Time.news – Emanuele Severino, one of the greatest Italian philosophers of the last century, who died in his Brescia on January 17, 2020, had understood everything twenty years in advance. And who knows what he would think of the current crisis, triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In the preface to the 2002 edition of his book Techne, which first appeared in 1979, Severino he wrote prophetically that the US-Russia opposition had never ceasedbecause “the ability of the Russian nuclear arsenal to compete with the American one has never failed”.
Words that could be written today, after the invasion of Ukraine (preceded by the showdown in Crimea in 2014). In 2002, in fact, the signs for thinking of an East-West thaw were all there: the anti-terrorism agreement signed by NATO and Russia and, four years earlier, the NATO-Russia Permanent joint Council that was supposed to lead to Moscow’s entry into the Atlantic Alliance.
Severino, however, does not let himself be ‘fooled’ by these agreements and tries to look at the complex situation, placed in its historical context and background: “Since 1989 I have always maintained that, despite the profound crisis due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, but properly speaking, the scientific-technological apparatus underlying the Soviet Union and Russia-CSI, would have managed to survive until the moment in which it could activate and exploit the enormous natural resources of Russia and the other former Soviet republics of the Csi “(Community of independent states, the organization of the former Soviet republics born in 1991).
Therefore, “although continuing in a different form, bipolarism – that is, the competition between the US and the former USSR – has never ceased. And the reason is that the ability of the Russian nuclear arsenal to compete with the American one has never failed. That is, it was not understood that the end of real socialism was not the end of that technological apparatus which in the East should have safeguarded Marxist socialism, but which, in order to save its competitive capacity with respect to the West, ended up removing half the hindrance constituted precisely by Marxism “.
The discourse developed by Techne regarding the East-West tension, according to the philosopher, indicates “a constant that goes far beyond the ideological form that this tension took on during the Cold War”.