The memory - not the celebrations that did not take place - of the Italian victory in the Great War And state the opportunity to reopen the cataracts of feel-good rhetoric national. «No more useless massacres!», «No more wars!». «War is always the worst solution!». Se and pensa to an armed conflict between superpowers equipped with terrible atomic arsenals, non yes you can than to agree. Today the guerra can represent the end of life on earth or, Anyway, reduce the planet to a state similar to that described by Robert Altman in the film 'Quintet' of 1979. Such evidence, However, it is such for the present but you understand a lot less for the pasto.
Which And the real reason it induces the pacifists in effective permanent service to believe That the war always has been the worst of evils? I don't see, within a Christian-Enlightenment ethic, that only one reason: the delivery of violence, accompanied by the destruction of human lives, of natural and artificial landscapes produced over the centuries with an enormous expenditure of economic and intellectual resources, of architectural works That ,without the war, would have defied the centuries, of civil buildings, of churches, of libraries, of monuments of art, of science laboratories.
Except if it's about this, there is nothing even more terrible than war in the revolution? If we talk about the body count, of hunger, of famine, of looting, of the felling of homes and places of worship, of the demolition of the symbols of the overthrown political regime, the revolution appears objectively even more execrable of the war. In Soviet Russia alone they perished, in a few decades, more than double the number of people killed in the Great War or in the senseless Axis war. The Chinese Revolution it seems to have cost the civilian population more than thirtyto millions of 'enemies of the people. The same one ‘Great Revolution’ caused in France (and in Europe) a higher number of deaths than there were had in the wars dynastic for the hegemony from Richelieu to Louis XVI.
What's worse, but, it is not the quantity of those who have passed on to a better life but the ideological character, religious, ruthless, fundamentalist, of the revolution. The war ofancien régime – which is certainly not intended to idealize – they flowed and and mero conflict of interest: each army fought for the King and the Country and enemies – especially if official superiors – they felt part of aor same professional body, characterized by a specific sense of honor, that commanded respect of the 'colleague'.«Gentlemen THE English, PULL THE premiers !», the words spoken in the battle of Fontenoy (1745). The Great Illusion by Jean Renoir (1937) subtraction ,Perhaps, the expression more touching say thatl 'yesterday's world' in which the two aristocratic protagonists of the film were still immersed – he commander ofshe German prison, he capitano from Rauffestein (Eric von Stroheim) and ihis French prisoner, he cadd it Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) – but that he couldn't comprehend, due to its bourgeois origins, the other French prisonere, he tenent Marshal (Ian Gabin).
It's with the French Revolution, effectively, that begins the Great Transformation. The armies that fight against external and internal reaction do not raise the flag of 'Raison d'Etat' - which,as reason with a lowercase r, knows the art of prudence and ability to self-limit not in the name of morality but of "interest well understood" – but rather the banner of the «human and citizen rights» which leads to considering enemies as agents of Reaction, expressions of absolute Evil, of denial radical of theequality, of thefreedom and dellto the dignity of all the Children of the Earth.
Violence it is not now perceived as an unavoidable necessity but as the just punishment of the corrupt and depraved who want to stop the course of history. They are no longer there reasons in the plural but there is only the Raison in the singular – and with a capital letter – which requires the reclamation of the conquered land lfreedom from parasites and bad weeds that, over the millennia, they prevented the planet from being transformed into the garden dreamed of by utopians. AND l’ethicization (e, afterwards, the juridicalization) of the conflict it causes, in fact, the revolution, in its course, more inhumane than war, since none Convention of Geneva it is limits and contains violence. When the enemy is a criminal no mercy can move whoever captures him and if, nevertheless, manages to save himself (to be carried before a court) this happens due to the survival of ancient codes of honor in the winner. It is not a coincidence that during our civil war - the Resistance - the partisans coming fromarmy were less ruthless than those coming from parties (v. the memoirs of Edgardo Sogno and Alfredo Pizzoni); and that a similar phenomenon does is registryato in the 'Republican Guard' of Salò in which members of the Militia or the dissolved PNF they were less hasty thanthe soldiers of the former royal army.( It's the testimony—collected by me–of officers who, living in the north, they had found themselves in the territory of the Social Republic and that they had had to join it)
It arises, At that time, the question: whether the quantity of violence delivered and its very modality should have led us to fear revolution more than war, because the costs of the first have been removed in point da farne an event from sanctify (even when it ended badly, as in the case of 1917) while the second the clo has always remainedmaximum aca in which they pour out all the infernal sewers of terra? The reason lies in the fact that in a society characterized by a political culture lontana from realism, and supremely forgiving of all that smacks of – or it refers to – 'progress', they matter above all the intentions.
Revolutions happen (or at least that's what you think) for ideal reasons, to free men from aristocratic oppression or bourgeois tyranny, while wars originate from interests and interests are not values but selfish appetites. fire le case ofThe exploiteri of the people may be reprehensible but it is, nevertheless,manifestation of altruism: defend oneself (with weapons) by those who want to take away our place in the sun or prevent them from occupying it it doesn't have any justification, And manifestation of nationalism and of oppression, Also in the presence of an objective one will to oppression by dhe neighboring and competing states—the states, said Benedetto Croce, they are leviathans with bronze guts.
«War never solved anything?». In a in a certain sense it is true, if the two world conflicts have redrawn the map of Europe and the world, they failed Then to redesign it for the better, at least in every part of them: the old continent in 1918 attended, in many areas, althe affirmation of the 'principle of nationality', al collapse of the Central Powers and the tsarist autocracy but, in the chasm of power open since the Great War, and they would soon be installed totalitarian regimes so inhumane to do Montesquieu's 'Asiatic despotism' pales.
However «what did it solve then the revolution?». The budget of the rivolution Soviet state—even for historians decidedly left-wing like Eric J. Hobsbawm—at all bankruptcy and on its own rubble, forty years ago, a democratic-authoritarian political regime was born which only managed to avoid bankruptcy by selling its raw materials abroad. E as for the France, mother of all modern revolutions yes it would, Perhaps, found it worse without the Jacobin Terror, the Napoleonic dictatorship, and the whirlwind succession of republics and monarchies? These are questions that cannot be asked in any school in the Republic afterwards without lend oneself to the accusation of democratic defeatism if not of reaction. Yet the facts are those and they are there harder than steel.
In my humble opinion, to put it brutally and without any concern for the politically correct, non we will never be a democracy liberals a norma if we do not replace the “philosophy of war” for the “philosophersof the revolution", if we do not resign ourselves to seeing the adversary someone like us, that he has interests different from ours – e sometimes only modular with weapons (the weapons of the ballot paper, non military ones) – or if non we give up to consider him a morally inferior being, to crush without mercy.
Nella philosophy of revolution there is the idea of the rotten apple, of the virus lethal that infects a society (naturally) very much, in the 'philosophy of war', there is, basically – tinged with Humean skepticism – the idea of equality whereby on both sides of thebarricade we expect to find the same human material.
Dino Cofrancesco, da Hume page, Hume Foundation, 25 January 2019
