The war on terrorism may have been lost

(To Giampiero Venturi)
14/12/15

We will talk for days about bombs and attacks. A wave of indignation and rhetoric will follow yet another massacre of innocents, the appearances of a horror film decided by others. Political and military considerations will follow, with ideological debates on the causes and methods of reaction. We will talk about security, we will talk about intelligence. We have already seen it and we will queue on our backs as virtual citizens, angry behind a screen and a keyboard, but happy in the end for not being direct victims.

The so-called war against terrorism is perhaps already lost. The rest is chatter that will fade away, just in time to enter the next commercial streams in the calendar.

The reason is essentially social. A war is won first of all if there is, that is, if there are opposing forces. Forces that oppose each other have reason to exist if there is something to defend. Against ISIS or any jihadist group, there is no united front simply because there is no longer anything that has decided to survive. The West and Europe in particular have thrown in the towel, giving up on themselves and their identity. It has not happened too slowly in the last half century, in a silence between ideological malice and widespread carelessness.

Some will say that identity is an outdated concept, the result of an obsolete world and that the only value in which to recognize oneself is the mixture of identities themselves. With these premises, the result of fifty years of masochism, every debate is useless.

The explosions and normal death in the heart of Europe do not derive from weapons but from the tiredness of existing. They are the suicide of a society that does not recognize itself as a historical journey, an evolution that took place around objective and inalienable principles. From the Edict of Constantine, to the Magna Carta, from the French Revolution to the ideologies of the twentieth century: for millennia the West has proposed formulas that are often in contrast with each other, but nevertheless essentially focused on itself and its future.

What is left of this? What have we been able to build over the past few decades thinking of the generations to come?

Whether Western culture died in Yalta or Woodstock doesn't matter. The fifth column of the enemy that we believe we are fighting (let's call it ISIS for convenience…) is ourselves, tired of sweating for something, fattened up in the shadow of the privileges we inherited from our fathers. Failure to recognize the Christian matrix in the draft European Constitution was the most striking example of a general abdication. On a built continent physically around the bell towers and the crosses the debate should not have even been born. We have cut the thread with the past, phobics of every heritage and every tradition.

We are an obese and virtual society that pretends to want and love each other only to avoid the burden of sacrifice. It is not by chance that the pacifist and Third World obsession is often more imbued with hatred for one's own roots than with charity for others. It's a cul de sac mental from which one does not exit.

Fighting for oneself is too burdensome, especially for those who have succumbed to the abulia of belonging and no longer recognize themselves in anything. We have long since ended up in cultural masochism, sporting alternatives, critics for emulation, suicides due to fatigue. In the face of young, hungry, determined and ruthless cultures, we struggle in useless words, waiting for the next stage of the horror race.

It seems pointless to look for solutions. Radical Islam is a phenomenon of actuality, a simple instrument of history. Even if defeated on the field will be followed by another. Our enemy is ourselves, more and more similar to the Rome of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Combined in this way we are destined to disappear with great destruction of what, for better or for worse, has been built over the centuries.

The tragicomic fact is that many snakes in Western culture rejoice, believing to be out of the game, to be different, to be other.

(in the photo the participants of the summit on immigration held in Valletta in November 2015)