The article by Prof. Antonio G. Fidalgo CSsR, published on the Blog of the Accademia Alfonsiana
Humans’ historical learning is difficult. They are so inclined to focus on centers and want to reach the top of the highest pyramids of power and historical relevance. Almost always competing with each other to see who can reach the top better. It seems to be the world sport par excellence. And even if it can partly stimulate growth and participation, it still generates endless competitions, which in the long run are terribly dehumanizing. We clash with greater or lesser rivalries, between frivolities and bleeding cemeteries of destroyed humanity, between fights that have no other deplorable motivation than the chauvinist and patriarchal ferocity raised to yet another degree.
No defeat and no crushing destruction of the human, the territorial and the ecosystem can be celebrated neither humanly nor Christianly. The victories of those who win are never a victory, nor a defeat of anyone, but only the fantasy of every type of supremacy that leaves behind a history of real human failure, an evident impotence to overcome levels of inhumanity. Attacks cannot be celebrated, nor can revenge be blessed.
In this sense, the anniversary of last October 7 could summarize the failure of all the so-called victories of history, which have always left behind a trail of death and future revenge. The failure of all extremisms, of whatever color they are, the triumph of the most blind and inhuman obstinacy.
All these axes of violence and war, which swarm in our current historical reality (approximately more than 30), of which it seems that for a certain part of the world the most evident are those of Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Palestine, events that, in the midst of the disarming chaos, produce evidence of the existence of certain geographical and human peripheries, show how many places are not usually considered in the daily international and national agendas. They hide faces that no one wants to see, poor people and injustices that are hidden or minimized , behind the machine of arbitrary and absurd progress of a world that claims to launch itself towards super-technological and advanced goals, when humanity itself, in its cruel and lacerating majority, lives in the most oppressive and false systemic marginality that humanity has ever conceived.
It is not just about the struggles between democracies (fragile, contradictory, and insufficient, at least as the West has implemented them) and theocracies, which is already a lot to learn to live with different and even diverse systems; it is rather about the increasingly dehumanizing, lucrative, and indifferent power struggles. This is why, with the peripheries that are becoming evident and becoming the center of occupation (first of all “media”), perhaps it is time to put at the center of the agendas what until now has been on the margins (considered secondary or “collateral”); perhaps it is time to really look for ways out of the real reverse of history. From the human, geographical and ecosystemic victims. This is an essential task for a truly human, socio-cultural, political, diplomatic, and therefore also a moral perspective.
I would like to conclude with the words of a great man of integration (in every sense), to remember them and suggest rereading them, because even though they were written in another historical time, it seems to me that they can continue to be relevant. I am talking about Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) who among other things had proposed that levels of peace could be achieved through at least two things: “cultural disarmament” [1] and a real effort of “interculturality.” As these words of his show: “If an enemy attacks us we must defend ourselves, but the best defense is to regain his trust – which is possible only if you love. Love for the enemy is not advice for a few “perfect” ones; it is a necessity for survival” [2].
[1] R. Panikkar et al ., Peace and cultural disarmament, edited by the Municipal Cultural Administration of Città di Castello, Città di Castello (PG) 1987; «Victory never leads to peace», 5-24; «Peace is a myth», 205-222.
[2] R. Panikkar, Peace and Interculturality. A philosophical reflection , Jaca Book, Milan 2002, 110.
