Official homepage of the Italian heavy metal band Future Is Tomorrow

Hi guys.

Let’s talk about war!

Yes, Future is Tomorrow are making a new Album and the main theme will properly be war.

We knowit , it’s a concept used and abused so many times by any kind of band or artist, expecially in heavy metal. A good example is the album “Dead Winter Dead” from Savatage. I mentioned it because it’s one of my favourite in the genre.

Our starting point has been a literary work by Giacomo Leopardi named “Paralipomeni della batracomiomachia”.

The main thing was to talk about the right to make a war: when it can be justified and how affects who is involved.

Well, the just war theory (Bellum Justum) is a doctrine of military ethics of Roman philosophical and Catholic origin.  Yes, Catholic!

The concept of justification for war under certain conditions goes back at least to Cicero, but its importance is connected to Christian medieval theory beginning from Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.

So the Just War theory is an authoritative Catholic Church teaching confirmed by the United States Catholic Bishops in their pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, issued in 1983. More recently, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2309, lists four strict conditions for “legitimate defense by military force”:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power as well as the precision of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

The international events of recent years, with the widespread use of seemingly inevitable war as a means for resolving conflicts between nations, also make it inevitable to consider whether there might be a just war and in what capacity, citing among the reasons for war.

The Leopardi’s work discusses the political events of 1820-21 and the failure of revolutionary movements, satirizing Austrians (represented by crabs, frogs’ allies), Bourbon (frogs), and the insurgent Neapolitan liberals (mice). Although it was wrtitten from 1831 the historical and political events are fully attributable to the current ones, the players change but the motives and acts are the same.

In the next part I’ll talk about this with some interesting examples of just war.

Meanwhile, peace&love!!

Grave