One thing is sure. Social peace is increasingly becoming a minefield of disasters. Two years of “war on the virus” did not pass unscathed. War metaphors are never neutral or by chance. In the face of the Enemy, it is necessary to close ranks, speak with one voice and isolate the deserters – as they cannot be shot. Confinements, drones over cities, forests and beaches, a NATO general as extraordinary Commissioner for the Emergency, curfews, green passes, bans on demonstrations in city centres, truncheon blows democratically distributed among logistics porters and any group of dissidents who try to approach an institutional building or a TAV tunnel: the sequence is neither accidental nor improvised. As the streets fill up with uniforms and cameras, bodies must be captured with no exception by the techno-industry and its miraculous products.
The language of power and its TV acrobats is becoming increasingly brutal – we need a Bava Beccaris, you’ll turn into green sludge, let’s organize separate carriages, only those who deserve it will get free treatment…- while the “antagonistic” language finds itself disarmed, forced to defensive premises (if anyone claims that Draghi expresses the interests of international financial capital, they will immediately add that this is not a conspiracy theory view…). Such a condition of submission – and of communication of war, as a technocrat in the mood for clarity put it – seems the ideal context for the international use of the military to bring a piece of Afghanistan inside Europe. Russian army exercises on the border with Ukraine, images of anti-atomic bunkers and voluntary enlistments in Kiev, NATO troops in Romania, Latvia, and the Black Sea. Who can rule out that from diplomatic manoeuvres and threats they will not move on to weapons? The boundary of the interests at stake is jagged. The very expression “Atlanticist and Europeanist camp” in no way defines a homogenous camp because NATO goals break up more or less explicit or unsayable political and economic balances in Europe (regarding the German and French States and not only). The Italian government itself servilely collaborates with NATO manoeuvres, by deploying fighter-bombers in Romania, tanks in Lithuania and aircraft carriers on the Black Sea, but the capitalists of ENEL, ENI, Banca Intesa and Unicredit continue to do business with their counterparts in Moscow. Nobody wants a USA-Russian clash, but States do not go where they want to go but where their power and the structural dynamics of domination and profit on which they are based take them. In the infinite variables, however, there is one constant factor. War – as a set of means that devour their alleged ends – always needs social peace. Therefore it won’t be with refined geopolitical analyses that we will stop the winds of war but by breaking up the home front, sabotaging national unity, making the danger of defeatism be felt.
To have confirmation of this, it is sufficient to put the reasoning in reverse. The only time hostilities between the various powers are suspended is when the exploited must be put in line, as their revolt challenges the interests of all bosses. This is what happened with the deployment of the Russian military in Kazakhstan and the bloody repression of the rebels in that country. In this case there were no human rights, self-determination of peoples or other presumptions in the name of which to be indignant, condemned or threatened. In order to exploit the huge Kazakhstani resources, order is needed, imposed even with blood – because that order is the only pedestal upon which the international conflict between state and capitalist gangs is based. There has been very little humanitarian chatter about the use of weapons by police against the rioters in Rotterdam, or about the dogs unleashed against the demonstrators in Amsterdam (but those are disgusting “no vax”…). And certainly it won’t be Biden to complain if his neighbour Trudeau – currently escaped to a protected residence – militarily put an end to the huge blockade against the vaccine passports in Ottawa.
If the situation in Ukraine were to deteriorate, we would be wrong to think that the majority of the population here would be against war as they were in the past. Not only because the destruction of all forms of logic with which millions of brains have been assaulted over these two years has left its traces. But also because in the face of the increase in utility bills due to growing poverty, the Enemy will be the one who will be blaimed for the price rises. Moreover the atmosphere changes a lot when the sound of guns gets closer. A certain ferocity compensates for the flaws in reasoning.
Taking to the streets in advance against the advancing war (and for the withdrawal of Italian troops from every front) is urgent and necessary. We have already seen how in the name of the Emergency the unprecedented can become everyday. If certain premises are accepted, then the most effective solution wins. The digitalization of society, an energy-consuming and anti-human flight forward, brings with it new wars for resources. The techno-industry and the military world are increasingly merged, their tendencies becoming more and more disproportionate as their calculations and means become more and more mechanised. Worldviews are now embedded in technological devices, in the automated moves of finance, in the results of laboratories.
Whatever the slogans we take into the streets, chasing back the police, today the strongest in the field, won’t be simple or painless. Whatever ground or angle of attack we judge a priority, it is not possible to avoid the sirens of militarism without deserting the “war on the virus”, which is more and more openly war on us and on whatever else human history still contains.
