CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Leviathan Returns: Trump and Netanyahu

Netanyahu and Trump at the White House. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

What Antonio Piccarolo’s A Guerra e a Paz na História (War and Peace in History – 1940) tells us about recent armed conflicts.

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), the United States’ and Israel’s war against Iran has brought the number of armed conflicts in which states are involved to more than sixty. In this regard, it is pertinent that both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are at the centre of serious controversies and accusations of various kinds that are widely reported in the international press, and are also embroiled in ugly, far-reaching legal and political disputes. The attack on Iran increases the number of the planet’s armed conflicts to almost two hundred, if civil wars, tribal conflicts, and fighting among criminal gangs are counted. If we add to these the cold wars, or social media dis(information) wars that fuel the hot wars, could we say that a third world war has already begun?

History doesn’t repeat itself but I looked to a past that echoes in the present when trying to answer this question. Just before Carnaval in February this year, I found in a second-hand bookshop in downtown São Paulo A Guerra e a Paz na História (War and Peace in History – 1940) by the Italian socialist Antonio Piccarolo (1863-1947) who had settled in Brazil. This essay, published in 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, is an intellectual and pacifist exercise in analysing the conflict that was ravaging Europe. That I should have found it precisely when I was trying to understand what was happening with all these armed conflicts can probably only be explained by Jung’s concept of synchronicity or meaningful coincidence.

A Guerra e a Paz na História was Piccarolo’s........

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