Dear U.S., British, Australian, New Zealand, Sikh friends, you who came here to save our country from tyranny, you who have restored to this country the freedom it ardently renounced, this country who allied itself with the most heinous machine of death and oppression ever imagined in human history, you who never returned to your homes, to your wives, to your children, and your remains are forgotten under the lines of white crosses, many nameless, in the countryside and at the edges of our cities rebuilt with the help of your countries, you, neglected brothers, please consider what we have become during these seventy years of Italian sunshine on your graves.
We have become, probably continuing to be what we have always been, before and after your sacrifice for us, the country that is witnessing another vicious aggression, and horrific massacres of unarmed civilians, by an updated tyranny that uses different flags but identical criminal methods to suppress the life and culture of a neighboring people.
And we, today, are using the freedom and democracy that we did not achieve on our own, but thanks to you, to organize demonstrations that place on the same level of responsibility the people who suffer aggression and those who attack them, and to boycott aid policies in the name of an alleged pacifism that calls peace the victory of those who bomb hospitals, rape the women of the invaded people, and kidnap and deport hundreds of thousands of children.
Influential academics in our country gather and sign appeals listing the conditions of the surrender of the bombed people, and unashamedly blame this people, not the criminals who attack them, for working against peace.
In our press, celebrated war reporters describe the Ukrainian resistance as the whim of cynical rulers who send their own people to slaughter to defend some “musty” province, while the aggressors’ propaganda finds here, just right in our own country, the most effective repeaters of the counterfeit truths, the systematic lies of an ideological butchery that begins by turning an atrocious war into a “special operation” and continues by calling terrorists those who defend themselves.
All this should not overshadow the fact that even here, despite everything, there is some room for the opposing voice, and that bravely and endlessly it has attempted to pierce the roof of a largely prevailing conformity.
But that minority voice is just a hint of civilian health in an overall sick body, and after nine months of war on Ukraine (we always say «war in Ukraine» here), our country is behaving not as it could have and should have, but as its nature and its aversion to freedom – its own and inevitably that of others – lead it to shamefully behave.
Dear friends, the country you fought in, to defend it after all from itself, is this. This kingdom with no more king and still so many servants, this half democracy, this small world, this no longer precious stone set in a sea of chatter, which serves it in the office of a wall against the evil of liberty, this damned plot, this earth under which you are buried… This Italy.