WORLD DAY OF PEACE - Disarming words

by Mauro Armanino*

Niamey (Agenzia Fides) - In the conclusion of his captivity diary "Chains of Freedom", his friend and confrere Pier Luigi Maccalli invites us to "disarm words". Two years of captivity in the desert, among stones, sand, dust and stars, convinced him that the path to peace, understood as "conviviality of differences", can only emerge with bare hands. Disarming words implies precisely moving with bare hands, without preconceived ideas, without ideologies of death and without borders to use to invent enemies at will. Father Maccalli wrote that, apart from the chains that had never abandoned him, he had generally been respected by his kidnappers in the desert. But what deeply marked and wounded him were the words of the kidnappers. Words like stones that hurt by lying, insulting, ultimately making the other a "non-person". He felt like an indefinable thing whose existence is useful only for what it can give in monetary terms with the price of the ransom. A bargaining chip and nothing more. In the introduction to ‘The Book of Power’ by Simone Weil, Mauro Bonazzi writes that "the only way to oppose the spread of force understood as violence is the search for truth... and this means, above all, taking care of words, because they are the instrument we use to understand ourselves and the world. And it is by distorting words that we create, consciously or not, comfortable barriers to protect ourselves from others". Taking care of words and their truth means "disarming" them. In the Sahel, where these notes are written, we have been besieged for years by armed "terrorist" groups, strategic interests, arms dealers, religious ideologies and hidden financing. The displaced and refugees from armed conflicts number in the millions, and the suffering is also incalculable in terms of the scars they will leave for future generations. At the root of all this drama, even before ethnic, religious or economic divisions, there are them, words. Simone Weil herself reminds us of this well. In the book cited above, Weil emphasizes that "let us capitalize on empty words and, at the first opportunity, men will shed rivers of blood, by dint of repeating them, they will accumulate ruin upon ruin... nothing real can really correspond to such words, because they mean nothing. Success will only coincide with the annihilation of men who fight in the name of different words". The list of words in "capital letters" would be endless, just like the mass graves. Capitalizing words that have no other meaning than that imposed by power is what propaganda is used for and above all the complicit silence of the "good and honest". Every community, every educational structure, means of communication, every family, every political and religious organization should have as a priority that of 'taking care of words'. We would then have, as Father Maccalli hoped, unarmed words to entrust to the wind so that they whisper peace to the world. (Agenzia Fides, 1/1/2025)

*Missionary of the Society of African Missions (SMA)

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