chimerical well-being that
deceives through the subtle solicitations of the market economy. Natural
disasters such as epidemics or seismic phenomena, which are beyond the control of
human intelligence, give rise to migratory movements.

For Seneca everything falls within the law of a cosmic order in which evil
coexists with good, in which contradictions find a synthesis in the practice of a
balanced rationalism and in the awareness of the sense of what is human and of
its history which escapes arrogant ideal of the linearity of the "magnificent and
progressive fortunes", as Leopardi of La ginestra reminds us.

"One fact is clear, however: nothing has remained in the same place where it
originated. Persistent and continuous is the wandering of mankind; every day
something changes in such a big world: the foundations of new cities are laid;
populations with new names are born, the previous ones extinct or aggregated in a
consortium that guarantees greater protection.

In a world in constant change by virtue of economic, political and cultural
factors on which the legacy of the notorious colonial conquests and policies of
the insatiable Western countries weighs already starting from the discovery of
the New Continent, the consequent weight of the industrial revolutions and, in
the present, the binding conditioning of neoliberal logics, in what terms is the
millennial migratory process welcomed?

The latter becomes an occasion for often heated but inconclusive debates, a
pretext for the promulgation of laws aimed at the violent and inhumane rejection
of those who extend a hand in search of help. We have also allowed speculation
and blackmail to trade in human lives. After all, after Auschwitz the reification
of the human being was cleared through customs.

Yet "that incessant wandering of the human species" which allows us to broaden
our visual and mental horizon beyond the confines of our miserable cliques, our
villages, our cities and nations, overcoming the sinister logic of the regimes in
power, the absurdity of wars and the irreparability of natural disasters, in a
continuous helical process of connection between past and present, gave the input
to the birth of our civilization thanks to the encounter and mixing between
peoples. It has favored the development of civilizations bordering the "Mare
Nostrum", an open sea, in continuous ferment and cultural renewal by virtue of
the relationships between different peoples. From this matrix has sprung the
varied and convergent identity of the peoples who have lived it over the
centuries. Starting from these premises, Seneca invites us to cultivate a
cosmopolitan conscience, that is, of citizens of the world, and to reject the
falsely inclusive logic of government agendas.

Inclusion, an overused but ambiguous term. Its etymological meaning brings us
back to the concept of welcoming those who choose to include and by antithesis to
that of exclusion of those who must stay outside the fence. This last operation
is the simplest and most pragmatic to implement but it turns out to be a
harbinger of the contradictions inherent in a world that claims to be globalized.

Faced with these courses and recourses of human events and the reluctance to
understand their causes, we oppose the force of the words and thoughts of those
who have sown the seeds of a possible change of perspective and system.

We ask for silence out of respect for the victims of the banality of evil.

Giusy Carnemolla

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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