At the edge of the thinkable. And beyond / 1

My gratitude goes especially to those who thought it might make sense to invite, as a guest to this conference, one who has publicly confessed, in theatre and in a book entitled On war. Why we can't not make it (published by Redea), that he was of no use.

In accepting the invitation extended to me, I was aware of the risk I would be taking: how can someone who has served no purpose believe that he has something useful to say?

And how will I, by saying it as I intend to say it this evening, avoid being taken with the condescension that, even today, we reserve for the insane, to whom we agree, fearing that contradicting them might make things worse?

It will depend on you!

The reproach of having welded reason to madness has always been the price that must be paid by those who remain faithful to the exercise of critical thinking applied to reality and, in particular, applied to the commonplaces kept alive artificially.

Among these clichés there is one that takes my sleep away.

It robs me of sleep even though it is wisely cultivated to allow us to fall asleep at night: it is the idea that there is a tolerable, watchable, bearable war, a clean war in which the deads thank the ones who killed them for sending them to their Creator, respecting their dignity as human beings, a war in which no one and not for a single moment trespasses into the lands we define as Evil.

Human beings have always waged war and have always deluded themselves that they can control it. We resorted, for this, to philosophy, ethics, morality and not least religion: from ancient India, to ancient China, to ancient Greece, to the Koran, to the ancient Romans.

It was, however, necessary to wait until modern and contemporary times to see the introduction of legal precepts on the conduct of war widely subscribed (shared much less) by states and subjected to constant updating.

I will therefore try to shatter the commonplace that, even today and, I would say, especially today, allows us to believe that it is possible to prevent war from getting out of hand. I will try to get rid of the cliché that leads many of us to believe that war is not what it is: that war can be different.

I only ask you to follow me to the borders of the thinkable and beyond: it is in fact at those latitudes that it is possible to break free from the official version of the world and oppose the resistance of thought to the suffocating obsequiousness it constantly asks us to show towards it.

The exercise of critical thinking creates loneliness. I am comforted, however, by the people I met in war-torn lands, people who, through an act of immeasurable trust and brotherhood, entrusted me with their lives so that I could tell their stories, in the vain hope that their lives might change thanks to my stories.

I am also comforted, I will make no secret of it this evening, by the dead, to whom I have only ever had pity to provide as a guarantee of the use I would make of my photographs and video images.

When they visit me, at night in dreams or much more often during the day, these dead do not generate nightmares. Long conversations are born between us. The dead, with the irony that characterises them, question me about how humanly sustainable the bomb that killed them was.

I have spent part of my life recounting the tragedies generated by war.

What was the raison d'être of my photographs, of my films?

Of this photograph, for example?

Only one was: to stop war, in particular to stop the war in which I found myself from time to time.

As time went by, I felt more and more like a doctor who, looking at the X-ray of a fractured leg, turns to the aching patient and thanks him for letting him take that picture, assures him that the image of his tibia will end up in a well-preserved archive, and candidly confesses to him that he cannot do anything else: the unfortunate patient will have to keep his broken leg.

I then consigned myself to a long and, I confess, painful work on myself. Unable to consider the years I spent in the war as a chapter of my life that I could have closed, although I stubbornly wanted to close it to move on to something else, I realised that I had to look at the war with the gaze of an escapee.

I told myself that if recounting the disasters of war does not discourage human beings from delivering themselves into the arms of ever new wars, there must be another way to hold them back.

Finally, I realised that I had to reflect on war.

For I am convinced that this is the only way to turn it into a thought that does not exist, into a thought vacuum: the only way to make war unthinkable.

Reflecting on war means searching for the causes that, still today, make possible the obedience of soldiers, the endurance of civilians and the cheering that, from home, everyone does for one or the other side involved in a conflict.

Reflecting on war means starting from afar, from before war erupts on the battlefields: starting from the process of preparing for war.

Only after thinking about it, in this way, to the very end, will war become unthinkable.

Have I become a pacifist? Not by a long shot!

How could I, knowing full well that I would have been ready to wage it myself, not even out of conviction, but just for the sake of it, since I was in it up to my neck. War is easy to make.

I hate war because I hate being taken for an imbecile.

War is only possible if we accept being taken for fools. I will explain myself.

I had the good fortune and privilege to know, albeit only indirectly, an extraordinary person who is no longer with us. This person's name was Francesco Ferrari and it is thanks to his daughter Francesca, to whom I am very grateful, that I discovered her father through a piece of writing

Francesco Ferrari was born in the last century in Scotland, the son of an emigrant to Britain from Ludiano in the Blenio Valley.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Francesco Ferrari enlisted in the British army. He was first transported to France, near the Belgian border. On the morning of 11 May 1940 he arrived in Brssells: there was his baptism of fire, the Germans attacked. He writes:

‘The streets are full of refugees, women, old people, children, who also suffer, like us, terrible shelling and machine-gunning. We often have to stop our convoys, get out, carry the bodies of these dead or wounded people to the side of the road, without unfortunately being able to do anything for them, because we have to carry on, move forward (...)'.

The British, unable to withstand the German fire, retreated. Francesco Ferrari arrives at Dunkirk. These were days that remained indelibly etched in his memory. He took part in the famous battle that bears the name of the French town. He writes, again:

'We spent three terrible days in Dunkirk. At night, they took away the wounded and the dead. The dead, so peaceful, gave us a sense of envy in their eternal sleep, in the midst of all that chaos'.

The soldiers left alive under the German bombs envy the dead: it is a shocking image.

We would be wrong, however, to conclude that Ferrari meant to suggest that death was preferable to life that had become unbearable.

Those ‘so peaceful’ dead scattered on the streets and battlefields deprive war of its reality and thus deny it. The dead are extraneous to war, they even allow themselves to ignore it at the very instant when war, overbearingly, demands to be considered as the only conceivable reality.

It is not a resigned perception, that of Francesco Ferrari: it is a declaration of scandalous resistance, indeed of revolt against war.

That it is the dead who revolt, and not the living as they should, makes explicit what I call the absurdity of war.

‘Chaos' is the central word in Francesco Ferrari's description.

It is not just a physical perception of total confusion.

Chaos is a cognitive dimension: it suggests the presence of a world thrown off its hinges that, until the outbreak of war, were the guarantee of its order.

I call bewilderment or disorientation what Francesco Ferrari calls the human experience of the chaos generated by war.

This experience affects both combatants and civilians, but also medical and, more generally, humanitarian personnel.

It is an experience that takes many forms that I call ‘revelations’ or ‘manifestations’, to be understood, I emphasise, as cognitive experiences, hence of thought.

I will illustrate more than one of them this evening.

The mother of all revelations is the one the Roman philosopher Seneca had two thousand years ago.

In a letter to the poet Lucilius, he writes:

‘We repress murders, the murder of individuals: but what about wars and the extermination of entire populations, crimes of which we boast? (...) Atrocities are sanctioned by the decrees of the Senate and the people, and what is forbidden in private is commanded in the name of the State. Those crimes that, committed in secret, would be punished with the death penalty, we approve of because the high officials have promoted them'.

The paradox illustrated by Seneca is one of the manifestations of the chaos, the disorientation that human beings in war experience. Is it ever possible for the law to tolerate in war what it pursues in peacetime?

There are other revelations.

War exposes us to the experience of the death of others (fellow soldiers, colleagues, family, friends, strangers), but also to the always imminent possibility of our own death.

In war, we discover ourselves capable of killing our fellow human beings. It is an action that before the war we would not only have refused to do, but of which we believed ourselves incapable: we looked upon it with horror.

In war, we understand how easy it is to kill someone without feeling guilt.

This death-bringing gesture is perceived as legitimate (in practice legal) by virtue of the obedience due to the order given from above: ‘Open fire!’.

Soon, any remaining moral hesitation is swept away by the survival instinct.

Civilians, too, experience chaos in war, disorientation: they realise, for example, that life has lost all value, that human dignity matters not a fig, that a neighbour is capable of anything to survive, that people who are supposedly decent have started looting, stealing, threatening and overpowering, and that the mors tua vita mea that was thought to be the tragic prerogative of soldiers is in fact also true for civilians.

The 19th and in particular the 20th century have sought a way out, indeed an escape route from Seneca's paradox and, consequently, from the bewilderment we all feel when we are in, but also in the face of, war.

The Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, whom everyone knows as the father of the International Committee of the Red Cross, is in Solferino, Italy, on 24 June 1859. By chance he witnesses the aftermath of the famous and bloody Risorgimento battle. In 1862, he published the booklet A Memory of Solferino.

The battle causes thousands of deaths among the French-Sardinian allies and the Austrian army. Dunant notes that the wounded are left agonising on the battlefield. They are only helped by the villagers, particularly the women: they utter, at the sight of the dying soldiers, the formula that has become famous: ‘All brothers’.

Struck by bewilderment, Dunant has an intuition: to ask states and governments to conduct war in a more humane way by allowing aid to enter the battlefield.

The ICRC, which would see the light of day a few years after Dunant's book is the first major patch put on the ethical and legal vacuum within which war had been fought until then.

In 1907, another patch. The Hague Conventions saw the light of day, by which the great powers committed themselves to abide by a certain number of rules in the conduct of war. Good intentions soon swept away by the First World War, which saw soldiers used as cannon fodder and the abundant use of deadly gases.

In 1949, immediately after the Second World War, the four Geneva Conventions saw the light, which, to this day, constitute the most comprehensive body of law for removing the conduct of conflicts from the legal vacuum created by war. This corpus is also called International Humanitarian Law.

Seneca must have been turning in his grave. His blunt denunciation of war had given birth to a monstrosity: states had not agreed never to wage war again, but to continue to wage it by invoking humanitarian principles.

This was the most glaring and resounding patch to the oxymoron identified by Seneca: thanks to the legal framework of International Humanitarian Law, wars could now even boast of their legality and the ‘murders’ committed in them and otherwise punished in peacetime became legally unexceptionable, provided they met certain standards. They were tolerable. Indeed, tolerated.

Thus saw the light of day the humane and humanly tolerable version of war. Such a war exempted states and their citizens from not waging it: war had become, finally, desirable.

Seventy-five years after the Geneva Conventions, exactly on 18 November 2024, the Swiss Foreign Minister, Ignazio Cassis, declared in an interview that:

‘Everyone is appealing, calling for respect for International Humanitarian Law and, at the same time, expressing frustration because international laws and UN resolutions are not observed by several states’.

Cassis was right as rain, although he was stating the obvious: the law is not the same for everyone. Neither is humanitarian law.

Israel, which after the massacre on 7 October 2023 unleashed a war against Gaza, where the victims, according to a UN document, are 70 % civilians, has been repeatedly urged to respect International Humanitarian Law. This has not prevented those who have been urging, i.e. the United States in primis, from supplying Israel with weapons, ammunition and even the so-called dumb bombs, the ones that fall due to the force of gravity, and peace and amen if they fall in a half-hearted manner, without making any distinction between combatants and civilians.

On 20 November, US President Joe Biden authorised the supply of anti-personnel mines to the Ukrainian army. They have been outlawed since 1980. Before that, Washington had supplied Ukraine with cluster bombs, also outlawed. Does it matter to anyone, perhaps?

The US and Europe have repeatedly accused Russia of violating International Humanitarian Law and the laws of war. It is true: Russia employs cluster bombs and its bombings have claimed and continue to claim civilian lives.

That even Kiev's bombs (cluster and noncluster) and missiles have made and are making civilian deaths in the Donbass has not prompted any heartfelt calls to respect the principle of distinction between civilians and soldiers, which is one of the pillars of the Geneva Conventions.

Remember the drone war ‘against terrorism’ unleashed in the Middle East by former US President Barak Obama? Nobody ever thought of challenging him for the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the large number of civilians killed by his drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

And again: when the US and its British and French allies razed the cities of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, they did so because they were strongholds of the Islamic State. It was such a good cause that the bombing done in its name could not contravene International Humanitarian Law.

I was there, in Mosul, and I can assure you that the city was still inhabited by civilians. Not all of them had managed to escape. It was never known how many died in Raqqa and Mosul. No one was interested in knowing.

Let us return to Federal Councillor Cassis' statement: it is interesting beyond the obvious, though not insignificant observation of how ballerine the laws of war are.

Cassis indirectly suggests that if everyone respected International Humanitarian Law, we could rest easy. Wars would still be fought, but they would stop producing terrifying images and, thus, humanitarian headaches.

What more can we ask of life? Or rather, what more can we ask of war?

This illustrates, in a nutshell, the criticality of the legal corpus introduced in the 20th century to defuse Seneca's paradox: to make us believe that a war obsequious to International Humanitarian Law is a clean, acceptable and legally ‘just’ war.
 

From here to conclude that a just war is also good, in the ethical-moral sense of the adjective, and that there can therefore be a good and just war, the step is short. Indeed, it is not even a step. It is a logical closure. It is a wish.

(gianluca grossi)

- to be continued -