When Brasil banned it, they tried to enact fines for using VPNs. Would you endorse it?

Edit: Ty for replies. I was just curious about the banning part, would EU dare to go in Brasil's steps, considering Chat control fiasco.

Im fully aware average T user doesnt even know what VPNs are :D

And we have a task to do.

Following on from my last post, we know that the war in Ukraine is likely to end in negotiated settlement. We cannot allow Parp’s blackshirts to dictate the terms or to hold Ukraine back in the meantime. Ukraine is not going to give up a fifth of its territory. It is not going to have neutrality forced on it.

When you have the time, write to your MEP. tell them that the EU’s first priority now is defence, and we don’t care where the factories are built. Tell them that Ukraine needs to be allowed to take the gloves off, so at the very least it can go to the negotiating table in a more favourable position. Tell them this war ends with European boots on the ground in Ukraine while they work on meeting the requirements for NATO & EU membership. Tell them that we are Europeans, that we have fought long & hard to be represented in our governments, & if they aren’t going to take the threats abroad & at home seriously enough to stop quibbling like SocDems in the 30’s, then you will find a representative that will.

This isn’t the end of what we need to do, but it is the beginning.

Part one: https://www.reddit.com/r/YUROP/s/KJGIXgtzGS

After the fall of the Roman Republic, Mazzini returned to exile. In 1850, in London, Mazzini founded the European Democratic Central Committee (together with the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth and the Frenchman Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin) and the Italian National Committee, in reaction to and in continuity with the fall of the Roman Republic.

Inspired by Mazzinianism and socialist ideologies, the Milanese uprising of 1853 failed, as did the Valtellina uprising the following year. The same years saw the ill-fated expedition of Spari, which ended with the death at the hands of the peasants of the patriot Carlo Pisacane, who had fought for the Roman Republic and was a friend of Mazzini.

In 1860 Mazzini published his most famous work, The Duties of Man. Moreover, Mazzini dreamed of a council of humanity that would be able to draw up a declaration of principles by which believers of all religions - Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians - could finally feel like brothers. For Mazzini, the nation is intimately linked to humanity, and the latter - the fatherland of fatherlands - is the ultimate and supreme goal: the nation is a necessary and noble means to achieve this goal, since - in Mazzini's vision - each people is endowed with a specific mission which, when linked to the missions of every other nation, can constitute the fatherland of all, in which the word "foreigner" will no longer be heard from the lips of men.

His idea was a theological one, in that he believed that the (moral) unity of humanity reflected the unity of God, and that politics should embrace theological concepts: liberal individualism was merely the child of the exaggeration of Protestant principles, which led many thinkers to focus exclusively on the independence of the individual, an idea that led to the oppression of those who, deprived of time and education, were unable to educate themselves or participate in political life. The emancipation of the latter could only be built on the basis of a shared belief in the common duty to participate in the progressive unification of humanity.

The idea of humanity is a normative principle of emancipation: the principle of the unity of the human family should have led to the inclusion in it of women, who at that time were civilly, politically and socially excluded from this unity. It was the duty of men to protest in every way and at every opportunity against this denial of unity. It was precisely for this reason that Mazzini, in discussions with some of his friends of the New World, had argued for the fullest emancipation of the freed slaves after the Civil War (indeed, he had compared the oppression of women by men to the oppression of black people in the US).

The fatherland must therefore be placed at the service of humanity, and is in no way contradictory to it, as the cosmopolitans of the Enlightenment believed.

It is sacred as long as it is a working instrument for the good of all, for the progress of all, but if the nation works evil, if it oppresses, if it declares itself a missionary of injustice for a temporary interest, then it loses the right to exist and digs its own grave.

There is a crucial difference between Mazzini and the Cosmopolitans; although they share the same goal, humanity, they differ in the means by which they achieve this goal: Mazzini's base is the fatherland, that of the Cosmopolitans is the individual, aware of his recognised rights and individual capacities.

Mazzini's base is the fatherland, that of the cosmopolitans is the individual, aware of his recognised rights and his individual capacities, but unable to carry on his shoulders the individual's capacity to contribute to the betterment of humanity, forcing the cosmopolitan individual to choose between inaction and despotism.

The problem is that the cosmopolitan individual, unable to emancipate the world on his own, becomes accustomed to believing that the work of emancipation is not up to him: unfortunately, the slightest suspicion of his inability to conquer is enough for him to resign immediately, without a struggle.

An isolated individual is powerless in the face of humanity and incapable of really improving the world by his own actions: that is why the duties of fraternal co-operation require him to unite with other human beings similar to himself in tendencies, language and historical tradition (with whom he can understand himself better and more quickly than with others), in order to succeed in this way in benefiting the whole of humanity with his own work. In this way, the homeland becomes the fulcrum of the lever that we must pull for the common good.

But the nation was also necessary for another reason: addressing the Italian workers, Mazzini had pointed out that their emancipation could only come from a united Italy: for example, it would not have been possible to achieve the increase in capital and production necessary for the emancipation of the workers as long as the country remained divided into factions and separated by customs lines and artificial difficulties of all kinds, which could only create limited markets. Without the unity of the country there would have been no common protection for Italian workers.

If we wanted to modernise Mazzini's language, we could say that political institutions, situated at an intermediate level between the individual and humanity, are indispensable media for preserving the political agency of the individual and enabling him to leave his mark on the world.

Since it would have been impossible to throw the individual into the midst of humanity without depriving him of his capacity for agency (he certainly could not have emancipated the world on his own), it follows that any political project that wanted to be meaningful needed the nation, not least because at the time it was the only entity capable of having some impact on the world (a capacity that smaller entities lacked).

Curiously, Mazzini had also used arguments related to the idea of interdependence between peoples and between individuals to show the Italian workers that their emancipation also depended on the conditions in which the whole of Europe found itself: no people was able to live on its own products alone.

On the contrary, it lived on foreign exchange, on imports and exports, so that the impoverishment of a foreign nation would have as a direct consequence the impoverishment of the Italian workers. There was no hope for them, said Mazzini, except in universal improvement, in the brotherhood of all the peoples of Europe and, for Europe, of humanity.

Precisely because it is at the service of the realisation of the universal democracy of humanity, the fatherland - which can disappear if each man reflects in his conscience the moral law of humanity - must be understood not as an aggregate but as an association, which is why all citizens are called upon to fight against every privilege, against every inequality within their own fatherland.

It should also be remembered that Mazzini was convinced that only a national pact - understood as a written constitutional convention - could make the nation aware of the specific objective with which it could and should approach the common goal that is the ideal of humanity: without this awareness, there would be no nation, but only people who would soon be destined to merge with others.

Mazzini's Constitution, and therefore the Constituent Assembly, are a natural consequence of the political and religious concept of exile, and were one of the pillars of the ideas he supported and spread during the Risorgimento: they would have represented the pact of love capable of uniting citizens in a beautiful and sacred harmony.

Moreover, since the founding of a homeland is a religious act, these nationalities would be founded only on the free, meditated and solemn consent of the people: there would be no moral freedom of choice without discussion, examination and presentation of the arguments for and against.

It is therefore not surprising that, at the time of the Expedition of the Thousand, Mazzini was opposed to annexation, believing that the decision should be taken by a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage: the result of such a vote would be made more transparent by free discussion, and the peoples of southern Italy would not vote for an annexation subordinate to the imposition of the Savoy dynasty, but because they wanted Italy to be one and indivisible under the dynasty of Victor Emmanuel.

Mazzini had accused Cavour of wanting only an enlarged Piedmont and of not understanding that a statute wrested from the king by the people without debate and which, at the time of its drafting, was addressed only to Italians living in the north, at a time when national unity had not yet been achieved, could not express the purpose of a revived Italy.

It was this awareness that prevented him from entering the Parliament of a united Italy. On 25 February 1866 Messina was called to vote to elect its deputies to the new Parliament in Florence. Mazzini was a candidate for the second constituency, but was unable to campaign because he was in exile in London. Two death sentences hung over his head. Unexpectedly, Mazzini won with a large number of votes. On 24 March, after two days of debate, the Chamber annulled the election because of the previous convictions.

Two months later, the voters of the second Messina constituency went to the polls: Mazzini won again. On 18 June, after a new debate, the Chamber again annulled the election. On 18 November Mazzini was re-elected a third time, this time with the Chamber's approval. Mazzini, however, even if an amnesty or pardon had come, decided to refuse the post in order not to have to swear allegiance to the Statuto Albertino, the constitution of the Savoy monarchs: he could not have sworn allegiance to a statute that was older than the national life of Italy and, for this reason, could not be a good basis for the moral unity of the nation.

Moreover, as we have said, nationality is to be understood not only as the participation of the individual in his own history, but also as a vocation placed at the service of humanity: just as the individual must be able to transcend himself in order to fulfil the purpose for which he was put on this earth, so too a nation must be able to look beyond itself and serve humanity.

Duty to humanity makes legitimate the will of a people to become a nation: the interests of different peoples, even if organised democratically, would still be in conflict with each other, but, unlike despotisms, they would be able to resolve the conflict through cooperation rather than violence. The new European nations thus created would also have to pursue a foreign policy based on a solid foundation of moral principles.

He believed that each nation had the duty to defeat the tyranny that oppressed it, not through the intervention of foreign armies, but in its own way, taking into account the tradition and culture of the nation, Mazzini condemned the policy of non-intervention typical of the liberal states of his time, Mazzini condemned the policy of non-intervention typical of the liberal states of his time, Mazzini condemned the policy of non-intervention typical of the liberal states of his time when it led to the failure to come to the aid of a people against the military interference of a foreign power with the aim (as in the case of the Second French Republic against the Roman Republic in 1849) of suppressing the freedom of that nation and restoring the deposed tyrant to the throne.

Nations would have a duty to intervene militarily even if an obvious injustice (the Exile cites as an example a possible massacre of citizens of Christian faith within Turkish borders) were to occur anywhere in the world, even within the borders of an independent nation-state.

In this sense, when he wrote to his British friends urging them to help the Italian cause, he had urged the English to remember that noble sentiment of manly resistance to the godless tyranny of England in the days of Cromwell and Milton (Note: This was the case when, after the massacres of the Waldensians in the Piedmontese valleys in 1655, the Protestant International, led by Cromwell's Commonwealth, put pressure on France and Savoy to grant the Waldensians freedom of worship: This action can hardly be explained by the strategic interests of the Commonwealth, since the Waldensians were too weak to be serious future allies).

The feeling was that the English of his time had to behave like the English of his time and help the Italian cause like Cromwell's England, and Milton helped the Waldensians in Piedmont (it is possible that he had also studied the figure of Cromwell, thanks to the mediation of his friend Thomas Carlyle, who gave him a copy of the biography of Cromwell he had written around 1845).

He also criticised British isolationism, saying that Cromwell's country had to become a champion of freedom and nationality in Europe, otherwise it would one day find itself a third-rate power.

It should also be remembered that in the second half of 1867 the Peace Congress was held in Geneva, organised by the League for Peace and Freedom and attended by such leading figures of the time as Mikhail Bakunin, John Stuart Mill, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Mazzini refused to attend, arguing that peace could only be the consequence of freedom and justice (in the United States, for example, there had been gigantic struggles to free the slaves) and that the Congress had substituted the end for the consequence: the Hesule affirmed that it would not be possible to achieve peace until justice had been substituted for arbitrariness, truth for lies, duty for selfish interests, the republic for the monarchy.

Just as individuals are called upon to combat the evil and corruption that prevails around them, so nations are called upon to act in solidarity, according to their means, to combat evil wherever it is found and to promote good wherever it can be achieved: peoples who remain inactive spectators of unjust wars inspired by dynastic or national selfishness will find themselves spectators - and not allies - when they themselves are attacked.

In a sense, just as individuals must fulfil their duties within their nations in order to achieve their rights and material well-being, so nations - individuals of humanity - must fulfil their duties to humanity in order to achieve peace and security. In the wake of Young Europe, Mazzini also founded the Universal Republican Alliance in 1866.

Aware of the consequences of individual selfishness, Mazzini warned Europeans not to repeat the same mistake in the national sphere (already in 1836 Mazzini had used the term nationalist in a pejorative sense to describe those who wanted to usurp the rights of other peoples): Mazzini urges Italians instead to refrain from any action which - even if it has the possibility of benefiting the homeland or the family - if carried out by all and for all, could harm humanity.

In 1868 he left London and settled in Lugano, Switzerland. The last years of Mazzini's life were as sad as ever. In addition to his moral and physical suffering, there was the grief of his family, and it was his sister Antonietta, the only surviving member of his family, whom he had always loved deeply.

In 1870 Mazzini felt more than ever the longing for his beloved homeland. Tired, exhausted, ill, with the certain feeling of his imminent end, he returned to Italy, to that Italy which owed him so much if it had risen to the status of a free and independent nation, lacking only Rome, its legitimate capital.

But the indomitable conspirator was still too frightening for the timid authorities and, arrested (for the fourth time in his life) in Palermo, he was taken to the fortress of Gaeta, where he was imprisoned when the breach of Porta Pia claimed Rome for Italy.

Taking advantage of the political amnesty that was immediately proclaimed, he decided to return to his native Genoa to end a turbulent life that had known neither rest nor peace. In February 1871, on his way from Basel to the Gotthard pass, he met Friedrich Nietzsche, then a little-known philologist and lecturer, in a carriage. Years later, Nietzsche himself would witness this meeting.

Mazzini wrote to his sister Antonietta, the widow of the wealthy Massuccone, asking her to welcome him into her home. Antonietta, who was 76 years old at the time, was very surprised and upset by her brother's request. Very religious in her youth, she had become the slave of a true religious mania, to the point that she would do nothing without first asking and receiving the permission of her confessor, or rather her confessors, for she had two.

When she received the letter from her brother Joseph asking for hospitality, she hastened to inform her confessors and asked for their opinion, to which she would unquestioningly submit.

And the answer was what was to be expected, namely that she would take care not to receive her brother, the excommunicate soul of the devil, into her home. Receiving him would also have drawn upon her the thunderbolts of divine vengeance... unless he converted, made public reparation for his sins, and repudiated what he had written or done against the papacy, against the clergy, against the Roman Catholic Church.

And his sister Antonietta wrote to Mazzini all that her two advisers had suggested to her, inviting him to repent of his past, to return to God with a solemn public conversion, which would be a salutary example to all impious men like himself!

And to better achieve this goal, he sent him a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, so that he could see how even that great sinner had converted in time, publicly recanting his errors and faults. Giuseppe Mazzini returned the book to his sister, writing that he already knew it and that it was very good, but adding that he had nothing to recant, nor did he need to deny and trample on his faith and his past.

His only wish, he repeated, was to join his sister in mutual assistance, to die in the family, serene, secure in his conscience that he had never harmed anyone, and free to believe in his God, as he had freely done until then.

Antonietta ran to take her brother's answer to the Jesuit in the naive illusion that he would abandon his advice; but he was intransigent. And the unfortunate woman had no choice but to write to her brother that she had absolutely no desire to receive into her home an obstinate follower of impiety, although she consoled him by expressing the wish that God, in his infinite goodness, would one day touch his heart and call him back to the bosom of true religion.

Mazzini replied with deep sorrow, reaffirming his faith and his pride in remaining faithful to her until death, and assuring his sister that he would continue to love her in spite of everything. And it was then that he took refuge in Pisa, at the request of the Rosselli family, close relatives of the Nathan family, with whom he was bound by an old fraternal friendship.

On 6 March, Mazzini's condition made them fear the worst, so much so that the Nathan Rossellis warned their closest friends, the leaders of Mazzini's movement and his sister. Mazzini died on 10 March at 1.30 p.m.: his last words are said to have been "I believe in God".

The next day the Chamber of Deputies unanimously passed a resolution of condolence, but its president avoided any discussion, as some left-wing deputies had wanted.

The news of his death spread quickly and Italy was moved; his body was embalmed (although Mazzini had strongly opposed this practice in his lifetime, considering it a desecration). In 1946, the Italian Republic, in search of founding myths, decided, according to its own proclamation, to expose the body of its forerunner (petrified at the time of his death) in order to annul the vow made in 1872 by the disciples of the Master.

But what of his intellectual legacy? Abroad, even after his death, Mazzini was held in high esteem: he was admired by Nietzsche, Georges Sorel and Tolstoy. Wilson, who had to travel to Paris in 1919 for the Peace Conference, wanted to visit Genoa to pay homage to the man whose ideals he had so consciously put into practice. British Prime Minister Lloyd George also recognised Mazzini as the father of the idea of the League of Nations.

Mazzini was also considered a hero by Sun Yat Sen, Nehru and Gandhi (indeed, The Duties of Man was translated into at least six Indian languages). The first book on socialism published in Japan (by Tomoyoshi Murai) was imbued with Mazzini's theories and regarded Mazzini as one of the initiators of the social revolution.

In Japanese-colonised Korea, it was the Buddhist monk, patriot and poet Han Young, one of the authors of the Manifesto of Korean Independence from Japan, who took an interest in Mazzini's national thought.

If we want to look closer to home, we need only recall that at the first congress of the Paneuropa movement, organised by the Austrian Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi in Vienna in October 1926, Mazzini's portrait appeared alongside those of Kant and Hugo. In Italy, however, Mazzini's legacy was more complex. At home, one of those who used and modified Mazzini's thought was Francesco Crispi, who had somehow taken from Mazzini's conception of the nation as a natural and timeless entity both the idea that the existence of the nation preceded in law any suffrage of the people, Forgetting the ideal of humanity that was so important in Mazzini's thought, and identifying the nation not with the end towards which it should be directed, but with what Mazzini called the clues (territory, race and language), they created an Italy that did not correspond to what the exile had hoped for.

At that time, after heated debates, Parliament passed a law making The Duties of Man (suitably cleansed of too explicit references to republicanism) compulsory reading in state schools. It is also true that Ernesto Rossi, one of the future authors of the Ventotene Manifesto, had enlisted as a volunteer during the First World War and (although he felt very distant from Mazzini) had explained Mazzini's thoughts to his soldiers, finding his words much more apt and true than those of the interventionists of his own time.

There were references to Mazzini both by Mussolini - who included references to Mazzini in his rhetoric from the 1920s - and by Giovanni Gentile - who had made Mazzini's gospel coincide with the Fascist gospel: this operation had already been criticised by Salvemini, who had written that Mazzini's ideas could only be made equal to Gentile's by eliminating the atmosphere of justice and goodness that animates all of Mazzini's thought.

If on the one hand Salvemini (while criticising his lack of understanding of economic realities) appreciated Mazzini's ability to instil moral fervour in political action, on the other hand Gentile - who had previously criticised Mazzini for hindering national unity - made Mazzini the prophet of modern nationalism.

Mussolini, on the other hand, in his search for the noble precursors of Fascism, claimed to be one of the few who had managed to read all one hundred volumes of the national edition of Mazzini's works: the volumes were placed on his desk as soon as they were printed.

Within the Marxist left, Gramsci lamented the fact that Mazzini's patriotism had distanced the Risorgimento movement from more radical goals of social reform, and Togliatti said that if Mazzini had lived in his time, he would have applauded fascism.

As for the rest of the anti-fascist field, Gobetti - in 1924 - had defined Mazzini as romantic, tasteless, imprecise, and Croce, while acknowledging his merits as an inspirer of a common European conscience, accused him of going so far as to deny the concept of freedom and to compromise it on a theoretical level.

So has Mazzini's legacy been lost? No, fortunately! There was an anti-fascist descendant of those Rossellis who sheltered Mazzini on his deathbed, who claimed to act both in the spirit of Mazzini and to feel deeply the ideal continuity between the struggle for freedom of our ancestors and that of his time, and who wanted to act better than Mazzini, making national sentiment a force in the European sense, a necessary term of passage, of education, of construction. But I will tell you about this European hero, Carlo Rosselli, in another post, because his story also deserves to be known.