In the famous work Mass and power, Elias Canetti explains the meaning of the “mass”, the object of his investigation, also in reference to war, stripping this bloody practice of dealing with conflicts of any ideological superstructure and bringing it back to its essence: in war “the greatest possible number of enemies; the dangerous mass of living opponents should turn into a group of the dead. Whoever kills the most enemies is the winner.”
Despite the rhetoric of “victory” that has accompanied the war in Ukraine is fueled by increasingly powerful weapons sent by Western governments to the Ukrainian one, to which they respond – in a logic of escalation – weapons of equal and opposite power deployed by the Russian government, is still the quantity of soldiers “killed” on the battle (carefully censored by the media), and the reserve mass available to replace them, which is ultimately determining the fate of the civil warAnd in the heart of Europe.
For Canetti, war positions everyone within the two intertwined masses of the fighting parties: “for his own people, he belongs to the number of living warriors, for the adversary to the number of potential or desirable deaths”. This is the reason why Poland And Lithuania have made a commitment to the Ukrainian government – “short of reserves to mobilize”, as specified by the Lithuanian defense minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas – to drive back to their homeland, by hook or by crook, all the Ukrainian men who in these two years they had managed to expatriate in the countries belonging to the European Union, around 650,000 according to estimates, hoping in vain for protection. Which Italy, for example, had activated in 1992 against deserters from the republics of former Yugoslavia in the previous European civil war and today we are careful not to confirm it.
“But how does the formation of mass war?”, asks Canetti. “We conclude that we are threatened with physical destruction, and we proclaim this danger publicly before the world.” That is, the perception of danger is fueled and fear spreads, as it does Emmanuel Macron alluding to the fact that Russia wants to directly threaten EU countries if not stopped at any cost, when it reiterates the hypothesis of sending ground troops to support the Ukrainian army, if the Russians “break through the front”, as stated in the interview with The Economist (May 2). But this total threat to Europe, which would be immediately self-destructive for Russia, it is part of the opposing war propaganda, which Canetti himself evoked in his essay: if the enemy “did not express it first, he still planned it; and if he didn’t plan it, he at least thought about it; and if he hasn’t already thought of it, he would have thought of it.”
Although the French president’s position still seems to appear isolated in Europe, the alarm from the Italian Chief of Staff soon arrived Carmine Masiello: “These will be years of great crisis, it’s better to be prepared. To date, the workforce is not sufficient, the two war scenarios – Ukraine and the Gaza Strip – teach us that mass is needed, because forces wear out and must be regenerated”, he said in the interview with Corriere della Sera (3 May). The concept of “mass”, to indicate the sum of soldiers, is therefore fully explicit: what counts in war are not individual personalities, but – in addition to the growing economic resources – the mass-for-death, which gets “worn out” and needs to be “regenerated”. Moreover, as Elias Canetti comments at the end of the paragraph dedicated to the war, “for the duration of the war one must remain a mass; and the war is truly over when you are no longer mass”.
The opposite of the mass is the personal posture of those who avoid massification, becoming a mere body for maneuver – “cannon fodder” he said Chateaubriand in anti-Napoleonic polemic – starting from a position of conscience. It is the foundation ofconscientious objection to military service, which was born as individual civil disobedience of those who refuse to conform and become a cog in the war machine. Today in our country, with the suspension of compulsory conscription (not suppression), conscientious objection to military service is not foreseen, but European governments and military leaders, instead of strenuously engaging in the search for peace between Russia and Ukraine, are progressively returning to the formation of the war “mass”. This is why the new phase of the campaign is important Personal objection to warpromoted by the Nonviolent Movement (which I have already written about in relation to the new resistance).
It is no longer just a question of support for objectors, deserters and evaders of all the warring parties in the ongoing armed conflicts, which continues, but of the preventive self-declaration of one’s own pacifist subjectivity, which refuses – explicitly and formally – to become slaughter mass. In the name of conscience, as well as of the Constitution.
