It is up to you, young people, to cry out, to shout, and to protest

IT IS UP TO YOU, YOUNG PEOPLE TO CRY OUT

OTHERWISE THE VERY STONES WILL!

“If the others keep silent, if we your elders and those responsible – often corrupt – keep silent, if the world keeps silent, I ask you: “Will you cry out?” Please, make up your minds before the very stones begin to cry out.” These are the words Pope Francis used to challenge the youth present in St. Peter Square on March 26, World Youth Day. Almost at the same time of the Pope’s appeal, millions of young and very young Americans took to the streets with the slogan “Never Again” in 800 American cities and towns (800,000 in Washington, DC alone) to say “No to Weapons,” weapons that in the USA kill thousands of young people. It was a clear political move intended to send home, in the mid-term election of November, all those members of congress and senators who support the NRA, the powerful arms lobby. It was an extraordinary reaction in Trump’s America! Meanwhile we “your elders and responsible” Italians keep quiet in the face of the madness of weapons, wars, racism and the destruction of the planet. Will at least you, young Italians, have the courage to shout and to cry out? The SIPRI Institute of Stockholm has revealed that, in 2017 alone, worldwide we have invested $1,739 billion in weapons, equal to $4.5 billion a day. Last year, our country wasted €26 billion on weapons, equal to €70 million a day. And in 2017 it exported over €10 billion worth of heavy weapons. These weapons were sold, by way of example, to Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen, to Qatar and the UAE that use them to support Jihad and Al Qaida groups. And all this happened under the nose of Law 185 that forbids the sale of weapons to warring countries that violate human rights.

We watched in silence the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of Israel, which is armed to the teeth including nuclear weapons. The race to nuclear capability is becoming more and more intense, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons of 2017 notwithstanding, which Italy has not yet signed. Over the next decades, the USA alone will invest $1,000 billion to update its nuclear arsenal. These atomic weapons, “illegal, immoral and illogical,” according to Pope Francis, are leading the world to the brink of the abyss of a nuclear war. But not less harmful is the arms race in ever more sophisticated conventional weapons leading to always new wars from Syria to Afghanistan, from Yemen to Ukraine, from Somalia to Congo, from South Sudan to Mali, from Central Africa to Libya, from Sudan to Nigeria. Today Africa is the continent most devastated by wars, mostly because of its wealth, especially in minerals. The consequence of these wars is the flood of refugees reaching our shores asking for asylum, that we reject.

In fact, Europe, the birthplace of human rights, has given $6 billion to Erdogan to block in Turkey those who run away from Syria and Afghanistan, and has pushed Italy into making a treaty with El Serraj, the strong man of Tripoli, to hold in the Libyan hell a million refugees, to be tortured and raped. Europe already has on its conscience 50,000 migrants buried in the Mediterranean. Now the mouthpiece of the new government, the minister of internal affairs, Salvini, screams: “Enough with NGOs in the Mediterranean to save castaways,” and “no assistants to people traffickers must dock in Italian harbors.” Then he wants to expel 500,000 undocumented. It is the triumph of racism and of xenophobia, not only in Italy, but also in Poland, in Hungary, in Croatia, in Austria. It is happening not only in words, but with walls, barbed wire and metal barriers as sharp as razor blades. The old continent has lost its humanity! Our grandchildren will say of us what we say of the Nazis. It is our Shoah! And all this in the silence of us, “elders and responsible.” My generation, the one born during WWII and still alive today, will be among the most accursed generations in human history, because no other generation has so violated the Planet Earth as we have. We hand over to you a world which is sick, and now it is up to you! It is up to you to shout, to cry out, to protest against an economic-financial system that impoverishes and starves so many people and violates the Planet Earth, and against the madness of the huge investments in weapons leading always to new wars, and against this wave of xenophobia and racism that corrodes the EU and our country. We the elders and corrupted caused this disaster. Now it is up to you, young people! “Please, make up your mind, before the very stones start crying out!”
Alex Zanotelli
Naples, June 20 2018