In May 2026, Uruguay’s president, Yamandú Orsi, said that the country has “a very secular tradition, but at times we have underestimated the role played by spirituality (…) churches handle the issue of addiction better than the state.” Orsi not only made the dialectical leap of associating A with X (typical of cults), but his discourse is consistent with the Dark Enlightenment, which is anything but spiritual.
The annual graph of ice cream sales and crime rates align perfectly. Is ice cream responsible for the murders? Are the histrionic athletes of temples, manufacturers of circus miracles, spiritual people? Is there spirituality only in a church where people go to show off their faith or attend sessions of Dionysian catharsis? Have they also privatized spirituality? What about medicine and the science that studies addictions? What about social justice? What about consumerist culture?
If the idea is to associate a reality with some notable aspect of a country, we could associate soccer with addiction in Uruguay and Argentina—even though soccer has served the opposite purpose, to pull young people away from drugs and crime. If religions had superior medical or moral advantages, they would not have such extensive histories of persecution, torture, pedophilia, and genocide. I am not speaking of faith, which is a personal matter. I am saying that churches and religions are neither good nor bad. They are human institutions and deeply political.
Uruguay’s well-established secularism—which is now being questioned—allowed for far greater religious freedom than in societies where religious fanaticism produced a long list of people persecuted for their beliefs—even within the same religion. It is much harder to find instances of persecution based on race or religion in Uruguay’s history than in Switzerland, Germany, or the United States.
Days later, Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, in one of his garage-turned-temples broadcast to his faithful, stated—in short: “God is a capitalist, and capitalism is Paradise on Earth. Marx was a Satanist, because he brought hell to Earth.”
Let’s set aside the fact that capitalism not only hijacked all of humanity’s intellectual capital, accumulated millennium after millennium; that it did not accelerate technological innovation but rather slowed it down; that almost no inventor or creator of non-sectarian prosperity was a capitalist; that capitalism is defined solely by its accumulation and its lack of morality; that capitalism did not invent the free market but rather destroyed it; that capitalism is not defined by common freedom, but by the freedom of a minority to enslave the rest; that capitalism enslaved and destroyed entire nations and continents for the progress and wealth of a few, but also left several hundred million dead in its Paradise. “The Hundreds of Millions of Deaths of Capitalism” (Página12, 2023)
Ayn Rand, the spiritual guide of the neoliberals, had delusions similar to Milei’s, though one of the most defensible was that “Christianity is the best possible safeguard against communism.”
Karl Marx, like most young people of his time, wrote romantic poetry in the style of Goethe, using dark and dramatic imagery. Almost as dark as the novels of Stephen King or any commercial film that is never labeled as satanic because they leave millions of dollars in the hands of a few and because they serve capitalism.
While Marx was learning to write, believers in God such as Napoleon Bonaparte or Nicholas I of Russia were leaving millions dead, on the battlefields alone. Not to mention the multiple holocausts perpetrated by believers in God, such as the Crusaders, or the Inquisitors who preceded and followed them—almost all of whom have been marginalized from popular memory—except for the massacres carried out by fanatics of other sects.
For centuries, the trafficking and enslavement of Africans and Native Americans was carried out to sustain civilization and in accordance with biblical teachings, where slaves are explicitly advised to be good to their masters. Neither the Bible nor Christianity served as moral impediments to this human trade. In fact, there is an abundance of passages in the Old Testament where slavery is accepted as a social relationship as normal as servitude or war. Leviticus 25:44–46: “You may acquire male and female slaves from the nations around you. You may pass them on to your children as a perpetual possession.” Also in the New Testament: “Servants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with sincerity of heart, as you would Christ…” (Ephesians 6:5); “All who are under the yoke of slavery, regard your masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the doctrine may not be blasphemed. Those who have believing masters should not show them less respect because they are brothers, but should serve them all the better, since those who benefit from their good service are believers and beloved” (1 Timothy 6:1). The Europeans who profited from this trafficking and exploitation were all believers in the sacredness of the Bible, yet not a shred of moral sensitivity was stirred in them by any passage that indirectly condemned racism and slavery.
Three months after the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, the French Empire massacred 300 people in its colony of Senegal. Five months later, it upped its numbers by killing between 15,000 and 45,000 people in Algeria to keep them subjugated to a version of God and the same old capitalism. Fifteen years later, the figure would reach one million. I mention France not because it was the worst of the capitalist empires, but merely as an example of a political and cultural system that maintains an aura of sanctity and civilization. A few years after the Jewish Holocaust, the Zionists began their own massacres in Palestine. We have written in detail about the Anglo-Saxon massacres.
We have also written, more than a decade ago, about the Belgian massacres in the Congo, where a pious believer in God, King Leopold II, left ten million dead and just as many maimed to improve his country’s prosperity. (“For the sake of civilization’: the great tyrant of European colonialism,” Huffington Post, 2016).
Or the global massacres carried out by other supremacists, such as Winston Churchill. Or the brotherhood of religious fanatics in Washington and the CIA, more recently.|
The whole Satanism thing is in the minds of fanatics with poorly treated psychiatric disorders, who see Satan even in a poor owl. Why isn’t it Satanism to massacre 20,000 innocent children and call them terrorists? Because it’s done in the name of God. This was always the implicit answer in every rhetorical tantrum, in every prayer that constipated fanatics raise to the heavens.
That is why those who have emptied the word freedom to fill it with excrement hate education: the obscurantist associations, typical of sects led by athletic pastors and believers in a trance, without any kind of enlightened analysis, without a single basic syllogism that works, is the way to maintain this slave-driving order that trembles and becomes more violent and genocidal than ever.
Needless to say, I am not attacking any religion or any honest faith. Nor am I attacking God. Imagine the chances of a poor mortal attacking the creator of the Big Bang, the stars, the Earth, and all species. Imagine the creator of the Universe getting upset over something as trivial as disagreeing and protesting the absence of any coherent reasoning, and the abundance of death and pain in his name.
Jorge Majfud, May 2026
