Yesterday I went to the demonstration in front of the Russian embassy in Rome. I certainly did not think of changing the course of history, but at least I hoped to write a paragraph of mine: tell me how dismayed I am at the ongoing war. Apart from the journalists on duty, we were few. On Twitter I saw thousands of people parading through the streets of Moscow, in front of the Kremlin, shouting no to war and I was consoled. Someone still has courage.
The conflict
Facebook and Twitter: “So you can defend your accounts from Russian hackers”
When I was a boy and I went to school there was a question that our grandparents had asked themselves that remained with me: Dying for Gdansk? Gdansk, the Polish city invaded by Hitler in 1939, the ultimate cause of World War II. The year before at the Munich conference we had deluded ourselves that we had found an agreement with Germany by giving it some territory. On Netflix there is a film that tells the story well that went down in history as theappeasement by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain: in the film that weak side is told with more indulgence; he was really looking for peace but the premier got it wrong. He was deluding himself. At the time there were no social networks, there was no Twitter where in these hours the messages coming from Ukraine break the heart.
A group of journalists in Kiev began to tell the Russian siege in real time in English so that no one can say that they have not understood, that they do not know. We know what is happening, what happened. But we don’t know what to do. The pandemic has devastated us. We are tired. After the war on covid, we want some peace. I wonder what Chamberlain would have written on Twitter in 1939. Maybe he would have written: harsh penalties.