War enters Europe: latest in a long line that continues to tear apart populations around the world
“Every war leaves the world worse than it found it. War is a failure of politics and humanity, a shameful surrender, a defeat in the face of the forces of evil”. (vaticannews.va)
This is what Pope Francis ‘tweeted’ after going, promptly and surprisingly, to the Russian embassy at the Vatican, in an unprecedented gesture for a Pontiff, with a request to stop the Russian bombs that have been falling on Ukraine since 24 February.
Photo: ansa.it
But Ukraine is only the latest in a long series of crises and conflicts that have torn, and continue to tear, the peoples of the world in recent years. Conflicts in which the two powers, the United States (with NATO in tow) and Russia, have never abandoned their doctrine of ‘spheres of influence’.
Photo: www.farodiroma.it
In other words, the two powers use various countries as ‘theatres of war’, where they often do not fight each other directly, but through the military forces of allied or friendly governments and local militias supplied with weapons. All this is to the advantage of the war industries, which know no crisis and make a golden business out of the pain of the civilian populations, the main victims of the ongoing wars.
Photo: www.documentazione.info
We have seen it in Libya and Afghanistan, and we continue to see it in Syria, Yemen, the Sahel, and above all in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What we are seeing at work today in Ukraine is also the umpteenth tug-of-war between the military-industrial complexes of the United States, Russia and the NATO countries. “Behind Putin’s decisions in recent weeks there are economic returns for the Russian military-industrial complex, which is controlled by the state” (Francesco Vignarca of the Milex Observatory of Italian Military Expenditure).
Photo: focus.it/cultura/storia/
War, like “dictatorship is a temptation older than the vertigo that led to the belief that democracy could be exported at the point of arms and not ‘by healthy contagion’ and patient cultivation, but – thank God and the path mankind has taken – the disastrous bloody export of dictatorship is an even more false illusion. It must be clear, we must know how to resist.” (Marco Tarquinio, Avvenire of 26/02)
"God grant the peace that man cannot build"...
(Pope Francis)
Photo: www.papaboys.org
NETWORKING BETWEEN BELIEVERS AND NON-BELIEVERS
BETWEEN PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS:
the secular world also enforces what is written in the charters certifying the birth of the European Union in whose preamble we find clear words rooted in the right to human dignity, not the right to force:
"The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever-closer union among them, have decided to share a peaceful future based on common values."
(European Charter of Fundamental Rights, 2009)
