Ambiguity of Peace

“You are pacifists only today, and this thing is even worse.”

It happens that, always sworn enemies of human ambiguity and hypocrisy, thanks to one of the latest works published on our social networks, we have earned a new dose of insults and calls for reporting. So far nothing new, but this time we noticed that most of this belligerent stuff came from users who had a little blue and yellow flag on their profile picture. A flag that, out of today’s media, seems to represent a country not so stranger to the hard way, when needed.

In the words of the Italian reporter Vittorio Rangeloni, who has lived in the Donbass since 2015: “In the Donbass, Ukraine has been bombing for 8 years, where were you? This is the center of Donetsk which is being bombed at the moment and not by Russia, not by Putin but by the Ukrainian army”.

And while in these days, in countries like Italy, Russian film screenings and university lectures on Dostoevsky are canceled — in the clumsy attempt to “avoid controversy” —, historians who try to contextualize are silenced and censored — for daring to mention, for example, the expansion of NATO following the dissolution of the Soviet Union —, Russian students are expelled from European universities, as well as Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from Beijing 2022 Winter Paralympics, as well as “No cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe — Fédération Internationale Féline d’Europe — pedigree book outside Russia”… There are many people who take to the streets and invoke peace and condemn Putin, the bad guy.

“They demonstrate against war,” Rangeloni said. “All this is fantastic, it is right, war is something wrong, unjust but the hypocrisy of those who give a damn about the fact that it is not something that happens these days. They have been shooting at these cities every day for 8 years and you didn’t give a damn, you are pacifists only today, and this thing is even worse.”

Also reached by Italian Adnkronos, the reporter speaks of a “bloodbath” in Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, encircled today by Russian troops and popular militias from Donetsk, Donbass. “There will be huge losses, there will be a lot of blood on both sides” and civilians will pay “too”, because “the popular militias have created two humanitarian corridors giving the population the opportunity to leave Mariupol and go to Donetsk or the Russian Federation, but the Ukrainian soldiers are preventing them by shielding them with their bodies”.

About our beloved art world, many creative minds, as often happens in these events of unanimous thought and unanimous participation, have promptly given their contribution to the cause of bombed Ukraine.

German illustrator Nadia Menze is one of those who has been most shared but, at the same time, attacked because of “an unfortunate oversigh”. She was practically forced to modify her “pacifist” work after receiving a series of comments outraged by the fact that, in this one, the fish of Poland was missing, a country that they say “is making a huge contribution. Not only they are going to be providing Ukraine with MiG-29 fighters — doubling Ukraine’s inventory —, but they’re also coordinating care for hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting. A tip of the hat to Poland!”

But Nadia immediately ran for cover by publicly apologizing for the serious omission and proposing a new version of her work.

“I chose a random selection of fish — there are a lot of important countries missing, there just wasn’t place enough for all, also sizes have no meaning. But because so many were complaining that Poland was missing — here you go.”

And everyone lived pacifically ever after.