Facts are one thing, words another
When on 7 October 2023 members of Hamas’s ‘government’ torture and kill, is the aim to liberate their land? When the government of Israel kills Palestinians by hunger and disease, steals their land, is the aim to make the future of the State of Israel secure?
When governments similar to ours bomb pediatric wards, resources for heating, assassinate dissidents and opponents, create paramilitary militias, cheat in elections, imprison poets, blind women, invade third states, is the aim peace for their own citizens?
Do the political programs of far-right formations in Europe aim at the construction of plural, autonomous, cooperating states, respectful of the individual, of equal opportunities, of the individual freedom to choose the life one is to live, of peace among peoples?
When governments of affluent societies let children die by drowning if they are foreign, create concentration camps for migrants and abandon them to our fate in our streets, do these governments aim at our security?
What do these facts have in common? They have in common that their evidence opposes the declared aim. It opposes the words used.
Food, care, environment, affection, security, fiscal justice are rights we feel to be just, natural. Non-negotiable rights. Rights for which we feel part of this or that country.
In affluent societies, denying minimum income or what is necessary for food is not a question of economic sustainability, but of political choice. Likewise, it is a government decision to reduce public access to care, to make some pay and others nothing, to label those who oppose as unworthy of being heard, to use the law as a means of consensus or political propaganda.
In history, as in the present, those who hold power use these places, these ‘assets’, as instruments of government. Techniques for orienting people and groups, mitigating moral conflicts, orienting values, supporting which interpretation to give to events and to the choices made. One might say, in order to rewrite the history of events.
Social space is administered by selecting interest groups, not as a generality.
In this inherently changeable space, the government offering is co-optation of consent, not recognition or repression. It is a corporate administration, updated to the techniques of producing consent under conditions of redistributive inequity of resources.
The legitimation of the constellations in power does not pass through an equitable management of society or the application of some general and abstract principle of justice, but through the search for alliances with some and marginalization of others.
In Europe the most dangerous nationalisms are growing again. Slogans spread: ‘my state first’; and it is a paradox, because at the same time states are eclipsing as political entities.
Loss of weight of the Constitution, growing importance of government: a pragmatic bureaucratic structure, the practice of words overpowering facts, a social system polarized by the friend/enemy binary, procedures for centralizing decisions to the detriment of public places of knowledge. The importance of private and transnational oligopolies.
Violence, techniques of government
These techniques of government are not neutral with respect to the field of interests. They cannot be. They privilege some, disadvantage others. And since their technical usefulness is resolved in administering according to the derived numbing, the abstention from dissent, they exclude interests evaluated as “minor,” groups already marginalized by other previous techniques of government, those most useful to point to as the cause of all evils. In short: those least capable of causing generalized consent crises if neglected or persecuted, the most suitable to be stigmatized.
The fact that certain slogans that drastically simplify reality are successful, become common sense, is a measure of the success of techniques of government, of the capacity to construct opportunistic visions of the world. It is a prevalence of the assertiveness of words over the dialectic of facts. The learned words with which we name the things that happen to us, with which we evaluate them in our personal or social moral hierarchy, are not neutral words; they are oriented toward values, and therefore endowed with meaning. Meaningful in relation to different interests.
The administration of justice is the question of cohabitation: it concerns how we are treated, what rights we have recognized and who and how much has the duty to protect them or else to dole them out sparingly or deny them. A mirror of the times, justice is discussed and delegitimized as a power informed by general and abstract principles, especially on the subject of judgment on the lawfulness of government acts. It itself becomes a place of conflict in order to reduce it to a component of the operational tools of administering consent.
Examples are the management of crime news, the gap between resources given and media investment, the overexposure of the individual, the reduction of social and historical complexity. That is, an occasion for words, grassroots propaganda at negligible cost.
When a government uses spaces of freedom or people’s bodies as a battlefield, the question of a third-party justice becomes urgent, concrete.
Today war is possible; I do not like the mainstream that runs through Europe. Nationalisms are crude hypotheses of life with others. They are not conservation of identity values; they are wars to come and destruction of identities.
Economic and political leaders seem to many inadequate, now embarrassing, now dangerous for our interests and acquired rights.
The posts that follow, under the title ‘Under the War’, are a reflection to explain why I share these concerns, and to give my contribution. They are also a way, this is my usefulness, to give some arrangement to readings and experiences made, complete, incomplete, heterogeneous. To remember suggestions and comparisons had: beautiful people, for me, whom I have known. Memory, in short.
The method: the individual posts have three possible readings. Three levels.
A post for students
- The first is the text of the post. The writing is synthetic, akin to a fact sheet, with common language, even at the cost of some generalization or excessive synthesis. The aim is to show what to pay attention to in order to understand the events that happen, according to my opinion, obviously, and from a criminological perspective in the general sense. Words in italics are key words or ideas of the discourse.
For technical reasons the post is better readable on desktops.
Mobile phones, tablets and laptops sacrifice some graphic aspects that have been studied for better enjoyment of the text.
A post to go deeper
- The second level is the notes. Besides serving as support or justification for what is written in the text, they have more technical content, a more discursive form and greater linguistic attention. Read together with the text, they transform the post into a small essay, a long read. In the notes, proper names, places, laws and norms are emphasized to build a visual map of references and places of the discourse. Being better-circumstantiated statements, they offer grounds for criticism more easily.
A post to connect aspects of daily life
- The third is the connection with knowledges that go beyond the strict criminological or sociological sphere, the only fields on which I have some systematic readings to my credit.
The attempt is to investigate how an important fact of associated life has points of contact between knowledges only apparently distant from one another: fashion, music, art. Each post has references to these knowledges. The one summarizes the others, so to speak.
This last is the most experimental part and must be considered as such.
For these three reasons the posts are open to the contribution of those who wish, I would like that, and always being updated.
All posts are published under the title ‘Under the War’, then specifying the topic. Saying under the war means alluding to several contextual things:
Under the War
- first, to roots, to mechanisms, to the conditions of possibility of war or of a high social conflict. Thus to all that precedes it or that appears inevitable if left to operate.
- Then it alludes to the point of view of those who do not decide, but suffer. Crushed subjects are blameless, they are underneath and are the majority. They are called victims.
- Again, ‘Under the War’ alludes to what is not seen, to what remains opaque to those without means.
- Not least, the title ‘Under the War’ alludes to criticism as an essential act of public life and not only. Criticism of those who do not share, do not approve, suffer, unveil or at least try with what they have and know. In short, to the reason why social conflict is always a good, but war against others or against the internal enemy of the decision-makers in office, no. War is another thing.
I have had the fortune to be able to grow in peace and to be able to care for myself, drink clean water and adequate food, study and read what I like. I have a social debt in this. For what it is worth, I give back.
P.S.
For visually impaired readers, all posts have a high contrast between font and background. It may be that, for others, such contrast gives slight discomfort; in this case lowering the brightness of the screen should solve it. For the same reason there is a reading of the text, an audio file at the beginning of the post. Unfortunately the audio file does not include the reading of the notes; it is an important missing part.
Each of these posts costs hours and work, which obviously does not mean that there are contents of value. Whoever wants can make the use of it they believe, the only constraint being the Creative Commons terms of use as specified in the footer of the blog.
All posts are updated as occasion arises, the notes in particular, even long after the original publication.
The posts in the ‘Under the War’ series are dedicated to the memory of:
Federico Cantaluppi. 1924, Como. Anarchist, killed in the street by fascists with a beating. The trial against the murderers was never held. Similarly to the Regeni case, the authorities said that the cause of death had been a fall, drunk, from a bicycle. For fear of further fascist violence, the family destroyed all documents and photographs concerning him.
Primo Levi. 1987, Turin. Witness of the abomination of Nazism and of Jewish persecution. Suicide.
Giulio Regeni. 2016, Cairo. PhD student, killed with atrocious torture. The trial of the defendants, high officials of the currently serving al-Sisi government, is ongoing (March 2026).
Translated by DeepSeek.
Original Italian text by the author · NB: Unless otherwise specified, all links were verified on 07.03.26
– Last Updated on 26.10.26 by wv
If there are errors in the notes, a missing source or a case that deserves examination, please write to me. If you have experiences or proposals about what would be needed before or after, please write to me. Every report is welcome.
To write to me: contatti@wvan.it · Bluesky · Instagram
