Today, in Italy, being a pacifist means three things. The first meaning is the one expressed in Article 11 of our Constitution and which Maurizio Caprara summed up very well a few days ago in the columns of the Corriere. That is, it means rejecting for our country any aggressive policy of a nationalistic or colonialist nature or what it looks like. At the same time, and as a consequence, it means rejecting the idea and practice that international disputes can be decided by cannonballs and thus, inevitably, in favour of whoever has the most cannons.

In this sense, there is no doubt that in our country the pacifist front, let's call it that way, is very broad. From Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and Defence Minister Guido Crosetto to the most sinister left-wingers, not only do I not see anyone preaching the need for Italy to embark on a military adventure, but there is no one who wants to put on a fierce face or show his muscles towards anyone. In short, we are all or almost all pacifists here.

But alongside what I have now said, there are two other types of pacifism: pacifism according to circumstances and the pacifism of unreality.

Pacifism according to circumstances is that which is applied by its adherents to only one of the two belligerents. Naturally to the one who for whatever political or ideological reason is disliked and to whom therefore the responsibility for the war is always attributed, peremptorily ordering him to stop. The classic model of this pacifism are the 'partisans of peace' of ancient memory, the organisation of the Communist Parties, including the Italian one, which in the years of the Cold War, in obedience to Moscow's orders, 'defended peace' by portraying the United States as a sort of aggressor on permanent duty: militarist, imperialist, only eager to unleash an atomic war against the Soviet Union at the first opportunity. The latter, on the other hand, was portrayed as a 'peace-loving' country by definition, all sound principles and good works.

With the appropriate variants, it is the same pacifism that today is urging the Ukrainians to stop defending themselves - and thus stop asking us for weapons to do so. For in this way those fools would only prevent Putin from winning and thus becoming the master of their country. This is the pacifism that we could call surrender as the best way to peace. The same one, however, that is essentially silent if Hamas attacks Israel in the way that is known and is careful not to even demand that the captured hostages at least be returned.

What is perhaps most widespread, however, is the pacifism of unreality. The pacifism of unreality because, boldly contradicting millennia of human history, its adherents are convinced that war is not, alas, a tragic rule of that history, the way that has always been used by the most diverse human collectivities and states to settle their disputes when they think not only that all other ways of doing so are useless, but also, of course, that they can prevail. No, war is not the rule: it is the exception. Basically due to the dirty interests of a few (first and foremost the arms merchants) or to the perfidious nature of a few rulers and their crazy ideas.

In this way, war emerges from history to become a rupture of a purely criminal nature in the orderly unfolding of things: just as murder is in the orderly life of a community. This has the decisive consequence of bringing it, as such, back into the realm of law, codes and courts.

I am not discussing the historical reasons (Nazism, the Nuremberg trials, etc.) and good intentions behind this phenomenon, but rather the consequences it has had on the collective mentality and sentiment.

The first and most obvious of these is the obvious gulf - on a crucial political issue such as war and peace - between public opinion and cultural sensibilities in the West and those in the rest of the world. On the one hand, recourse to arms is always considered a potentially penal code matter that can open the gates of jail, on the other hand, a more or less normal dimension of politics. The resulting radical imbalance in the psychological disposition of those who have the highest responsibilities in government and must make decisions is evident.

But perhaps the most important consequence is not this. It lies in the mentality that now threatens to prevail among us. A mentality dominated by an irenicism all smug about its own ethical irreproachability and which substitutes good feelings for reality. A tragically optimistic irenicism, unaware that in order to avoid war it is not enough for us to be peaceful because it would be necessary for everyone else to be peaceful too; a pacifism that while the horizon blazes with a thousand conflicts burning everywhere, insists on imagining a happily demilitarised world. Which, however, according to what one sees around, risks being, in the end, only ours.

See, Tre modi di intendere la pace