“Rearmament is madness. The confirmation of the distance and the disconnect between elite and citizens. The ruling groups support the war line, the people have a great desire for peace, a word that seems more and more a blasphemy in the roar of arms ”.

Marco Revelli, historian and sociologist, a pupil of Norberto Bobbio, reflects on the war in Ukraine which produces restlessness and uncertainty. It is a very hard blow to an already fragile balance, thirty years after another moment of great pain: the start of the siege of Sarajevo, another crucial step in the history of the Old Continent. Many unknowns weigh on the present and the future. “It's a furious world that is backtracking. This conflict could have been avoided, but little has been done to avert it. I have no doubts: Putin has committed a crime. I distinguish between aggressor and attacked I am on the side of the attacked, of those who have been invaded undergoing a very serious abuse. But this war, which erases all sense of humanity, must be stopped. We need to stop the war spiral ”.

What did your father Nuto, writer, Alpine and partisan, teach you?

“He taught me respect for those who are used and sacrificed by power like his Alpine troops who went to Russia. He understood how much those peasants forced to be soldiers hated the conflict, how much they felt similar to the other peasants they were forced to fight against and how much fascism had been criminal and scoundrel in its foolish politics and in its wars of aggression. He taught me the hatred of war and fascism. I see many similarities and affinities with Emilio Lussu, a great Sardinian. Although of different generations they lived their respective wars as young officers. Then they shared the values of the Resistance ”.

The state of emergency for Covid has just ended.

“We are left with a kind of intoxication. We have raised many walls to protect ourselves from contagion, waste that remains. We will have to do mental healing work that implies a change of horizon and way of thinking. We always hope to return to normal. But which normality? Was the life we used to lead normal? Will the life we lead later be normal? ”.