At the end of 1943 Leone Ginzburg, meeting Sandro Pertini in a corridor of Regina Coeli where he had been incarcerated by the Nazis, despite his face and lips swollen following a violent interrogation, managed to say to the future president of the republic: “Woe to us if tomorrow we will not be able to forget our sufferings, woe betide if we invest all the German people in our condemnation ”.
Ginzburg did not see the end of the war, because he will die in February 1944 following the torture he suffered in that prison.
What is striking about this testimony is the concern for the future expressed by the great Italian-Russian Jewish intellectual, born in Odessa.
The founder of the Einaudi publishing house, whom he had already translated at a very young age Anna Karenina, he knew well that all freedom arises from the ability to distinguish and that the worst atrocities arise from the exaltation of arbitrary concepts such as that of the purity of the race. Precisely for this reason, in the darkest moment of his life, he was able to turn his gaze to the aftermath, to the relationships that would be established between the populations once the war was over.
It has happened several times in history that far-sighted ideas have taken shape in the darkest dramatic years.
Thus it was in the midst of World War II for the drafting of the manifesto For a free and united Europeconceived by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli in 1941 while they were confined by the fascist regime to the island of Ventotene.
And it was with the Speech on the four freedoms which every person in the world should enjoy, pronounced by Franklin Delano Roosvelt in January 1941, which anticipated some principles that are the foundation of Universal Declaration of Human Rightssigned in 1948 thanks to the great commitment of Eleanor Roosvelt for its editing.
A peace proposal
More recently it was at the height of the war that bloodied the Balkans in the nineties, causing over two hundred thousand deaths and the return of episodes of ethnic cleansing on our continent, that Alexander Langer, the most acute and sensitive green and pacifist politician our country has ever had. , elaborated an articulated proposal: the creation of European civil peace corps, making the effort to give substance to extraordinarily visionary and radical ideas.
In the bloodiest months of that conflict, Langer worried about the aftermath, the long trail of hatred and the deep fractures that war would leave behind.
I remember his tireless commitment to connecting those who from various fronts opposed any idea of ethnic separation to be consecrated with arms.
Born in a disputed borderland, Langer had drawn from the history of Süd Tirol-Alto Adige the awareness of the consequences to which every claim of ethnic purity leads inexorably, in lands where the events of history have brought different cultures and peoples to coexist.
I think it is of great importance to return now to that proposal, at a time when in Italy there is discussion of a considerable increase in military spending, starting from the unfortunate consideration that the only possibility to defend oneself and keep the peace consists in a greater purchase of weapons. and in the increase of men to be trained for war.
A European anti-army
On the contrary, the proposal of the Civilian Peace Corps assumes that, in order to build lasting peace conditions, it is necessary to plan and give life to a sort of anti-army and that Europe, due to its history, has a political and ethical duty to work on a radical turning point of thought, capable of proposing new ways for effective conflict prevention and to take care of and heal the long-term consequences of wars.
Here are some passages from the proposal that Alexander Langer elaborated and brought to public attention in the summer of 1995, in the third year of the long siege of Sarajevo and a few days before the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Bosnian Serb troops in the city of Srebrenica, which Langer did not arrive. to see.
“The civil peace corps will act by carrying messages from one community to another. It will facilitate dialogue within the community in order to decrease the density of the dispute. He will try to remove misunderstanding, to promote contacts in the local civil society. (…) It will promote education and communication between communities. He will fight against prejudice and hatred. (…) It will make the most of the capacities of those in the community who are not involved in the conflict (the elderly, women, children). ”
Thinking about what professional skills should be trained for such a task, Langer proposed to “develop high-level qualities, necessary for individuals participating in the peace corps: tolerance, resistance to provocation, education in nonviolence, marked personality, experience in dialogue, propensity to democracy, knowledge of languages, culture, open-mindedness, ability to listen, intelligence, ability to survive in precarious situations, patience, not too many personal psychological problems “, concluding that those who will be accepted to be part of the peace corps” will belong to the most gifted people in society. ”
The idea that the best intelligences and sensibilities of our continent can find a place of operational research and experimentation to learn how to remove one of the main causes that fuel wars, seems to me a perspective to be taken into consideration and around which to work very seriously.
Langer’s anti-army could begin to come to life as a kind of high-profile school, where to study and put into practice the assumptions and conditions of the art of coexistence, more necessary than ever today.
It could start from the positive experiences of many non-governmental organizations operating in multiple fields in support of the civilian population, but with the ambition of becoming a permanent body capable of intervention, initially supported by some states and the European community, starting with ‘Italy.
Conflict prevention
Regarding the need for effective and consistent training, Langer stressed that “success and failure will also be determined by the degree of training of the Peace Corps people. Training programs will prepare each participant for their mission. At the same time, educators should have the opportunity to be trainees on missions to gain experience in the field. The training will include the growth of personal strength and mentality, but also practical things such as the language, history, religions, traditions and sensitivity of the regions where one goes to operate. ”
Then, with the ability to look realistically at what happens and can happen, Langer added: “A Peace Corps operation can fail and no one should be ashamed to admit it (…). As long as there is no political solution, the Peace Corps cannot really leave. It is essential that the cooperation of local authorities and communities is promoted by an international reward policy (and not by punishments / sanctions). Since poverty, economic underdevelopment and lack of superstructures are almost always part of any conflict, the preparation to live together, to re-establish political dialogue and human values, to stop fighting and violence should be rewarded with immediate international support. economic and financial for the benefit of all communities and regions concerned. Too often it has been forgotten that peace must be visible to be believed. But if it is made visible, peace will find many supporters in every population. ”
It is impressive to read the clarity of these considerations, written before the Western “military operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the results of which were disastrous also due to the inability to make peace “visible and credible”, and before the wars unleashed by Putin in Chechnya and Georgia or the interventions of Russia and Turkey in Syria and of both sides in Libya.
Thinking about the more than seven years of war in the Donbass regions, which prepared the ground for the invasion of Ukraine, we see once again how conflicts are often anticipated by inter-ethnic clashes, fueled by war-mongering narratives of powers interested in shattering and detonating peaceful cohabitations stratified over the years and sometimes over the centuries.
I remember numerous testimonies of girls and boys from Sarajevo, who told how before the outbreak of the war in that city, exactly thirty years ago, none of them had ever considered themselves Muslim or Serbian.
The prospect of mobilizing to ask for part of the planned military spending to be converted into investments for the civilian peacekeepers certainly appears utopian and distant in the weeks in which we are witnessing the massacres of civilians committed by the Russian army and the courageous resistance of the Ukrainian people.
Full solidarity with the victims is more than ever necessary today, only possible by listening to the requests for support for the resistance.
However, if we do not want to remain imprisoned in the logic of war alone and we wish to cultivate thoughts capable of going beyond the present tragedy, as Leone Ginzburg suggested, we must take Alexander Langer’s proposal seriously. The establishment of civil peace corps could, in fact, mobilize the energies and passions of a generation to which we are handing over a world crossed by growing inequalities, poorly managed hotbeds of war and deep fractures, which risk deepening more and more, subtracting hope from the future.