How Great You Think You Are At Creating Peace?

 

People talk a lot about peace. It is ok, there is obviously nothing wrong in wanting peace. But if you have a reality where there is war, then bringing peace requires some effort. If you go around acting as if it is enough to say “just stop”, then it seems that you are saying it is all very easy and simple, “just stop”. Looks like you are saying that people are at war just because they want.

Not that words aren’t important. Obviously they are an undeniably important front in any war. But if you want to change things, I don’t think it is enough to say “war” and “peace” as if these were magic words. You must respect people as human beings and discuss the concepts that brought us all to this point in History.

There has always been war in the world, and now that the West seems to be enjoying a time of relative peace, it is not fair to just treat people that live far as people who just “likes war”.

When it comes to discussing ideas, concepts and History, there is a whole  group of people whose job should be to throw light on concepts. You know, the academical World. But it’s been notorious that they are only seeing one side of what is happening right now, in the Middle East.

If you turn the television on, you will see the portrait of a war that somebody is waging apparently only because they want. If you turn to the Academical World – with few exceptions – you will only find the description of the Israeli State as oppressive, and Israel itself as stolen land.

Think of the end of the 19^th century, it was, all over the World, a bit like and “old west” thing. There was a lot of small pieces of land that weren’t being used by nobody, and people were moving around, finding land, building small villages and such. It was like that in the British Mandate of Palestine, it was like that in the World.

People of different ethnicity sometimes established close to each other and conflicts happened. In the British Mandate of Palestine there were more Arabs, but also a lot of Jews, and even more Jews dreaming to go there to escape the horrors of Europe and return to their ancestral homeland.

When the modern age came, and it came in different years in different places, and the countries we now know were formed in the map, people were displaced, a lot of people in the World.

After the War that came as consequence of Arab refusal to accept the Jewish State, Arabs were displaced from Israel, and Jews from Arab countries. Sad, but not unique, and it shouldn’t have necessarily lead people to think they couldn’t go on with their lives.

Gaza is not a prison, Israel protects Israeli borders because there is terrorism and a country protect their borders. A prison? What about looking in any of the other directions?

But instead of talking about the specific realities, the Academical World has a ready formula to explain everything. You find the one who seems to be poorer economically, then the other is the “oppressor”. They say they defend minorities, don’t they say it all the time? So if there were more Arabs in Palestine and there are still more Arabs in the region – almost four hundred million people in the middle east, which has some pretty rich countries, and less than ten million are Jews – are the Jews not a minority?

And if someone says the terms of the division of the mandate of Palestine were the problem, then why so many Arab leaders said their people shouldn’t accept a Jewish Sovereign land “in the size of a postage stamp”? Their words. A minority with no right at all…

To bring peace we must discuss some things. Try to understand even when someone says something we disagree. Sometimes we must say, “hey, there is an honest guy saying this, I should try to listen”. Lately, I’ve been hearing people that I respect use the word “victimhood” to describe the mentality of people who give themselves the right to go around destroying things instead of building because they blame all their problems on someone else.

I always had a problem with the word “victimhood”, because I’ve seen it used in contexts where I disagreed with it and by people who were really too aggressive against any kind of awareness for the difficulties that certain groups faced more than the others. But I started seeing that there is some truth in the word, when the awareness of the pain of people is used not to create solidarity and union, but to engender hatred.

The key to me is in losing or not your moral center. The moral center is a clear vision of what a right life is, that don’t depend on data. “Some people were marginalized in History” is not something wrong to say, but taking away people’s responsibility for their own acts is.

To me, this is not a paradox at all. You can’t exempt people from acting morally, you would be in fact depriving them of something. “Man can’t live by bread alone”. By excusing someone out of the moral world you are not helping them. We can see that it doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring them the things a good life offers.

As an illustration, having a public lawyer for everybody is good, total impunity is bad. By using our good principles of caring for people who had less chances, to relativize absolutely all of our ethical principles, we are eroding all our chances of finding common ground.

In the context of October7th, a lot of intellectuals used this idea that if you call someone “oppressed”, then this person doesn’t need any morals anymore to justify an attack that not just gone beyond every moral restraint you can imagine, but exploded in open cruelty, with people laughing while doing all other horrors they did.

It is interesting to note how the incoherences of the Academical World fit with the interests of dictators around the World. Does it sound like conspiracy? Well, in this World we usually can’t know exactly how much of the system works by explicit agreement and how much is “coincidence”, but in order to understand why some things seem to be mysteriously pointing in the same direction, it helps to understand what is represented by this “thing” they “coincidentally” oppose.

            Somehow, Israel and also America, and actually the Jewish people too, seem to incarnate what they fight against. And when you look at this “thing” they are fighting against, you see what they have in common. Both a socialist teacher, and an extremist dictator, want to be seen as someone who holds the key to another dimension.

I’ll explain. What is more disgusting, both to a European Mainstream Intellectual and to a Islamic Theocratic Ruler, than people who believe that, once you live in freedom and follow basic moral principles, happiness is within your reach? Both the European Mainstream Intellectual – American Academia seem to be mostly European in it’s Marxist soul – and the Islamic Theocratic ruler have a need to be seen as a special kind of people, selected people, who can see beyond our reality, who know that living and doing your thing “is not enough”, that acting according to simple moral principles “will not be enough”, that happiness lies beyond a veil that only they can see through, because they are special people, and to get there we may even have to do things that look ugly to the “shallow perception” of not-super-enlightened simple people with more down-to-earth common-good moral values. In other words, those two guys are fascists.

You may think I am tripping, but what we are seeing happening in various levels seems to be pointing in the same direction. Press too, obviously, never giving kids any tool to question what a lot of their teachers might be saying, never giving nobody information that might make them see that peace is not just an absence of something bad they are seeing in the news, but something that must be built with some effort in a complex World.

            And there are the social medias with their quick dives into extreme emotions and self-congratulatory virtue feelings without much reasoning about more complex causes and effects. I don’t want to scare any family, but what I can say is that my 8 years old son don’t have any social media and he already knows that Tic Toc is the Chinese Communist Party trying to make us less rational.

So you have an intellectual world largely contaminated by vengeance-based bias that is pushing radical people to the streets, a social media that helps them and a press who portraits these manifestations as just spontaneous feelings of concern from normal people, which makes more people buy the “movement”, closing some kind of a circle that feeds itself.

            Then you have this wave happening in various levels. The very intentional bias of what unfortunately seems like the majority of Social Sciences being echoed in social media, denied by television – because if they don’t talk about it, maybe it’s not important – all of that surrounding the common people to make them feel obliged to make a stand, or else they will feel guilty. “Don’t you want to take the streets and be a real pacifist?”

            Well, you prefer peace to war, that’s good, but you should consider you are not the only one. But what peace is this that only sees one side? You only see the suffering of the Palestinians. Well, that’s real, Hamas provoked a war that is causing a lot of pain to the people in Gaza.

But how can you speak of peace to the Israelis if your message is “I don’t see you”, “I don’t care if they still have a hundred of you as hostages”, “I don’t think it’s worth mentioning that your girls were raped”, “I think the death toll in October 7^th was small”, “I don’t see nothing specially abominating in the methods of October 7^th”, “I don’t care if tens of thousands had to leave their homes”, “I don’t see the missiles fired against you”, “I think your soldiers are dying because they chose to”?

            If you have a reality of War, then, if you want to get to peace, there is work to be done. How is Israel going to trust the World to conduct this process of peace if everybody just turned a blind eye while an ideology of pure hatred was dominating big portions of the World, and extremist governments started funding terror groups, and the International Organizations, that were there to protect these people, did nothing against the radicalization and the militarization of the people?

            How is Israel going to trust a World that accuses them of genocide, without caring for the actual meaning of the word, because supposedly these everybody cares infinitely for people dying in wars, but didn’t have ten percent of the anger in bigger and worst situations in the World?

            The conflict in Syria caused more than two hundred thousand deaths and fourteen millions displaced since 2014. China has been keeping millions of Uyghur muslins in concentration camps, with silence from the “brothers” from Iran, for instance. The Russian invasion of Ukraine have caused more than a hundred thousand deaths. The Somali War caused more deaths than all of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And there is more.

This is not to say that deaths somewhere else simply justify killing here, I’m saying all this just to point that there is a total lack of evidence to show that people care so desperately about deaths in wars as they are screaming now. And the World really have to start making a better work if we want people to see us as efficient peace makers, if we want to say, “trust us, we will help this peace to happen”.

            I know the words “just stop” sound very appealing, as if you were talking to a couple of neighbors who got in a stupid fight that is getting worst, and you know that if they “just stop” both will live longer and happier lives. Did you check the facts to make this simplification?

You say human lives is what matters, and I agree it is, but how can you guarantee your desired outcomes? The future is unknown. Everybody knows what the best imaginable outcome of a ceasefire is, but what about the possibility of a giant war that might already have started being prepared, a war that could destroy countries, force the World into a huge disastrous fight, with much bigger losses on all sides?

            From our comfortable sits in the West, such a thing may be unimaginable, and I pray it never happens. I have no problem admitting I don’t know the future, but I am able to at least imagine how things must look like for a country whose soldiers have gone into neighbor territories and found Kilometers of highly equipped tunnels, guns and ammunition and military gears literally everywhere, tons of explosives, Information Technology, along with propaganda that commands people to a total war with anything that is different from them. Their leaders did state their goals of escalation.

            I hope none of that happens, but Israel is the one in the most vulnerable position, and even if we don’t have a bigger war, leaving terror groups and attacks unresponded can increase, by the year, the danger for human lives, both Israeli and Palestinian.

            There was no reality of perfect peace that was broken by Israel suddenly invading your television. There is a situation of conflict. And the words that sound “better” in an echo chamber are not necessarily the ones that will bring the best outcome.

            Ceasefire should be demanded from the side who started the conflict and is admittedly trying to completely destroy the opponent, demanded from the side that has been proven to not give a damn for their own population. And in the case of a terror organization that only exist for that – read their charter – I think surrender would be the perfect ceasefire.

            It’s that, or accusing a nation that, after suffering their worst attack, had to go to war with tears in their eyes. At least, they didn’t see happy to me that day.

               

 

 

Evil is Alive, Unfortunately

           The question I am asking is this: Can a country be responsible for the death of it’s own people during a war? Because if we say a country can’t be responsible for the death of it’s own people, then a government can declare war against a neighbor and just sit and watch the number of deaths that increase among it’s people, making the world public turn against their enemy.

Because History showed that very evil people can ascend to power, yes, it is necessary that we check if nobody is using this kind of diabolic strategy. Using human shields is a crime. And if it is so, what are the signs that could tell us if somebody is doing precisely that?

Making an insanely cruel surprise attack against civilians, then launching rockets from inside cities, hiding among houses, having military equipment inside hospitals, and coercing their people to stay where they are even when the opponent announces where it is going to attack, is it all not a clear sign that we should condemn this as a crime, and ensure nobody is going to get away easily to do it over and over again?

But of course, this puts us in an uncomfortable position ff having to condemn the side where more people died. This seems to go against some basic intuition we have. In a World where wars are something that happen far away, it is easy to imagine that everybody that takes part in a war is doing it for bad reasons, and the side who had more people killed during the recent conflicts is the less bad.

This idea makes it easier for us to find the “right” reaction. All we have to do is say “just stop”, and we’ve done our part, and can go back to our lives. Any other state of things is too painful for us.

We live in a new world in the western societies, a world with no war, thank God. But when we look at the past we have no problems to understand that not everybody holding a gun was bad. I tend to use the example of War World II because I believe most people understand that there was an Evil side, and for the other side, it was necessary to fight. We have no problems putting the responsibility for all the horror in the evil side, in the provoking side.

From our homes in the modern west, living a peaceful life, working, watching tv, etc it is getting harder for us to believe that evil giants still exist, but they do. Some things that we call simply “governments” of foreign countries, work very differently from what we call a “government” here. The “ideological” disputes there are not like here ( and I pray our disputes don’t become like theirs ). The reality in the Middle East, for instance, is very different from here.

            When Israel was established as a modern state, after the division – remember, division, between two peoples in a land that had space for that – of the British mandate of Palestine, seven Arab countries declared war against her and attacked. Those countries simply wanted to destroy Israel. The war was of a country defending itself from elimination. Israel won, and that’s the reason it wasn’t destroyed. It had to fight against a group of nations that attacked as a block. Unfortunately, this reality is not just in the past for them, there are still many nations wanting Israel to cease to exist.

What people are saying against Israel, in the end amounts to this: “You can’t attack countries that are attacking you because people will die”. Someone may say that countries are not attacking Israel, just “organizations”, but this is just a trick, a strategy.  Hamas has been ruling over Gaza for a long time, just like Hezbollah rules over South Lebanon. With the complacence of everyone around, they attack with the power of small countries – that have not so small allies by the way.

A country, like Israel, can’t neglect to consider attacks on it’s population as crimes that must be responded. The giant quantity of weapons, bombs and military structure that Israel is destroying right now, was all there for the sole reason of one day being used against Israel. There are International Organizations present in these places that definitely should not have allowed all that to be set there, but they did nothing, it seems. And now who is wrong?

Of course, the press don’t ever seem to have the time to give us nothing that helps us to see the big picture, the power and the intentions of the leaders that Israel is eliminating, and how they make everything they can to make the price of their life the higher possible for their own population. Those leaders say openly what their goals are, they say openly that their population must be martyrs.

But all the press does is publish numbers of deaths, which seems to be the only thing those groups have in their favor. And if it is the only thing they have – what else they have? What service for the happiness of their people? What is happiness for them besides destroying someone else? – if it’s the only thing they have, we must think on the question in the beginning of this chapter.

The press won’t even have a word to say about how the societies in some places are becoming more radical, more people are engaging with terrorist organizations, the governments accept to live side by side with these groups ( when government and the groups are not the same ), and the normal man is more and more believing that the western freedoms are the reason of all the evil in the world.

There are still leaders who see absolutely no problem in the total dominion of man over man, they believe there is nothing to discuss, no philosophical or ethical development needed all truths are already defined, and some men are naturally entitled to impose them, as infallible leaders. Moreover, they believe that any other form of society is evil, too liberal, too open, and the right thing to do is to conquer those societies, using any amount of violence necessary. They definitely don’t give value to human life individually speaking.

If regimes like that exist, and we have a set of laws in our countries, freedoms we want to preserve, naturally some clash will occur one day. They would really like to destroy the West, banish anything resembling women’s rights, respect for sexuality and things like that from the face of the earth. But for now, it’s Israel who is paying the price.

People who want to “defend” extremely radicalized countries, because they think these countries are “just poor countries” and all their problems come because of the western “oppressor”, are faced with the incoherence of defending regimes that go against all that they defend, all freedoms, all rights, all respects for minorities, everything. They usually come up with the excuse that all this radicalization is to blame on the “oppressor”, “these societies were oppressed so they radicalized”. But what about rich Arab countries that are getting more and more radicalized? Who is oppressing Iran, the Emirates, so on? Nobody.

Anyway, the press, with their simplistic facts, don’t help us to see what each side defends.  Isn’t there more to talk about, when it comes to Middle East, then wars after they explode? The radicalization of the people makes very sad stories. Women subjugated, people with no dreams…

Of course, after some time, they don’t even see their own lack of freedom. But it is not wrong, and it is not racism or religious discrimination, to wish they had more dignity and self-respect. Isn’t teaching praise for terrorism in schools a form of child abuse? Isn’t praising suicide attacks an international crime?

The History of the anti-Jewish hatred – and if you hate everybody who supports Israel, then I’m sorry, but you’re hating like ninety percent of the Jews – is old and still hard to totally explain, still hard to fully understand, but I think I can see some of the reasons why imposing some defeat on Israel, even if not totally destroying it right now, would be good for those giant tyrants. It would encourage losers to enlist in terror groups, it would encourage people in the middle east and the world to buy more and more radical visions. In the meantime, the sacrifice of civil people is used to turn people Western against Israel, and push an ideological agenda that turns the West against itself, turns democracy, that those leaders hate, against itself.

            Being for peace is different from shaking hand with tyrants. We don’t like war, that’s ok, but how come those dictators are our friends? It makes no sense. How come our Internation Organizations fully accept well known dictators that hardly pretend to care for human rights as perfect members, honorable members?

Why don’t we ever try to see from Israel’s perspective, they are not protecting a government or any other convention, they have a people to protect, a people who comes from a long history of slaughter and persecution. Israel is fighting back strongly, yes, because what is happening against them is very large scale, too, if you didn’t notice. Through the history of the world, the giants of the Earth don’t seem to like Jews, but now they have a chance to defend themselves

Now, if you think that what I said in the beginning of this chapter, that bringing peace to the World is more complex than doing third grade maths with numbers of deaths you see in superficial news, is a form relativizing human deaths, I tell you, it is not. Because I am not making their deaths a less sad thing. It is still tragic.

I am just saying we must make an effort to see the truth, find the real responsible people and find what is the right thing to do. if we really want to extend our goodwill and care to people on far places, on different societies, I don’t think we can do much in the real world, if we don’t give up the illusion that we can protect people that live under evil regimes if we don’t oppose those regimes somehow.

The fact that we need to oppose tyrannies to try to protect people, brings some pain and some complexities, but think with me, we could be worst. Imagine if we lived in a Universe where we had to support tyrannies to help people. I think that would be worst.

Social Studies Magic Mirror

 

Get your Social Studies Magic Mirror now!

No, it’s not the same stupidity mirror that’s been making people incoherent since time immemorial, no, it’s… it’s a new one, it’s Transdimensional!