On one side the executioner, on the top the victims. Prohibition of hypocritical equidistance: someone is at war, and someone is suffering from it. “The Russian army is the executioner, the Ukrainian people are the victims.” Clearer than that is difficult.
So while a hypocritical and one-sided pacifism is raging, there are those on the Left-Left who retain the intellectual honesty of calling things by their proper name. Cecilia Strada, for example, daughter of Gino, founding doctor of “Emergency” and icon of Italian pacifism, who passed away in August.
Milanese, 43 years old, former president of the NGO known for her work in theaters of war, Cecilia Strada is now involved in the relief efforts in the Mediterranean and is persecuted by a left-wing public opinion that loved her father. certainly not fond of the West and the Americans.
«The situation is clear – he writes – there is an aggressor, Russia, which has invaded Ukraine and is massacring its civilian population. The Russian army is the executioner, the Ukrainian people are the victims”. And in two days his speech on the Russian war in Ukraine received a rain of consensus, the beauty of 20,000 “likes”, a number that would pale the “posts” of the various party leaders, especially in the Giallorossi field.
A good lesson in clarity, for the specialists in distinctions and “but also” who rage on TV, sometimes (false) pacifists who appeal to “complexity” and proclaim an “equidistance” that turns into proximity to the aggressor. They often don’t mention Putin at all, instead only talking about the Americans or the Ukrainians — indirectly providing him with excuses and mitigating circumstances: the alleged Western “provocations” first and then the Azov battalion and the neo-Nazis or the qualities of the Ukrainian President Zelensky , its orientations and background.
“I think I’ve remembered something that bothers me a lot about the story of the war in Ukraine,” Cecilia Strada bursts out. And he sees two possible mistakes. On the one hand the idealization of the victim, on the other hand his attribution of blame. He summarizes them as follows: on the one hand “Zelensky like Gandhi” and on the other hand “the Azov battalion anyway”. “There is no need to paint Zelensky as Martin Luther King – he warns – or to deny the existence of neo-Nazis in the country (let’s remember we have them too, eh) or to deny a country’s contradictions or problems to be on the Standing by the side of the victims, as we rightly should ». “The Ukrainian leaders – on the other hand – could also be mediocre, it could be up to 350 thousand Azov battalions, crimes could have been committed in the Donbass in recent years, it could be anything: and it would not change an iota of it that Russia is there: “Aggressor, attacked Ukraine, one the executioner, the other the victim, and the victims must be defended”. “We are on the victim’s side,” he concludes, “because the victim is protected between the executioner and the victim. Independent of everything else ».