“Russia is threatening open societies on the European border.”
Essay of high quality on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Reflections on the short to medium term on what the West can continue to do to achieve a credible and, where possible, lasting peace. The text requires a good knowledge of contemporary history, politics, geopolitics and economics in order to be appreciated, and in case you have different interpretations, to counter some issues.
History is one of those subjects for which scientific respect for sources and facts is an ethical obligation. Once it has been ascertained how the facts really went, there may be different interpretations, and for contemporaries it is never easy to judge an event too close to them, both geographically and in time, and still less one in which they themselves are a part in question.
Unlike the author, we have less certainties of what were the unleashed causes of the invasion of February 24, 2022, still waiting to be able to see the secret documents and underground agreements of which we are not aware. Certainly, however, the insights that Parsi opens with his analysis of him are remarkable, in particular, as he says in the subtitle, what will be the final cost of freedom?
As Parsi rightly points out on the Ukraine question, the first useful thing to do is to turn off the traditional information media, where biased judgments are given, leaving room for careless ideas, which aim to simplify issues that are extremely difficult in reality. We need to go back to the roots and study.
Then one can more or less agree in finding parallels between the current period and that of the thirties of the twentieth century (we are not among them), but knowing how to consistently motivate an interpretation is the starting point for having a comparison of ideas open and sincere, and not bar talk (at best).
Reading the book is deliberately agile, to reach a wide audience, and not remain gathering dust in a university library.
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Vittorio Emanuele Parsi, Il posto della guerra e il costo della libertà, Bompiani, Milano, 2022