Commentary
The military parade for a perpetual state of war
It's as if the endless repetition of the triumphal marches of a militarized West, if adorned here and there with civilian faces, could justify – to the point of concealing – the deep-set vocation for war that surrounds us.
Just like the previous years, the June 2 parade marched along the Imperial Fora, with flags and medal bearers, thousands of soldiers, dogs and horses, weapon platforms, fighter jets, the Frecce Tricolori aerobatic team – and city mayors, for some reason.
They passed between stands of (seldom) applauding onlookers. “Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels / Over the paving. / And the flags. And the trumpets. And so many eagles. / How many? Count them. And such a press of people. / We hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City …” – these lines of Triumphal March, T. S. Eliot’s scathing poem, come to mind, as do the deranged military hierarchies in Céline’s Casse-pipe and the verses of Dino Buzzati’s Il Capitano Pic, the prologue to his The Tartar Steppe.
All of them lambast the obsession with the unnatural preparation for the condition of war. And it only gets worse every year.
Because there cannot be a more false display than marching a few mayors wearing the green-white-red sash – a dab of civic colour – beside armed troops, tanks and fighter-bombers. This is the new “political correctness” that now accompanies the ideology of war, first depicted as “humanitarian” by NATO’s 1999 campaign, and then once more in Libya in 2011.
It's as if the endless repetition of the triumphal marches of a militarized West, if adorned here and there with civilian faces, could justify – to the point of concealing – the deep-set vocation for war that surrounds us. Of course, President Sergio Mattarella is right: we want “a future of peace for the younger generations.” But how can we wish for peace while, true to the old Roman Imperial para bellum motto, we prepare for war?
Why does Italy spend more than €87 million every single day for arms and military spending (according to the latest data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute - SIPRI)? Why are licences for Italian weapons exports rising – and why does the government rejoice, citing GDP growth, when the buyers are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates: petrostates steeped in repression and engaged in bloody wars whose effects we will feel for years?
According to SIPRI, the Swedish institute recognized globally as the authority on the topic, total military spending hit $2.718 trillion in 2024, up 9.4 percent on 2023: a rise of nearly 20 percent since the end of the Cold War, reached in only three years. Everyone is at it. The five biggest spenders – the United States, China, Russia, Germany and India – account for 60 percent of the global total. Europe shows an overall rise of 17 percent, led by Western Europe’s leap of 24%.
In East and Southeast Asia the increases are 7.5 and 7.8 percent respectively. NATO countries still top the rankings: its 32 members make up 55 percent of world military spending ($1.506 trillion). U.S. spending grew 5.7 percent to a staggering $997 billion (37 percent of the 2024 world total), while Russia’s budget rose by 38 percent in a single year (149 billion) and Israel’s rose by 65 percent. China also increased its military budget and is now in second place in the world with $314 billion. Italy, for its part, raised defence spending by 1.4 percent to $38 billion.
We are on a path of militarization with a rising risk of war, with national sovereignisms craving security for themselves while denying it to the “enemy” they have finally named. War reproduces itself through war and must keep going. Following the dictum of the “isolationist” Donald Trump – arm yourselves, but buy the weapons from me – we are, incredibly, doubling our military spending to 2 percent in order to support NATO, which has already pushed dangerously eastward in search of fresh conflicts, as the bloody Russian-Ukrainian quagmire (ever closer to a nuclear one) shows, which cannot be completely reduced to the serious aggression perpetrated by the neo-tsar Putin.
Meanwhile, as we convert the natural vocation of entire Italian regions into new military forms of servitude and turn the inviolable vocation of schools into a service bordering on conscription, we stand ready for a “New European Defense” – not instead of but in addition to the costs for NATO. The European Union, whose number one investment is now the €800 billion allocated for military spending – also under the shadow of Germany’s alarming mega-rearmament, while the AfD is at over 20 percent – is asking state-owned firms in every country to manufacture weapons: in good Atlantic fashion, the EU will no longer impose any budget caps on that.
Instead, the cuts will fall on health care, wages, jobs, society, young people, schools, social services – and workplace safety, where a veritable war on the working class is under way.
We stand at attention fully armed, while reaping the consequences of the failed conflicts we ourselves set off: from the former Yugoslavia to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from Libya to Syria (where we are now shaking hands with al-Qaeda). Was that the “world order” we now lament as compromised? Are we still weeping for it now?
The truth is, we were the first to compromise it in all these years. Years in which we might have safeguarded peace in the Middle East, while Palestine – Gaza and the West Bank, territories occupied since 1967 – has become an immense prison camp of the damned, where death and despair run rampant for millions of people whom we are now suddenly discovering actually have a “right to a home.” The truth is that we are “at the still point of the turning world,” to quote Eliot once more.
The way to celebrate the Italian Republic’s birth on June 2 is by practicing, and giving life to, the provision of the Republican Constitution, whose Article 11 – often abused, erased, vilified – states that Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offence against the freedom of other peoples and as a means of settling international disputes. Triumphal military parades are a blind alley.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/2-giugno-il-foro-imperiale-del-riarmo on 2025-06-03