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I admit that I struggled to identify US President Joe Biden with the over 100-year-old veterans of the Normandy landings 80 years ago. While I pay tribute to them at the celebrations in France, I raise a tenacious barricade of thought against the US president's words: they drag a lost and applauding Europe towards the abyss of a new war. In the general silence of all. Switzerland included.
According to Joe Biden, the war effort for Ukraine 'echoes the D-Day battle for freedom'.
The applause of European leaders makes the phrase even more terrifying: if it is to be taken seriously, then it can only lead to an extended war.
Should we not, perhaps, have the courage to fight it to the end, against Russia, someone will ask?
No, I answer. Courage, today, is at home elsewhere: it lies in dismantling this indigestible and obsessive war rhetoric coming from the United States and which Europe, supinely, repeats reverberating it.
How is this possible?
It is only possible if we accept the belief - committing an immense error - that war can only be answered with war and that what is tragically unfolding in Ukraine is not the result of causes for which the West bears devastating responsibility.
That today, then, the President of the Swiss Confederation, Viola Amherd, declared, as she did, that Russia was not invited to the Birkenstock conference because she had long said she did not want to participate, definitively consigns the Confederation's initiative to the soap bubble category.
Courage, today, belongs to those who oppose war and will do so until the very end. And afterwards. On all fronts.
It is cowardly, on the other hand, to call for war.
(gianluca grossi)