Against Zagrebelsky and his praise of unjust peace

Gustavo Zagrebelsky is a formidable ‘mis-educator’. If you wish to follow wherever the warmth of your heart and the abstract nature of the law – even mild or constitutional law – may lead you, whilst completely disregarding the lessons of reality filtered through the coldness of reason, experimental cases and historical circumstances, you can rely on him, the master of masters in pedantic, consolatory platitudes. He takes to the lectern with some regularity; he never fails to spread illusions, scattering the incense of secular conformism without remorse or doubt, and never allowing his theses to be called into question. His lectures often focus on impractical moralising; he either contradicts the course of human history or disregards it altogether with the confident boldness of one who believes himself to be in the right, employing a combative yet mediocre intellect with the utmost pedagogical correctness.

He is currently writing a pamphlet to argue that there is no such thing as a ‘just’ peace, otherwise there would also be a ‘just’ war; that peace is an absolute principle of law, and therefore its opposite is nothing other than a crime; that there is no such thing as the ‘soldat inconnu’ or ‘unknown soldier’, but only the ‘missing victim’; that it is a mental illness (perhaps, but only ‘perhaps’, preferable to war) the mutual deterrence provided by dissuasive weapons – that is, the instrument that brought decades of peace following the totalitarian world wars of the last century, and ultimately the non-violent liberation of a part of the world that had been pinned down under the iron heel of political police forces and proletarian dictatorships. It is the ideology of the flotilla, the attempt to give the initiatives of the International Criminal Court the legal form of dogma; it is the platform upon which hinges all the ambiguity surrounding resistance to the European rearmament plan against Russian aggression in Ukraine and along the entire eastern front. Zagrebelsky’s ideas explain the defence of the white flag by a pope oblivious to the meaning of words, and shed light on the attribution of extreme reasonableness to Putin by a lady such as Ginevra Bompiani, who has no inkling whatsoever of the meaning of words.

‘Educare a occhio e croce’ would seem to allude, at least in the best sense of paideia, to the formation of a citizen; better still, to the intellectual—rather than emotional—construction of a mature human spirit, one that is aware of the crooked nature of humanity. It would therefore imply an introduction to politics, to the tragic sense of life, and to its painful truth—which certainly encompasses questions about war and just peace. Instead, with Zagrebelsky, one is inundated with guidelines devoid of any connection to the reality of things, all subservient to ‘oughts’, to ethical absolutes, to a disembodied and empty notion of the common good: the ‘mis-educator’, however well-intentioned, perfectly embodies – in pure paradox – the void described by Tacitus as an expression of the devastating pax romana: he creates an intellectual desert and calls it peace. Without a concept of justice, without the contractual validation of security—which provides the foundation and framework for the state and the community—and without the authorisation to defend oneself against threats, the very concept of peace is useless; and to fail to recognise this, to deny it, is highly counter-educational. Zagrebelsky’s argument is simply a eulogy to unjust peace.