Not that I deem these short essays precious, but hey: some drops of life have been brewed in, so:
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It was a characteristic of the marxist thought to label every reasoning that didn't fit the scheme as either "superstructural" or as "formalism". This, in the marxist thought, gained beauty a bad name, and even poets like Shakespeare weren't but "products" of the "economic settlement of his age" whose unique purpose was to reproduce in "superstructural" words the values an economic system thrived upon: in other terms, poetry (and anything else as a matter of course) wasn't but a superfetation of the current political economic issues.
 
In ancient Greece Cassandra was a prophetess of misfortune, and although she was a trustworthy prophetess ("aletho-mantis" is apparently the greek term) none the less she was never believed. This was not a consequence of the unappeasing nature of her prophecies: truth can be believed even if it is not what we wished for; but it was the outcome of a spell cast on her by Apollo, the god of beauty and who embodied the sun, as a result of a oath to the god, betrayed by Cassandra.
 
Accordingly to his spell, Apollo took from cassandra "the power to persuade", the "persuasion": and since Apollo was a male god of beauty, it is of no difficulty to understand that what was taken away by the god, was the power to seduce, was seduction. So Cassandra tells the truth, but nobody believes her: because her truth yields no accompanying beauty.
 
There is a most enlightening distinction made by a contemporary economist, van Hayek, between two greek terms both signifying: "order".
Such greek terms were "cosmos" and "nomos". Cosmos is a word that holds two meaning: it means beauty, from which the word "cosm-etic" directly derives its significance as a product meant to enhance charm; and it means "order" or "law" altogether. The second term meaning law or order was "nomos".
What's the difference?
 
Nomos was the order imposed unto something by the outside, thenceforth nomos was the term reserved for legal contexts.
Conversely cosmos was the order that spontaneously blossomed from the inside when something obeys a natural law: thence the anglosaxon concurrent meaning of cosmos as the starry dome whose architecture revolves around an inner, and not an outer, law, logos, or Torah.
 
The sweeping consequence implied in this greek differentiation, is that what is ordered by a natural law, and as such is also true (truth can be contested to the nomos, but not to nature by which even experimental science derives it), is necessarily also beautiful.
 
So beauty is no longer formalism, neither it is a byproduct meant to disguise the real nature of things, insofar as beauty, deriving from an inner law, cannot be feigned at all.
 
Beauty is therefore a symptom of truth.
 
This is why a truth spelt without beauty cannot be believed, even when it is pronounced by Cassandra: because men know that a speech of truth can neither set aside beauty nor it can survive without it: beauty is the chrism of authenticity, genuineness, and even legitimacy flowering from any-thing true.
 
Beauty can mislead you as much as a drug (pharmakon) can both heal and kill you: but it is absolutely impossible that something that may only kill you is also beautiful, whereas it is quite possible that something that may heal you has been deprived by the god of its beauty.
 
Since then, men know that what is beautiful, must also have a healing power in it; and this is why words do matter, and why beauty is not formalism, but harbinger of an inner voltage of Health.

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PART I
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The USA president Woodrow Wilson

As the historian Burckhardt wrote of Talleyrand in his biography on Richelieu, the genius and the glory that can inhabit bribery was displayed only once in human history, and it was with Talleyrand himself: a man who could be brilliantly bribed only into "those decisions he had already [secretively] taken"; Talleyrand's way stands out, if compared with default grafting.
Since there is an unadmitted contiguity between some lesser idealism and such lesser bribery, insofar both are swindlers busy warping the texture of reality into unfaithfulness, relentlessly switching its circuits and threads, we can only complain that some idealists served themselves with too self appeasing a name, and never realized they were just crooks who sold themselves out for the cheaper bid.
 
As for the inscrutable reasons men invariably cut for themselves so bad deals with so dedicated a frequency, perhaps the basic motif we can identify is still and best freezed by the sentence Simon Singh reports in his book on cryptography: in such business "the involved protagonists are intelligent, upright, and support the option in point. But no one garners more than two of those characteristic at once".
 
Although Machiavelli never wrote that the ends justify the means (it is the loathsome vulgata they tagged him, as a few "-isms" get attached to genius canned and anesthetized in a nutshell), anyway it is certain and noteworthy that some means can utterly compromise the ends (and many a time they did indeed), and that anyway equality in means still do not amount to equality in ends. Period.
 
None the less the latter assumption, is precisely the supposition normally enrolled by all those who resent the Usa and are in search of arguments to trade.
Whatever politics, from North Korea's to Talibans' to Iran's to Iraq's to Russia's to USSR's to China's to Singapore's to the more far fetched atoll's, even too readily are to be reckoned as extremely shrewd, cunning, astute, appropriate, even palatable honest & fair, as long as they can be foiled against american politics; which on their turn have been conversely and monotonously labelled as: incompetent, unlearned, irresponsible, inept, ignorant, imperialist, illegal, selfish, flawed, hopeless, reckless, unjust, ruthless, criminal, clumsy, mischievous, and wicked. Did I forget anything?
 
In the Korean war (1950. A UN sanctioned war, after North Korea attacked South Korea, whose peninsula was divided in two as a consequence of the Russo-Japanese war) the Usa feared that the communist totalitarian system of the North could be imported in the whole far east. So the Usa general MacArthur under UN mandate sweeps throughout the peninsula, frees it from the invading forces, and does it in order to back South Korea that was and still is democratic (some of the most appalling records on human right violations belong to North Korea even to date).
The chinese lest leaving such a success unchecked might eventually encourage the Usa to proceed even further with both tanks and the entailed democratic intention, counterattack and regain the whole of the peninsula. The Usa counterattack again up to the 38°, and the matter gets conveniently settled down with the region still divided in two areas: a prosperous democratic south some labeled "the tiger of the east" because of its economic successes, and a ghastly north that earnestly fought for its totalitarianism and to preserve its feudalist assets.
 
Now, since both the American and the Chinese reasoning behind the same means (war) revolved around the same logics too (namely preventing the trojan spreading of a political system), there are some who completely miss the substance of the ends, stamp them as irrelevant, and consequently consider the Usa/China or South/North positions entirely equipotent on the basis of the means and of the logics.
Whatever fortunate exception to the rule fit to be charged on the Usa (Vietnam, a real case of means that compromised the ends), is than more than welcome to further the confidence in a wrong conclusion that was such since its inception.
 
No one of those who reason that way ever considers the substance of the power behind the means and beyond the ends.
Partisanships and politics become therefore fully interchangeable, and being just brothers in blood, what should prevent us from deliberately choosing the worst for ourselves and wholeheartedly recommend it for the others?
 
The substance of the systems is ignored, insofar they're both marked "system"; it gets discarded as futile before this perceived equivalence, or at its best it becomes an option whose fictitious acknowledgements get relegated in perfunctory forewords, mere forerunners of a by far far more reaching peroration advocating the opposite option or strongly outlining a set of objections whose bulk reveals the phony nature of the prolusion.
But when substance is ignored, and the truly different nature of alternative and irreducible projects is thenceforth disavowed, and all options are ruled commensurate in means and equipollent to love and to pick from because of the shared logics and logistics, then in the most favorable case we have just made ourselves the connivers, the cajolers and the conjurers of the worst choice which might befall us: everything goes in this relativism, and when between theocracy and democracy some are fully capable of declaring they see no differences but in formalities -and none of them blushing- rest assured the system you're bestowing the actual neat advantage is the former.
 
A substance, which is not presumptive or opinionated, but is embodied in fixed, incoercible facts.
Of course, if facing the Marshall Plan we say that it was undertook "simply" to make sure a recovered Europe would not fall in the clutches of the Soviets, because deranged states are normally even too willingly to give up themselves to tyranny, and from there we disregard the "Molotov" plans that Stalin lent as an alternative and that he wantonly enacted, in order to conclude that since the Usa did this to check the USSR then the merit of the plan is actually soviet and not american, and conversely given such concurrent intention the Usa have to be accused of imperialism, well if we do so and we allow all of that, there is no longer in the entire universe one single star, one single fact, one single argument, one single historical record, that could contradict us once we get persuaded of whatever we're pleased to persuade ourselves with or into.
And this, please take good note, means being positive warmongers.
 
That in Europe so many recently proved themselves so ready to indulge in such blatant blunders and proudly exhibited a faith in these equivalences with the most lighthearted attitude, is an ominous reminder of how much our european nations still are either secretly seduced by or inherently exposed to autocratic temptations; it is a reminder of how scarcely the democratic roots, irrigated by so much autochthonous and foreign blood, have plunged in our souls after we revealed ourselves utterly uncapable of providing ourselves with democracy and shared welfare; and it is a reminder of how much our european (or shall I say euro-asiatic?) countries are still unhealed from their millenarian penchant and weak spot for being brutalized by despotisms of every seasoning.
 
Let's serve ourselves with the truth: either we somewhat resent this democracy and wealth we didn't want and that insolent american legs brought to us, or we still don't deserve them entirely. And brushing aside this solid (and worrisome) argument with our awkward assurances or with our meek denials, or even worse with a sense of annoyed disturbance, still betrays the embarrassment before what the current factual facts seem to stress and to be beckoning at.
 
Can the European Union prove itself a bumper or a frameset for the containment of this streak, or would it even heighten it with a revival of a typical eurovice: provincialism? But the right question is whether an European Union can prosper at all, knowing it's growing shunning this streak.
Or is the EU doomed to a pavlovian, vegetative democracy, implemented as a conditioned reflex protected by a couple of mirages, while our ex-communists flirt with the remains of the USSR and the splinters of the USSR look at the Usa?
And what positive contribution to a positive enhancement of the Atlantic Alliance could ever provide such an EU? The NATO seems deteriorated: and once again, in its best indigenous tradition, Europe let alone at its own devices didn't miss the occasion to prove itself unable to mend.
 
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PART II
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The USA president Franklin Roosevelt

There are at least two types of well known combat tactics I'm aware of. The first predicates you don't enter a war which challenges your interests at once, whenever possible; you enter it at a second stage, to make sure your opponents have already drained themselves for a while before you hurl your weight at them.
 
The second pattern had its first champion in cardinal Richelieu, and should be credited to him: you don't have to hit your target directly, like Richelieu didn't engage Spain and the spanish Habsburgs branch frontally; rather you target what is around your foe or what your foe derives most of its strength from, blowing sort of a transversal hit likewise Richelieu engaged, and eventually pulverized with the Westphalia Treaty in 1648, the much more manageable and less challenging Habsburg branch in Germany, in order to weak its remoter Spanish twin.
 
Variations on the latter strategy have been described by Hugh Brogan: "Whereas the Japanese hoped to wage a war of defensive attrition, in which by disrupting every inch of ground, they might wear down their opponents, the Americans imposed a war of selective attack: they bypassed islands and bases of secondary importance and concentrated overwhelming force against those few points that they really had to capture.
MacArthur's variant on this was 'leapfrogging': he simply bypassed strong Japanese points altogether, leaving them to wither on the vine while he seized weak points in their rear at a comparatively light cost in American casualties".
 
You can in such way achieve by far more reaching and lasting results because you curb what you foe's power derives its sustenance from little by little.
You can, then, use a combination of these politics.
 
The only institutions that are not liable to be tackled this way and that are fitter to resist such politics, are democracies.
The decentralized nature of democracies, the very same fact their wealth is more or less evenly distributed or its nodes flourish in a huge variety of locations without even being all apparent, the fact that the wealth is distributed throughout a territory, and the fact democracies base themselves onto a polyarchic model under every aspect and measure, on multiple layers and across all dimensions, all of this makes them characteristically sturdy and adequate to endure prolonged and heated strain. And there is no critical point at hand to focus hostile efforts on.
 
This is why a set of attacks meant to destroy one of the most apparent economical centers like the WTC, matched with an attack onto the main military stronghold, even matched with a wannabe successful attack on its main political switch (the White House or the Congress), still did nothing structural but only gained a ticket to hell for those who waged the attacks.
You can destroy a centralized structure, but not a diffuse one unless you burn the planet with it.
 
Terrorists indeed attempted to apply a lesson from cardinal Richelieu's scrapbook, but such lessons are meant to impair feudalist societies, not modern ones.
Also, terrorists are said to attempt to decentralize themselves as well (the notorious 'cells' with an alleged compartmented structure - which is not the original shape these structures start with), as a further attempt to ape and import into a feudalist setting tactics borrowed by modern societies; it is sort of a grand misunderstanding accordingly to which what modern societies are is not something morphological that derives from within but a mere instrumental epiphenomenon of applied enginery, which could even be stripped off modern societies, and that if was so successful with democracies could also be isolated and used otherwise, in different opportunistic environments, and without democracy.
 
But this still does no special good to terrorist organizations. In fact it does no good smuggling inland an allogenic tactic to implant it onto a hierarchical organism whose very same quintessence negates even the possibility of a polyarchic approach. Decentralization makes a democracy resilient, and no one else.
 
Now, the western democracies weak spot can be conceived being Europe, not the Usa.
Technically, terrorists could accordingly attempt to apply Richelieu's lesson to Europe (and actually there was a plan to do so in Bruxelles) in order to affect the Usa (in order, in turn, to affect Saudi Arabia, as the eventual target: a domino plan with clear napoleonic delirium in regard of which solving the Palestinian issue is unrelated and as such should be solved for other reasons, because behind 9/11 there is nothing idealistic).
But if they'd do that, this would instantaneously rank (after a first moment of sheer disconcert at themselves) the whole of Europe behind the Usa: because for so much bountiful anti americanism they have sported in time of US granted prosperity, still today Europe, if in time of distress and threatened by a real challenge, would beg Uncle Sam to let her hide behind his wide shoulders.
 
No european country, not even the whole of them, and perhaps with the exception of the UK [see the Falkland crisis] could afford gather any credible military dispatchment corp whatsoever, so imagine if they could arrange it and arrange it so to encompass the whole of an enemy territory of some significance and solve the issue over there quickly and solve it without meddling too much with civilian casualties. The most they can do is either peace keeping with a handful of soldiers or, still today, a long traditional war in the WW1 style, of uncertain results and endless casualties matched with increasing budgetary debilitation.
In such scenario, the most Europe could do is that France might soon be tempted to use its somewhat limited "force de frappe" (strategic nuclear weapons) -I am not aware of tactical nukes in french hands- to cut the story short, and with joy of the pacifists.
 
So the most terrorism could do is just to cause harm with some millions casualties by non conventional attacks, but that would trigger a permanent situation where any type of reaction is immediately legitimated by itself alone: facing mdw really means gloves are off, and the UN would simply be overwhelmed by a challenge it clearly could not meet: for the nature of such a scenario is such that it would automatically bury the UN with the victims, and places like the Pankisi gorge of Tora Bora would be dealt with differently.
 
It is invariably and conveniently ignored that if we have, and if we ever had in history, international institutions like the UN, it is because of the direct initiative and commitment of the Usa and of the Usa alone: and this regardless of the deceptive idea that unlearned persons may derive nowadays, by listening to ignorant pacifists whose speeches seem to reveal they haven't the slightest clue there is a direct filiation of the UN from Usa will.
 
After WW1 the League of Nations was a direct offspring of Woodrow Wilson's politics: he ideated it, he sponsored it, he persuaded other countries about it, he entirely masterminded it, he pushed it through, and he made it true. The UN derived from the efforts of presidents Roosevelt and Truman to provide the world with an international framework still under the influential legacy of Wilson's aspirations, but without the limits of the League, dismissed after WW2.
 
It is thence singular that a Usa sponsored and directly derived organism, is not only perceived today like a USA antagonist organism fanned and meant to perform as such, but it is also assumed that the Usa should not be for interventionism whilst at the same time should not to be for isolationism: namely they should merely and passively put all of their forces and means at disposal of the UN, which otherwise would have no authority or credibility whatsoever, so that the USA could act as the repository of their own military that other countries, at their own will, could command through the UN to settle those disputes among such countries the UN finds relevant or unable to compose.
This is, obviously enough, unacceptable an implication.
 
The League was born in an era that still heavily incurred in meaningful colonialist remnants, therefore in the League some colonial countries could present themselves not just as a single country that had one vote like all the others, but as a disguised array of countries all responding to the inputs of the colonialist nation: Ireland for instance was rightfully scorned that the United Kingdom, with her dominions, could cast at least six votes.
 
The UN council was conceived to have 5 members with a veto power also in order to bypass these problems that harassed the League.
The veto isn't an american prerogative, but belongs to 5 nations among which France sneaked in from the back door, for it never won WW2 (it is true the opposite) as conversely the other 4 vetoing members did.
 
While the NATO seems wearing down, the UN appears increasingly obsolete as well, and it seems so at least as much as the League appeared in the aftermath of WW1.
The League of Nations was conceived after WW1 and ended when it failed preventing WW2. The UN, conceived after WW2, ends its natural lifespan with the end of the Cold War.
 
Many things have waned since then, from the USSR territorial integrity to Yugoslavia to, as noted, NATO's traditional role, to East Germany, to other regimes in east Europe. All this didn't come all of a sudden but piecemeal and by gradual steps, as a whole body gradually decaying: arguing that the UN is not imperiled by the same events that engulfed so many situations and goes on mirthfully unaffected, means not to have understood the nature of the forces behind the UN establishment, nor the scope of the cold war final stage, nor the powerful forces such event unleashed, not even the significant leap beyond all that which the anarchy ensued in the shape of terrorism entailed.
Could this process have been prevented from affecting the UN? No. Has the current US administration accelerated it? Undoubtedly. Was it better not to have accelerated it? Perhaps. Is a war necessary? This should not be asked to the Usa alone, insofar who has no clear perception whatsoever of these implied and profound streams is in no position to debate this last point only.
 
What we're headed towards is this: as it already did in the past, the nation that made the League and that reincarnated it in the UN, is now arranged to craft a new international organization suited to deal with the new challenges and threats.
Whether this body is going to retain the name of UN or whether UN too is to dissolve like the Warsaw Pact and change like the Nato and the League to give way to the Third Phoenix, is a question whose answer stays more in the choices of the UN than in those of the White House.
Whether the Third Phoenix will see its dawn and will be more effective than the UN like the UN was more effective than the League to live up to its pledge, although we don't have one single record of a successful UN mandate except the one during the invasion of Kuwait, is something we're going to verify in the forthcoming years. But the inexorable logics that will get unfolded in the years ahead will nearly be a syllogistic consequence of what is going to unfold in the next months.
 
A few leaders, among them the italian premier Berlusconi namely a leader that at the beginning of its premiership was depicted as a staunch foe of the European integration and of international interferences, whether knowingly or by inclination made the best moves to make sure their countries may have a chance of a good standing in the new organism; whereas other nations did their best, and very efficaciously, to trash as punctiliously as they could their own chances of being protagonists of the new, preferring being protagonists of the past and of the status quo in the face of objective changes.
 
"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity".
This is a big game indeed; and the only three actors who understood quite nothing about it and are using a playbook of a different drama are: Germany, France, and many Pacifists.

Post-modern society is a term Ralph Dahrendorf reminds us how little it reveals about what such a society should be: "Many structures have not crystallized yet, therefore we are compelled to view them in an imperfect state of aggregation. The notion of 'post industrial society' has much to share with this amorphous state of things".
 
Although we certainly know what a pre-industrial society looks like, and although we sense there is a difference indeed between our society and the coal based industrial society without prefixes of the 19th century, still the terms 'post-modern' and 'post-industrial', far from profiling an identity, betray our difficulty to define something too elusive to be caught.
We are a riddle to ourselves, and despite we acknowledge we are past a threshold of modernity, we retain none of the frugal virtues that should have gone with this surmounting, while we maintain all the vices that go with satiety.
 
That such entailed debauchery is one that should only affect those who eat the flesh instead of being vegetarians (though I personally do not eat flesh more twice or thrice a year - I don't like killing animals) and only those who pollute the air instead of being stout Greenpeace militants (though I personally own no car or motorcycle - they cost too much for my thin wallet), is a convenient intellectual figment that those who fully partake of our post-modern society vices delude themselves into: the issues they treasure and the solutions they sponsor are not ingredients of the cure, but symptoms of our ailment.
 
The weakening of ethnic identities in the global village, the crumbling of the ideologies (those monstrosities that you sell your soul to, trading it with the comfort of a solacing collective identity meant to be engrained on yourself and to make up for the absence of a personality of your own), the blurred nature of the outlines of an amorphous post modern condition, all these are things fit to beget lilliputians not giants.
 
Deserted by the topics that made the mighty intellectual vigor of the patrology, light ages far away from the issues that concerned the adamant moral fibre of the stoics, completely unlearned even of the existance of men like Pericles and his achievements in the face of immense difficulties, uncommensurable with the tragic grandeur that involved Danton and Robespierre, desperately unacquainted with the so costly sacrifices that men like Lincoln have laid on the altar of Freedom, egotistically uninterested in the unbearable matters that men like Roosevelt and Churchill had to cope with in order to hand free Homelands down to us, utterly incapable of the cunning of a Voltaire and even of the vitriolic genius of a Jonathan Swift, so limited in scope that we cannot even feel any more such proximate a grandeur like that which palpitated between complete geniuses as Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, we wantonly abandon ourselves to the depleted versions of those imperative issues, persuading ourselves that our pathetic and dwarfed engagements are worthy inheritors of those of our forefathers, and that we would have been emulating those powerful minds, those haranguing and moving speeches, the seriousness of those issues, and we would have been about to attain the pitches of those heights or at least and most certainly that we're busy defending those legacies: we posture ourselves as the ultimate guardians of a freedom we enjoyed since the cradle to the grave, and that we emperiled with our foolishness far more than we defended it from non existent domestic foes but those lingering in our spoiled imagination.
Lord Protectors of provisions and systems that owe their strength to roots other men better than us planted and irrigated with their own blood, our contries rely on our protection no longer, although we feel like that fly in the latin fabula, which rested on the cockpit of a carriage and when the carriage arrived home, shouted: see, I drove it!
 
Therefore we can afford getting concerned with trifle some issues pretending, and even demanding with an outraged look when it is not immediately warranted, that they are among the most serious.
 
Thus we encroach our emptiness with Ecology (would you dare be pro pollution?), with the privacy on the Internet (Is perhaps my ISP going to reveal to the nosy and tyrannical british police that yesterday I was performing onanist activities watching those racy pics of Pamela Anderson, or that I was playing doctor online with mrs Mary Smith? Let's raise! The most grievous liberty matter is at stake here indeed! - and actually a few religious fundamentalists would even agree with our concerns...), the death penalty (would you dare being pro? I am against, but far from defining my social involvement as something mostly represented by this aspect, or holding it care because most certainly it would neither imperil nor question my narcissism too much), the International Tribunal (an issue most know a flat zero about, and none the less find irremissible being pro. After all, what cost does this engagement entail? None, so why not waging it?), the deployment of a defense shield (a sheer waste of money, which makes those who try to spare it believe and act as if they're the saviors of the world), the Debt of the Third World (from Keynes to No Logo is uphill indeed... and a nuance of unselfishness is always something worth having, in the same sense Marguerite Yourcenaur wrote of "those women who provided themselves with passion in the same way they put some lipstick on"), pacifism (would you dare being pro a war? Let's make love instead - but let's make it indeed at least!), the Globalization (do you know what is it? Since it is vague enough to be suited to accept anything you're pleased to put in it, so why not being against 'it'? That hologram can't bounce back!), and by and large a whole set of issues as long as they are non-issues enough so that you can entertain about them a socially respectable opinion of no consequences at all, whilst telling yourself you're 'socially and politically committed'.

The new conformism cometh: a depleted version of Ideology, because a set of pre digested issues isn't but a holy book again, and a repleted version of qualunquismo.
 
The most beautiful cry by Albert Camus "I rebel, therefore WE are", gets turned into: "I party, therefore we are not - but at least together: who would rebuke us then?"; I wait to see what a few others do, then when I ascertain it is of no consequence, I party against everything which I'm sure would not harm me, and asks me nothing but a few spring marches with my Marlboro in my pocket, a can of beer in hand, and several laughters and jokes in store to share with my companions in strolls. There come the collective nudist 'protests' against 'the war': the collective strikes of our forefathers are replaced with our collective strips.
It is no longer the issue what makes the standing, it is the protest that makes the issues.
 
And they call themselves anti conformists.
An order of lukewarm priorities we embellish ourselves with; but from whose ephemeral inconsistence and distasteful self indulgence our forefathers we pretend to be up to would have recoiled from, for they had a completely different agenda of urgencies, endured a completely different shower of blows, and got nourished by a thoroughly sounder set of values, challenges, struggles, concerns, and beliefs.
 
In such a situation, a few of us even try to persuade themselves into the certitude they're apt to make distinctions. Regardless of how would it be possible that from such a scheme would ever jump out an outstanding wit and a free thinker, what can be observed is objectively the opposite.
These persons have always been characterized by a singular lack of any discriminative capability whatsoever, and those who were marching against the Pershing Missiles in Europe during the Reagan presidency are still the same who protested against the UN mandate for the Gulf War in 1991 to free Kuwait, and are still the same (when age permits, otherwise you still have kids to shape in such fruitful image as yours so that it can multiply) who were against the Kosovo intervention which saved a muslim population from being exterminated, and are still the same who were against the intervention in Afghanistan (remember all the chatters about the impossibility to fight in Afghanistan?) which freed the country from the most backward regime the post war era knew, and so no surprise at all they're today against another war. This doesn't spell discrimination: this spells fanaticism.
 
Alas, no one saw even one of them marching at the outbreak of the war in Chechenya, nor at the outbreak of the soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, nor after 9/11.
Is that the distinction?
Alas, but they say they did. The strange fact is: nobody saw them. A conspiration of the media, undoubtedly. So the only difference is: this time let's pretend that that guy in that photo taken at that march two years ago, well that guy - nay, that wasn't me. He just looks like. Because I discriminate.
 
Not that I contest the position: I despise the incredible hypocrisy.
I believe we'd judge wars by the words of those who fought them, and not by the words of those who never saw one.
 
Ernest Hemingway, a great opposer of any war, who fought ALL of them and so had the stature to talk about war, and still today he could teach if only these teenagers would read a few books, wrote:
"If war was fought by those who wanted to fight it and knew what they were doing and liked it, or even understood it, then it would be defensible." [Ernest Hemingway: By-Line: Notes On The Next War] This is exactly the case in point, and this is why I'd respect and share any anti war stance by a man like Hemingway (in fact we all know war and terror can bring death home), but not by those who attained or wielded it after having thoroughly crossed such a path of contradictions with no resipiscence: we're not brothers in the conclusions (those are merchants, or brutal friendships), but in the process and gravity of the experience undertaken and endured together.
 
This is why their collective marches can't yield any respectable identity: because it is the men who make the standing of the march, and not the topic of the march what makes the moral standing of the participants; and it is still the individual who makes the Champion, and not the play what makes the value of the players: you don't arrange any dream team simply with a set of well trained skating monkeys. That's circus, and that beats no one.

"Listen. There is no use in writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat the dead men at what they have done. The only way he can tell how he is going is to compete with the dead men. Most live writers do not exist. Their fame is created by critics who always need a genius of the season, someone they understand completely and feel safe in praising, but when these fabricated geniuses are dead they will not exist. The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him." [Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: 'Monologue To The Maestro: A High Seas Letter']

And now, if you're here (which I doubt), let me disconcert and puzzle you. Some of these protesters are ubiquitous. They attend any type of meeting, not only encompassing all the time but traversing all the spaces.
The same somebody is one week in Seattle (USA) to protest, next month in Geneva (Italy) to protest the G8, next month in Brasil to attend the anti globablization worldwide forum, six months later in South Africa to attend the second worldwide anti globablization meeting (once a year isn't enough), then after six more months to the world wide march in Florence (Italy), then again in Canada to protest the new G8, then throughout Europe to protest against some war, then in Bruxelles to protest against the Euro Parliament. Now, may I ask who's gonna pay the bill?
 
Because many of these guys are in their 20s, many of those very same somebodies I've just mentioned have no job whatsoever (officially they pay no tax, in fact), none the less they extensively travel the planet.
You have to account for their air fares, their lodging, for meals, insurances, consumptions. Of course, you can argue that these omnipresent guys, normally never travelling in groups of less than 50, among their several virtues rank being particularly parsimonious too, and they eat sandwiches and Lodge at the house of 'friends' (they have a lot indeed apparently); friends who have to be exquisite guests to say the least. None the less it still doesn't address the serious question: who is paying the goddam bill?
 
Clearly enough, somebody is. How convoluted the circuit might be is of no relevance: what matters is that most assuredly the required money is delivered by some Mr. Somebody (a sect of philanthropists, I assume).
May I ask then where this money flows from?
No, I may not.
But actually I need not. For I know who's paying the bill.
 
Those somebodies are the core of the agitation. Because to rally a new crowd in every country, you need to dispatch a preparatory group in the kinship. You have to pay only them. They are the catalysts to agglutinate consensus.
It is well acknowledged that the tide of protests (first against 'globalization' in Seattle, now in the disguise of pacifism - but it's still the same fomenters and cheerleaders in action) is insurgent and increasing, starting from such core of permanent agitators.
Therefore who pays is probably who has an interest into building this consensus in order to exploit it. Can we spot such a character in the scene, or elaborate more?
 
It is in fact perfectly possible to use the 'post-modern' issues as an extremely convenient connective substance meant to weld together the wide electoral basin composed by the youth: they are a highly fertile ground peculiarly liable to be manipulated, given their immaturity and scarce historical memory, with the adjunctive advantage that whoever else may be picked thorough these traversal issues cannot but be a welcomed side effect.
The youth represents a huge volatile amount of electors whose behaviour at the ballots can be by far more predictable if they're melted together with a surreptitious shared identity injected into them by stirring these topics through agitation. Lacking such a cohesive pseudo-ideology, it would be utterly impossible to subsume them into a predictable electoral stream.
 
The 'post-modern' issues are uniquely posed and handy, insofar it is hardly possible to declare oneself against them, thereby the fiction of an ideological proximity can be immediately enacted.
 
Moreover such issues are of no special vexation for those politicians who may eventually be elected by the opportunistic exploitation of these tactics: a program that promises its electors to look after ecology and the alike is a thorough sinecure for any impending government: it would be enough to vote a couple of treaties or to implement whatever facade measure to sponsor it like a glorious fulfilling of the ecologist agenda, and therefore let these voters gathered by this technique gulp the whole vial.
 
In this perspective it is obvious that the chosen topics are topics to which the politicians resorting to attach no special significance, because they do not belong to the set of their real priorities.
 
An agenda which pledges to be pacifist is still an agenda that imports no consequence: wars are made by others, protesting by diplomacy is a price worth paying as long as you're elected president of such chickens, and indeed it would even be possible that these politicians may be even less interested in world peace than those who are involved in a war.
What suffices for these projects is, clearly enough, to get the premierships and the majority, after which it is still possible to enforce a pacifist politics abroad as long as you're let fundamentally undisturbed at home.
The foreign agenda becomes therefore but a trojan horse to domestic undisturbed dominance.
 
Once you're in power, you've a full mandate to keep whose consensus from wavering is enough to insist fanning the usual issues of no real relevance to the elite. After all, government would mean carrying out such fake agenda, whilst reaping all the domestic advantages: if something goes awry, who pays is still the tax payer, and power still involves money, clout, lots of fringe benefits, and logrolling anyway.
If this is the profile of a leader who is not really concerned with his country, who cares: who would dare say to a leader who in order to prove his concern simply has to cry pacifist slogans, that he is not defending the integrity of his people and accomplishing the ambitious agenda?
 
Therefore why not stimulating these arguments that can spread with the easy of a disease, and provide these useful idiots with a carrot that will make them feel members of the fold instead of letting them roam randomly in someone else's courtyard?
The French and the German policies are but the consequence of a leadership who perfectly understood the menace to their re-election implied in this strategy if monopolized by an opposition, and accordingly they neutralized the threat of a foe riding this strategy, by overtaking it in the field and on the run.
"Our politcs is very, very firm" says Schroeder - and considered his appalling records at home I have no difficulties beliving it has to be firm indeed when everything else in Germany spins off route.
 
There is a real tide of fluttering rainbow flags in Europe nowadays (a rainbow flag in Europe carries no special meaning since in Europe it was invented a few weeks ago as the badge of choice of the pacifist movements), all of them sporting the embroidered word 'Peace', and nearly every building in Europe has at least two windows from which citizens let these banners flap to signify their pacifist stance. For how many they can be, in a few weeks they will all be recycling these pieces of motley fabric for more traditional and foul uses, and go to swell the ranks of the worthless who got defeated without consequences.
I personally still hope no war at all breaks out: I don't want it and I do not feel comfortable at all with the dangers it involves; but my main concern is that with pacifists of this quality, we are granted it will; because interest may spawn wars, but hypocrisy only spawns slavery.
 
As for the interventionists, they are on the side of History and indeed can draw legitimacy to their questionable actions from it, even if History teaches us that no one but a dictator can win a war and go unpunished.
As for the others who have been unable to dispel their initial blunder to the degree now they do not lead a policy but it is a flawed policy which hurriedly drags them along, there is no longer anything they can fix about it: because it's too late, stupid!

Once a nazi, you never really quit being such.
It has been this desultory and isolated comment of mine which set off an unexpected, although most interesting, upheaval among a few german readers online.
The observations that such excitement of german readers elicited in me and them, are worth being accounted for: not in the sense they have any preciosity in themselves, but in the sense the underlying issue is in itself the most complelling possible one, regardless of how unworthly my words can report it or attempt to live up to its dramatic nature.
 
A reader immediately reacted wondering whether I, being italian, would be ready being called fascist.
What follows is my first reply; please, be patient.
 
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PART I
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I didn't consider my statement in the light of how a german could receive it.
After WW2 we all owe an inexpiable debt with those who fought for our freedom; and they were not only the USA - although the USA have been the only ones that after the war also set FREE governments. Because freedom is not something you get one day and then you can forget about it - if that freedom lasts for decades: in fact, the Usa have not liberated one platoon, or one sect, for the time being: but they have liberated the Generations.
 
After the catastrophe of that war it was a german, Karl Jaspers, who uttered the most moving sentence: "Our guilt is of being still alive".
That's moving.
So I didn't consider what a sensitive chord my sentence could pluck in a german conscience even of to-day.
 
But we do have to concur that Schroeder has positively been capable of issuing and divulging an entirely unnecessary order which entails that German troops are encouraged and authorized (even worse: german paratroopers have been positively asked, they have been positively ordered in Anno Domini 2003) to sit mum possibily watching Usa marines writhe on the ground until their convulsions break their backbone and they die, and have been ordered to be insensible to the show and to the possible pleas of help.
This is something that inevitably makes you shudder with an atavistic shiver: and that shiver is even too mindful of nazism, when it is german lips who deliver the military order (because that it is).
It is an order which aggravates a situation with an unnecessary "detail", and such a big mistake is not, by all measures, the fruit of a great intelligence.
 
We can argue whether a fascist is the same as a nazi although the only differences were exactly differences in cruelty, but the issue is not whose guilt harasses one's more: the issue is what premier of a liberated country can be so mad to deliver a thoroughly inhumane order amidst a 21st century democracy.
 
And this has not been Berlusconi but Schroeder: objectively an inferior statesman (though in this not worse than many other mediocrities history has known, so his fault doesn't reside on this plane. Compared with his predecessors, Brandt, Schmidt, Khol, he really vanishes in this air), but most of all a man who is proving enough no one should admire him any longer. In fact, admire him for what?
For having brought Germany near the exclusion from the Maastricht parameters, for having followed what 80% of citizens with no clear foresight asked for (that is not courage, by any credit), and for having said Bush is like Hitler (should we assume the opinion should not be disregarded insofar it is "competent"?), and for having now given this unheard of order whose unique necessity is pure sadism only?
 
In fact you can be for peace, do not fight, and still lend an atropine dose to a USA marine dying among spasms right before your eyes, without this affecting your honourabilty - provided you know how to hold it high.
I couldn't even conceive how a similar order could be issued concerining Iraqis: if an iraqi citizen is dying before my eyes, I'm not going to spare him my help and refuse him medical care. It would mean being an animal, not a man.
 
That some germans can find proud in this chancellor simply because he is pro 'peace', shows what peace is in store for us and at what price, and how easy it can be forgotten that peace and inhumanity of orders ill go together, but a population of [here your preferred qualification] still can see no evil, no contradiction, and raise aloud praises.
 
If somebody believes that these premises are foreboding anything good for germans or for europeans, he's dead wrong - and the only disparity in opinions could be in the degree of this death.
The consequences of what happened in these months are going to be payed by us europeans for years; and those cheering crowds don't realize yet the big and epochal mistakes that have just been committed in the name of peace: mistakes that still only prove how we all as europeans stick to our 'best' legacy: a legacy of millenniums of wars made under the banners "peace" and "appease". We're still the same, still violent, still unworthy of democracy, still unable to mend and good only to split; and this doesn't include only germans, although it is a german who, this round, still got the chance to utter an order that cries vengeance before the Lord.
 
This is why I don't like these 'pacifists' at all: because I see all which is implied in them, although I am one of the very few who saw that with this clarity. But don't worry, I can do nothing about it.
 
Of course, revisionism has always been a cute practice.
I recently discovered a review online about a book which extolls the role of Adolf Hitler in the arts.
Apparently, it hosts refined excerpts like the following:

«Hitler as he saw himself: a man of refinement, intent on building not merely a 1000-year Reich but a cultural empire to surpass the most glorious examples of antiquity.
What is chilling is that it was taken on February 13, 1945, in Hitler's bunker beneath Berlin, as the Russians and the allies approached. He still dreamed of cultural glories, which the tiresome necessity of war (for living space for the German people; for the destruction of the Jews and Bolsheviks; for the enslavement of Slavs) was postponing. In 1940, fulminating at Churchill's refusal to make peace, he complained, "It is a pity that I have to wage war on account of that drunk instead of serving the works of peace." He meant it; he spoke constantly of his Culture State aspirations, in which splendid buildings, art galleries, opera houses and beautiful motorways (the autobahn was an aesthetic object for Hitler) would proclaim the triumph of the Aryan spirit.»

Romantic.
It reminds me of those who incensed Mussolini, in my country, because when he was dictator he did not only proved himself exceptionally good at exterminating guys, but also made sure that all trains arrived on time.
 
It was enough to make him station master then, not president.
 
So if Hitler was so amazingly good in making wonderful marbled buildings (an opinion may experienced architects would horrify at), it would have been enough for him to be architect, and spare us all the rest.
 
A good hint for such writers and journalists too, who could therefore quit playing the journalist. There are better guys than them for their current job, and they'd rather devote themselves to what they really know about and they really have a flair for: painting wonderful aesthetical drawings with the blood of the others.
 
So while I never said a german of to-day is a nazi, I do contend that an inhumane order by a German statesman is unavoidably herald of the most diresome memories it conjures up by itself: and this is not something that over time can be laundered away in the same fashion a gentleman forgets a bad word; there is no road, in matters of such magnitude, at the end of which one day we can be authorized to start talking about the unparralleled monstrosities committed during WW2 as something towards which we can finally watch with disinterest.
 
Auschwitz is forever.
And it is such for all of us: germans or not, whatever we may have had the mere venture of being born, wherever we may have had the mere venture of living our little lives.
 
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PART II
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The german counterparts got possibily even more pissed off, for reasons that still today I can't discriminate in their entirety: I never easily understood how's possible that arguments based on resoning, acknowledgements ("I didn't consider"), meaningful quotations, and historical data, can be dismissed so light-heartedly.
The german readers simply got focused on the first line "I didn't consider" and rather than seeing in it a sign of sensitiveness towards their plea, they pleased themselves painting it as an admission of brutal insensibility on my part.
Furthermore, they curtailed the subject line of the CNS News which originally was "Germany Will Not Aid US Soldiers In Chemical, Biological Attacks", into just "Germany"
Here is what followeth.
 

"Of course, all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow, that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.
(...)
But at three o'clock in the morning a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work - and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream - but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world.
(...)
Well when I had reached this period of silence, I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, it was difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks.
(...)
I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person.
(...)
The sign 'cave canem' [my note: 'beware the dog' - it is latin] is hung permanently just above my door. I will try to be a correct animal tough, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand"
[F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Crack-Up]

The deeply impressive nature of this book by F.S. Fitzgerald struck also the imagination of a fantastic author, although and unfortunately much less widely known than Fitzgerald is, and whose nationality is romanian and whose name is E. M. Cioran.
Doggedly haunted by life and the role of failures and conscience crisis in life, E.M.Cioran couldn't but find in The Crack-Up a fertile ground to stew about.
Few men have been sharper in their minds than Cioran: he's in the line with Swift, perhaps even in the kind of Thomas Hobbes - a comparison so haughty that as far as my knowledge goes only an italian author, Pier Paolo Pasolini, reserved for another italian author, Alberto Moravia.
 
Cioran devotes a full and thrilling, perhaps even awesome, essay to Fitzgerald in his book [in french] "Exercises d' admiration".
 
Qualifying the Crack-Up as Scott Fitzgerald's "season in hell" [quotation by Rimbaud, obviously], Cioran, a man Robert Frost would have defined well acquainted with the night, analyzes how a man can cope with his crisis and bad conscience, and attempted to verify whether Fitzgerald was up to the treasures which are in it. "Clearly, he was not entirely up to his nights", writes Cioran. And noticing the discomfort that Fitzgerald apparently showed with his own bad conscience, Cioran ends his essay with a wonderful statement:

"Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between literature and the real dark night of the soul".

Not being able to cope with one's most lonely and awful nights, not being acquainted with laying on the bed staring at the ceiling fan while a bad conscience erodes you, not being able to feel the knife getting deeper and deeper in your flesh and at the same time keep your eyes open, not being able like a start up boxeur not to close your eyes when you see the foe ready to land another blow, not being able to savor the ultimately and definitely precious (perhaps the most precious on Earth) treasure of a guilty conscience, and conversely desperately arraying oneself to display justifications instead of insights, is not just an experience a far away guy like F.S. Fitzgerald can do - although he had genius, so we don't know precisely if ONLY genius can pose you to the level when a guilty conscience can be coped with in some way which is not barely a foolish and childish desperate escape from oneself.
 
I have noticed what a deep chord a desultory note like "Once a nazi, you never really quit being such" can pluck on german consciences. What was written in bytes and on the run, appeared suddenly as if it was written with fire since ages.
 
Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, outrage is in the soul of the already wounded.
As an italian, my own guilty conscience doesn't provide me with any easy recovery, and most certainly I would never swap "the real dark night of the soul" with the unwise immaturity of a kid who stomps his feet hoping this would ever be a fair way to cope with the past my forefathers slurred my conscience with.
 
Therefore were I to face a sentence like "Once a fascist, you never really quit being such", I would feel no special need to rebuke - a difference in feelings which is a meaningful one indeed.
At most, I could elaborate more about it acknowledging the dramatic truth in it, and showing my awareness that yes: having a fascist past is utterly dishonourable, it is something you're not going to go away with a brilliant smile; even more, we still have in Italy some significant fascist guys, and I would stress that we still have problems with that as well as we still have problems with communists; and this even despite the politician who is allegedly assumed as being somewhat more proximate to a fascist legacy, Massimo Fini, has made giant steps to elaborate and disavow that past.
Because it is only insofar you've thoroughly acquainted yourself with the real dark night of a guilty conscience, and you have acknowledged that you have it, that is belongs to you, that you can really quit being a fascist, and feel no longer any outrage whatsoever in reading a sentence about fascism.
 
But as long as you've not, and you've proved yourself unable to choose whether to undertake the painstakingly hard path, well then you will always feel yourself snapped in the trap, because it is your own guilty conscience what grips you, and as Seneca wrote: "Indeed, as long as you're ignorant of what you should avoid or seek, or of what is necessary or superfluous, or of what is right and wrong, you will not be travelling but merely wandering. There will be no benefit to you in this hurrying to and fro; for you are travelling with yourself and are followed by your afflictions".
 
"Vivere militare est", still Seneca wrote in that beautiful lapidary style only ancient latin allows; which we could translate: "living like military is", it is a struggle, is like being enrolled, under a mere metaphorical standpoint, in the Marines Corp.
Kids can't fight the hardest foe of all: conscience; and finding a justification more necessary than a bad conscience is, means going on being followed by its affliction.
 
There come strange, strange and odd indeed, dynamics and symptoms like curtailing a Subject line that goes "Germany Will Not Aid US Soldiers In Chemical, Biological Attacks" and turning it into: "Germany" tout court.
 
This positively shows where the weak spot stayed, and that it was not the original subject that set it there.
 
So this is why this article is titled "Wider Cockpits For Air France" - to see whether by this way we can prove that one subject can't be curtailed and still claim to preserve its original meaning, although the curtailed one was the only one the listener, like the beholder, was intimately ready to give significance to.
 
Therefore, let's curtail this new subject line too to whatever the mind of the beholder finds fitter to curb it into, in order to make it closer to what really haunts such mind, and let's see if it still retains the original meaning, if it is still equivalent, and if such an operation would reveal more on the purposes of he who posted the full subject line or the intentions and bad conscience of those who curtail it.
 
Let's see in other words whether such apparently desultory an operation with no apparent meaning in it (subject lines can get changed: but curtailed, it's a very very rare and unusual occurrence when you're just hitting the "Reply" button: you really have to have a reason to perform such a clearly deliberate action) is or is not an unvoluntary and amazing, thoroughly sound, and quite unsearched for confirmation of exactly what such awkward an operation was so disdainfully attempting to contend.
 
Children want to get rid of a bad conscience: they believe that time can wash it. Men treasure it like one of the most precious things God could ever send to them.
 
Because it is, most assuredly it is, "a second-order mind" the mind which cannot choose between fLight "and the real dark night of the soul".
But considering more attentively, that was Fitzgerald: a genius.
Other mindsets chose - indeed.