The war in Ukraine hurts everyone’s heart and devastates the soul. The experience of our powerlessness leaves us stunned, as if it is true that there have always been massacres and exterminations, when it is true that just the Second World War was entirely solved by targeting the massacres of unarmed civilians and this one carried out so many human hostages lately, we really delude ourselves that these horrors have now been archived. Just as we believed that the fire in the former Yugoslavia, the massacres in Uganda and the massacres in Syria were simultaneously enormous but also peripheral tragedies: certainly bloody and unacceptable events, but fundamentally located light years away from our culture and from our world in an Elsewhere that we feel alien to.
In our universe of acquired beliefs, the war in Ukraine has arrived as an extraterrestrial, a new covid that, before killing the corpses, kills the human inside them.
In this media war, in which the bullets take the unprecedented form of news from the front lines, arming the response of international forums far better than any proclamation, information bombs are also falling in the living room.
The confrontation with Covid marked a similar path. A little over a year ago it was the communications from the civil defense officer that illustrated the obituary every night, now it is the news of the massacres, arriving at dawn and reported around twelve, that serve us the pain at the table to make us that measure of horror.
The regime of closure proclaimed during Covid forced both politics, business and society as a whole to go strictly through corridors of minimum living: from closed factory gates to distance learning, from the ban on funerals to that of family reunions. Neither of us has really breathed in over a year.
The war in Ukraine is rampant with even more undeniable evidence. You can’t think, plan, decide and choose anything as long as everyone (and everything) depends on what happens at the front. Everything threatens to be put in brackets and thus suspended, economic life as well as political life.
Not only is the climate agenda being postponed to a later date, but also that of recovery, escaping the damaging effects of closures, returning to growth.
We must therefore live with a permanent flicker in which all the essential elements underlying each project are actually suspended in anticipation of the next fight.
But if the pandemic by virus trapped us with no will other than that of our own survival, today it is the conscious choices of concrete men that underlie this tragedy. In vain can we reduce everything to a few names: people stand behind people who see their future threatened or think they see it.
This raises the essential issue that the pandemic failed to anticipate: that of justice.
We are all caught up in the forced choice of a justice that precedes and overrides all other principles. And our desire for justice feeds on the horrors of everyday life, it grows with every broken life, every innocence betrayed.
The results are devastating. Indeed, a circle of hell is nurtured, where the conflict that inspires terror in everyday life feeds a need for justice that cannot be affirmed without a solemn reckoning.
But above the proof of justice as a prerequisite for any peace there is another proof of a higher order: that of truth. Certainly not and not so much that of the daily massacres, but that of the responsibility that preceded the war for years. But precisely this truth remains in the archive.
Can we reiterate here, perhaps aloud, the concept expressed by John Paul II in the January 1, 1980 sermon that “truth is the power of peace without being confused with proPutinians? Probably not, and this is an even more insidious virus, for it is the virus of closed doors, of no analysis, that can even remotely scratch the evidence of those responsible for the daily horror.
The same pain that explodes behind every daily carnage makes no difference: the times are gone, the truth is already there, summed up in the apparent arrogance of an intruder in the face of attack. There is nothing to seek or analyze around such a fact.
The proof of this assertion advises laying down the pen: the weapons of criticism really yield to the weapons of criticism. But it is no longer the language exercise of a Hegelian philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, but the scenario of the facts, in their clear rawness as well as in their disturbing and scandalous inhumanity to recite every day.
The fact remains, however, that truth is the cornerstone of every negotiation, of every possible meeting. Peace is not possible by hiding responsibility and connivance, guns cannot be silent when no hope of truth appears on the horizon.
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