The days pass, the war continues. Misery grows while the West fails to give sound responses to a situation that has evidently reached the point of catastrophe. The only thing it knows how to do is send arms to the Ukrainians who, meanwhile, continue to be massacred while hoping for a Russian capitulation. A thoroughly utopian hope in my view. The only pervasive certainty is that, sooner or later, this will lead inevitably to the triggering of a third world war which will be fought with nuclear weapons.

Italy, so ignorant, - oh Italy, land of saints, poets, seafarers and limping sheep – we have found ourselves the bride in an abusive marriage. Without natural resources and without a valid foreign policy it is tipping into an unprecedented economic abyss. Costly energy, not only bringing the internal market to its knees, is also devastating the foreign market with exorbitant consumer prices.

The West, incapable of finding the path to peace or even a route that could lead to a ceasefire, continues undauntedly to starve its own people. In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, is turning to alternatives to Russian gas. How? We reignite coal plants, we restart nuclear reactors, we pursue drilling and regasification.

I ask myself: how long before we manage to develop the technological infrastructure to free Europe from dependence on Russia? In the meantime, how will families, businesses and the markets survive? But not just that! Assume we manage to quickly realise the dream of homemade energy, how much will it cost per cubic metre?

Perhaps I am being myopic in my failure to understand the determination to drive millions of people into famine.  In whose name? We say in the name of democracy.  What democracy? Perhaps the democracy of the interests of the American president or better of American expansionism in Europe? I do not think that it can all be reduced to solely what has been in the discussion up to this point.  I maintain that everything that is happening serves to destroy the European Union above all, an entity whose growth is perhaps beginning to irritate Russia and the US.

Next autumn our squares will be full of hungry people, we will witness a social war before the start of a nuclear war.  I hope good sense triumphs.  Leaders, in particular Biden and Putin, I hope that as soon as possible they will sit down at the table and begin once and for all to recognise they are human and to speak of peace. The world cannot exist on the edge of collapse.  Two masters cannot be served at once: God and Mammon.  Unbridled wealth and the loss of values persist only to the detriment of the multitude.  I hope we can soon find common sense again in this damned earthly village called the world.

 PEACE

 Noises, like damned souls fill the silent voids.

 Prisoners of lightless gaols

 reach their hands into the dark, begging Sister Death “why?”

 Bird’s nests devoured by flaming tongues

 of immoral people who indomitably command

 the earth and make it a slave and whore.

 Yet peace, like water in the desert,

 with gentle sighs assures life in the hope of living it.

ft-es