WAR AND TERRORISM

Facing the Twin Towers we are involved in a double clearness:

  1. The Poors, or better the ones that have become poor, must no longer be object of charity, but subject of rights. At last they have been given their human beings’ dignity back, capable themselves of capitalism. The iranian film ” Trip to Kandahar” shows in plenty that talebanism is the eldest son of poverty. While according to our clumsy ethics, only terrorism is immoral; we are not frightened by the poverty that causes it.
  2. Today western people are taking part in an ultra-capitalistic system, based on planetary unfairness and theft, perpetrated against all mankind.

Even the most honest among us feel the social pressure towards “a deal” (a euphemism for theft), attracted by the desire to stuff himself. Fish out of water in an ocean filled with sharks, in a world where the great divine commandment “Do not steal” sounds like double Dutch.
We Christians are called out. It is not the time of feeling “sinners” for private sexual morals, but also and mainly for a political and social sense. We are thieves at the level of the system. In spite of us. In the best of the cases, honest thievies.
The young people perturbed by the sublime prayer of the Twin Towers’ kamikaze are very many. Secretly attracted by the Al-Jazeera icon, the arabian CNN: a spiritual and rivolutionary Bin laden, almost a fire-lily. Jesus’s words thunder in my blood: ” every richness smells of unjustice”. “be the poors your friends, not your victims” (Luke 16,9). In other words: capitalistic sharing. Capitalists must remember Paul’s words as well: “God gives you everything in abundance, so that you may be generous” (2 Corinthian 9,11).
I feel American to the bone, because Kennedy’s America was the mother of the values that have always nourished my spirit and my mind: freedom and freeing, democracy, polyphony of cultures, dialogue. But it is the same love that gives me the authority to criticize it, when it makes a prostitute of itself to a kind of capitalism, for which very true are the anthrax verses of Trilussa in “The war lullaby”, during the First World War:

“Because that dan of killers,
that is staining our land with blood,
knows that war is a large business that
prepares the resources for the stock
exchange”

While the ecological crisis is spreading and we hear the ancient Indian Cree prophecy: “Only after the Last Tree has been cut down, Only after the Last River has been poisoned, Only after the Last Fish has been caught, Only then will you find that Money Cannot be Eaten”.
We have to oppose a revolutionary democracy to this antichrist capitalism, new not in the principles but in its applications and solutions, infinitely wider and more radical than the present one. Global like capitalism, able to rule and direct it, opening it to the poors, at last successful as capitalistic co-subjects.
Be intelligences and abilities, intellectuals, politicians and technicians put into action.
With the most generous commitment, on the wave of a magnificent vision, almost romantic: the Earth must not die of capitalism. Sustained by a fundamental certainty: poverty is the “par-excellence” crime against mankind. Only in this way the West will be superior. To itself.

Priest Dr. Franco Ratti

Reported by

  • The newspaper “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno” of 1 and 14 October 2001
  • The “La Stampa” newspaper of 30 September 2001
  •  The “Liberation” newspaper of 29 September 2001
  • The “La Repubblica-Bari” newspaper of 30 September 2001
  • The “La Repubblica” (“Woman”) newspaper of 6 November 2001
  • The “Corriere del Mezzogiorno-Puglia” newspaper of 16 November 2001
  • The “Corriere dell’Irpinia” newspaper of 4 October 2001
  • The “Ottopagine” newspaper of 2 November 2001
  • The magazine “Il Borgo” – November 2001
  • The magazine “Portauova” – December 2001
  • “Irpinia TV” of 3 October 2001
  • “Prima TV” of 3 October 2001

This article is available in Italian too