There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy.
There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.
A. Lincoln
Our foundation “Science for Peace. EU” strives to convey the message that war must be condemned no matter what. We hope that our heartfelt request to eliminate all weapons, dismantle arsenals and abolish the lobby of weapons is heard all over the world.
We want to start this article with the words of Gino Strada, a great man, who died recently, and whom we all love and admire: "War is liked by politicians who do not know it ... war is liked by those who have economic interests, who stay far from where the war takes place ... ... for whatever reason it takes place, every war has a constant: 90% of the victims are civilians, people who have never picked up a rifle and who don't even know why a bomb is thrown at them and who have no faults. This is why war is wrong in itself …… Wars are declared by the rich and powerful, who then send the children of the poor to die ”.
Yet, many countries are either directly or indirectly engaged in a war. Regretfully, currently 90% of victims in conflicts are civilians, and one-third are children. This leads us to one conclusion: God created humankind while Satan created weapons.
Psychoanalytic research on war underlines that psychotic mechanisms, lying in Former Military Chiefs' unconsciousness, are among some of the several causes of conflicts; such mechanisms are persecution mania and schizotypal personality disorder. Unfortunately, these mechanisms make it possible and highly likely to turn victims into aggressors and those who persecute into persecutors. Wars between Nations are aimed at power and expansionism, indeed we reward those who take part in conflicts with war crosses and medals.
With its paranoid genocides, war is the craziest form of insanity, the most destructive human behaviour rooted in homicide, hatred and violence; bloody insanity kills compassion and anesthetizes morality. “It is scientifically unfair to state that humans are endowed with a violent brain… It is scientifically unfair to state that war is caused by an “instinct”, thus genetically induced, as the only instinct we all are born with, is living in peace” (see the Tau’t Bato tribe).
War results in madness, and this is proven by the regularity of mental disorders and the high suicide rate among veterans. In the last 20 years, NATO experts have been providing upsetting results: for every soldier killed in the war in Afghanistan and Iran, two committed suicide.
Violence, fear, paranoia and chaos make people unpredictable and insane during a war. Deep physical and mental stress lead individuals to reach their highest peak of craziness. When facing a dangerous situation, stress generally causes two kinds of reactions: attack or escape. If none of these behaviours are expressed, physical paralysis is the first extreme response our body gives, followed by psycho-physical freezing, a sort of mental and moral paralysis. When soldiers return from war, they suffer from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
As a survival mechanism, the most natural reaction to war would be to escape; however, being involved in a conflict causes psycho-physical tension and, at times, our consciousness is dissociated. In this state, people experience ''moral disengagement'' (Bandura) and tend to lose any critical and moral judgement of their actions; they end up committing awful actions as if they were not able to control their destructive and cruel inclinations. This causes them to spend the rest of their lives with regret and guilt for having been, although temporarily, criminals and torturers hidden in their official uniforms. Once they are back to their everyday lives, these people, who often very young, will feel as if they were awakening from a terrible nightmare and will have to face and exorcize their demons before finding their serenity and inner peace.
The fifth commandment “You shall not kill” symbolically refers to the safeguarding of human life and therefore forbids any violation of human dignity. It should be caved in everyone's heart before reading it in sacred books; it should be meaningful for all humankind and for all Countries, even those who sell weapons. Regretfully, the fifth commandment is often violated, leading to what we refer to as war, militarism, dictatorship, psychological violence, torture, racism, sexism, economic slavery, lack of empathy towards those who suffer and, the most subliminal, destruction of the biosphere and the killing of Gaia.
Ignoring the fifth commandment is both criminal and perverse. One can kill not only with weapons but also with words, cynicism, egoism, denial of basic resources like equal distribution of wealth as well as access to energy, food, water and decent work.
Although violence rules and separates, non-violence helps people get together and cooperate for everyone's self-esteem. This means that a non-violent society can exist because humans are not inevitably killers. Most individuals are not murderers, have never murdered anyone and never will because human’s ability to grow, improve and change is great. Luckily, only few individuals are capable of killing with no regret or remorse. According to several psychiatric studies, War dehumanizes and physically weakens 98% of the involved, the remaining 2% of the cases were already insane.
We call “moral insanity” such follow-up disorder that affects all aggressive psychopaths of the Dark Triad, namely the disease of the lust for power (psychopathy, paranoia and narcissism).
“Science for Peace. EU” can explain the causes that lead to violence by scientifically stating that violence is not something innate (every child on Earth is born friendly, social and with the potential to develop his/her Real Self); violence is induced, cultural and is triggered by the violation and denial of human needs and rights. The violation of these essential rights can cause discomfort, pain and anger.
Violence is not genetic but cultural, it is epigenetic and thus a social disease that can be treated and cured. All cultures should be capable of exchanging with other cultures without using violence, learning from diversity and from one another, without always having to overcome the other.
Hatred is a powder keg that might explode from time to time and traces its origins back to frustration, envy, jealousy, competition, social diversities, fatal wrath, desire of possession and revenge, which in turn fuel these emotional states turning them into violent reactions.
Our psychopolitical perspective leads us to believe that war is the ultimate expression of the evil pathology of power, which implies utterly separating Good and Evil. This segregation allows us to identify ourselves with Good, thus projecting Evil onto others, resulting in the creation of the Enemy. In the dark side of our deepest subconscious, Good and Evil are symbiotically joint and confused in the madness of crowd psychology. People are dehumanized and feel legitimized to kill, as occurs in lynching.
Since conflicts have always implied a paranoid-schizoid separating process, the enemy is identified with the Evil: our truth becomes our credo and we feel sure about it; it is true because we believe it, even if we don’t have any proof. According to the frame of mind of “all or nothing”, we can never stop hating the enemy as this would mean losing our identity first, and then power. For this reason, we need to keep the enemy under continuous psychological pressure.
We express our internal enemy onto others, believing we can control it and manipulate it at its best. We then identify our internal enemy in external enemies, with the same pride of the fascist motto: “many enemies, much honour”.
According to “Science for Peace.Eu” war is immoral as it is characterized by the lack of prevention, the shortage of targeted diplomatic interventions, the lack of control by international organizations such as the United Nations and lack of control for the production and trade of weapons and of mass-destruction-related technologies.
According to the Italian Disarmament Network, Italy has been really involved in the trade of weapons for a long time. Only few know that in 2014 the aircraft carrier Cavour went on a tour around Africa showcasing the weapons produced by Italian industries, stopping in every African harbour. This resulted in the violation of law 185/90 which prohibits, inter alia, the export of conventional arms to armed conflict countries or to countries whose governments have seriously violated international conventions on human rights. Official sources affirmed that the tour was simply part of a “promotional campaign” of ‘made in Italy’. The mission was called “Sistema paese in movimento’’ (country in action), confirming what Goethe wrote: “Real obscurantism is not to hinder the spread of what is true, clear, and useful, but to bring into vogue what is false”.
As a matter of fact, the “promotional mission” showed its results very quickly: the sale of weapons was authorised in Algeria, Angola, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia (ongoing conflict with Eritrea), Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Namibia and South Africa. In 2016, the export rate of Italian Arms reached EUR 14.6 billion, with an 85.7% increase compared to 2015. This inhumane and profitable trade leads to the following conclusion: we cannot complain if the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa are powder kegs when we too, with many other countries, are responsible for the supply of weapons, starting the fire of war (Francesco Vignarca). If we put together all weapons produced in Europe, the United States and the rest of the world we could assert that hardly any government is excluded from arms trade and hardly any government wants to take official control over the sale of arms. Many American political campaigns, among which that of President Trump, have been financed by the powerful lobby of producers and owners of arsenals, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which invested USD 30 billion in Trump’s election. In return, Trump said: “You came throughfor me, and I am going to come through for you”.
Today fortunately Donald Trump is no longer President of United States.
Each military intervention enriches the warlords and the incredibly powerful global gun lobbies, which, inter alia, deceive us defining “smart weapons” those highly sophisticated death tools that keep on killing more harmless civilians than militaries.
In the language of war, there are no human beings but “targets”; bombings are described as “surgical elimination of military targets, through smart weapons”, whereas harmless and innocent civilians killed are simply considered to be “side effects”.
It is also possible to kill people without weapons but simply with indifference and exploitation as these are even more powerful. Hunger, poverty and diseases keep on exterminating people in third-world countries and in many other degrading, unstable and social disadvantaged situations. Many innocent people die because of the evil that surrounds them, yet those who commit such evil and inhuman actions always find rational justifications for their behaviour. We invite those who barbarously vindicate these deaths as “side effects” to visit any Emergency hospital in order to eyewitness the consequences of the monstrous red knight of the apocalypse: war.
Moral insanity (deficit of moral sense) features the de-humanization process, the spreading of responsibility, justification and moral disengagement. The lust for power trivializes Evil misrepresenting it as common Good.
Powerful organizations are represented by moral disengagement, spreading of responsibility and moral justification when people are asked to follow orders or abide to rigid rules of thechains of command and the political hierarchy. This pyramidal structure justifies cruel actions in light of a superior command to obey, leading to indifference and/or distortion of the consequences of one’s actions, and minimizes their causes, through the de-humanization process and the “fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt).
In many ways, the moral insanity of power is also tangible in peaceful countries like Italy: people are discriminated for their nationality or skin colour, workers are not fired but “selected”, managers talk about “redundancy”, forgetting that employees are human beings who are part of a family.
The vilest and most inhuman moral disengagement is that of arms dealers, who contribute to the cruellest atrocities. An example is Tergil, a famous arms trafficker who covered his activity under the captivating name of “Intercontinental Technology”. When asked if he felt guilt or remorse for having supplied torture and death weapons to Idi Amin, evil African dictator in the 70s, he answered by accusing Dover Chemical for supplying napalm to the United States, who then used it on the Vietnamese population. Dover Chemical acquitted herself, accusing, in a Machiavellian way, someone else of a worse crime than his own.
Gun lobbies are very powerful as they are presented under acceptable and legal names and covers, so to create dispersion of moral and legal responsibilities. Too often well-known multinational corporations seem to show a clean façade, producing goods we all consume, but really hide a secret unknown to most people: they are arms manufacturers.
In the USA, gun lobbies are highly influent and determine many political choices. Gun lobbies, which largely financed Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, have been supported by an army of deputies and senators who are not in favour of the regulation of arms trade.
The powerful American lobby of gun producers, the National Rifle Association, objects to any kind of control and manages to get away with it thanks to the huge investments in arms trade. In the United States the minimum age required to buy alcohol is 21, whereas there is no age restriction for weapons (in some states it varies from 16 to 18). This plague will keep on worsening under Trump’s mandate. Despite the great number of shootings in American schools and colleges, the American society, affected by deep moral disengagement, is not able to produce efficient laws on the regulation of weapons. The current ones are easy to pass-by by gun producers and prevent all supervisory bodies from doing their job. Moreover, the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution allows US citizen to bear arms. However, our studies have proven that bearing arms does not make people feel safer, it is far more dangerous instead.
We are so frequently exposed to violent movie scenes that our brain reinforces the connection between weapons and violence, because we recognize the threat and the risk that arms represent. When we see a gun, not only do we visualize the act of shooting, this instils the idea of violence in our head; by doing so, we feel induced to use violence, letting all our internal aggressiveness out.
The world lobbies of arms manufacturers are a group of high-ranking traffickers who illegally set up arsenals through import-export licenses to channel death tools from one country to another, from one continent to another. This is possible thanks to false certifications about the end-users and to the enigmatic ways to get the arms also to those nations subjected to the arms embargo. This criminal web also encompasses ex-government officials, intelligence/secret service, military attachés and money launderers.
Between 2013 and 2017, the arms trade increased by 10% compared to five years ago: the trades volume increased especially in the Middle East and Asia. According to a study of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the main arms exporters are the US with 34% of the market share, followed by Russia with 22% and China, France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK accounting for 2.5% of existing weapons.
The arms sector accounts for roughly 0.7% of the Italian GDP (2,500 enterprises of related activities and production, 92,000 full time employees).
In 2016, the authorizations of Italian export of arms and military systems reached over EUR 14,6 billion, increasing by 85.7% against the 7.9 billion registered in 2015. Compared to 2014 there was a 452% increase in only two years. In 2017 it was over EUR 10 billion. What we consider to be the most upsetting is the recent Italian government’s propensity to sell weapons to the authoritarian monarchies of the Persian Gulf, neglecting their constant violations of human rights, their involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts and their support of terrorist groups.
Italy sells arms to ongoing conflicts areas, despite Law No. 185 of 9 July 1990 which prohibits the export of military goods to countries engaged in armed conflict, as well as todeveloping countries to avoid triangulations that mask the final beneficiaries, the notorious “warlords”. This data “confirms an alerting trend regarding the most recent export policies of military goods: North Africa and Middle East are, indeed, the ultimate areas of tension and are mostly authoritarian states and absolute monarchies that utterly disrespect the basic human rights. The supply of arms and military systems to these regimes contributes to fuel the tensions and appears to be a tacit consent to their repressive policies”.
The export of arms ‘made in Italy’ is clearly a flourishing and successful business. According to the Institute of International Research Archive Disarmament (IRIAD), Angola, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and United Arabic Emirates are among the main recipient countries of Italian arms. Over 60% of our arms will end up outside EU and NATO countries.
We do not know how many arms circulate in Italy, although all purchases must be reported to the police headquarters. The broadcast of “Presa Diretta” revealed there is no exact data and that the last census dates back to over nine years ago. Not only has the Ministry of the Interior never indicated the number of arms legally held in Italy (estimates range from 10 to 12 million), but it does not even make public the total number of licenses issued and in force, nor does it check on the physical, mental and health status of the owners. Too often guns are in the wrong hands.
Italy stands out with the highest rate of firearm murders. 85% of guns in the world belongs to civilians, people who do not have a real need to have one and, in Italy, civilians own 8,6 billion firearms: 2 million are reported whereas 6,6 have not been filed.
Italy itself has produced many weapons. In fact, it used to be the centre of one of the most active antipersonnel landmines (APL) industries, Valsella, which scattered many war scenarios with mines, mutilating hundreds of thousands of innocent children and invading extended territories that won’t be demined for decades.
Nowadays, the export of Italian weapons produced by Beretta, in the province of Brescia, is growing steadily. The main recipients are the USA, who use Beretta in their police forces, the UK, Turkey, but also Syria and Lebanon (country subjected to arms embargo) and Egypt (many bullet casings manufactured by Fiocchi di Lecco were found in Tahir square in El Cairo after the clashes).
Every 30 minutes an innocent and harmless person is killed by a Beretta weapon or mutilated by an antipersonnel mine crafted by Valsella, which today arrogantly claims its mines production to be smart and time-programmable. On the contrary, the only thing we would consider to be ‘smart’ is that all weapons factories in the world were shut down forever. As Howard Zinn affirmed, when you drop bombs from eight kilometres high you don't realize the damage you are causing, you don't hear people screaming, you don't see their blood; you don’t see all the children blown to pieces by the explosions. You slowly begin to understand how, in times of war, atrocities are committed by ordinary people, who do not see victims as human beings but as enemies, even if they are only five years old.
In 1997, Jodie Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize for her international campaign against antipersonnel mines. This campaign paved the way for the Ottawa International Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. However, it was only adopted by three-quarters of the world countries; yet, 250 million mines are kept in the military arsenals of 105 countries.
Despite the Ottawa Treaty, 88 countries are still contaminated with APL and the annual production of mines in the world is likely to reach 10 million per year, whereas the annual demining is only 250,000; with these rhythms, total mine clearance would take at least a century. Under no circumstances demining for humanitarian purposes will prevail over military purposes since what matters the most to a soldier is safeguarding another soldier's life rather than that of a child.
4,300 years: this is the time needed to fully clear Afghanistan from APL; in the meantime many people, especially children, continue walking on mines, losing their legs.
The paranoiac desire to create more and more destructive weapons is so strong that the atomic bombs doesn’t seem enough anymore, and something more powerful is being built: hydrogen and neutron bombs. Bombers account for over 200 times compared to World War II, and aircrafts carriers and tanks are respectively 20 and 15 times more expensive than they used to be. The cost of military technologies is proportional to their fatal power.
For our Foundation, the economic resources used for military spending could be committed to research on nuclear fusion, through which the world's energy problems could be solved as well as limiting the Global Warming that is linked to pandemics.
If you ask an Italian citizen which are the productive sectors of the economy, he would most likely reply: fashion, tourism, gastronomy and soccer; only few know that the Italian economy is strongly supported by weapons systems industries, such as Beretta and Finmeccanica, which manufacture world-recognized sophisticated guns, helicopters, bombs and mines. Furthermore, the Italian government owns 35% of Finmeccanica.
Finmeccanica finances political parties foundations and, since firearms for civilian use can be exported without any authorization from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, their illegal trade has been steadily growing, passing them off as civil and sports weapons.
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), a programme of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, there are currently 30 large-scale armed conflicts in the world (not considering guerrillas and riots) and the “Italy of weapons” triggers this tragic portrait. The best-selling Italian war equipment are tanks, airplanes, helicopters, ships, artillery, bombs, missiles, torpedoes, rifles, munitions and riot-control chemical weapons.
The most powerful enterprise is Finmeccanica, ranked 9th in the world production of arms, which also has other branches such as Augusta Westland, Alenia Aeronautics, Selex and Mbda.
Furthermore, if we look into the activity of all the Italian commercial banks engaged in this sector, we notice that each banking group has its own supply chain linked to the particular and delicate weapons market: these banks invest in shares of weapons manufacturers, they are also connected to specific credit lines to support Finmeccanica and, most of all, to feed the huge cash turnover of the arms trade (over EUR 40 billion in the EU); this network is possible exclusively thanks to a well-structured and considerable financial system of intermediation that only banks can provide. Such system is provided by the commercial banks we normally use to handle our savings, including Unicredit, UBI Bank, BPM, BNP Paribas and ING Direct (Conto Arancio). The only bank that has never financed activities linked to the arms trade is Banca Etica.
Some countries where Italy exports its arms are not members of NATO nor the EU, which means these same countries could possibly attack Italy in the future; and the arms trade is so unscrupulously amoral that we would not be surprised if this were to happen.
A glimpse of truth must be also be made on whether or not to stop the purchase of the well-known F35 aircrafts, vertical take-off fighter-bombers, which is part of military expenses and must be considered within the Joint Strike Fighter, NATO international programme. This international cooperation project includes different countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the USA and the UK) committed to working together in search of the “fifth generation” war aircraft, invisible to radars and equipped with cutting-edge computerized systems. Italy undertook to buy 90, for USD 93/95 million each. Just to be clear, with the cost of just one F35 it is possible to buy eight Canadair fire-fighting helicopters, or to carry out considerable humanitarian work.
The F35 is not just a plane but a political choice; as a matter of fact, by deciding to purchase the Lockheed Martin fighter planes by the USA, unquestioned military head of the western system, Italy remains anchored to the US military industry, showing the country is politically and strategically affiliated to the Atlantic bloc, from which Italy cannot and refuses to disengage.
In recent years, Defence Ministers and several representatives of governments have been pushing for the “indispensable” need for a noteworthy military budget to purchase the F35 to be placed on the Cavour aircraft carrier, already set up to accommodate them, at a cost of EUR 3.5 billion. To solve the problem, three Senate Commissions were involved: Defence, Foreign Affairs and European Polices. The expenses to equip the aircraft carrier were already made, so as to make the Parliament aware once the deal had been closed.
The aircraft carrier Cavour, flagship and pride of the Italian naval team, symbolizes the projection of a militaristic and aggressive power, consequently increasing prestige within NATO.
According to its Constitution, Italy “rejects war”; then why do we need a super-equipped aircraft carrier? Indeed Cavour was only used twice: first in 2010 for humanitarian purposes in Haiti and then in Brazil to try to convince the Brazilian government to buy warships made in Italy.
Furthermore, Italy continued with bypartisan agreements between the parties to purchase the very expensive F35 even when the Biden administration and its new team at the Pentagon were deciding whether to continue production. By June 2020, the number of aircraft destined for Italy had risen to 28, although they have not yet demonstrated their effectiveness against the most demanding air defense systems. According to a calculation, Italy spends for each jet about 100 million euros.
Today Italy has decided to invest in a new sixth generation superfighter, more advanced than the F35. This is the Tempest, an aircraft that will be built together with Great Britain and Sweden. And which is destined to become the most expensive program of our armed forces: six billion euros are foreseen for development costs alone. The new super fighter is referred to as a "system of systems". In fact, together with the aircraft, drones will be developed that will interact with the Tempest through artificial intelligence, sharing sensor information. For this it will be able to carry out not only interception missions, but also reconnaissance and bombing missions. Obviously, such an initiative has very high costs: an investment of two billion over fifteen years, destined to gradually grow.
Hence, once again, all the expectations of so many people of goodwill who were hoping for social, moral and humanitarian ways to collect funds have been let down once again. Therefore, the Defence Ministers’ ambiguity around the need to purchase these armaments leads us to thinking that those who should advocate for peace are actually Ministers of War of a country that does not at all seem to repudiate war.
According to a study by the International Affairs Institute, it is possible to save about EUR 8 billion of the defence budget, by redefining the NATO defence model in a peaceful European perspective. The money saved could be much better used to support families and workers in financial difficulty, but also for welfare, nursery schools, for the safety of school buildings and to prevent hydrogeological and seismic risks.
In our view, the reduction in military expenses finds its raison d'être in the fact that peace is not pursued with weapons and that all the so-called “peacekeeping missions” are nothing but Machiavellian lies. How can all these sophisticated weapons lead to pace? Soldiers have always been professional warriors, with a license to kill.
We disagree with the choice to spend billions of euros to buy aircrafts capable of carrying nuclear weapons which are offensive and non-defence weapons. We consider it to be incomprehensible and undemocratic as we all know how difficult it is to find resources for work, school, health and social justice. Every year, every citizen, including new-borns, pays EUR 407 for military expenses without even knowing it, and this money is spent on the Armed Forces and not on people’s basic needs.
Italian rulers do not seem interested in the ethical implications of the double Italian moral, which repudiates war and produces and sells weapons. Unfortunately, Italy is among the first places in the ranking as a sower of death. This happens in an almost bipartisan manner and in the silence of too many consciences. Italy sells weapons of various kinds and power, which continue to kill innocent people, especially children who die because of the mines which remain the area even after the conflicts have ended.
We would like Italy and the rest of the world to have fewer weapons and more efficient schools, nurseries, libraries, playgrounds, sports fields, cinemas, theatres, social gathering places. Unfortunately, we are told that in the last three years, around 200,000 people in our country have started to attend shooting ranges and taking intensive training courses, gun licenses have increased by 14% and 39% and it seems to become easier and easier to own a weapon.
We would like for governments and citizens to accept the challenge of tackling the complex problem of violence in the most permanent way, that is by educating to peace and cooperation. Self-defence is the easiest way, but it is also the most dangerous as it allows anyone to defend themselves by buying a weapon and shooting at any stranger who might be perceived as dangerous.
“For 40 years the American lobby of weapons has been trying to hide the equation that more firearms means more innocent deaths. The massacres of students in the United Statesoccurred in recent years have shown the world that the liberalization of the use of guns does not produce any positive results for safety. It is not useful to our society and, above all, it is not right. Our civilization has deep roots and has a history made of culture and human respect” (Paolo Siani).
Unfortunately, instead of combining security with the strengthening of resources for the police and judiciary forces, nowadays both Italy and Trump’s United States tend to increase the trade and the use of arms with a rudimentary “do-it-yourself” justice. The scapegoat here is: “If I find a masked person at home at 3 in the morning, it is not up to me to understand if they have a fake gun, but I do have the right to defend myself and shoot”.
Matteo Salvini, former Interior Minister, did what he committed to when he was elected, to ensure that Italy soon has a law that legitimates self-defence. He is doing it together with the lobby of weapons. During his electoral campaign, Salvini signed a document publicly committing himself to involving and consulting the D-477 Committee (an association founded in April 2015 which defends the interests of legal arms holders) and other associations of the sector. This would happen whenever there is a discussion on the measures that may affect the right to practice sports activity with arms, hunting or hold and legitimately use weapons for any reason, requesting their convocation by legislative or administrative bodies whenever it is appropriate to hear their opinion directly.
On behalf of his Party (Lega Nord) Salvini also took a public commitment to protect legal arms holders, sporting shooters, hunters and arms collectors. Regarding self-defence, Salvini has committed himself to protecting the right of citizens who have been victims of crime not to be prosecuted, even financially. On the contrary, they should receive a compensation from the State and their own aggressors. This means protecting the interest of those who want to defend themselves both at home and in their own business by shooting. Based on the “presumption of legitimate defence”, the need to demonstrate the proportionality between defence and offense is cancelled. This means that first you are entitled to shoot and maybe kill, then someone will decide about responsibility.
Meanwhile, since September 2018 in Italy it has been much easier to buy a firearm. To obtain the license there is no obligation to notify family members or cohabitants and to document their possession you simply need send a certified mail to the police headquarters. This practice might allow to psychologically unstable people to get hold of weapons.
The number of sports weapons that can be detained is also increased from 6 to 12 and the ambiguous category of “shooting sports” is created (category accessible not only to the members of the Italian National Olympic Committee, but also to those registered in the National Shooting sections, to the members of the amateur associations affiliated to the Olympic Committee mentioned above and to the members of the sports shooting facilities and private shooting ranges). They will be allowed to buy war-like arms as the Kalashnikov Ak-47 and the Ar15 semi-automatic rifle which have often been used in American school massacres.
On 1 April 2013 the treaty on international trade in arms was approved and signed at the UN General Assembly (Arms Trade Treaty, A.T.T.). “The States recognize, on the one hand, the mutual political, economic and social interest in the international arms trade; on the other, the sovereignty of each state in the regulation of production, trade and use of arms”. This treaty hypocritically underlines the need to repress the illegal arms trade and the distraction of the same in black markets or for unauthorized purposes, such as terrorist acts. States become aware of the fact that because of the internal sovereignty of the State in matters of arms and due to the numerous international conventions that regulate the trade of arms between states, there will never be a controlled and safe circulation. This will keep being the reality as long as there is no harmonious, uniform and global discipline that imposes standards of security and transparency. This means that it is okay to produce, trade and earn on the main instruments of death, as long as it is done “legally” and everyone agrees. Excellent example of a psychopathic and guilty hypocrisy.
We cannot sleep peacefully knowing that 90% of the world's atomic arsenals capable of destroying the planet are in the hands of men, who often embody the Disease of Power as Vladimir Putin, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
May God save humanity from them and from all the warmongers by making us sleep peacefully in the perspective of a more human and unarmed world.
The symbol of the knotted gun placed at the entrance of the United Nations Glass Building in New York is to remind everyone that war never leads to peace and that if all weapons were knotted and made impossible to shoot, the world would be a much better place to live in. The image of the knotted guns symbolizes the uselessness of weapons that only sow death and destruction without ever having resolved conflicts, which should instead be remedied with diplomacy and willingness to find the right shared compromises. This sculpture is in the right place, the United Nations, and we have adopted it as a symbol of our Foundation “Science for Peace.Eu”. We hope that when entering the building, UN delegates really observe it not only with their eyes, but also with their hearts.
The arms industry produces more and more powerful and perfected weapons. It increases the madness that makes it possible to search for the way to kill the highest number of men in the shortest amount of time. It also fuels all those wars that, causing destruction and death, make millions of people flee from their crumbling homes and their now-destroyed countries.
Every rifle and gun that is produced, every bomb that explodes, every plane or warship that is built costs millions and represents an insult and a theft to those who are hungry and cold. This colossal economic waste generated by military expenses causes the “holocaust of poverty”, which is exterminating millions of people and killing Gaia who, in turn, is wounded and intoxicated and therefore fails to feed and protect us all.
What more has to happen before we realize that peace, sustainable development and environmental protection are interdependent, indivisible and necessary because they give us all life? And that the problems that threaten life on Earth have consequences on everyone and therefore we must act collectively to solve them, while we still have time?
This increasingly armed world is not just squandering a lot of money but is also spending the resources and potential of those who work, the intelligence of scientists and above all the expectations of our children in the future.
In Syria, the most tragic war scenario of our time, bombs continue to fall on innocent people: civilians, women and children who try to survive in total poverty or are buried under the rubble, in a genocide that nobody seems to want to stop. Everything happens without the world and Western diplomacy doing anything, without the UN helping those who are dying, without medicine to treat the wounded. This happens because, as Hannah Arendt said, war does not restore rights, it redefines powers.
We want to spread UNICEF’s message, which should convince even the most insensitive consciences and the hardest hearts to repudiate war: “We no longer have words to describe the suffering of children and our disdain. Do those who are inflicting these sufferings still have words to justify their barbaric acts?” And the even more eloquent words of a Syrian mother (from the eastern part of Ghouta, the last Syrian rebel enclave against pro-government forces supported by Russia): “We cannot escape. Run away to go where? There are no ways out, we move like rats just to hide. My children are hungry and thirsty, they are hidden here with me and I don't know how to feed them. A mother’s pain is the same all over the world. And we can't do anything about it. Nothing is in our hands in this hell of bombs. How do you describe the pain of a mother, who knows she cannot save her own children? It cannot be described”.
This desperate cry raises unspeakable emotions in our hearts. Such emotions can be defined as indignation and condemnation. We would like to comment on it with the straight words of a great writer and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, who was able to combine poetry and civil commitment better than anyone else: “The war that is coming is not the first. Before it there were other wars. When the last one was over there were victors and vanquished. Amongst the vanquished the lowly folk went hungry, amongst the victors the lowly folk went hungry also.”
Nowadays, hunger and inequalities cause millions of people to migrate, and when they reach a new land they continue to be exploited as “new slaves”. For this reason, we must commit ourselves and fight together against war, which is the generator of all human tragedies, and against weapons, without which the horror and devastation of war could not take place.
War and those economies based on the arms trade are the greatest shame of humanity.
Every man should always be able to use his intelligence, develop his sensitivity and open his heart to the point of rejecting this aberrant instrument. For this reason, our exhortation to the world is: let's shoot ideas of peace instead of bullets!
All wars are wrong, unacceptable and unjustifiable, because they cause horror and death. Therefore, it is not acceptable “to look the other way to avoid seeing the faces of those who suffer in silence” (Gino Strada).
Democracy cannot be conquered and exported by war, because the only war that can be won is the one which is not waged.
Weapons continue to kill and guillotine the principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité and the creatures of God. This reduces Creation (Gaia) to ashes, even though she is the one giving us life.