War and Peace

 

For many years, looking at the world, we have heard the echoes of distant wars, of deaths that no longer make the news and serve only to swell the statistics.

Once we were shocked; we felt disgust and repulsion; we felt fear. Today those feelings seem to have vanished, diluted in the lights and celebrations of a society entirely devoted to the anaesthetic of the world: excess and mindless entertainment.

My words may sound exaggerated, yet they are more relevant than one might think. People think of the sea, of nightclubs, of aperitifs, of clothes, of amusements — but almost nothing of the events that define the times we live in.

The news reports come and we listen distractedly: nothing truly shakes us, nothing brings our minds and hearts to consider that what other human beings are enduring could, tomorrow, happen to us as well.

Meanwhile the political parties continue their mutual apologetics: each tries to pin ideological errors on the others, promoting its own line as the only just and correct one, offering diplomatic solutions that prove utterly ineffective on the ground.

In all this chaos, however, it is always the people who pay the price — those from whom every dignity and every real power of decision has been stripped, because someone at the top of the pyramid has decided for everyone according to their own interests.

Some speak of political and diplomatic strategies; others translate those strategies onto the battlefield. Everyone talks a great deal, yet in a language unknown to one another. Everyone speaks and no one understands, much as it happened at the Tower of Babel.

Arms dealers rub their hands as they watch the profits of their industry. Politicians calculate the consensus their pro- or anti-war campaigns will bring. Investors eye the stock-market quotations that will follow the decisions taken. And the people? Ordinary men and women? They are the ones who must put their lives on the line, who must sacrifice themselves to the folly of this or that institutional figure.

There is no such thing as a just war. There is a just peace — that, yes.

The problem is that no one truly seeks this peace, because those who have the power to bring it about have no interest in doing so. Everyone is paying a very high price, but only the poor.

And so these figures of a thousand interests and no God busy themselves pursuing their only god: money. They present as righteous the language of patriotism, armament, the danger of invasion.

No one thinks of a true peace, showing it by example, praying for it, instead of chasing the frenzied entertainment that these same bureaucrats promote precisely because it is the anaesthetic that leads people not to think and to detach themselves from the realities that surround us.

We keep believing that none of this will ever happen to us, because we are strong, and that it can only befall weak peoples. But how weak we are…

Let us pray to God that He may help us rebel against this culture and free ourselves from this drug of the world that seeks to lead us toward self-destruction.

Father Ambrose