June 2nd – 3 Thoughts Out Loud

June 2nd is not just a day of parades, flags waving in the wind, and institutional rhetoric. It is, first and foremost, a moment of deep reflection on what our Republic is today, how it was born, and, above all, what is needed to defend it in a world that seems to have lost its compass.

Today, away from the stages of loud politics, it is necessary to express three thoughts out loud.

1. Freedom has a cost (and is defended with arms)

Let's say it clearly, without hypocrisy: without the sacrifice of the Allies and the Italian Combatants, we would NEVER have been able to liberate our country from those who had become decidedly unwelcome guests on national soil. Our democracy was born from the blood and mud of the Liberation war, not from good intentions.

There is also a historical fact that too many today tend to forget, or take for granted: the geographical and political fortune. If we had not been positioned on the right side of the Iron Curtain, Italy would have had to endure another fifty years of dictatorship, this time the Russian-Soviet communist one. For confirmation, ring the bell in Warsaw, Budapest, or Bucharest, where entire generations know perfectly well what it means to live under that yoke.

The point is simple: Without a real military capability, the Values of the Republic cannot be defended. They are just words in the wind. Welcome to reality, dear false dreamers and one-sided pacifists: freedom is protected with the strength of deterrence, not with good feelings.

2. The Atlantic Alliance is not in question

The second thought concerns the fundamental axis of our security: the value of the alliance with the United States.

All republics and great democracies, throughout their history, go through difficult moments, identity crises, or political choices that may seem incomprehensible to allies. But this cannot and must not undermine a mutual support that is vital. We live in an increasingly compressed, geopolitically fragmented world, where a large part of the globe does not recognize itself at all in Western democratic values.

We must remember it every single day: without the USA today there would be no Italian Republic. Many of those American boys who rest in American cemeteries scattered throughout Europe died also for us, for our freedom.

International relations, like it or not, are not a gala salon; they are the result of precise balances of power. As the Canadian prime minister recently rightly reminded: if you don't have strength and strategic weight, you can't sit at the decision table. Isolationism or anti-Americanism on the surface are luxuries we cannot afford.

3. Guarding the Values of the Republic against ideological drift

Finally, the soul of our society. We must fight, today more than ever, to pass on to future generations the values that our grandparents, in their extraordinary and pragmatic simplicity, tried to pass down to us.

Today these pillars are constantly endangered by a society increasingly lost, fluid, and prey to irrational trends. It is time to take a step back towards common sense and return to basic concepts:

• Family: the fundamental unit of solidarity and growth.
• Respect: for others, for the rules, and for memory.
• Service to the Nation: the idea that before the right there is the duty to contribute to the common good.

Only a society based on mutual service and respect can hope to survive over time. For this reason, we must stay away from easy wordsmiths, demagogues who – for pure personal interest or ideological madness – try to lead us away from the path of common sense, risking losing the weaker segments of the population and, above all, our youth.

Happy Republic Day to those who do not forget who we are, where we come from, and how much it cost to be here today.