Piazza Duomo con blindato - Le Alternative -

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

A delicate post for a delicate topic and written in a very particular moment of the recent European history. It seems interesting to us to propose it again now that the topic is not part of the main media headlines, so it seems like a good idea to (re)read it with a cool head.

This article was written on July 16, 2016 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 374/ Piazza Duomo with armored vehicle

As some of the 24 readers know, Cassandra lives in a city where the Piazza del Duomo is a beautiful place, a place of art, a good living room, a banquet.

For a few months now, in the most visible place in the square, where a life-size clay and wood nativity scene is normally mounted at Christmas, an armored vehicle with camouflage livery has been parked all day, and some lagoon soldiers and paratroopers stand in the nearby corners, holding rifles assault, disturbing even if facing downwards.

During rush hours, crowds of tourists, mainly Japanese at this time, surround them, but keeping a certain distance. Someone gets a souvenir photo taken.
Some Italians ask him which battalion he belongs to, and maybe they discover they are comrades in arms.

And Cassandra? He had wanted to write on the subject for a long time, and the tragedy that had just happened was evidently the last straw.

Spending almost every day in the area, he always asks himself the same three questions.

Why?
What is it for?
What else could be done?

Personally, I am proud, and consider myself very fortunate, to be able to live in a country and on a continent where the ideal of democracy is present at incomparably greater levels than the rest of the world. I particularly care about this.

Despite the terrible attacks of these last days, months and years, life continues and must continue.

It is obviously appropriate that all reasonable measures are taken to prosecute and combat them, as long as they are useful, and in particular do not cause greater damage than they are intended to avoid.

Terrorism is no different problem from others that afflict us. Illness, poverty, ignorance are much more serious afflictions, because they have always oppressed and killed many more people, and they cannot be solved or in any case have never been solved.

Even if this certainly cannot console the family of a victim of terrorism, and perhaps not even be considered acceptable by them, the risk of being killed by a terrorist attack in Piazza Duomo is infinitely less than that of being killed, as a morning pedestrian, by a moped going the wrong way on the sidewalk or from a delivery van.

While, on a general level, by anyone, terrorism can be countered very effectively in a simple way, even if "simple" does not mean "easy".

“So Cassandra has the solution?!?!”
No, it's there, before everyone's eyes, because terrorism, especially in the Internet era, is a classic example of asymmetric multidimensional conflict.

As we learn in the military academies of all nations, starting with China where the term was invented, it cannot be fought with conventional weapons, with restrictive or aberrant rules, with walls or with borders.
You fight it, when you can, only with intelligence.

Two Chinese air force officers, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, theorized this type of conflict in a manual which later became the book “War without limits” (the Italian edition is not complete).

In our "limited case" of terrorist attacks we only need to take note of the sad truth; no deployment of forces can prevent a well-organized suicide attack.

Do the armored vehicles and assault rifles next to the cathedrals then at least serve to reassure people?
For what it's worth, they have the opposite effect on Cassandra, and none of the people she asked the question responded in the affirmative.

Instead, the phenomenon is clear.
Terrorism, as the term itself says, wants to scare.
The more we get scared, the more it achieves its goals.
The more he manages to make people talk about himself, the more he has won.
The more he manages to make an entire society react in a way that harms its citizens, for example by declaring a state of emergency or reducing civil rights, the more he triumphs.

If instead it were countered only with operations of intelligence, without deployments of forces, terrorism would lose a vital advantage.

If the media acted responsibly, and the news of the attacks were given like that of a serious road accident, without empty and obsessive repetitions, marathons, extraordinary editions, continuous statements by politicians and prime ministers, terrorism would suffer a very serious defeat.
It wouldn't be censorship, which Cassandra particularly hates, but just an acceptable sacrifice to fight terrorism on the old and new media, a field in which she is now undoubtedly a winner.

What if we all succeeded”simply” to live without fear, as if he didn't exist, he would be reduced to dust like a vampire hit by a ray of sunshine.

Marco Calamari