15 luglio 2016
Death demands silence. It is a mystery to which man is not given access. It is the silence of prayer. Of respect. Of extreme greeting and recollection.
Last night, in Nice, death arrived aboard a TIR. Deviously and cowardly, it drew its scythe reaping innocent victims. Even children. Words are lacking to express a feeling, which is a mixture of grief, anger and anguish.
Who was driving the truck? One name does not bring 84 people back to life. But to find out that the person who for a year and a half has been engaging in this “ deadly game,” which sows terror and panic, is not an immigrant who arrived yesterday, but someone who has distant origins (Tunisian, Maghrebi, Algerian...), but who nonetheless was born in France and whom France has welcomed and raised, makes one reflect.
And it makes one think along with the fact that for the latest massacre, not a random day on the calendar was chosen, but the day that commemorates the beginning of the French Revolution. The revolution that was the result of the ideals of the Enlightenment, for which all men are free. For which all men are equal. For which all men are brothers. Why? The fathers of the Age of Enlightenment, from D'Alembert to Voltaire, from Montesquieu to Diderot, all the way through Locke and Kant, answer in unison: because they are bearers of Reason. Liberty, equality and fraternity in the name of Reason. And because “Enlightenment” (quote Kant) is the exit from the state of captivity, from that mental imprisonment whose strains were called ignorance, superstitious and prejudice.
Now, that the attack that hit the Promenade des Anglais took place just as France was recalling the values that its history has expressed and on which modern Europe is founded, is a fact that cannot go by the wayside, but should arouse our indignation: there are cultures that do not know those values, indeed, they despise them, they consider them the cause of corruption and degradation. Cultures that believe that ours must be destroyed. And those who take upon themselves the task of undermining it with the weapon of fear, even before fire, are people who were born and raised in Europe, but instead of assimilating its values, they have harbored hatred and resentment. Perhaps complicit is the brainwashing operated by those who have every interest in sending mavericks to their deaths, whom their ignorance makes easy prey for fanaticism.
Does it matter that the order for yesterday's massacre came from an Isis “headquarters” in Syria or Iraq or anywhere else? Or does it matter rather the blatant fact that an exalted person has the power to arbitrarily sentence 84 people to death with a TIR and toy guns? Because that's all it took yesterday.
If our answer is to continue bombing Syria, then we have already succumbed to moral blackmail. It is the most conspicuous response. But what vicious circle do we enter? The blood of innocents has never been washed by the blood of other innocents.
Isis, today, is no longer a network of training camps or buying and selling weapons. What it wanted, it has already achieved: our fear. Our having to look over our shoulders, but perhaps also in front, and left and right at the same time. He got that people without a homeland or values can strike in the heap, at random, with tools of any kind, and even a TIR becomes a lethal weapon.
Hatred? I don't know.
For now it is time for 84 prayers.
