A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Edited: Europe at war: full speed ahead! (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

EU defense ministers met informally on 30 and 31 January in Brussels to 
discuss the hot topics of the moment: the war in Ukraine and the Red Sea 
crisis. Dwelling on the summit's concluding statements is quite 
instructive. The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security 
Policy of the EU, Josep Borrell, who took part in the meeting, first 
complained about the delay with which the EU is sending the ammunition 
promised to Kiev, confirmed the commitment to train another 20 thousand 
Ukrainian soldiers and then said: "Europe must increase its defense 
capacity, today to defend Ukraine, tomorrow to defend itself". For his 
part, the Italian defense minister was pleased with the fact that Europe 
is finally less bureaucratic and on the ministry's website we read: "I 
have finally seen a Europe that moves faster than what we are used to.": 
today, in fact, we discussed the launch of a European operation 
following the crisis in the Red Sea. For the Aspides operation, Italy 
confirmed its willingness to participate by providing a ship for the 
entire duration of the mission. Specifically, there will be more ships 
taking turns and as it is a new mission there will be a parliamentary 
passage first." In the days preceding the summit, Minister Crosetto had 
been interviewed by the newspaper La Stampa, to plead the cause of the 
new militarism: "We have built - he said in response to a question - 
rules with the idea of an always peaceful world, of nations that do not 
invade the others, with wars that do not affect the well-being of our 
citizens. And instead we find ourselves in a different world, whose 
actors who are destabilizing it, Iran, Russia and North Korea, have a 
military production capacity superior to that of NATO." And again: "Yes, 
we transformed the armed forces with the idea that there was no longer a 
need to defend our territory and that peace was a de facto irreversible 
achievement. The armed forces, in this context, at most participate in 
peacekeeping missions, without leading to actual clashes. Now the fences 
have been torn down, there are no more rules." Therefore the minister - 
at this point in the war - concludes that in order to protect its 
territory and "intervene in distant countries to defend Italian 
interests", Italy must equip itself militarily, and in this specific 
case it would be necessary to establish a military reserve. This is 
basically the same concept expressed several times, after the outbreak 
of the war in Ukraine, in a more elegant manner by Lucio Caracciolo, who 
believes that there is not a sufficient military culture in Italy.

The wishes of the interior ministers were accepted on 1 February by the 
European Council which allocated a further 50 billion euros for a 
financial assistance plan for Ukraine. Zelensky naturally thanked him 
and everything is seen as another step towards Ukraine's integration 
into the European Union. It should be noted how a good part of the 
Italian media presented the matter: a double success, "saving Kiev" and 
bringing Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has always been 
critical of aid to Ukraine, back into the "democratic" orbit, who has 
now instead had to give his consent. In this way the attention was 
catalysed, not on the useless continuation of a war which after two 
years is still stuck at the same point, bringing back into vogue the 
dirty twentieth century wars fought meter by meter and whose only result 
is the devastation of entire territories and the count of tens and tens 
of thousands of deaths, including civilians and soldiers, but on the 
success of democratic Europe over the retrograde Europe represented by 
Orban, which corresponds, according to a crude but effective parallel, 
to the clash between democratic Ukraine and authoritarian Russia.

Meanwhile, the other hot front in international relations, the Iranian 
one, is splitting. To the situation in the Red Sea, where the Houthi 
attacks on "Western" merchant ships have met with a prompt response from 
the USA and Great Britain who bomb positions and shoot down rebel drones 
(to this initiative should be added, as we have seen, the operation 
Aspides, also supported by Italy, always dutiful in waging war where the 
American master calls), overlapped with the attack conducted by the 
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on an American military base in 
Jordan. Also in this case the United States responded with various air 
strikes on the bases of these groups, whose instigators reside in Shiite 
Iran, Iraq and Syria. Biden declares that he does not want to wage war 
on Iran, but in the meantime the situation is becoming more and more 
uncertain and the ongoing tragedy in Gaza makes everything more 
unpredictable.

Of course Gaza and what is happening in Palestine becomes more 
unsustainable and unspeakable every day, more than 25 thousand deaths so 
far, many children; defenseless people subjected to extreme living 
conditions, all in the most total indifference of governments, 
institutions, organizations that flaunt democracy and solidarity at 
every summit, but in this situation show compliance rather than 
impotence. The public debate in Italy is also unbelievable, perhaps it 
should be better said that it is imbued with a revolting moralizing 
cynicism. A lot of the press, a lot of television, a lot of politicians, 
the foreign minister standing out among all, show the good face of 
understanding for the plight of the Palestinians but in the meantime 
they support and support the Israeli government, in their opinion 
another democratic bastion in the dark forest of illiberal Islamism . In 
the mainstream narrative on the ongoing war in Gaza there is a very 
specific pattern: the fate of the Israeli hostages, the perfidious 
action of the Hamas militiamen - the pinnacle of which is represented by 
the infamous tunnels (the image of evil emerging from underground) or 
from mixing with the sick in hospitals -, the positions of the various 
actors in the field and finally the miserable conditions of the 
inhabitants of the Strip, whose responsibility it would seem to be 
attributed to an adverse fate if not to a sin to be paid for. To this 
narrative has been added the sterile controversy on the occasion of 
Remembrance Day; many have been led to believe that accusing the action 
of the Israeli government and army of genocide is equivalent to denying 
the Shoah, or in any case demonstrating anti-Semitic attitudes. In the 
museum of memory everything crystallizes, guilty and innocent, victims 
and executioners are projected into a space outside of time, where what 
happened is fixed forever and forever away from us, a warning and 
apotropaic ritual to be fulfilled to keep us safe and feel guiltless, 
indeed custodians of the truth.

I don't think there could be clearer evidence of how state policies now 
move in a climate of war and militarism. That pacifist sentiment, a 
legacy of the rejection of the tragedies of the world wars, which 
perhaps persisted until the war in Iraq in 2003, is now completely 
erased. But if we do not want to succumb to wars (without forgetting the 
ongoing climate crisis), it should be a priority to rebuild a strong 
opposition to war which cannot ignore the rejection of weapons and 
armies, the rejection of rising nationalism and the revival of a new 
internationalism, proletarian if we want.

Angelo Barberi

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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