A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #472 - Horizons of war and prospects of struggle (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Arms Race. ---- Horizons of War, to paraphrase a famous film, could be 
the definition of our time, in which armed conflicts, whether actual or 
threatened, occupy the political and media space and present themselves 
with a compelling force that brooks no discussion or reconsideration. 
But war itself is nothing new; it hasn't appeared on the scene recently. 
The history of the 20th century, to focus on a specific period, unfolded 
through two tragic world wars, and the subsequent period, that of armed 
peace and nuclear weapons as a deterrent, as Eduardo Galeano reminded us 
a few decades ago in his extraordinary book, Upside Down: The School of 
the World Upside Down , saw the deaths of more than 20 million people 
due to war. Since 2001, the date of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 
New York, a permanent US war has emerged, unfolding across vast swathes 
of the planet, contributing to the uncertainty and instability that 
appear to be the hallmarks of this sad era. With the outbreak of the 
conflict in Ukraine in 2022, war has been fully normalized in our 
latitudes too, resorting to the age-old adage of the enemy, different 
and irreducible, to be defended at all costs. Thus, a new arms race has 
begun, involving the governments and parliaments of the world's leading 
states. Emblematic of this madness, as requested by Trump and endorsed 
by many governments, is the increase in NATO's contribution to spending 
to 5% of GDP. This arms race, despite the steady increase in military 
spending over the past decades, today presents a different quality, due 
to the aforementioned normalization of war. And so, in the face of the 
extreme instability we are experiencing, war is no longer a possibility 
to be averted with diplomatic means which could "even" fail but a 
concrete and viable option. A choice already legitimized by the way 
relations between states are conceived and made necessary by media 
propaganda.

However , beyond the particularities of this historical phase, the 
transformations underway in the global political and economic system, 
the contingent reasons (or presumed reasons) that have given rise to the 
various ongoing conflicts, from the Russian-Ukrainian one to the one in 
Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and many others, even forgotten or barely exploited 
by the media, perhaps it would be appropriate to distance ourselves from 
the current manifestations of war, of wars, attempting to penetrate more 
deeply into the dynamics of the global capital system, its perverse 
logics of oppression and profiteering, and also adopting an ethical 
stance against the dominant realpolitik. Of course, there are the 
well-known causes of war: economic, political, hegemonic, cultural; 
Sometimes unexpected causes, even economically unsatisfactory ones, as 
was the case with 19th- and 20th-century imperialism, whose economic 
results were less important than the desire for power that drove the 
powers of the time to engage in wasteful and senseless wars (by the way, 
Italy knows something about this with its colonial wars, from Eritrea to 
Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia). Imagine if this desire for power wouldn't 
tickle a Trump or a Putin today! And there's also geopolitics, which 
explains relations between states, how an imperialist conflict is 
underway between the United States and China, how Italy and Europe 
should join this struggle and carve out a space for themselves, adopting 
the same tools and the same logic of supremacy and dominance (read a few 
issues of Limes to understand what we're talking about). And while 
explaining all this, geopolitics suggests that beyond this given 
framework there are no alternatives; this is the reality, and we must 
deal with it.
But is it enough to know about geopolitics, to understand the causes, 
contexts, and motivations of wars both known and unknown to generate 
real, practicable, and effective forms of opposition to war? Granted, we 
already know and understand (certainly for those who want to know and 
understand) the causes or origins of past and present conflicts, the 
point is that this is not enough to push for concrete opposition to war. 
Indeed, it seems that today, and not only in relation to war, the more 
we "know" and the more we "understand," the more we become overwhelmed 
by such a mass of information, developing a sense of impotence and 
inevitability.

In 2021, Carla Benedetti, professor of contemporary Italian literature 
at the University of Pisa, published an essay titled " Literature Will 
Save Us from Extinction." Discussing the climate crisis, she notes that 
knowledge of the issue is not enough to spur action to avert the 
predicted catastrophe. She writes: "If knowledge alone, while 
indispensable, is not enough, it means that something else must also be 
mobilized, probably something dormant, forgotten, fossilized by those 
same thought structures that have favored the type of development and 
society that is now leading us to catastrophe." She further discusses 
imagination and emotion as energies that must be activated to break the 
sense of impotence. Precisely, one might say, that feeling of humanity 
that drove millions of people to take to the streets in the fall of 2025 
to demand an end to the massacre of Palestinians. A powerful and 
unexpected feeling that catapulted millions of people to the center of 
the agora. We now know that, over time, that explosive force has been 
partially extinguished, but that doesn't change the fact that it has 
managed to reawaken, to find ways to express itself. We must begin again 
from this possibility. And from the awareness that certain preconditions 
must be developed, without which no fight against war is truly anti-war. 
First, in capitalism or in an economic system based on growth, 
competition, and accumulation, war is a structural fact; second, without 
challenging militarism, weapons production, and the police forces built 
to defend the system and perpetuate exploitation, the call for peace is 
a palliative; third, we need to deconstruct the concepts of homeland, 
borders, and enemy, the ideological elements that lend legitimacy to 
war; fourth, we must connect the struggles; the fight against war must 
unite with those for social rights, those for the climate, and feminist 
and anti-racist struggles.

It's not simple, but nothing is given and established forever.

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/2026/09/20/orizzonti-di-guerra-e-prospettive-di-lotta/
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