On the evening of May 3, 2025, in Domodossola, the "Demonstration for
Disarmament" took place, promoted by the Ossola Committee, of which I ama member, as part of the European campaign "Stop Rearmament". A
well-attended and heartfelt event, which began with speeches and music
and culminated in a torchlight procession through the streets of the
city. But we cannot hide behind a simple local moment: national and
international news requires us to raise our voices forcefully against a
trend that is accelerating dramatically.
In Italy, as in all of Europe, military spending continues to grow at a
dizzying rate. The government recently celebrated the increase in war
spending up to 2% of GDP, considering it a "milestone", but it is now
clear that this is only an intermediate stage towards even more
ambitious and dangerous objectives. It is no longer a hypothetical
question: we are preparing for a long-lasting, large-scale war. The real
risk of a new world conflict has never been so close in decades. It is
not just a question of billions of dollars in weapons and technologies
of death, it is the entire political language that has been militarized.
European and national leaders speak more and more often of "defense",
"sacrifice", "national unity", "enemy at the gates". Nationalistic and
patriotic ideology is exalted in every official speech, as if the only
way to face global challenges was to close borders, militarize society,
emotional training in fear and hatred.
Through the idea of an authoritarian federalism between nations, they
pretend (and to a large extent they have succeeded) to naturalize the
State. This sort of national blocs with variable alliances represents a
system of organized selfishness: the idea that each person feels
protected by an armed State is one of the most elaborate stupendous
drugs that the masters could invent. This pro-European ideological
approach, born with the propaganda excuse of breaking down the borders
between the member states of the Union and defusing the totalitarianisms
of the last century, has increasingly acquired an obscurantist profile
since the Ventotene Manifesto. In the way the masters have conceived it,
for example, the "NATO bloc" passes through the single nationalist
ideology. This affiliation should have, according to the logic of the
masters, something natural and indispensable. The relationship between
nationalism and patriotism (the latter being the sentimental and exalted
version of what nationalism supports) serves to justify any type of
maneuver that, in other circumstances, would be considered abominable.
Through the idea of a joint armed bloc, understood as a "society of
nations in arms", an attempt is made to supernaturalize a collective
culture and an insistence is made on naturalizing the social hierarchy.
The armed nation is not a Platonizing essence, nor a historical reality
pre-existing to the political will of those who invent it, organize it
and, on many occasions, impose it by force. In an arms race, both the
nationalism of each individual State and the patriotism associated with
it are ideologies that refer more to biology than to the social pact.
However, it is a mystical and mystifying biology, populated by eternal
essences and patron saints disguised as martyrs of the national
character and, by commutative property, transnational.
Patriotism resides in the mythological and ideological glorification of
the person-nation, in the establishment of its identity through the
warlike exaltation in the face of internal or external antipatries, in
the militarization of the community and individual mentalities. This
need for opposition and hostility brings us to the true reason for the
idea of nation: conflict. Without battles, without fallen, without
bloodstained flags, without subordinates who give their lives for their
leaders, neither ethnic groups, nor customs, nor language, nor shared
history would be "national" in themselves: it is the authoritarian
political-ideological project of nationalism that fishes the relevant
characteristics from the "wastebasket" of aseptic data. Mass-media
propaganda, then, has the task of validating them and converting them
into "identities". If there were no enemies, there would not even be
individual homelands: the army has become the very incarnation of the
nation (the famous "people in arms!"). I ask myself: can there be a more
terrorist mentality than the one that considers it normal to live in a
balance of terror? The one of those who consider nuclear weapons
justified, for offense or defense, of those who squander wealth to kill
instead of using it to cure, to feed or to teach?
To be an internationalist means to be rationally convinced that the
division into nations (which has nothing natural about it) does nothing
but impede human emancipation and that patriotic mythology always serves
to legitimize the power of the most abject and rapacious oligarchy. It
is legitimate for the individual, starting from the revolutionary acts
and facts of the Age of Enlightenment (whose ideal was certainly
universalist and not national), to defend the right to his own freedom
of belief, expression, association and intervention in public life; but
to convert the people into a single individual is another thing.
National identity served, in its time (and still serves) to provide a
myth legitimizing the centralist function of the State. No human
community is, nor has it ever been, natural: Europe is as conventional
(that is, invented by some, agreed upon with others and imposed and
defended against the remainder) as Italy, Germany or England. All
borders are artificial, all peoples are born from blood, oppression,
depredations, regardless of the time that has passed. To ostentatiously
give oneself an identity (be it national or continental), with all its
paraphernalia, both warlike and of signs and symbols, adds to the logic
of imperialisms, aims at the annexation of territories that in turn
resist the new conquest, etc... The fact that this EU invention has been
unsuccessful is evident: the anti-European quarrel continues to be
present as before, although now with a different aggressiveness in its
features, and this was seen with the aggression against those who
carried the flags of the European Union in the square in Turin, at the
25 April parade. Then there are nationalisms of incomprehensible crushed
patriotisms that implement both policies linked to the central
administration (of which they are a part), and create affinities with
other realities, linked to or enemies of the glass palace. This war
rhetoric is not limited to foreign policy: this "pro-Europe" versus
"pro-Putin", "pro-Western democracies" versus "pro-Axis of Resistance"
split also serves to justify increasingly brutal internal repression.
The new "Security Decree", recently passed, has strengthened the power
of law enforcement, further limiting the right to demonstrate and
introducing harsher penalties for dissent. The concrete application of
these rules is becoming evident throughout Italy. Emblematic is what is
happening to peaceful demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian
people, against the increase in military spending and the introduction
of new repressive laws: unjustified charges with unprecedented violence
with the clear intention of dispersing and breaking up demonstrations
just because participants dare to question the authority and logic of
war. Scenes that would have been unthinkable until a few years ago, and
which today are becoming normal.
It is against all this that I demonstrated on May 3 in Domodossola,
together with many who do not give up on the idea that war is
inevitable. Because true security is not built with weapons, but with
social justice, cooperation, solidarity between peoples.
We reject all nationalism, all patriotic appeal that pushes us to see
the other as an enemy! Peace is not a utopia: it is a concrete, urgent,
necessary political choice. And our fight will continue until every
warmongering logic is unmasked and rejected. Because our homeland is the
entire world and our law is freedom!
'Gnazio
https://umanitanova.org/i-mille-volti-del-riarmo-nazionalismi-patriottismi-e-retorica-di-guerra/
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