Without repudiation of war, no future is possible,
an article by Teri Volini
- April 30th is the third anniversary of the Naming in Potenza (via del Gallitello, height of the galleria Unita d'Italia), of the Rotonda dedicated to Marija Gimbutas (Vilnius, 1921 - Los Angeles, 1994), the great archaeologist who realized the passage from the deleterious vision of war as inherent in the DNA of the human being to that of Peace as the Primary Value of humanity …
foto Nietta Lisco
- In a nutshell, Gimbutas offered us on a silver platter the incontrovertible proofs of the existence of ancient cultures that systematically practiced peace, privileging it as a founding value.
- The substantial thesis - always considered utopian - of peace as the only possible way for the survival and the evolution of humanity and planet, had always been held back by the fateful statement that war had always existed, almost a destiny, a biological datum of humanity.
- With his invaluable work, Gimbutas revealed the ground- lessness of such a false belief, amply substantiating it with her archaeological finds and the related classification of the finds, in a considerable number of publications, whose images unequivocally show the lack of weapons or defensive fences, confirming instead the presence of religious objects, female statuettes and artistic and handcraft works of great beauty and exquisite workmanship, signs of a peaceful lifestyle that gave space to everyone's creativity in everyday’s life.
- from Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess)
- "That culture "drew intense pleasure from the natural wonders of this world. Her people did not produce lethal weapons, nor did they build forts in inaccessible places, as their successors would later do, not even when they were acquainted with metallurgy. Instead, it built magnificent tombs-sanctuaries, temples, comfortable houses in modest-sized villages and created superb pottery and sculptures. That was a period of remarkable creativity and stability, an age free from conflict "
- (from Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess)
- An illusory and losing progress
- This brief excursus makes us understand how illusory and losing is the concept of progress so much heralded in our time: how can it ever be defined with that term - which should include development, improvement, advancement, progression, civilization - if that instead leads us directly to self-destruction ?
- l
- In the last 50 years of so-called non-belligerence, conflicts have continued to involve many nations, small and large, in the earth, and the most powerful ones, instead of committing themselves to fostering peace, to heal conflicts and to facilitate the recovery of peoples in great difficulty (often beyond the limits of survival), continued to make profits precisely in those countries, which without knowledge had great natural resources. And instead of bringing equity and well-being, they provoked the escalation of conflicts, creating pretexts to trigger other wars, coups d'état, agreements with tyrannical governments, and so on
- And armed conflict is still provoked, playing at the good and bad, without wanting to see the abyss ready to swallow us, to any group we belong ...
- With a similar disappointing way of proceeding,the human beings, especially those in power, show to have a totally inadequate and diabolically
perverse vision: and surely it’s wrong when - instead of treasuring the horrors
and atrocities of the past, and stopping the impending ruin - they persist in their robotic, unconscious
decisions, without any knowledge that in similar ways a future not even there may be, if not death and
destruction
- Treasure the past
- As Gimbutas did, with his strenuous faith in finds that were not always weapons weapons and more weapons, as in his previous 30 years of archeological excavations,
- we
- should turn to the past, embark on a trans-spatial
and trans-temporal journey: flying over the historical eras and - taking care not to be hit by some arrow,
spear or rocket or atomic bomb, in reverse order used in the innumerable
conflicts that occurred on the plane -
we‘ll be able to find that before the sadly historical ones, there were others that did not met war .... - we‘ll be able to find that before the sadly historical ones, there were others that did not meet war ....
- At that point, a quick comparative flash will lead us
to the bleak conclusion: that the
inhabitants of the earth in the 3rd millennium have a decidedly lower
intelligence than that of the Paleo / Neolithic peoples ...
- And anyway: "I like to think that if we trained ourselves to develop non-conformist thoughts, with a mind free from prejudices and arrogance, moderating the claims of superiority referred to our hyper-technological culture and historical periods in general, and instead we tried to understand or intuit the civilization of those ancient peoples, we would discover that, beyond being senseless brutes, they handed down something fundamental to us: “they were in contact with divine, they made art in everyday life, they nurtured a relationship of profound respect towards nature, being attentive to relationships with all living creatures and the planet" (Gimbutas).
- (cit.from Teri Volini, Glifi, a differentiated research in Basilicata)
