"While a feeling of pity arises towards the dead, towards the civilian victims, there cannot but arise, at the same time, a movement of revulsion on the part of all consciences for the destruction of a territory and its resources, for the annihilation of the families who they lived, in the pursuit of the blind logic of war, that of the reduction of the enemy to nothingness, without any respect for the innocent victims. Mourning and suffering, paid to a large extent by the innocent civilian population, starting from the disastrous bombing of February 15th against the Abbey, in which , with the monks, displaced families perished, many people who had taken refuge there counting on the immunity of a religious building, a universally known expression of high culture. But the war does not know how to stop on the threshold of barbarism".
The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, said this while speaking in Cassino at the commemorative ceremony of the eightieth anniversary of the destruction of the city.
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