Power, Credentials, Ideologies and Crimes

 As I always say, I know that there are a lot of things going wrong in the World, and a lot of things that should be working for the benefit of everybody but a lot of times just don’t. I think most of us feel that there are some forces at play, forces that serve goals that are very different from the best for all mankind.

So, some come with weird conspiracy theories, like old Antisemitic visions of Jews controlling the World. Well, what I think is that just because things like the theory of relativity turned out to be very useful in Science, it doesn’t mean that, in all aspects of our lives, the weirdest a “theory” is, the more we should feel it is true.

On the contrary, I think that when it comes to human power, we don’t need more and more strange and unverifiable information, I believe we must clear the dust from before our eyes, to just see clearly what is in front of us, probably the answers are more obvious than we think. We just have too much weird information in our heads to be able to just step back and look at things with clear eyes.

For instance, when it comes to who controls what, I see things in a simple way. I think that the most powerful people in Russia are Russian super rich guys and Russian politicians. The most influential people in Italy are some powerful Italians. The most powerful people in Muslin Arab countries are powerful Muslin Arabs. The most influential people in Israel are some Jews. In the United States, it’s super rich Americans and politicians.

There are more Jews in the high circles in America than there ever were anywhere – outside Israel, of course – because America gave them opportunities they never had – but I don’t think the majority of powerful people in America – that are not Jews – would let someone else control them, even if that was what the Jews wanted. And why would you consider that all Jews are taking part on a “plan” commanded by the few super rich Jews, if you don’t do that with any other people? There are so many reasons why these conspiracy theories about Jews controlling things make no sense at all…

Anyway, even knowing that there are powerful people – that is, people who have much more influence than the common man – acting violently is the worst thing you can do in a democracy, because it weakens the power of a set of rules that, even if not perfect, is meant to give our society other parameters that are not simply the law of the stronger. If there are no rules, the stronger will prevail, and this means precisely the most powerful ones.

And the structures of wrongful power are made not only of money, they are also made of notions that people in higher positions have more value as human beings than others, they are made of the power some institutions may have to tell people how much they are worth, or impose a unique vision of the World and silence all other ideas.

Academic people like to talk about power. They see all this cobwebs everywhere, that they call “structure”, “systemic” this, “systemic” that. I think it would be interesting for them to reason about the power that they have. Think, they are the ones who give credentials for people to work in the fields that people want to work.

They give the titles and the honors that people can use to promote a book that they want to sell, for instance. And how many of the people in International Organizations have beautiful academic credentials to increase their worth? Also,  I don’t know about the rest of the World, but here in Brazil it seems they want to forbid people without diplomas to work in more and more jobs that didn’t require it before.

And all this makes kind of a circle. Because the most influential people in Academia are also the ones who define the curriculum for Colleges and Schools, and think: when we hear someone make an analysis of a situation, most of us will give it more weight if it resounds with something we learned in school or college. It is a very big power.

I am not against the existence of Academia, obviously. I think we must have Academia. But I do think it is very bad when there is one line of thought imposing itself, silencing the voices of all other possible ideas and lines of thought, as if all the discussions already had been discussed and there were no more reasonable objections – this is not true.

And what is the vision of the World that the Academia has been pushing? Nowadays, it seems that they are looking at absolutely everything through the notion of “race”. I know that there has always been racial problems, but when they are talking about race, instead of thinking on what would be the solutions for the minorities to prosper more and more within our society, within the law, it seems that they are offering the idea that the “system” is so crooked that it is not enough to do your best and help each other.

When they say that an infraction, or even a crime, committed by someone of an oppressed minority should not be considered as such, the message is that people have a right to reject the peaceful way to happiness, even the peaceful way to fight for your rights. That crime is sometimes the only way.

Well, if the minorities need to break the law, need to commit crimes, then they will always need lawyers, then big political movements become the only big salvation. The individual dimension of life becomes insignificant compared to the importance of collective and organized struggle. The circle closes. The person who belongs to a minority should place all his bets in “movements”, nothing else. I think movements are important for some things, but they should never aim to create total dependency.

And when it comes to geopolitical issues, they extend this idea of race to everything, using concepts like “Imperialism”, to blame the Western World for absolutely everything that is wrong. It goes like this:

“The evil deeds that are done by people who we don’t consider as heirs of the Western prosperity, must not be treated as simple evil, because the Western oppression is directly or indirectly responsible for everything.”

Because of this thought, people can’t place in the oppressive leaders of the “non-Western” World all the responsibility – and fault – that they deserve for their actions. Also, you see feminists overlooking the fact that some “non-Western” societies are the most oppressive to women. The same with queer movements, cheering people who literally murder homosexuals. Putting it shortly, people who say they want to free people from oppression becoming unable to put any real responsibility to real dictators. Because they may say “I don’t agree with this dictator necessarily”, but the big villain is always someone else – the imperialist – so in practice, nothing can be done against those dictators.

I will propose a thought experiment that I think is interesting: sometimes, when there is a lot of confusion in a line of thought, too many contradictions, it is interesting to notice if some specific assumption is the center of all that contradiction. Then, just for a moment, consider the possibility that this assumption is not true. Let’s do it with this assumption:

“The evil deeds that are done by people who we don’t consider as heirs of the Western prosperity, must not be treated as simple evil, because the Western oppression is directly or indirectly responsible for everything.”

Just take this away. Consider for a minute that the things we see in the World are the result of a far more nuanced situation. A World where every deed counts, where people are always responsible for the use of any power that they have, no matter who they are or where they live. Think like this for a minute.

See the difference. Now, people who fight for gay rights can be enemy of the greater haters of the gays, feminists can denounce what happens in the societies in the World that most oppress women. People who are concerned with exploitation of the poor can oppose any political leaders in the World that get rich while keeping their population poor, not only in some places. If you are concerned with how powerful people can harm the common men, you can oppose tyrannic visions of Society wherever they appear.

That is, you are always in favor of what you say you are in favor, and always against what you say you are against. Wow. Wasn’t it kind of magical?

Also, now, when talking about a war, you can give the proper weight to the fact that a certain side started it, like, in the case of the current war between Israel and Hamas, it should be very simple to see that this war wasn’t there in October 6^th, that Hamas started it in October 7^th. And they didn’t surrender or stop fighting yet.

You can look at History and see that the war that the Terrorists create is not about land – the tiny strip that the Jews got of the Middle East when the Empires ended and the map of the whole World changed – it is a manifestation of a very old feeling that exists in the Middle East – a hatred against the Jews, that was and is encouraged by wicked and megalomaniac leaders.

If you were able to put responsibility on people who dominates regions – like Hamas dominates Gaza – you would not be talking about numbers of deaths as if the option of real and safe peace was there for Israel to easily reach. You would see the danger that would threaten Israel if an attack like that of October 7^th went unresponded. Like a city where that mayor says, “we will not punish crime anymore, we will just improve the security of buildings”. What happens?

Without all this bias and preconceptions against Israel, we can see the measures they take to mitigate civilian harm on the other side. They are fighting an enemy that is hidden among their own people, and that don’t care for their people. An enemy that uses their own people to create the most cruel dilemma they can for Israel and the World, making the cost of the war the higher they can.

The powerful people that created this dilemma – this is a war against Terrorist groups backed and financed by Iran and Qatar – can slow Israel, but totally stop to fight them would mean give them everything they want. It would be extremely dangerous to make the most cruel strategy ever conceived so successful. Violent aggressive political forces, that use cruelty as a weapon, will never be satisfied with one particular “victory”.

If the academic people and most of the press wasn’t turning a blind eye to this “other side”, if they were talking openly about the ones who created this cruel strategy of human shields, I think a lot of people in the World would see things differently.

This is a manifestation of how academic people do their “best” to show a vision of things that are happening that fits their general simplistic narrative about the whole World. With the “West” and Israel as the eternal villains, nothing can be done against the worst dictators of the World.

Usually people that have some power and influence don’t want to lose it, they want to amplify it.  If the influence and power that the Academic World has is related to some political agenda, then they will play it rough, to impose their vision of the World and to make people think that political ideologies are all that is really important in the World.

And with this idea that sometimes violent crimes are just an inevitable consequence of something else, they open the doors to a dangerous relativism, the idea that evil should not be seen as such, or that maybe there is nothing we can call evil.

In my opinion, there has been far too little attention to “how” October 7^th happened. People are just talking about numbers, as if one thousand and two hundred people slaughtered was too little to start a war – I don’t think it is. They don’t talk about the cruelty, as if “cruelty” was too subjective to be dealt with – only numbers matter.

But hordes of men coming and laughing while killing people at random and violating young women, burning families alive, killing children in cold blood – that matters.

We can’t let biased political visions prevent us from placing the blame of all the tragedy of war on the ones who caused it, the same ones who do nothing to make it less tragic – on the contrary. Why the World can’t answer: if not now, when Hamas will be dismantled?

I think it is very dangerous when political or social ideologies becomes infinitely more important than any rules or common sense that mankind has arrived to along our long History on this planet. And I don’t think a real peace will come if we consider half of the World as not really responsible for their deeds. Peace, I think, will not come if we don’t consider everybody responsible for the use they make of the power they have, wherever they are.