This is the definition given to what happened in Taranto a few days ago when insults and stones were launched at a Navy frigate as it pased by. What can we say? We can only agree… It is an act of exceptional violence that a missile frigate, a military operational unit named after the carabinieri army, can return to an important NATO base in grand style following a mission, crew lined up on deck. These are images that lacerate your heart.
Fortunately that day, near the revolving bridge, there were some enemies of militarism who expressed all their disgust at this violent repulsive spectacle. Their shouts and insults thrown at the military broke the deafening, complicit silence of those who held back, enjoying the show, and the stones thrown at the frigate tore away the grey area of silent collaborationism of those who never have the courage to call things by their name.
Giving substance to one’s antimilitarism – especially in this period of war propaganda, which has passed uninterruptedly from covid to war – is the sign of a particularly admirable ethical tension. While the whole of the national press and politicians hastened to label the demonstrators “pacifists” and condemn the gesture, we think that shouting “Murderers!” at the military, regardless of historical contingencies, is the truth, pure and simple.
To expose the role of words that describe soldiers as “heralds of peace”, is the first simple act to be carried out so as not to drift further and further into a reality that wants us to believe that at nightfall all cows are grey …
From the beginning of time, the job – the dirty job – that soldiers have to do is wage war, i.e. kill, and they get specific training and are paid for this. Only propaganda that obfuscates minds, and the debasement of language, can make it possible for the obvious to be forgotten; similarly only a selective memory can forget, for example, that the marines Latorre and Girone who murdered two Indian fishermen a few years ago wear the same uniforms as the soldiers on the “Carabiniere” frigate and work in the same area. A double homicide that the Italian State resolved brilliantly a few months ago by paying over a million euros to the families of the murdered men in exchange for impunity.
Now the news is talking of a brutal Russian army prepared to massacre civilians and rape women; but they don’t say that this practice belongs to all the armies in the world and that the vile serial systematic rape of women belongs to the history of all conflicts and has been widely documented from Vietnam to the present day – just to mention the most recent massacres. News that is written not with the pen but with the bayonet, that says nothing about the practice of torture as a scientific system consciously applied by all armies, trained to do so by their States, as Italian paratroopers did in Somalia and the US military did in Abu Ghraib.
By virtue of this, we can only be on the side of the anonymous protesters from Taranto, whom the Digos are now trying to identify in order to accuse them of “insulting the armed forces”. A crime, if it were ever to be proved, which can only be something to be proud of.
