On the Italian soldiers recently killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, by the Italian section of the Anti-Imperialist Camp
“HERO”: I. In antique civilisations; individuals of a semi-divine nature; endowed with exceptional virtues, authors of legendary feats. II. Extensive: whoever demonstrates extraordinary warrior values or is ready to sacrifice himself courageously for an ideal: to die as a hero, author of or able to undertake exceptional tasks.
“MERCENARY”: I. Adj., one who serves others for pay, mercenary soldiers, who from the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance served whoever gave better pay, fighting without passion and without faith. II. Professional soldier enlisted usually for single operations of warfare. (Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, Great dictionary of the Italian Language)
The return of the six Italian soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan has set off a patriotic tsunami in complete fascist style. As in the earlier cases, they have been described as heroes, as simulacra of good, as paladins of peace. The strategists of the dominion – whose motto is the same as Ignatius Loyola in the time of the witch hunts: one must make others believe black is white, and that white is black – thus have they sealed within those coffins the truth, the decency, the intellectual honesty of so much wasted time. We do not participate in this farce. Words are important. Everyone knows the real reason why gendarmes, Alpine troops, sharp shooters and other soldiers like them ask to leave as auxiliaries of the American killers: if they do have an ideal, it is that to save up some money. That’s the long and short of it. Only a ragged imperialism like the Italian one could present its mercenaries as if they were saintly souls, painting the armed searches at Nassiriya, at Kabul or at Herat as if they were the Peace March from Perugia to Assisi. The asphyxiating propaganda of the regime indicates how very desperate they are trying to annihilate, along with the truth, common sense. In this context, here is once again the plague-spreader Magdi Allam who takes it out against us. Let’s hear what he has to say:
“But terror is never pacifist”
“Can one be at the same time terrorists and pacifists? It would seem so, reading in Alias, the supplement of il manifesto, the presentation of the film by Lina Makboul Leila Khaled, the hijacker. A eulogistic version of the story of the terrorist from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who had become famous for her participation, on 29 August 1969, in the hijacking of a plane of TWA in flight between Rome and Athens, forcing them to land in Damascus and there the plane was blown up. “Portrait of the first pacifist terrorist”, is the title in Alias. A contradiction of terms that is emblematic in the nihilism that is filtering in ever more often into our lives. Arriving at the point that life and death assume the same identical worth. It is an ethical drift that has seen the far more cynical militants of the Anti-Imperialist Camp make the equivalency between Islamic suicide terrorists and ‘martyrs in the war of Liberation.’ Read the homage made on 4 December in their Newsletter in Internet, to Muriel Degauque, Belgian citizen who had converted to Islam and who had blown himself up on 9 November 2005 in Iraq. Only scraping the bottom of the relativism of values is one able to understand how grave the equivalency between terrorism and resistance is, thesis now also given credit in influential sectors of the judicial branch, in politics and in information.
In the context of an historical revisionism and of the negationism of the aggressive reality, not reactive, of the globalised war of Islamic terrorism, what end will this West come to, courting the terrorism that has brought the Palestinians to ruin and is willing to drag the Iraqis and the Afghanis in the chasm as well?”
(from Corriere della Sera of 7 May 2006. Rubric: Saturday’s Ideas)
Magdi Allam must have had a dose of heroin (translator’s note, in the original deve essersi fatto una Pera – he must have done a pear, slang for shooting up heroin – is a play on words that refers to his ideological relationship with the former President of the Senate Marcello Pera, who is attempting to establish himself as the perfect Italian Neo-Con and insisting on a definition of Islam that would make the Crusaders proud). Nothing is farther from the so-called “relativism or nihilism of values.” We do not at all make an equivalency between the violence concentrated in the imperialists in coalition and the resistance of the peoples who will not accept to submit to them. We are on the side of the latter and, now that a certain Left is happy with the arrogance of the coalition, unconditionally. How can one be a nihilist who, as we do, insists upon obstinacy in using the key concepts such as oppressed people and oppressors? How can we be relativists if we never miss a chance to express our solidarity with the former?
Nor do we think, as Allam writes of us, that human life has no value. Life is not only a mere biological journey. It assumes value when man is a social being and is endowed, precisely, with ethical principles, with morals, trying to find his own freedom in the respect of common good. Now, we make the case that the imperialist system, to defend the opulence and well being of a minority, sacks the greater part of the world’s populations, letting billions of human beings rot in inhuman conditions. They are depriving them of freedom and hope, reducing their lives, as a matter of fact, into a sorrowful biological journey. Terrorists without pity or values are those who so as to defend this shameful state of things unleash wars, bombard, annihilate entire nations by depriving them of their sovereignty, sending in occupation troops, torturing them, and then cynically manipulating the public opinion. They are therefore heroes all those who so as to destroy that present state of things, reach the decision to make the extreme sacrifice of giving their lives in order to fight the monster of Neonazism, whether it is coloured with stars and stripes or masked by the star of (Goliath).
It is not true that the Heroes love death. It is in the blistering disproportion of means that characterises the war in course, that there is nothing left for them but to use their own body as a weapon, still before doing so to terrorise the imperial Moloch, they do it to prevent that their own people are made to stay on their knees.
Translated from Italian by Mary Rizzo and revised by Nancy Harb Almendras, members of Tlaxcala (www.tlaxcala.es) the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation is on Copyleft.
