What the Pope said about Ukraine is scandalous: you have to negotiate. It causes a scandal because it deviates from what the White House says, from what Brussels says, from what Palazzo Chigi says and is repeated by conformist information: “Forward until victory”. He differs, what he says Pope francescoeven from what he himself had said a few months earlier: “A just peace”.
The only peace is possible, with the injustices it entails, with the end of illusions, with the groans of those who would have wanted more, on both sides. Wars end in two ways: or one of the two winsand there is surrender, with conditions or without. Or the enemies negotiate, to get out of a stalemate, from a bloody and harmful balance for both, to spare the lives of its citizens. What should the Pope have said: patria o muerte, like a Che Guevara in white? Forward to the last Ukrainian, like the European leaders, including Meloni: let’s arm ourselves and leave?
Should he have deluded himself into thinking he was Saint Francis talking to wolves and convinced Putin to return within internationally recognized borders? Should he have said that the risks of worsening, of new Russian advances enticed by the stalemate, of involvement of European armies, of the eternal nuclear threat in the background, do not matter?
It was not equidistant between invader and invadedhe didn’t wave the flags of Good against Evil, he said a simple thing: just die and kill. Ukrainians are free to think differently (at least those who do not try to escape forced enlistment), European leaders are free to replace a faltering American commitment, all of us are free to delude ourselves that, after Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq , Balkans, Libya and so on, exploits of strength gone awry, this time victory will smile upon us. But even a man of common sense is free to say: war is naked.
TheVermilion.com is also on Whatsapp. Simply click here to subscribe to the channel and always be updated (free).