9 Maggio 2022 Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti

Marco Tosatti 

Dear readers of Stilum Curiae, it seems opportune to bring to your attention this reflection by Americo Mascarucci on a phrase – overlooked but illuminating – spoken by the reigning Pontiff in his interview at Corriere della Sera. Enjoy your reading and meditation.

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Let’s face it, if the phrase about “NATO barking at the gates of Russia” that “could have facilitated Putin’s reaction” had been uttered by any political or intellectual leader in our house, the media pillory would probably have started and automatically the unfortunates would have rightfully ended up on the proscription lists of pro-Putinians, so dear to the parts of Corriere della Sera (but not exclusively). On the other hand, since Pope Francis said it, of course, one cannot venture that much, and then it is better to cover it with a good dose of silence, talk about it as little as possible, and pretend that it has not been said.

In reality, what the pontiff declared, paradoxically from the columns of Corriere della Sera itself, is what so many authoritative journalists and historians, such as Capuozzo, Orsini, Cardini, Santoro and a few others have been supporting from the beginning, finding themselves precisely marked in the Putinian line, or accused of being on the Moscow payroll.

Now Giuseppe Brindisi seems to have joined the ranks of those “sold to the enemy,” guilty of having given the floor in his transmission to the Russian Minister Lavrov, considered a kind of new Goebbels. And it is the same Brindisi that until not so long ago we criticized as a functionary of the government’s vaccine narrative, one of those who systematically pilloried the unvaccinated and those who dared to rebel against the obligation of the green pass. According to the law of retaliation, a bit of healthy criticism cannot hurt him either; at least he will understand what it means to be pilloried.

But let’s go back to the central theme. Pope Francis said what in the end many of us think but few have the courage to declare: namely, that this war could have been avoided as tensions with Russia were avoided in the days of the Trump administration. Simply because the former president did not consider it essential to extend NATO to the borders of Russia by incorporating Ukraine, as well as Sweden and Finland, historically neutral countries, after having previously swallowed all the states of the former Warsaw Pact despite the commitment of the United States not to extend the Atlantic Alliance in Eastern Europe (a commitment made by Bush senior with Gorbachev and then promptly rejected). It is obvious that Biden, after his unworthy withdrawal from Afghanistan and an all-time low popularity, needs to remake his image; and what is better than a war to regroup internal public opinion, which continues to a large extent to consider him a usurper and an abuser, having won the last presidential election by means of the specter of fraud? There will be mid-term elections in November and Biden cannot afford a heavy defeat. But neither can he take responsibility for unleashing World War III, which is why it is in the interest of the US to keep the conflict going as long as possible, supplying the Ukrainians with weapons, increasing their resilience, and hoping for the weakening of Russia through a long war and the weight of economic sanctions. Putin must be said to have fallen into the trap, because the invasion of Ukraine was what Biden wanted to show the world that Russia is a danger to be stopped. It is no coincidence that the Americans began announcing the invasion at least a month before it actually took place, relying on the provocations that the pro-Nazi Ukrainian militias were carrying out in the Donbass against ethnic Russian citizens.

What is disconcerting is the attitude of Europe, which is once again dominated by US interests. And even more disconcerting is the scandalous subjection of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who seems more and more to be Biden’s “parrot,” to the point of being the most staunch supporter in Europe of the “armed peace” policy, or the need to send weapons to Ukraine to strengthen it in the fight against the enemy and force it to negotiate. All to the detriment of Italian economic interests. Until the whole of Europe understands that the time has come to leave NATO and establish a common European defense system, talking about peace will always be a utopia. Because NATO, like it or not, will always represent a threat to the other half of the world that does not adhere to it. And inevitably Europe will end up being dominated by American games and interests that have long since no longer coincided, or which are opposed.

So who really wants peace? And who instead just pretends to want it? Surely the battered Ukrainian people want it, the victim of games played on their own soil; Maybe Putin also wants it, but he has to take home at least the full conquest of the Donbass and the port of Odessa; Biden certainly does not want it, since he has every interest in keeping international tension high, in order to make things difficult for Putin and to be able to demonstrate to the Americans that he has bent the Russian monster by arming Ukraine and imposing increasingly harsh sanctions. Europe should want it because it has a war at home, but it is totally incapable of an autonomous position vis-à-vis the United States, a fact that has prevented it from playing an active role in the negotiations.

All is seasoned with a good dose of propaganda, cruel images, stories of massacres, slaughters, genocides and so on and so forth. And the world is rightly indignant, as it was indignant at the images of the massacre in Timisoara or at the famous test tube shown by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell as proof of the existence of the nuclear arsenal that Saddam Hussein was ready to use against the West. Then in Timisoara it was discovered that there was no massacre but that everything had served to sentence the Romanian dictator Ceausescu to death without due process, and that nuclear weapons were not in Iraq but had served as a pretext for attacking Iraq and eliminating Saddam. In Bucha the dead were really there, but God forbid that, as in Kosovo, the responsibility for the killings be attributed only to one group.

Perhaps the pope deserves credit for having torn off the veil of hypocrisy by affirming an inconvenient truth, which is dearly costing so many colleagues who with courage and determination try to provide a minimum of counter-information, attracting criticism and slander of all kinds – in the knowledge that, in war, the truth almost always rhymes with propaganda.

Americo Mascarucci

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Tag: mascarucci, papa, ucraina

Categoria: Generale