On September 29, 2025, the New York Times reported on the White House meeting between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Its front-page headline read: “Trump and Netanyahu Tell Hamas to Accept Their Peace Plan, or Else.” The subheadline clarified: “President Trump said Israel would have a green light to ‘finish the job’ if Hamas refused to agree to the cease-fire deal.”
The cease-fire deal… It’s not that history rhymes. It repeats itself. Since the 15th century, agreements signed by European empires have been systematically ignored when they no longer served those empires or when new opportunities advanced their lines of fire. Destruction and plunder were seasoned with a convenient cause: civilization, freedom, democracy, and the invader’s right to defend itself. For centuries, this was the repeated history of diplomacy between Indigenous peoples and white settlers―not unlike the most recent case of the “peace agreement” proposed and imposed under threat by Washington and Tel Aviv on Palestine. It was the same history of violated peace treaties with Native nations on both sides of the Appalachians, before and after 1776. What historians call the “Louisiana Purchase” (1803) was not a purchase but a brutal dispossession of the Indigenous nations who were the ancestral owners of that territory, territory as large as the entire nascent Anglo-American nation. No Indigenous people were invited to the negotiating table in Paris, a place far from the dispossessed. When any of these agreements included a “representative” of the attacked peoples―as with the Cherokee dispossession of 1835―that representative was false, a Guaidó invented by the white settlers. The same thing happened with the transfer of the last Spanish colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam) to the United States. While hundreds of Sioux were staining the snows of Dakota red to demand payment under the treaty that forced them to sell their lands, a new peace agreement for tropical peoples was being signed in Paris. No representative of the dispossessed was invited to negotiate the agreement that supposedly made their liberation possible.
For Theodore Roosevelt, “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, and “the only good Indian is the dead Indian.” Further south he wrote and published that Blacks are “perfectly stupid race.” According to Roosevelt, democracy had been invented for the benefit of the white race — the only one capable of civilization and beauty.
During these years the Anglo-Saxon ethnic group needed a justification for its brutality and its habit of stealing and laundering its crimes with peace agreements imposed by force. Since the epistemological paradigm of science had replaced religion in the second half of the 19th century, that justification became racial superiority.
Europe had subjugated the majority of the world through its fanaticism and its addiction to gunpowder. Theories about the superiority of the white man went hand in hand with a narrative of victimization: blacks, browns, reds, and yellows were accused of taking advantage of white generosity while threatening the minority of the superior race with replacement by the majority of “inferior” races. Does this sound relevant today?
Because these biological theories were insufficiently grounded, proponents turned to history. At the end of the 19th century, linguistic and later anthropological theories about the pure origin of the noble (Aryan, Iranian) race―the white race, traced back to the Hindu Vedas―proliferated in Europe. These far-fetched stories, along with Hindu symbols such as the Nazi swastika and other ancient motifs (the Star of David has a long and complex history), became popular as racial symbols in print.
Not coincidentally, it was at this time that supremacist theories and political Zionism were founded and articulated in northern Europe. Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern political Zionism, believed Jews should have their own national home and wrote in the terms of his era; some early Zionist thinkers adopted racialized language.
Until World War II, these supremacists coexisted with frictions, but not enough to prevent agreements such as the Haavara Agreement between Nazi authorities and Zionist organizations, which for years transferred tens of thousands of European Jews to Palestine. The first anti-Zionists were not the Palestinians who opposed colonization, but some European Jews who resisted ethnic-based projects. At the same time as Palestinians were colonized and dispossessed of their lands, Judaism was transformed and stripped of many of its local traditions.
When the Soviets and the Allies defeated Hitler’s Nazis, being a supremacist became a global disgrace. Suddenly, Winston Churchill and American millionaires stopped openly praising fascist ideas. Before that, the 1917 Balfour-Rothschild Declaration was an agreement among imperial powers to divide and occupy a territory inhabited by peoples they deemed “inferior.” As the racist and genocidal Churchill―then a senior minister―wrote, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
But the brutal irrationality of World War II also liquidated the modern age’s naive faith in reason and progress. Science and critical thinking gave way to the irrationality of consumerism and a new kind of religion.
This is how today’s Zionists no longer insist at the UN and the White House on Aryan racial superiority, but rather on the special rights of being God’s chosen. Netanyahu and his evangelical allies cite the biblical sacredness of Israel a thousand times, as if he and King David were the same person, and as if the dark-skinned Semitic people of three thousand years ago were the same as the Khazars of the Caucasus who later adopted Judaism.
The Washington agreement between Trump and Netanyahu, to be accepted by the Palestinians, is illegitimate from the start. It doesn’t matter how many times the word “peace” is repeated―just as it doesn’t matter how many times the word “love” is repeated while a woman is raped. It will forever be a rape, just as Israel’s occupation and apartheid of Palestine is.
On Tuesday, September 30, U.S. officials gathered and quoted George Washington: “He who yearns for peace must prepare for war,” not because Washington “wanted war, but because he loved peace.” President Trump concluded that it would be an insult to the United States if he were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1933, in his Reichstag speech, Adolf Hitler declared that Germany only yearned for peace. Three years later, after militarizing the Rhineland, he insisted that Germany was a pacifist nation seeking its security.
Even if the new agreement between Washington and Tel Aviv is accepted by Hamas (one of Netanyahu’s historical adversaries and opponents), sooner or later it will be violated by Tel Aviv. Because for the superior race, for the chosen peoples, there are no real agreements with those considered inferior―only strategies of plunder and annihilation: strategies of demonizing the slave, of stripping agency from the colonized, and of victimizing the poor white man, that gunpowder addict―now a white-powder addict.
On September 10, 2025, at an event called “The American Comeback Tour” at Utah Valley University, a student asked Charlie Kirk:
“Do you know how many mass shootings there have been in the last ten years?”
“Counting gang violence?” Kirk responded ironically.
Kirk was a professional right-wing haranguer, credited by President Trump for helping him win the election. He had previously argued that a few deaths from gun violence (40,000 annually) were a reasonable price to pay to uphold the sacred Second Amendment. According to the National Rifle Association, which overturned previous Supreme Court interpretations, this amendment protects the right of individuals to carry AR-15 rifles. The 1791 print doesn’t speak of individuals but of “well-regulated militias.” By arms, it meant muskets that wouldn’t kill a rabbit at 100 yards. By “the people,” it meant, not in the least, Black, mixed-race, Native American, or other nonwhite people.
Before he could articulate a complete response, Kirk was shot powerfully in the throat from a building 150 yards away. In the process, coincidentally or not, his enemies on the right—like Ben Shapiro and, perhaps, Tel Aviv—got rid of a traitor who had questioned the October 7, 2023 story.
The media and social networks exploded, blaming “the left,” despite the fact that, in the last fifty years alone, right-wing massacres account for 80 percent of the deaths, while left-wing massacres barely reach five percent.
But who cares about reality if the word creates the world? From Europe to the Southern Cone, those who heard Kirk’s name for the first time organized moving ceremonies for the new martyr of “left-handed violence” and were unstinting in their praise for his “profound influence” that “blazed a path” for good people.
Two days later, the governor of the Mormon state of Utah, Spencer Cox, announced the identity of the killer. Almost in tears, he acknowledged that he “had prayed for 33 hours that the killer would be someone from outside, from another state or another country,” but God didn’t listen. Two days later, he returned to the media, more relieved: the killer, although conservative, a gun lover, and a voter for President Donald Trump, had been influenced by the “leftist ideas” of his partner, a young transgender man.
Religious capitalists don’t believe in collective sin but in individual sin, yet they are always looking for a sinner within an outside group to criminalize the entire group. When Cox acknowledged, “For 33 hours I prayed that the killer would be someone from another country… Sadly, that prayer went unheard,” it didn’t occur to him that “we, who lead the way in giving across the country,” might be criminals, sinners. If we close our eyes to telling God what to do, we can’t be bad.
Now, what’s the social logic (if not engineering) in all this? Let’s put it with a metaphor that spans three continents and more than a thousand years of history: chess.
Like modern mathematics, factual sciences, and Meccans, in the 9th century the Arabs introduced Indian chess to Al-Andalus (present-day Spain). Europe adopted and adapted it. The European feudal system concentrated all social prestige on land ownership and the honor of wars. Like today, nobles invented wars in which their subjects would die in the name of God, while they reaped the spoils and honor. Pawns, that line of faceless and nameless pieces, are modern soldiers and, more recently, civilians who serve only as cannon fodder.
Where’s the trick? In geopolitics, the two sides represent two blocs or alliances of countries. Still, those on the bottom are the first to die. If a pawn survives until the end of the game, it’s because it leaned against the king to protect it.
At the national level, it represents a civil war, but these tend to be rare; they’re the last instance of a longer war that precedes them. When we see these pieces in action, we see White against Black. We see a “culture war”—a war that doesn’t exist today because, if it really were a culture war, freedom of expression would be guaranteed, something that, in the United States and under the libertarian Trump-Rubio administration, has been dying every day.
In other words, the culture war prevents us from seeing the real war that precipitates the conflict: the class war. In the firing line, we have the pawns. Further back, the aristocracy, the rich. Finally, the true masters of the battle: everyone fights and dies to defend a king (BlackRock?) who, without sacrifice, takes it all.
In The Narrative of the Invisible (2004), we proposed a thesis on the political struggle of semantic fields: whoever managed to define and limit the meaning of the ideolexicon (later “culture war”) set the direction of history. This is without denying that the main force of conflict lies in class struggle, which the ruling classes (and their amanuenses) always deny or attribute, with perverse intention, to Marxist critics, conspirators of evil.
Today we can see how this class struggle, exercised by financial elites, has constantly promoted a culture war as the perfect distraction: Black against White, Christian against Muslim, sexist against feminist, God’s chosen against God’s flawed creations…
This oligarchy, which continues to hijack and concentrate the wealth of societies, has realized two problems: (1) The gap between those who have everything and those who have nothing has increased logarithmically—ergo, dangerously. (2) The vampirization of the colonies that supplied the empires of white capitalism is drying up, and the people, who barely benefited from this historic genocide that left hundreds of millions dead, no longer feel the privilege of this international system. They are impoverished, indebted, destroyed by hard drugs and by the drugs of passionate and useless arguments of the entertainment networks, producers of sectarian, nationalist, and tribal hatred.
The main drug of the elites is money and power. They always need more to maintain a minimum of satisfaction, but they know that this situation, both nationally and internationally, is not sustainable. On a national level, it’s the perfect formula for a bloody rebellion. On an international level, it means the collapse of a dictatorial power that in the 19th century was called “white democracy.”
Domestically, to avoid or postpone this rebellion, they need to promote hatred among those at the bottom and militarization as the solution. Abroad, the goal is genocide, the annihilation of any emerging power, or the Third World War.
Palestine is the perfect laboratory where they decide how to achieve brutality despite the opposition of a powerless world. Propaganda is failing them, so they accelerate the silent resort to war violence, whose objective is the cleansing of inconvenient humans through massive, endless, unpunished bombings.
With growing nervousness he made triangular shapes by folding the little paper that said 22-A. He tried to think about the advantages of the A or the K over the intermediate letters. He was sure he would say the word as soon as he faced the woman at door H.
This absurd certainty had frightened him so much that, without looking anywhere, he took a step and left the line. He feigned discomfort. He took his suitcase and headed to the bathroom. He made several suspicious movements: he took a hallway full of people going in the opposite direction; he had to struggle with ten or twenty people who didn’t notice someone was going against the flow. Everyone smelled of perfume, of cleanliness. The men wore black and blue suits. Even the homophobes wore pink socks and ties, because it was fashionable. Sweet perfumes predominated. One even smelled like watermelon, but without the stickiness that comes from the sugar of dried watermelon on the hand. At least five women wore real jewelry, mostly white gold. They all looked alike. They must all have been beautiful, according to the enormous beauty ads in the duty-free shop windows. Full lips of a mouth that could open and swallow a person. Giant eyes with wrinkle-free eyelids.
Although he had been born there, although he had lived there for forty years, 22-A felt like a foreigner, or something caught his attention. He was disturbed by offending the strict routine; lately he hadn’t fulfilled the usual Sunday services; a recent experience in the mountains—he had been disconnected for a week, cut off by a weather accident from all the indices he loved most—had kept him under a mild but suspicious fever. His new state revealed itself in enigmatic phrases, perhaps thoughts. “One day for God,” he said to a friend from the stock exchange, “six days for Money.”
He took another hallway just to save himself from the current that dragged him in a compromising effort. Although he didn’t know where the row of bathrooms he had used half an hour earlier was, he walked with feigned confidence. After several changes of direction that must have been picked up by the hidden cameras in the dark Christmas spheres, he found a restroom.
He entered a stall, dragging his suitcase cart, and forced himself to urinate. But he had nothing to do and feared that someone might be watching him through the air vent. A black hole revealed no glass eye. Nor its absence either.
The obscene dialogues of the sixties, which had been erased for years by the rigorous moral hygiene in place, were beginning to return in a more dignified form. In impeccable red printed letters, the company W wanted to remind the happy urinator that the world was in danger and needed his cooperation. Across the way, on the door, another sign warned the current defecator of the deceptions of all forms of relief and the need for permanent maximum alertness.
He tucked himself away modestly and left, absurdly nervous. What would he say if someone stopped and interrogated him? Why was he nervous? If he had nothing to hide, he wouldn’t have any reason for that pallor on his face, for that revealing sweat on his hands.
While washing his hands, he saw it. This time, yes, there was a small camera. Or it pretended to be a camera, it didn’t matter. Like those half-spheres hanging in big stores. Out of ten, maybe one has a camera that watches. What matters isn’t whether it exists or not, but that no one can say for sure if it exists or not. A kind of agnosticism of the other’s gaze was the best restraint for the basest instincts. Surveillance that no one could accuse of violating privacy, because all those were public places, including the bathroom area where people wash their hands. The cameras (or the suspicion of cameras) were there for the safety of the people themselves. In fact, no one was against this system; quite the opposite. One would have to imagine how terrible it would be if those checkpoints didn’t exist. Those who occasionally dared to imagine it were horrified or wrote voluminous novels that sold like hotcakes.
For some reason, 22A understood that going to the bathroom and not being able to urinate couldn’t be anything extraordinary. Less suspicious. This thought calmed him. Touching his stomach, then his head, trying to think what might have upset him, he left again, heading toward door H.
“The monster must die. What do you think?”
“Which monster?”
“Which one? Beardy.”
“Oh, right, Beardy, the monster…”
“Do you doubt he’s a monster?”
“Me? No, I don’t doubt it. He’s a monster.”
“Then why do you ask which monster? Were you thinking of Oldbeard?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”
“What other monster could deserve to be judged in a court like the one that judged Beardy? Can you explain it to the audience of Your News Show?”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“But you doubt.”
“Yes, of course, I doubt. I firmly doubt.”
“Incredible. Who are you thinking of?”
“I can’t say.”
“What do you mean you can’t? Don’t we live in a free world?”
“Yes, Sir. We live in a free world.”
“Then say what you’re thinking.”
“I can’t.”
“Aren’t you free to say that Beardy and Oldbeard are two monsters?”
“Yes, sir, I’m free to say it and repeat it.”
“Then?”
“Am I free to say everything I think?”
“Of course. Why do you doubt it?”
“Anything I say could be used against me. It’s better to be a good person.”
“Of course, freedom and licentiousness aren’t the same.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you thinking that thank God dictators are judged by justice?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve always thought that all dictators should be judged. It saddens me a little that some always escape.”
“Excellent. The problem is that we don’t live in a perfect world. But your words are very brave. Of course, such an act of rebellion wouldn’t have been possible under a monstrous dictatorship like Beardy’s or Oldbeard’s.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you realize you can say it freely?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is anyone torturing you to say what you don’t want to say?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you understand, then, the value of freedom?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. We’re going back to the studio and continuing with Your News Show, where You are the main star. Can you hear me, Rene? Hello, can you hear me?”
But he didn’t join the line he was waiting in to enter. He wanted to know if he was sure of himself. For a moment he felt better; the symptoms of panic were gone. But he still hadn’t reached the certainty that, even if forced, he wouldn’t utter the word. He knew that fractions of a second were enough to say it. Fractions that had been fatal for many people who, unaware of the danger, unaware of the consequences of their actions, had dared to use it in jest. He knew of the case of a foreign senator who had entered a store to buy a pen. When he passed through the checkout, the clerk asked him what it was. Why the hell did she ask that? Didn’t she know that a pen is usually used for writing? Even if the pen had other functions, for example, sexual or for serving bread at breakfast, what did it matter to her what he wanted that tiny object for, sold in her own store? That is, in the store of someone she didn’t know but for whom she worked day after day under those lights that didn’t allow her to know if it was day or night, like in industrialized chicken coops where the good layers never see the variable light of the sun.
A pen, miss. That’s what the senator should have answered. But no, the fool said the word, as if irony were recognized by the law. How stupid; irony is only recognized by intelligence. If that were that, the senator wouldn’t have said it. He said it because that wasn’t that, and saying it was supposed to be funny, like when the surrealists put a pipe in a museum and titled it This is Not a Pipe.
The senator was lucky because he was a senator. His country paid a fortune, and he was released after several days in jail. A poor devil, who knows what. A poor devil has to be very careful not to say the bad word and, moreover, not to seem like he’s about to say it.
As soon as he reached this point, he realized that saying it was a matter of a slight distraction. A slight betrayal, the kind that a sick man or woman often commits against their own physical integrity, throwing themselves off a balcony for no reason or planting a kiss on the most puritanical woman on the continent, who at the same time is the boss on whom the job and life of a poor devil, a sick devil, depend.
He stood up almost rebelliously. He stood up without thinking. Suddenly he found himself standing, surrounded by people who, without stopping their hurried pace, looked at him as if he were crazy. He was starting to look suspicious, now not just to himself but to everyone else. He realized that far from helping him, the delay and the meditation were doing him harm. In bad, in terrible condition, he would reach the woman at door H. He would face the least attractive of all the officials and say the word. The more he thought about it, the more likely it became. Hadn’t he been thinking about going to door H when suddenly he found himself standing, in one leap, next to his gray suitcase and the other people watching him pass by?
Suddenly, without remembering the previous steps, he found himself in front of the woman at door H, who asked him:
“Anything to declare?”
To which he responded with a silence that suspiciously began to stretch.
The woman at door H looked at him and then at the guard. The guard approached, pulling a transmitter from his belt. Two more appeared immediately.
The woman repeated the previous question.
“Anything to declare?”
“Peace,” he said.
The guards grabbed him by the arms. He felt hydraulic pliers cutting through his muscles and finally breaking his bones.
“Peace!” he shouted this time. “A little Peace, yes, that’s it, Peace! Peace, damn it! Peace, you son of a bitch!”
The guards immobilized him with a high-amperage electric shock.
He was accused in court of threatening public safety and later convicted for having concealed the word in time with the word Peace, which is also dangerous in these special times. The defense appealed the ruling citing psychiatric disturbances resulting from his recent traumatic experience in the mountains.
Although the Western representation of time continues to be a line where the future is forward and the past is backward, reality insists on proving older, more contemplative cultures right: the past is forward and the future is backward, which is why we can only see the former and not the latter. But predicting the future has been more important to humanity than finding the goose that lays the golden eggs.
In the work routine, for example, the most important element in any job application is the resume and the reference letters of the individual or the applying company. In any case, the section on projects and objectives is much smaller and less relevant than the rest, which refers to the applicant’s background, whether ethical or professional. Even though the employer is interested in what the candidate has to contribute in the future, when reading the resume and references, they always focus on analyzing the applicant’s past to form a vague idea of the future. Even artificial intelligence systems that read applications, whose goal is to predict a candidate’s behavior, do so exclusively based on their background.
On a larger scale, sociology and economics do the same: their main tools of understanding and prediction are not in equations but in history. This was already recognized by John Maynard Keynes when, after predicting the tragic consequences of the impositions on defeated Germany in World War I, he failed to foresee the great collapse of markets and economies in 1929. From his obsessive search for a pattern in the stock market, he came to recognize that the unpredictability of the economy is due to the “animal factor” of human psychology. Of course, he did not observe that the animal factor in humans is far more complex and unpredictable than in other animals.
Economists themselves have observed that even today, when one of them manages to predict a crisis, it is due to luck, not to any objective calculation. Out of hundreds and thousands of predictions made by economists before the great crisis of 2008, few specialists were correct. One of them was the economist Nouriel Roubini, who, after becoming famous for his prediction (which he attributed to his intuition, not to a mathematical calculation), continued making predictions that never materialized—even the nose can be wrong.
However, human history is not a succession of chaotic and disconnected events. It not only rhymes but also allows for the identification of certain common elements, certain patterns, such as the cyclical crises of capitalism described by Marx. It is also true that the search for patterns has its dangers, not because patterns do not exist (like the physical and psychological stages of human beings) but because their simplifications often lead to wrong and even opposite conclusions.
One of the simplest and most general abstractions derived from this study is a model we might call the inverse progression model.
(figure 1)
For reasons of space, for this model of history, we will limit ourselves to considering the last thousand years, analyzing only the last five centuries and focusing in more detail on our time. In this sense, we can observe that each period reacts against the previous one and crystallizes its demands, but, in all cases, it is a matter of opposing ideological narratives that serve the same goal: the accumulation of power in a dominant minority, usually the one percent of the population, through the exploitation of the rest by the exercise of physical coercion first, followed by narrative proselytism and, finally, consolidated by “common sense” and the obvious truths created by the media. Once the economic system convenient to the minority is exhausted by the growing inverse consensus of the majority (Christianity in the time of Constantine) or a new minority with growing power (the capitalist bourgeoisie of the 17th century), it is replaced by the alternative claimed by those below (movements against racism, sexism) and, finally, captured, hijacked, and colonized by the dominant minority. In this way, we can see a continuity between opposing ideologies, such as, for example, feudalism and liberalism, rural slavery and industrial corporatism, monarchical absolutism and Soviet statism.
We start from the axiom that the human condition is the result of a dialectic between a historical component and an ahistorical one that precedes it. We will focus mainly on the observation of the first element of the pair, history, but we will consider its ahistorical component as always present, as are psychic and physiological needs.
On the other hand, this model of reading history is based on another ahistorical component, denied for more than half a century by poststructuralist thought: the dualism of action and reaction in human action and perception. For example, in liberal democracies, elections are almost always decided by a coin toss, that is, by two or three percent of the votes. If not by one percent. In many other aspects of individual and social life, the complexity of reality is often reduced to a pair of opposites, from religions (good-evil, angel-demon, yin-yang), politics (right-left, state-private enterprise, socialism-capitalism, liberal-conservative, rich-poor) to any other aspect of intellectual and emotional life: up-down, white-black, forward-backward, cold-hot, pleasure-pain, inside-outside, euphoria-depression, etc.
In June 2016, in an interview about the possibilities of Donald Trump’s victory in the November elections, we mentioned this pattern and this emotional component in political elections, whereby if a goat were to compete with Mahatma Gandhi, after a certain period of electoral campaigning, the goat would close the supposed logical advantage of the rival candidate.[i] In June 2016, most polls and analysts dismissed a Trump victory. As in the 1844 elections, when everyone laughed at the intellectual shortcomings of candidate James Polk. In 2016, the difference in favor of Hillary Clinton was two percent of the total votes (though Trump was elected president due to the electoral college system inherited from the slaveholding era). In 1844, James Polk won the election by one percent, which ultimately led to a radical change in the history of the world in the following century.[1]
Capitalism emerges as a novelty and reaction (though neither intentional nor planned) against monarchical absolutism, which in turn had arisen as a reaction to feudalism and the power of the landowners. Its economic and ideological system opposes the feudal and absolutist systems while simultaneously drawing from both, and later, it ends up reproducing them with the consolidation of economic and financial corporations, through a radically different culture: the oligopolistic power of transnational corporations served by weaker neocolonial states and protected by central metropolises with almost absolute powers, expressions of democratic political systems indebted to dictatorial economic systems.
The new capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, founds and grounds its revolution in democratic opposition to kings and absolutism, but once it becomes the dominant class, spider-like, it does not abandon the tradition of minority accumulation over the majority. Since its banner is democracy, it cannot abandon it once power is monopolized, but must disguise it to continue the dynamic of appropriating the wealth-power of the majority. In this way, it was possible that throughout the Modern Age, the most brutal empires in the world were democracies. Its ideology, liberalism and more recently neoliberalism, also emerges as a critique of the power of the minority of its time (monarchical absolutism) and becomes the narrative that justifies the dominant power of the new minority, corporate and imperial, articulated by economists functional to the current power with a veneer of science and material objectivity. At the center of the new neoliberal narratives lies a purely ideological and cultural component: the reduction of human existence to a single goal: the pursuit of individual profit at any cost, even at the price of the most radical dehumanization, the simplification of the human being as a producing-consuming machine, and the destruction of the planet. All in the name of democracy and freedom.
Liberals are the continuation of feudal lords, opposed to absolutist kings (to central governments), but they cannot renounce the banner of freedom and democracy, even though they only have the words of these two principles, repeated mechanically like a rosary. By freedom, they mean the freedom of capitalist lords, of the minorities in financial power. By democracy, they mean that electoral system that can be bought every two or four years or, as Edward Bernays, the inventor of modern propaganda, will summarize, that system that tells people what to think for their own good.
In all cases, we will see a progressive divorce between narrative and reality until a new super crisis, a social and civilizational paradigm shift, causes both to collapse. The more words like freedom and democracy are hijacked and repeated, the less relevance they have. A reality creates a dominant narrative-web, and this narrative sustains the reality so that it does not dissolve in its own contradictions. To achieve this, the narrative resorts to religious sermonizing, in our time dominated by mass media.
In this study, we will analyze the most significant moments of the last four centuries of this dynamic. Based on the “Inverse Progression” proposal illustrated earlier, we will begin by projecting the same logic to earlier periods in the following scheme, which, without a doubt, must be adjusted in its details for greater clarity for different readers.
Before we begin, let’s provide a few brief examples. When capitalism emerged, feudalism simultaneously transformed into anti-monarchical liberalism in Europe and, later, into slavery against the central government in the United States. This ideocultural tradition persists today in the Southern principle of “defending state independence,” the same principle that led to the Civil War to maintain slavery over a century ago and later the transformation of slaveholders into CEOs and boards of dominant corporations.
Today, neoliberals repeat the imperial rhetoric of the free market when, in reality, they refer to the earlier school they refuted, mercantilism. Mercantilism was a system of currency accumulation that, to a large extent, practiced the interventionism of imperial states to protect their own economies and destroy those of their colonies through protectionist policies and forced purchases at gunpoint. Not without irony, the ideology of the capitalist free market ended the free market. What we have today, five centuries later, is corporate mercantilism, where corporations are no longer medieval guilds but the same feudal lords who accumulate more power than monarchies. Today, the surplus (capital accumulation) prescribed by the mercantilists of the past does not reside in national governments but in the neo-feudal lords of finance. Conversely, countries manage debts.
In the United States, as in other countries, the competition between two political parties will eventually lead to a role reversal, as with the Southern slaveholding Democrats and the Northern liberal Republicans in the past. The inverse identification of Southern Confederates with the Republican Party, to some extent starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, or perhaps earlier during the Progressive Era, and of the leftist Democrats, follows this model and leads us to predict that it will eventually reverse again, especially given some demands of the Republican right that align with old demands of the Democratic left. I suspect this crossover and inflection will occur sooner in their disputes over international policy, which have never been very antagonistic. In chapters like “Social Networks Are Right-Wing,” we will provide a more recent case.
If we consider the immediate present and a projection into the future, we can see the case of the United States during Postcapitalism. Only in the last century, the superpower experienced the sine wave of the Inverse Progression in an accelerated manner, with periods of fifty years. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, progressive policies not only migrated from the Republicans to the Democrats but also established the paradigm for the next fifty years. This paradigm strengthened unions, made possible the creation of State Social Security, and allowed government intervention in the economy without major questioning. This cycle ended with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the triumph of the neoconservative-neoliberal reaction, also a consequence of the global crisis of the 1970s. In all cases, ideological changes were followed by transmutations and travesties of the elites at the top of the social power pyramid to maintain continuity amidst change.
Today, fifty years later, the system is once again in crisis for the third time, with minor symptoms but major causes. For the United States, it is not yet a massive economic crisis, but it is already a crisis of hegemony that will end its monetary privileges and, later, geopolitical ones. As happened with the crisis of the Spanish Empire in 1898, this country will have to turn to deep introspection.
This megacrisis will likely occur in the 2030s or 2040s, and it will be a new opportunity, judging by the dynamics of the Inverse Progression, for new generations to reorganize themselves into a system removed from neoliberalism, from capitalism as an existential framework, and to question the postcapitalist dictatorship with atomized options but with the common factor of a less consumerist and more cooperative politics and philosophy. The death of the capitalist paradigm will not mean the automatic disappearance of its institutions, but rather a new way of seeing and living in the world. Extending the theory of the Inverse Progression, it would not be an exaggeration to predict that, even if the two-party system remains, the current Republican Party, hijacked by the nationalist far-right, could even switch roles again in a few decades and represent these new aspirations that in the past century were associated with the left, while the Democratic Party would return to its 19th-century role of representing the conservative, corporate, and Eurocentric South. But this last point would be a detail.
In the 21st century, another pair begins to invert: a large number of center-left politicians and governments position themselves in favor of the “free market” and trade agreements (which have little to nothing to do with a free market but rather guarantee, in secret agreements like the TPP, the freedom of investors) while other conservative right-wing governments, such as that of Donald Trump, align with the traditional protectionist line of the left. While in the West the neo-feudal model represented by mega-companies and corporations whose powers surpass those of the states signifies not only the death of classical capitalism but also a return to its socioeconomic predecessor, feudalism, in China the system of state capitalism centered on the Communist Party is a confirmation of the monarchical model, where the fiefdoms (the corporations) are subordinated to the State.
In a Cartesian graph we can place on the x-axis a progression ranging from (a) absolute government (x=0) to (z) absolute and self-regulated anarchy (x=10) and on the y-axis we distribute the degree of religious fanaticism, starting from (a’) a radically secular or atheist society (y=0) to another (z’) theocratic or sectarian society (y=10). We could speculate that in secular societies with centralized governments, like China, their position would be: x→0; y→0. The Middle Ages or Feudal period could be placed at the top of the curve (x→5; y→10) with a fragmented political power, that of the feudal lords, but not anarchic-democratic. The extreme x→10; y→0 signifies a break with the Middle Ages where the fragmentation of power has surpassed the maximum curve of religious sectarianism to render it ineffective as a ligament (religion, re-ligare) of the concentrated and independent powers of the feudal lords of the Middle Ages or the financial elites of our time. Obviously, the crossing of this critical point (x→5; y→10) cannot occur without a general upheaval, a conflict likely on a global scale.
(figure 2)
[1] We explained this in The Wild Frontier (2021).
On the morning of July 27th, the newspapers and television reported a strange crime committed in Sayago. Two homeless men had killed a third, likely the night before. Though not alarming, the news surprised many. The reasonable thing, and what is most common, is to kill for money, pride, or some family passion. And none of these things could apply to a half-man who lived in the city’s garbage dumps.
The exact reason for the beating was never known; and no one wanted to know more once the judge sentenced the killers to ten years in prison. But I, the judge, never entirely forgot the case, and some years later, I visited the prisoners in jail. I did it almost in secret, as with everything, because people liked to say that I favored criminals over victims. Now, if I had to pass sentence again, I would give them another ten years in prison; not for justice, but out of compassion. I believe I can explain myself.
The dead homeless man was Dr. Enríquez, who had lived without a home for the last six months. Eusebio Enríquez was a surgeon and had lost his eldest daughter in an operating room on January 24th, where he himself had intended to relieve her of an incurable illness. The surgeon had no reason to blame himself for his daughter’s death, but reasons mattered little because, suddenly, he went mad and one night left his home. He crossed the city in the January rain and abandoned himself by the railroad tracks in Sayago. He let his beard grow, dirtied and faded his clothes; he quickly lost weight, and his face grew darker and more sunken, giving him the unfamiliar appearance of a Hindu sannyasin. He became so marginalized from society that he ceased to exist for the government and for society; and that is why they could never find him. Soon after, he met Facundo and Barbarroja, the two men who would later beat him to death with iron bars.
Neither Facundo nor Barbarroja were criminals, but people feared them or, rather, avoided them, as if poverty were contagious. While there were people who believed in God or in Hell, there were alms. But, little by little, good conscience and the tax on evil diminished, and these wretched men became part of the national unconscious, the hidden shame of a prosperous or pretentious economy.
The two men lived a nearly nomadic life. They inhabited any and all corners of the old train station, always avoiding the guard who might catch them sleeping in an abandoned train car or in the iron storage shed where they took refuge on rainy days. «This place is sad,» Enríquez would say to himself, «the good thing is that they don’t know it.»
But, I repeat, neither of them was capable of killing a bird. It is also true that during those six months of living together, Enríquez spoke to them only once. Still, the beggars held no grudge against him. They knew he was a poor madman who had once lived like ordinary people, who must have had a house and a car and even a family, because they had seen him flee from an elegant woman in clean clothes. They had learned to live with him like a family that has a mute or disabled member. Once, when the cold was unbearable and their jaws began to tremble, they brought him a can of boiling herbs. And he did not refuse it.
But that winter was one of the worst the beggars could remember. Temperatures dropped below zero; puddles froze over by morning, and the grass turned white with frost. It became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find glass bottles, much less sell them. Because people avoided those men whose beards and clothes worsened with each year. And so, little by little, they lost the little oral contact that connected them to the world.
Barbarroja fell ill from hunger, and Facundo began to complain all night about rheumatism or some other indecipherable ailment. The illnesses and sufferings piled up until they blended into a single hell. Yet, the two beggars continued to wait for spring and the summer heat, which each day seemed further away. Enríquez knew it. He knew this could be the last winter for his companions: their feet were swollen and purple, their faces pale and sunken, their hands useless. Only a depressing optimism kept them going, according to him.
One morning, Enríquez opened his mouth to read them their death sentence. That day was the only time the three of them spoke, and they talked for hours. Facundo and Barbarroja learned who the madman was and almost confirmed what they had imagined. In reality, the madman was, or had been, a rich man. A petty bourgeois, to his acquaintances, but a rich man to those outcasts.
The conversation ended with a proposal from the madman.
«It will get colder,» he told them, «and you will die. You no longer have defenses, and your bodies are failing. The suffering will last until September. Or, in the worst case, until October. But you will die. And if you’re lucky enough to survive this year, you’ll die next year, after suffering twice as much as you will this winter. But you are so poor that you don’t even have ideas. You won’t know how to escape this hell. Not even in the easiest way. You are so poor that you haven’t even thought of going to prison, where inmates enjoy a bed with blankets and a roof and where they eat almost every day. You are so poor that you won’t even have the strength to rob a market, because if you try, they’ll kick you out and you’ll end up with your forehead bleeding on the pavement. And if they jail you for theft, they’ll release you back to the street in two days, because the prisons are full and even the judge will take pity on two miserable, starving men. But since I’m a doctor, I’m going to tell you what you must do to save yourselves.»
The beggars exchanged glances, unsure of what to think. They even began to doubt the story he had told them earlier about his family and his former life.
«To go to prison for many years, you have to kill me. Don’t look at me like idiots. Hide that honest stupidity you’ve been carrying around, stinking in your clothes.»
Facundo and Barbarroja knew or imagined that the madman was worse than ever that day. But he kept insisting, with fanatical realism, on the convenience of sacrificing one of the three.
«God will punish us,» said Barbarroja.
«God has already punished you. Can you imagine a Hell worse than this? Do you see what I’m saying? You are so poor that you have no ideas. You no longer reason. Do I have to come and tell you what to do? Besides, why would God punish someone who kills a murderer? The Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ I killed a child, my own daughter. Do you feel sorry for me?»
The beggars stood up and retreated, frightened. The madman was beginning to truly scare them. Time passed, a week or two, and they didn’t speak again. They didn’t even approach him and avoided looking at him. On the 24th, it rained heavily. Facundo and Barbarroja moved to the abandoned shed at the station. As I said before, they only went there on rainy days because the guard would hassle them if he found them inside. On the other hand, I think they preferred the roofless train car because it was more discreet and the dark void of the shed’s height didn’t bother them. (Despite living on the street, I discovered that both suffered from a strange form of agoraphobia.)
That day, the madman didn’t enter the shed. He stayed out in the rain all night, like a ghost with his hands in his pockets, sometimes looking up at the sky, which outlined him with lightning and erased him with the dark rain.
On the 25th, the madman, exhausted by hunger, cold, and a lack of will to live, fell unconscious. On the 26th, the beggars decided to bring him a can of boiled herbs, but he no longer responded. His gaze was lost, and he could barely move his eyelids. His skin was white and cold, with no reaction or sensitivity of any kind. Facundo pressed his ear to the madman’s chest and confirmed that his heart was barely beating. Throughout the night of that day, the two men silently monitored the almost imperceptible beats of the madman’s heart. They waited or cared for him with fear and anxiety. Barbarroja began to tremble as never before, his shoulders hunched, unable to control his lips, which seemed to recite a voiceless speech.
On the 27th, the madman’s heart could no longer be heard, and by nightfall they thought he was dead. But he wasn’t. Therefore, the coroner’s conclusion was correct: Eusebio Enríquez did not die of cold or hunger; he was beaten to death by two beggars who confessed to the crime and were saved from a certain lynching outside the courthouse because the police dragged them to a van where they were dumped like trash.
I did not invent this story. It is a story that was once told in many forms, but it always told, more or less, the same thing. Then, due to the urgency of recent centuries, it fell into oblivion. Like the stories that matter, it may not be true, but it is truthful.
They say that two thousand five hundred years ago, there was a very good man who, on a dark night, received a visit from God. He couldn’t see Him, but he could hear Him.
The man was frightened because the voice was not of this world. Immediately, he knew it was God, who had heard his prayers and had, at last, decided to speak to him.
The good man had fallen ill and was alone, abandoned, so God offered to grant him a wish.
His heart raced, but before he could say anything, God continued: «You have always been a compassionate man. In your prayers, the men and women of your village have never been absent. So, whatever you ask for yourself, I will give twice as much to each of them.»
The man fell silent and, after a moment of thought, said:
Research indicates that children’s self-esteem has surged since 1980. In my 1998 book, Crítica de la pasión pura, I argued that parents were obsessively encouraging their children to believe they were as exceptional as Newton, Picasso, or Marilyn Monroe because they feared failure in a hyper-competitive society. The proliferation of self-help books served to enrich their authors, feeding the self-help narrative while boosting sales.
Increasingly, the emphasis is on the belief that happiness is tied to individual success, epitomized by phrases like “yes, you can” and “before anything, love yourself,” implying competence is crucial. Success and self-esteem, intertwined with failure and humiliation, pave the way for electing narcissistic leaders who personify these ideals.
How did we arrive here? Historically, private property was limited to essentials, like a home or the tools of an heir. The existence of trade throughout centuries underscores a primitive form of property: trading a cedar from China for an amber with an ant trapped inside, a contraceptive plant like silphium for an aphrodisiac, or a goat for ten shekels in Sumer. In many societies, private property was restricted or non-existent, especially in terms of lowlands or abstract assets, until the 17th century’s global trading ventures.
In medieval Europe, private property was primarily held by the nobility. Peasants, artisans, and soldiers had little: no land, no surnames. Yet they possessed more rights than chattel slaves, including security to occupy their lord’s lands—not out of altruism, but because they were valued labor. The introduction of money as a societal tool and the rise of the bourgeoisie democratized access to property, untethering individuals from the constraints of land and class.
Medieval noblemen transformed into liberals, opposing centralized power structures—monarchies, socialist states—that threatened their freedom to trade and wield power over people. In France, they opposed monarchies; in England, they allied with them. Modern states, theoretically created to protect common citizens, were swiftly commanded by powerful elites who monopolized capital and finance, buying control over military might.
Capitalism, distinct from previous economic systems, introduced abstract exchange values divorced from tangible use values, driving a wedge between economy and production, and later between economy and finance. This abstraction culminated in phenomena like virtual currencies and capital generation from nothing, as symbolic as medieval cathedrals or pyramids were extravagant displays of power.
Historically, private property was the domain of the noble elite. While capitalism broke class-based property concentration, liberalism exploited new technologies to re-establish similar hierarchies. Universal property ownership ironically enabled new minorities to consolidate power. In late 19th century Mexico, land privatization dispossessed 80% of peasants, as property bought could also be lost financially. Similar dynamics played out on U.S. indigenous reservations. Following the official end of chattel slavery, salaried slavery emerged, maintaining hierarchical control over blacks and poor whites alike. As Britons and Americans noted, consumerism had to replace direct subjugation, fueling desires for unnecessary possessions.
Let us consider the psychological impact. The focus rests not just on desire, but critically on fear. This anxiety over private property ownership fostered a new individual, one obsessed with accumulation for personal and familial survival. The ensuing anxiety and fanaticism spurred a painful cycle of sadomasochistic behaviors.
Reflecting on social structures like those of pre-colonial Native Americans—more socially advanced than their European counterparts before their destruction—reveals societies where individual identity was intimately tied to collective life. Plans and dreams could hold political significance. The advent of private property doctrine and survival predicated on individual gain (“one person’s greed is everyone’s prosperity”) catalyzed the individual’s desocialization. Social interactions became refracted through a lens of self-interest and accumulation. Even those less driven by greed conformed to these cannibalistic norms.
Consequently, individuals became desocialized, and in their desocialization, they became dehumanized.
Jorge Majfud. Summary of a chapter from an upcoming book to be published in 2025
Throughout history, we can observe a frequent and consistent pattern that spans different periods, economic systems, and cultures. This pattern can be summarized in a minimal and simple equation, but with diverse derivations:
P = d.t
where P is the hegemonic power (it need not be absolute power to be dictatorial); d represents dissent against P, diversity (cultural, ideological, political, economic), and “freedom of expression”; and t represents that power’s tolerance of d.
If we solve for t, we have
t = P/d
which leads us to deduce that, as dissent–diversity–freedom of expression (d) increases in a given social system, tolerance (t) decreases, unless power (P) increases in the same proportion. A weakened dominant power, challenged by alternatives or a changing social context, has a low tolerance for dissent in all its forms. A hegemonic power without real opposition embellishes its Pax Romana with greater tolerance, confirming its legitimacy to both insiders and outsiders.
Naturally, this is a logic that refers to the balance of power. It is a zero–sum equilibrium.
P – d.t = 0
From this, we can ask ourselves: what happens when the equation fails to close at zero? The answer is a conjecture derived directly from the formula: in that case, we are facing a revolution where one order replaces (violently, according to the Thucydides Trap) another, and after a crossover: Pa = Pc, a new order is established: Pc > Pa, with a change of roles. So, following the original formula,
dc.tc > da.ta
Both a declining hegemonic power and a rising hegemonic power will be governed by the same formula P = d.t, but the clash between the two conflicting systems cannot resist the formula’s equilibrium (for example,
Pa – d.t = 3 or Pc – d.t = –2
Tolerant, as long as power does not tremble
If we judge the first century AD by biblical accounts (real, imaginary, or distorted by repetition and convenience), we will always see the same dynamic. Jesus was crucified by the political establishment of a ruling Jewish class in complicity with the empire of the day, which allowed freedom of expression and freedom of religion as long as the disorder did not challenge its political hegemony in the colony. With the rise of Christianity and the subsequent decline of the Empire, persecution and intolerance toward these dissidents increased until the collapse of the early fourth century.
Both Jesus and other subversives of the time (from the Zealots to the Sicarii, or hired assassins, both considered terrorists for violently opposing the empire’s occupation) challenged the pyramid of power in different ways, which is why the resolution was a summary trial and political execution using the same method used at the time to execute criminals. Jesus’s bad example lay in a nonviolent challenge to the power of the rich and powerful and to social injustices, something all too common in the tradition of the so–called biblical prophets and therefore especially dangerous. In the case of anti–colonial resistance, it was feared by those in power with greater perplexity than armed resistance.
The same can be said of the political execution of Socrates four centuries earlier, when his dissent touched the most sensitive nerves of the power of Athenian democracy. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with excessive questioning (his recourse to maieutics or “birth attendant”) and of his excessive doubts about the dominant gods of Athens.
Among the periods of greatest intolerance in Europe are those where the dominant power was challenged or threatened. Europe radiates an image of civilization, peace, and freedom, but its history of obsessive and continuous violence says exactly the opposite. In the Middle Ages, their fanaticism translated into the Crusades “against the infidel” (the political and intellectual power of the time: the Muslim world) and the Inquisition, a paradigm of intolerance toward dissent and freedom of expression. The brutality of this ideological police (the origin of the modern police and secret agencies like the CIA and the NSA) had different moments and, in all cases, was a response by those in power to new threats to public opinion. From the persecution of the Cathars and Waldensians in the 12th century, the intolerance of Spanish Catholicism during the so–called Reconquista (which contrasted with the greater tolerance of the then hegemonic power, the Islamic world, its main enemy), to the fight against the new heretics, the Protestants, and their subversive reform in the 16th century.
Freedom of expression in open societies
Over the last four centuries of humankind, the most brutal, racist, oppressive, and genocidal empires have been democracies. Political democracies and economic dictatorships. Liberal regimes framed by a single ideology, capitalism, and justified by multiple strategic fictions turned into dogmas, such as the Free Market and Human Rights. At the same time that private mega–companies from the early 17th century, such as the East India Company, the West India Company, and the Virginia Company, plundered and massacred millions of people from Asia to the Americas, instilling racism and racial and hereditary slavery; at the same time that they imposed the worst forms of colonialism known to history, they destroyed prosperous societies through drugs, cannons, and protectionist tariffs; at the same time that they destroyed market freedom, their propaganda machines peddled their own narrative about “the free market,” the “expansion of civilization,” the “promotion of freedom and democracy,” “the struggle for justice,” and the sole recipe for “the progress and prosperity of the people.”
In practice, there was another notable paradox. These same brutal global dictatorships, and even national dictatorships, as in the case of the slave–owning United States, permitted (by law and, often, in practice) freedom of expression for their own citizens and even for foreigners. The American ethnic dictatorship (1776–1868) promulgated and protected the right to freedom of expression and conscience in its First Amendment from the outset. This freedom, like the earlier “We the People” (1787), did not extend to Black people, Native Americans, or Mexicans, despite the fact that “all men are created equal” (1776). When the Southern Confederacy went to war to destroy the Union (the United States) and thus maintain its “peculiar Institution” (the slave system), it established in its 1861 Constitution the sacred right to private property (especially in other human beings) while explicitly establishing the right to “free speech,” albeit somewhat more limited than the original Union Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of such grievances as the delegated powers of this Government may warrant it to consider and redress.” That is, freedom of speech as long as slavery and the power of the slaveholders were not questioned.
In practice, there was also a notable paradox. These same brutal global dictatorships, and even national dictatorships, as in the case of the slave–owning United States, effectively permitted freedom of expression for their own citizens and, often, for foreigners themselves. This freedom of expression and criticism of the dominant power was, from many points of view, indisputable and unquestionable. Karl Marx himself, exiled from the Prussian regime, found refuge in England where, despite his poverty, he wrote sweeping critiques of British colonialism and, thanks to translations from German to English provided by his friend Frederick Engels, was able to publish them in the New York Daily Tribune. Both survived in England on some money given to them by Engels’s father and the ten cents per article paid by the New York newspaper. Both lived under British police surveillance, but censorship did not prevent them from publishing articles in newspapers, nor even the first and most important critical analysis of the capitalist system in history, Das Kapital, published a few years later. The first volume of Capital was published in 1867 and the last in 1894. Karl Marx only saw the first volume published.
Eight years after the publication of the third volume of Capital, in 1902, British professor John A. Hobson published Imperialism: A Study, in which he criticized the brutality of the empire of which he was a citizen and dismantled the meritocratic logic of the superior race: “To a larger extent every year Great Britain has been becoming a nation living upon tribute from abroad, and the classes who enjoy this tribute have had an ever–increasing incentive to employ the public policy, the public purse, and the public force to extend the field of their private investments, and to safeguard and improve their existing investments. This is, perhaps, the most important fact in modern politics, and the obscurity in which it is wrapped has constituted the gravest danger to our State.” Hobson was critically marginalized, discredited by academia and the mainstream press of the time. He was neither arrested nor imprisoned. While the empire he himself denounced continued to kill millions of human beings in Asia and Africa, neither the British government nor the British crown bothered to directly censure the economist. Not a few, as is the case today, pointed to him as an example of the virtues of British democracy. It’s similar to what happens today with those critics of American imperialism, especially if they live in the United States: “Look, he criticizes the country he lives in; if he lived in Cuba, he wouldn’t be able to criticize the government.” In other words, if someone points out the crimes against humanity in the multiple imperial wars and does so in a country that allows freedom of expression, that is proof of the democratic virtues of the country that massacres millions of people and tolerates anyone daring to mention it. For Hobson, the highest stage of capitalism was imperialism, the nationalist enterprise of a financial system dominated by an oligarchy at the center of the Empire, which exploited not only the colonies but also the workers of the imperial nation. This idea (in addition to Marx’s principle of capital accumulation) would be taken up by Lenin in his analysis of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism of 1916.
The examples of dissent within the northwestern empires are numerous and notable. How is it possible that Great Britain, France, and the United States, the two centers of Anglo–Saxon capitalist hegemonic power, allowed this radical type of freedom of expression within their own midst?
Every paradox is an apparent contradiction with internal logic. In Moscase en la telaraña (2023), I summarized it this way: “An imperial, dominant power, unanswerable, unafraid of the real loss of its privileges, has no need for direct censorship. Indeed, the acceptance of marginal criticism would prove its merits. It is tolerated if it does not cross the line into genuine questioning. If hegemonic dominance is not in decline and in danger of being replaced by something else.”
Imperial Democracies
Now, if we jump to the 20th century and another center of the “Free World” and a media example of an “Open Society,” we will observe the dynamics of P = dt at different moments. For example, with the reaction to the anti–immigrant laws of 1924, no longer against the Chinese, who in the 19th century threatened to contaminate Anglo–Saxon blood and power, but against the dark–skinned southern Europeans who, besides representing an inferior race, were workers who brought the contamination of socialist or anarchist ideas. By the 1920s and 1930s, these new unwelcome groups were anti–fascists expelled from Italy, Germany, and Spain, threatening the Nazi popularity of big businessmen in the United States.
If we leave aside World War II (which deserves another chapter) and continue with the Cold War in the United States, we will see the phenomenon of McCarthyism and its restrictions on freedom of expression as a direct result of a power insecure in its own forces, despite its privileged position, derived from the Second World War and due to the undeniable economic, social, and geopolitical achievements of its former ally and new enemy by default—the Anglo–Saxon fever cannot live without an enemy, nor with an enemy either—the Soviet Union.
Outside the United States, in its southern colonies, the reality was even more unstable. Freedom of expression (freedom always when it is inconsequential and controlled when it transcends) is characteristic of consolidated empires. Tolerance of others (especially others who think differently and challenge the dominant power) is characteristic of those systems that cannot be threatened by freedom of expression or dissent. Quite the opposite: when popular opinion has been crystallized, either by tradition or by mass propaganda, the opinion of the majority is the best form of legitimation. This is why these systems, always dominant, always imperial, do not grant their colonies the same rights they grant their citizens. The many banana republic dictatorships imposed by imperial democracies are just one example that follows this logic. We will explain further below.
The Ladder of Intolerance
Now let’s review the (2) legal aspect, the second step in controlling dogma after (1) harassment, discrediting, and demonization of dissidents and before (3) police or military intervention where necessary, whether in the form of military dictatorships or proxy wars, as is the case with the last three, two of which are already underway to crush any challenge to the dogma of power: Ukraine and Gaza—Taiwan or the South China Sea would be the third, which we analyzed almost two decades ago, when the world was distracted by “the Islamic threat.” When the United States was in its infancy and fighting for its survival, its government did not hesitate to pass a law prohibiting any criticism of the government under the pretext of spreading false ideas and information—seven years after approving the famous First Amendment, which did not arise from religious tradition but from the European anti–religious Enlightenment. Naturally, that 1798 law was called the Sedition Act. More than a century later, another law, also called the Sedition Act, the 1918 Act, was passed as soon as there was popular resistance to the propaganda organized by masterminds like Edward Bernays in favor of intervening in the First World War—thus ensuring the collection of European debts and (according to other theories) as a bargaining chip in the negotiation of the surrender of Palestine to the growing Zionist movement, a betrayal that turned the country most open to Jewish tradition, Germany, into an anti–Semitic machine. But that would be a topic for another book.
Let’s return to the United States. In 1894, following the national strike crushed by the United States Army, trade unionist Eugene Debs paid for his social activism with six months in prison. There he began studying socialist theory and, in 1901, founded the Socialist Party of America, receiving six percent of the vote in the 1912 presidential election. For the 1920 election, he received almost a million votes while in prison, having been convicted in 1918 of a crime of opinion. Debs opposed the United States’ entry into World War I, for which he was sentenced to ten years under the Sedition Act and pardoned by President Warren G. Harding three years later due to the cardiovascular problems he developed in prison. That’s the fact. Following our formula, we see that Debs was pardoned when the Socialist Party had been dismembered, and World War I had been resolved with the defeat and humiliation of Germany and the consolidation of the Paris–London–Washington axis.
Until a few years earlier, the harsh anti–imperialist critiques of writers and activists like Mark Twain were demonized, but there was no need to tarnish the reputation of a free society by imprisoning a renowned intellectual, as they had done in 1846 to David Thoreau for his criticism of Mexico’s aggression and plundering to expand slavery, under the perfect excuse of not paying taxes. Neither Twain nor most public critics managed to change any policy or reverse any imperialist aggression in the West, since they were read by a minority outside the economic and financial powers. In that regard, modern propaganda had no competition; therefore, direct censorship of these critics would have hampered their efforts to sell aggression in the name of liberty and democracy. On the contrary, the critics served to support that idea, according to which the greatest and most brutal empires of the modern era were proud democracies, not discredited dictatorships. The Free World, the Civilized World…
All ideological and narrative fossils, like when people repeat “extremes are bad.” This popular maxim is easy to understand in medicine; even drinking too much water is dangerous. It also seems easy to understand when we talk about political issues. It’s assumed that we are at the center and that any call for radical change is extremism. Nothing new. During slavery, abolitionists were demonized as extremists, proponents of the end of civilization, of God’s divine order, of freedom and prosperity for societies.
Today, to say that a micro–minority has taken over countries and is leading the planet to catastrophe is to be an extremist.
Forecast: If not by law, then by cannon
Continuing to observe the formula P = d.t, we can deduce that in this century we will see an increase in Chinese t and a progressive decrease in northwestern or Euro–American t due to the inverse balance of Pa and Pb (Northwest and East).
The fight for the rights of immigrants is the fight for Human Rights, which is shown to be irrelevant every day when the interests of the powerful are not served. But immigration is not only a right; it is also the consequence of a global system that violently discriminates between rich and poor, capitalists and workers. This old class struggle is not only made invisible through cultural, ethnic, and sexual wars, as has been the case for centuries with racial and religious struggles but also through the very demonization of the concept of “class struggle” practiced by the rich and powerful and attributed to leftist ideologues as a project of evil. The class struggle, the violent dispossession, and the dictatorship of the ultra-millionaires over the rest of the working classes is a fact observable by any quantitative measurement.
This culture of barbarism and humiliation, of the politics of cruelty and the ethics of selfishness, occurs within every nation and is reproduced on a global scale, from the imperial nations to their servile capitalist colonies and their exceptions: the blockaded and demonized rebellious alternatives.
The illegality of immigration was invented more than a century ago to extend the illegality of imperial invasions to weaker countries. It was invented to prevent the consequences of the plundering of colonies held in servitude through the cannon, of systematic massacres, of the eternal and strategic debts that bleed them dry even today, of the secret agencies that murdered, manipulated the media, destroyed democracies, rebellious dictatorships, plunged half the world into chaos and dehumanized slaves from day one, some of them happy slaves.
Illegal immigration not only punished the disinherited of this historical process but also those persecuted by the multiple and brutal dictatorships that Europe and the United States spread throughout Africa and Latin America, with the various terrorist groups designed in Washington, London and Paris, such as the Contras in Central America, the Death Squads in South America, the extermination plans such as Plan Condor, the Organisation armée secrète in Africa, Islamic terrorists such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, all created by the CIA and its complicit mafias to end independence, secular and socialist projects in Africa and the Middle East… In other words, it is not only colonial capitalism that expels its people but the origin of that brutality: imperial capitalism.
Then, the victims become criminals. As with Haiti’s audacity to declare itself free and independent in 1804, as in other cases of the abolition of slavery, the slave owners demanded compensation from the governments for the loss of their private property of flesh and blood. Not the victims who had built the wealth of the United States, of the banks, of the corporations, not the slaves who built the White House and the Congress building. In the same way, according to Trump and his supremacist horde, the Panama Canal belongs to the invading master and not to the Panamanians and Caribbeans who left their lives by the thousands in its construction.
Immigration, in almost all its forms, from economic to political, is a direct consequence of these historical injustices. The rich do not emigrate; they dominate their countries’ economies and media and then send their «profits» to tax havens or in the form of investments that sustain the global slavery system as if it were a «high-risk» activity.
The rich are assured of their entry into any country. The poor, on the other hand, are suspect from the moment they show up at the embassy of a powerful country. Their applications are usually denied, which is why they often go into debt with loans from coyotes for 15 thousand dollars, only to enter a country that prints a global currency and work for years as slaves while being doubly criminalized. They do not victimize themselves, as some assimilated academics define them. They are real victims. They are wage slaves (often not even that) under permanent psychological terrorism that both they and their children suffer. In the United States, hundreds of thousands of children do not attend school regularly because they work under a regime of slavery, no different from the indentured slaves of centuries past.
Every year, for decades, illegal immigrants have been paying a hundred billion dollars into the Social Security system of complaining voters, money that will not be received by them but by those who spend their days complaining about the jobs that immigrants have stolen from them. As if this scale of injustice were not enough, finally, the most selfless, persecuted, and poor workers are thrown into prison as terrorists and returned to their countries in chains and humiliated, ironically by the mercilessness of rulers convicted of serious crimes by the justice system of the very country they govern, as is the case of the current occupants of the White House. They call this remarkable cowardice courage, just as they call the slavery of others’ freedom and the global bullies’ victims. Added to this is the traditional collaboration of the promoted sepoys, from academics to voters, from journalists to Latin, Indian, or African members of the imperial governments who, as a “solution to the problem of immigration” and the sovereign disobedience of some countries of the South, impose more blockades and sanctions to strangle further their less successful brothers who decided not to emigrate to God’s Land. The pathology is then sold as an example of “success based on merit and hard work.” Because that is the only pleasure of psychopaths who cannot be happy with anything: not their own success, but the defeat and humiliation of all others. One of the characteristics of fascism, apart from resorting to a non-existent past, is to exploit, persecute, demonize, blame, and punish all those who do not have the economic or military power to defend themselves, as is the case of poor immigrants in the imperial centers of the world. We, stripped of the sectarian interests of global power and responding only to a sense of morality and Human Rights, raise our voices to protest against the largest organized crime organization in the world, sure that this perversion of human cruelty will eventually collapse – not by its weight, but by the courage and solidarity of those below.
On November 22, 2021, Washington announced the end of the war in Afghanistan. After twenty years of continuous occupation, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and an increase in opium trafficking; eleven years after the official death of one of the CIA’s creatures, Osama bin Laden, Washington withdrew almost all of its operational troops from the country.
The sudden urgency, after a two-decade delay, created chaos: not only was the country left to the supposed enemies, the Taliban (another spin-off of the mujahideen, CIA-developed terrorists) but they were also left as a gift millions of dollars in military equipment, from war tanks to ammunition of all kinds.
The chaos and mysterious urgency were visualized in the despair of the collaborationists and the new refugees, a déjà vu from Vietnam, another historic defeat for the greatest military power in the world. Images of people trying to climb the walls of the Kabul airport, of families handing over their children to the sacrificed marines to be rescued from evil, are a historical genre of media propaganda that nullifies any critical view of reality. To illustrate it, it would suffice to republish the articles of the anti-imperialist Marx Twain, responding to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Heavy Burden”, gone viral in 1899 by an order of Theodore Roosevelt.
On December 31, the Wall Street Journal titled: “Who Won in Afghanistan?” The same article answered: “Private Contractors. The U.S. military spent $14 trillion [more than seven times the economy of Brazil] during two decades of war; those who benefited range from major manufacturers to entrepreneurs.”
After the significant rout in Afghanistan, I published about something that is becoming increasingly clear: the only thing we could expect is another war. What other reason, if not, could be behind a desperate change of strategy and a clear realignment of forces? Wars are big business for private corporations, but governments must provide tsunamis of money, apart from planning a defeat that can be sold as a victory—and apart from geopolitical reasons, of course.
On January 24, 2022, one month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we insisted on another article (“Nuevo enemigo se busca / New Enemy Wanted”): “after the new military fiasco in Afghanistan, and after such a fortune invested by Washington in the private business of war, in the merchants of death, it is urgent to find a new enemy and a new conflict. Before a bigger adventure with China, the choice is clear: continue violating NATO’s promise of no arms expansion to the East, pressure Russia to react by deploying its army on the border with Ukraine, and then, accuse her of trying to invade the neighboring country. Hasn’t this been exactly the history of the treaties signed with the Indians since the eighteenth century? Hasn’t this been exactly the order and method of acting on The Wild Frontier (2021)? Treaties with other peoples have served to buy time, to consolidate a position (forts, bases)”.
A year earlier, in January 2021, the State Department had already threatened European companies with sanctions if their governments continued to build Nord Stream II. “We are informing companies about the risk they are running, and we are inviting them to withdraw from the agreement before it is too late,” according to a government source (Reuters, January 12). This $11 billion project would have meant cheap natural gas for Europe, but it was going to hurt Ukraine by losing fees for older pipelines running through it.
In September of that year, leaks from the Nord Stream II were reported in the Baltic Sea, just after the works were finished. According to Sweden and Denmark, “someone deliberately bombed it”, but the mainstream Western press barely reported it and, when it did, described it as “a mystery” whose main suspect was Russia, the main victim. A classic media war resource, the one that the White House itself supported. In November, the Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist reported the discovery of explosive remains and the Swedish Security Service confirmed that it had been sabotaged.
Shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, media censorship began on both sides and with different techniques. Media such as Le Monde of Paris (“En Amérique latine, les accents pro-Poutine de la gauche”) made Ignacio Paco Taibo and me examples of a Latin American left that blames NATO for the war because, according to this well-known technique of demonization and psychological disqualification, we blame everything that comes from Washington. This is not true, because “left-wing intellectuals” like me support all social plans in the United States and I believe that this country will achieve peace when it wakes up from its war and monetary nightmares. We do not support the business of war and its powerful media arm.
My opinion is irrelevant, but the attacks are significant and symptomatic. I never failed to clarify that I did not support a Moscow invasion of Ukraine, out of mere principle: I cannot support any war, much less a preventive one. Perhaps for this reason, after more than a decade of frequent collaboration with RT TV, we never did any more interviews. On the other hand, warning of the powerful Western war propaganda and the non-existent space given to those who criticize and blame NATO is another form of censorship, a very effective, classic of the so-called “Free World”.
The greatest threat to the American people is the owners of the United States (megacorporations, megalomaniac politicians, kidnapped media, and what President and General Eisenhower called in 1961 “the danger of the Military Industrial Complex”) and their happy slaves (lovers of the weapons and wars, fanatic drug addicts, homeless but evangelized capitalists).
On February 8, 2023, journalist Seymour Hersh published his well-known article stating that the 2022 Nord Stream sabotage was a CIA operation. The White House described it as “pure fiction”, despite the fact that exactly one year earlier President Biden had warned that “if Russia invades… then there will be longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it… I promise you we will be able to do it.” Seven months later and five before the war, the pipes on the Nord Stream II blew again.
Was the urgent and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan related to the sabotage against Nord Stream II? I have neither proof nor doubts. In thirty years, the documents will be declassified and prove that Washington and the CIA already had the war in Ukraine in their plans and needed to move the multibillion-dollar resources from the country of opium to a new war that aims to corner China, another enemy invented before that it exists.
As always, in the name of Peace, Freedom, and Democracy.
Por una ley de 1994 (Holocaust Education Bill), en las escuelas públicas de Florida hay una materia llamada “Holocausto”, por la cual se estudian las atrocidades racistas ocurridas en Europa contra el pueblo judío. En 2020, el gobernador Ron DeSantis promulgó otra ley que exige que todas las escuelas primarias y secundarias certifiquen que están enseñando a las nuevas generaciones sobre el Holocausto. Por entonces, los senadores de la comunidad afro lograron que también se incluya en los programas la mención a la Masacre de Ocoee, donde 30 personas negras fueron asesinadas en 1920, lo que, para entender el racismo endémico y las injusticias sociales, viene a ser como explicar el cuerpo humano por su sombra.
Por ley, también, desde el año 2022, en esas mismas escuelas secundarias de Florida, está prohibido discutir la historia racista de Estados Unidos. La razón radica, según el gobernador Ron DeSantis, en que “no se debe instruir a nadie para que se sienta como si no fuera igual o avergonzado por su raza. En Florida, no permitiremos que la agenda de la extrema izquierda se apodere de nuestras escuelas y lugares de trabajo. No hay lugar para el adoctrinamiento o la discriminación en Florida”.
Si de eso no se habla, eso no existe. De este lado del Atlántico, el racismo no existe y nunca existió.
Los mismos esclavistas que definían como “propiedad privada” a millones de esclavos (la base de la prosperidad del país) en base a su color de piel, llamaron a ese sistema “bendición de la esclavitud”, la que querían “expandir por todo el mundo” para “luchar por la libertad”, al tiempo que a su sistema de gobierno llamaban “democracia” (Brown, 1858).
Los mismos que robaron y exterminaron a pueblos nativos mucho más democráticos y civilizados que la nueva nación de la fiebre del oro antes de la fiebre del oro, lo llamaron “defensa propia” ante “ataques no provocados” de los salvajes (Jackson, 1833; Wayne, 1972).
Los mismos que inventaron la independencia de Texas para reinstaurar la esclavitud y luego la guerra contra México para apropiarse de la mitad de su territorio, los mismos que mataron y violaron a mujeres frente a hijos y esposos, lo hicieron por el designio divino del “destino manifiesto” de Dios (Scott , 1846).
Los mismos que practicaban el deporte de matar negros en Filipinas lo hicieron para cumplir con “la pesada carga del hombre blanco” de civilizar el mundo (Kipling, 1899).
Los mismos que invadieron, corrompieron y plagaron América latina de repúblicas bananeras, destruyeron democracias y plantaron decenas y decenas de dictaduras sangrientas, lo hicieron para luchar por la libertad y la democracia (Beveridge, 1900; Washington Post, 1920; CIA, XXX).
Los mismos que regaron Asia con bombas atómicas, millones de bombas más benéficas sin un año de tregua, agentes químicos sobre millones de seres humanos y dejaron millares de muertos por donde pasaron, llamaron a ese ejercicio extremo de racismo “heroica victoria”, aun cuando fueron humillantes derrotas (Johnson, 1964; Bush, 2003).
Pero de eso no se puede hablar porque puede ofender a alguien de piel blanca que se sienta identificado con todos esos campeones de la libertad, la democracia y la justicia divina.
Como decía una canción popular para reclutar voluntarios para la guerra inventada contra México:
La justicia es el lema de nuestro país
el que siempre tiene razón (Pratt, 1847).
No por casualidad, cada vez que esos grupos de fanáticos sintieron que sus privilegios estaban amenazados por la nunca aceptada igualdad, inventaron teorías de auto victimización, como la teoría del “exterminio blanco”, articulada en el siglo XIX para justificar el colonialismo y la opresión de pueblos no caucásicos (Pearson, 1893) y ahora ha renacido como una novedad como la “Teoría del reemplazo” que criminaliza a los inmigrantes de países no europeos como “peligrosos invasores” (Camus, 2010).
No por casualidad, Adolf Hitler se inspiró en el por entonces institucionalizado racismo de la extrema derecha estadounidense que adoctrinó a millones de personas a sentirse superior por su color de piel y a otros millones a aceptar su inferioridad por la misma razón (Grant, 1916).
No por casualidad, Hitler condecoró a los grandes hombres de negocios de Estados Unidos y prohibió que en la educación pública se enseñe “cosas de izquierdistas”. Antes de perseguir y matar judíos, en 1933 cerró la célebre escuela Bauhaus por estar lleno de “anti-alemanes” y ser un “refugio de izquierdistas” que querían cuestionar y cambiar la historia.
En Florida y en todo el país, los sistemas de educación deberían empezar por una materia llamada “Hipocresía patriótica” para desarrollar en algo la capacidad intelectual de enfrentar la realidad histórica sin edulcorantes y sin las fantasías de Hollywood, de Disney World y del Ku Klux Klan.
No somos responsable de los crímenes de nuestros antepasados, pero somos responsables de adoptarlos como propios al negarlos o justificarlos. Somos responsables de los crímenes y de las injusticias que se cometen hoy gracias al negacionismo de la realidad que, no sin fanatismo, llamamos patriotismo. Un negacionismo criminal y racista, ya que, otra vez, niega justicia y el básico derecho a la verdad de las víctimas para no incomodar la sensibilidad de los demás, el grupo dominante desde hace más de dos siglos, el que insiste en la estrategia de la autocomplacencia y la auto victimización como forma de calmar sus frustraciones y su odio fundacional. Peor aun cuando ese derecho a la verdad se ha cercenado por leyes y una cultura llena de tabúes, todo en nombre de una democracia que les estorba y usan, como a los demagogos de la antigua Atenas la usaron para demonizar y luego ejecutar a Sócrates por andar cuestionando demasiado. Todo de forma legal, está de más decir, hasta que las leyes son escritas por otros.
¿Qué mayor adoctrinación que el negacionismo o la prohibición de revisar la historia? ¿Qué más adoctrinación que imponer el silencio cómplice o una “historia patriótica” en las escuelas, recargada de mitos creados post factum y sin sustento documental?
En vertu d’une loi de 1994 (Holocaust Education Bill), les écoles publiques de Floride ont une matière appelée “Holocauste”, dans laquelle sont étudiées les atrocités racistes commises en Europe contre les juifs. En 2020, le gouverneur Ron DeSantis a promulgué une autre loi exigeant que toutes les écoles primaires et secondaires certifient qu’elles enseignent l’Holocauste aux nouvelles générations. Dans le même temps, les sénateurs de la communauté afro ont réussi à faire inclure dans le programme la mention du massacre d’Ocoee, où au moins 30 Noirs ont été tués en 1920, ce qui, pour comprendre le racisme endémique et les injustices sociales, revient à expliquer le corps humain par son ombre.
Par la loi également, à partir de 2022, dans ces mêmes lycées de Floride, il est interdit de discuter de l’histoire raciste usaméricaine. La raison, selon le gouverneur Ron DeSantis, est que « personne ne devrait apprendre à se sentir inégal ou à avoir honte de sa race. En Floride, nous ne laisserons pas l’agenda de l’extrême-gauche prendre le contrôle de nos écoles et de nos lieux de travail. Il n’y a pas de place pour l’endoctrinement ou la discrimination en Floride ».
Si on n’en parle pas, ça n’existe pas. De ce côté-ci de l’Atlantique, le racisme n’existe pas et n’a jamais existé.
Les mêmes esclavagistes qui définissaient des millions d’esclaves (la base de la prospérité du pays) comme “propriété privée” sur la base de leur couleur de peau, appelaient ce système une “bénédiction de l’esclavage”, qu’ils voulaient “répandre dans le monde entier” pour “lutter pour la liberté” tout en appelant leur système de gouvernement “démocratie” (Brown, 1858).
Les mêmes personnes qui ont volé et exterminé des peuples autochtones bien plus démocratiques et civilisés que la nouvelle nation de la ruée vers l’or avant la ruée vers l’or, ont appelé cela de la “légitime défense” contre des “attaques non provoquées” de sauvages (Jackson, 1833 ; Wayne, 1972).
Les mêmes personnes qui ont inventé l’indépendance du Texas pour rétablir l’esclavage, puis la guerre contre le Mexique pour s’approprier la moitié de son territoire, les mêmes personnes qui ont tué et violé des femmes devant leurs fils et leurs maris, l’ont fait selon le dessein divin de la “destinée manifeste” de Dieu (Scott, 1846).
Ceux qui pratiquaient le sport de tuer les Noirs aux Philippines le faisaient pour assumer “le lourd fardeau de l’homme blanc” de civiliser le monde (Kipling, 1899).
Ceux-là mêmes qui ont envahi, corrompu et affligé l’Amérique latine de républiques bananières, détruit des démocraties et implanté des dizaines et des dizaines de dictatures sanglantes, l’ont fait pour lutter pour la liberté et la démocratie (Beveridge, 1900 ; Washington Post, 1920 ; CIA, XXX).
Les mêmes personnes qui ont arrosé l’Asie de bombes atomiques, de millions d’autres bombes bénéfiques sans trêve, d’agents chimiques sur des millions d’êtres humains et qui ont laissé des milliers de morts partout où ils sont passés, ont qualifié cet exercice extrême du racisme de “victoire héroïque”, même s’il s’agissait de défaites humiliantes (Johnson, 1964 ; Bush, 2003).
Mais nous ne pouvons pas en parler car cela pourrait offenser une personne à la peau blanche qui s’identifie à tous ces champions de la liberté, de la démocratie et de la justice divine.
Comme le disait une chanson populaire utilisée pour recruter des volontaires pour la guerre inventée contre le Mexique :
La justice est la devise de notre pays Celui qui a toujours raison (Pratt, 1847).
Ce n’est pas un hasard si, chaque fois que ces groupes de fanatiques ont senti que leurs privilèges étaient menacés par l’égalité jamais acceptée, ils ont inventé des théories d’auto-victimisation, comme la théorie de “l’extermination des Blancs”, formulée au XIXe siècle pour justifier le colonialisme et l’oppression des peuples non caucasiens (Pearson, 1893) et qui renaît aujourd’hui sous la forme d’une nouveauté, la “théorie du grand remplacement”, qui criminalise les immigrants des pays non européens en les qualifiant de “dangereux envahisseurs” (Camus, 2010).
Ce n’est pas une hasard si Adolf Hitler a été inspiré par le racisme institutionnalisé de l’extrême droite usaméricaine qui a endoctriné des millions de personnes à se sentir supérieures en raison de la couleur de leur peau et des millions d’autres à accepter leur infériorité pour la même raison (Grant, 1916).
Ce n’est pas un hasard si Hitler a décoré les grands hommes d’affaires usaméricains et a interdit l’enseignement des “choses de gauche” dans l’éducation publique. Avant de persécuter et de tuer les Juifs, il a fermé en 1933 la célèbre école du Bauhaus parce qu’elle était remplie d’“anti-allemands” et qu’elle était un “repaire de gauchistes” qui voulaient remettre en question et changer l’histoire.
En Floride et dans tout le pays, les systèmes éducatifs devraient commencer par une matière appelée “Hypocrisie patriotique” pour développer une certaine capacité intellectuelle à faire face à la réalité historique sans les édulcorants et les fantasmes d’Hollywood, de Disney World et du Ku Klux Klan.
Nous ne sommes pas responsables des crimes de nos ancêtres, mais nous sommes responsables de les faire nôtres en les niant ou en les justifiant. Nous sommes responsables des crimes et des injustices qui sont commis aujourd’hui grâce au déni de la réalité que, non sans fanatisme, nous appelons patriotisme. Un négationnisme criminel et raciste, car, une fois de plus, il nie la justice et le droit fondamental à la vérité des victimes pour ne pas froisser la sensibilité des autres, le groupe dominant depuis plus de deux siècles, celui qui insiste sur la stratégie de l’auto-indulgence et de l’auto-victimisation pour calmer ses frustrations et sa haine fondatrice. Pire encore lorsque ce droit à la vérité a été restreint par des lois et une culture pleine de tabous, tout cela au nom d’une démocratie qui les entrave et qu’ils utilisent, comme les démagogues de l’Athènes antique l’ont fait pour diaboliser puis exécuter Socrate pour avoir posé trop de questions. Tout cela est légal, cela va sans dire, jusqu’à ce que les lois soient écrites par d’autres.
Quel plus grand endoctrinement que le négationnisme ou l’interdiction de réviser l’histoire ? Quel plus grand endoctrinement que d’imposer un silence complice ou une “histoire patriotique” dans les écoles, surchargée de mythes créés post factum et sans support documentaire ?
Professor Walter Scheidel, in his book The Great Leveler, showed, more than convincingly, that from prehistory to the present day, all the socioeconomic systems known to humanity tended towards inequality and ended in global catastrophes. The first is quite obvious and we are seeing it today: those who have financial and economic power have inflamed political power, which produces a snowball effect. The rich and their corporations are the big donors to the political parties and then write the laws at their convenience. In 1971, a classic of political comics, The Wizard of Id summed it up best: “The golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules.”
The current corporate capitalism is a legacy of the Slave system: in the name of freedom, the exploitation of those below, the concentration of wealth, the sacralization of the masters-entrepreneurs, and the demonization of the workers-slaves.
In 2013, the French philosopher Thomas Piketty wrote his acclaimed book Capital in the Twenty-First Century in which he argued that, to a large extent, the growth of inequality is due to the fact that the wealth of the rich (based on stock of all assets) grew faster than the economy and the income of the rest, that is, faster than the wages of those who struggle to survive.
But inequality is not only economic; it is also racial, sexual, religious, ideological, and cultural. For generations, societies have debated the meaning of social inequality and whether this is good or bad. One of the conservative hypotheses (since they never reached the category of theories) was based on justifying inequality as a natural consequence of prosperity. In a tribe or in ancient times the differences were never as great as in our (proud) current societies. Hence the idea that (1) prosperity comes from inequality or (2) inequality is a necessary and inevitable consequence of prosperity prevailed. “Never before have the poor been less poor than today”, and we have to thank Capitalism and the rich for all this.
This show of radical ignorance is the banner of libertarians and neoliberals, missionaries against the intervention of governments (of their regulations and their taxes) in the social and economic livesof the peoples. Ironically, they have the US Corporations as their ideological model, whose prosperity, like Europe’s, was built on slavery and by force of brutal imperial interventions (by governments and their secret agencies) on the rest of humanity. Nor do they see corporations as dictatorships in the way fiefdoms were in the Middle Ages and Banana republics more recently.
Mere myths. Where is it shown that prosperity comes from the accumulated wealth of the rich? Why not see that development and wealth are products of humanity, based on the accumulated experience and knowledge of the millenary human history?
Another dogma of today’s world lies in a misreading of Adam Smith himself, according to whom all social progress is based on the ambition and selfishness of the individual. Hence, the social myth according to which progress and prosperity are based on the ambition of individuals to be millionaires, which is why there is no need to “punish success” with taxes. A popular but cheap myth, if we consider that all the progress, all or almost all the technical, scientific, and social inventions recorded in history (even in the Capitalist Age) have been made by people who were not thinking about the damn money.
Social myths do not come from the people. They come from power. Yes, (1) the Industrial Revolution multiplied (2) wealth and (3) inequality a hundredfold, but you can’t separate the three elements of (4) brutal Euro-American imperialism. If South America had plundered the rest of the world for centuries, today it would be a model of progress and development.
The fact that today the poor are less poor than yesterday is not proof of the benefits of Capitalism, since humanity has been making progress for millennia and all at an accelerated rate. No technical or scientific progress is not due to Capitalism or the capitalists. The millionaires just kidnapped them. The current corporate capitalism is a legacy of the Slave system: in the name of freedom, the exploitation of those below, the concentration of wealth, the sacralization of the masters-entrepreneurs, and the demonization of the workers-slaves.
At this moment, Capitalism is bringing nothing but existential problems, such as (1) the destruction of the planet by dint of growth based on consumption and destruction and (2) the aggravation of social differences, which will lead to greater conflicts. Capitalism is exhausted and the crisis lies in denying the socialization of human progress, which will be inevitable (after the breakdown) with massive robotization and the development of AI.
To suggest that the problem of inequality be solved with handouts is like fighting an infection with aspirin. Instead of being cured, the infection increases. The breakdown could be avoided by a global agreement, but if sanity were not a rare commodity, we would not be drowning in an environmental crisis now. The alternative is a global collapse, a dystopian situation where all the laws accepted today as dogmas, such as the value of the dollar and of private property are broken. A collapse where there are no winners but a definitive regression to the Middle Ages.
If in a town there were kids dying of hunger and someone happened to light a cigarette with a hundred-dollar bill, it would be described as immoral. Well, that’s the situation today. That is to say that we are in the first level of three:
1) Moral: It is immoral that children die of hunger in a super-rich and hyper-technological world. Basic needs covered would be the first step of a humanistic civilization.
2) Injustice: Then, there would be the discussion of the injustice of what falls to each one and based on what reason.
3) Convenience: A less relevant discussion is about the necessity or convenience of inequity. For many of us, equity favors development and even the production of wealth. Growth as a precondition for any redistribution is a dogma created by power.
The super-rich are the enemies of humanity. Not only do they kidnap wealth from the rest, they not only monopolize politics in democracies and dictatorships, but they keep them in a state of hypnosis through (1) the great propaganda media, (2) the media of distraction, toxic fun and fragmentary, and (3) by virtue of keeping millions of other humans in a state of need, as wage slaves with no time to think that their brothers and neighbors are not the pirates.
But a large part of humanity loves, admires, and desires the super-rich, as the slaves loved the masters who threw a potion at them at the end of an exhausting day. The master and the potion were received as a blessing and the rebels as the demons who wanted to turn the world upside down.
The holy verse of conservatives in America is the Second Amendment passed in 1789. Like any verse in any holy book, it is brief and open to different interpretations. As in any religion, they are theological interpretations, that is, political.
A conservative interpretation leads us to conclusions unwelcome by conservatives. Thomas Jefferson (his books were banned for being an “atheist”) was of the undogmatic idea that all laws should be changed according to the needs of each generation. But both Jefferson and the rest of the “founding fathers” were racists, a detail that is not recognized even by today’s racists.
The verse of the amendment reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Five words are the keys to understanding what the amendment means: Militia, free State, people, and Arms. Let’s start with the last one.
5. Arms. In the same way that the word “car” then meant something quite different from what “car” means today and hence the new traffic laws, the same occurs with the word which meant “arms” meant a flintlock or a musket rifle. In any case, for a person to be able to kill another, he had to be at a distance of a few yards, and, after shooting, he had to do some craft work to reload. For some decades, “the people” and the judges understand that with the word “weapons”, in 1789 the founding fathers also referred to an AR-15 and other assault rifles capable of killing, at a much greater distance, several dozens of people.
4. People. From the same constitution of 1787, the word “people” in “We the people” meant “white man, a slaver, and owner”. By no means black, Indian, or poor white. But a word is an ideolexicon, that is, a bag used to load different ideological meanings.
3.,2. Free State. The idea of “free states” as opposed to “slave states” belongs to an advanced nineteenth century that was struggling to abolish slavery, long after expanding it over Indian and Mexican territories where slavery did not exist or was illegal. In 1789 and for a few generations thereafter, “the free state” was the slave state of whites. In fact, in all the letters, congressional transcripts, and newspaper articles it is assumed that “the free race” was the white race, since the others were incapable of understanding freedom. Slavery expanded in the name of Law, Order, and Freedom. The third stanza of the national anthem written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, proclaims:
“No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave”.
The song was prompted by the British burning of the government house in Washington, later painted white by the slaves to hide the memory of the fire. England punished a similar attack by the Americans on Canada, when they wanted that territory as the fourteenth state. Many black slaves sided with the invader, for obvious reasons, and the patriot Scott Key, a slaveholder by law, unleashed his poetic fury in the famous song, now the National Anthem.
1. Militia. As anyone in their right mind can see, the expression “a well-regulated militia” does not mean individuals acting on their own. But that is not all. In both the 18th and 19th centuries these militias were the slavers’ police. How could a handful of white masters subdue a majority of black slaves? Not by the whip but by firearms. But since the masters formed a confederation in each state and among the slave states, the armed militias were of vital importance to safeguard the lives of the white masters and the system itself, which produced the richest men in the country, the slave capitalism of the 19th century, even when the north was already an old pole of commercial and industrial development.
Every right is regulated, and all interpretation depends on the political interests of the moment. Let’s see an absurd example referred to the First Amendment, of which I count myself as a radical defender.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, a “non-profit” organization in favor of the rights of large corporations. Its founder, Floyd Brown, defined it as follows: “We’re just old-fashioned, blue-collar social conservatives. These are people who couldn’t care less about politics, want to be left alone by government, but if their country calls for them to fight abroad, will”. For this type of old Anglo-Saxon fanaticism, the brutal interventions in other countries are not political nor are they about racism and economic interests.
In the lawsuit and in the final ruling, five members out of nine of the Court understood that the limitation of donations from any group to a candidate constituted a “violation of freedom of expression.” In addition, they began to have the right to do so anonymously, which is known as “dark money”. Of course, again, in the “Nation of Laws” everything is legal. Corruption is a thing of Latin Americans and poor blacks in Africa.
As is often the case in a democracy hijacked by corporations, the citizens had a different opinion. In 2010, a survey by ABC and The Washington Post had revealed that 80 percent of Americans were opposed to the elimination of barriers and limits on donations to politicians proposed by Citizens United.
The (political) interpretations against regulations always favor those who are in power. Nobody says that in every airport in the United States the Constitution is violated because the carrying of weapons is not allowed. The age to buy assault rifles is 18 years, but if it were up to the fans, it would be six years, when the victim enters school and does not feel free and safe. Now, is the 18-year limit not a regulation? It is not in the Second Amendment.
Meanwhile, 40,000 people die each year in this country from gun violence. Not accidentally, the killings are often racially motivated against “inferior races,” since that obsession is in the DNA of this country’s history. Blacks, Asians, or Hispanics do not slaughter whites out of hatred. The problem of crime in black neighborhoods is due to this same history of discrimination: when they became citizens, they were immediately segregated at gunpoint and by various policies such as the layout of highways or the criminalization of certain drugs introduced by the same CIA to the country and used by Nixon, deliberately, to criminalize blacks and Latinos.
This is the concept of freedom of those who suffer from a paranoia that does not let them be free. And they impose it on others in the name of freedom—and, as in times of legal slavery, are defended even by the “happy slaves”.
President Joe Biden has announced his intention to exclude Cuba and Venezuela from the Summit of the Americas scheduled for June 22. Under Secretary of State, Brian Nichols explained that non-democratic countries should not be invited.
Deciding which countries can attend a regional summit is not considered authoritarian by a country that is historically responsible for thousands of military interventions in the region alone, for several dozen dictatorships, coups, destruction of democracies, and massacres of all kinds and colors since the nineteenth century until yesterday, under the authoritarian exercise of imposing its own laws on other countries and violating all agreements with inferior races that ceased to benefit it.
Washington and the big corporations it serves have not only been the promoters of the bloody capitalist dictatorships in the region since the 19th century, but also the main promoters of the much talked about communism and of the current social, political, and economic reality of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Now that Governor Florida has signed a law to teach about the evils of communism in schools, it would be refreshing if teachers aren’t limited to the McDonald’s menu.
All those crimes and robberies at gunpoint have gone unpunished without exception. In 2010, the Obama administration apologized for the syphilis experiments in Guatemala, but nothing more than a tear. Impunity, the mother of all corruption, has been reinforced by a kind of Hiroshima Syndrome, for which every year the Japanese apologize to Washington for the atomic bombs they dropped on their own cities full of innocents.
A large part of Latin America has suffered and is suffering from the Hiroshima Syndrome for which not only are reparations not demanded for two hundred years of crimes against humanity, but the victim feels guilty of a cultural corruption inoculated by this same brutality. A few days ago, a lady received her brother at the Miami airport wrapped in an American flag while she yelled at him in Spanish: “Welcome to the land of freedom!” It is the morality of the slave, by which, for centuries, the oppressed tried to be “good blacks”, “good Indians”, “good Hispanics”, “good women”, “good poor” … That is, obedient exploited.
All this is framed within the economic interests of an empire (“God put our resources in other countries”). Still, the racial factor was essential in the fanaticism of the white enslaver and the black slave, the rich businessman and the poor worker. Currently, anti-racism movements in the United States have yielded to a convenient divorce whereby global thought and sensibility, macro politics, is annulled to make room for the micro-politics of atomized claims. One of them, the heroic and justified fight against racism loses perspective when it is forgotten that imperialism is not only an exercise in racism but that historically it was fueled by this moral calamity.
Before the emergence of the excuse of “the fight against communism,” the open justification was “to put an order in the republics of blacks”, because “blacks do not know how to govern themselves” or exploit their own resources. Once the cold war ended, racism was resorted to disguised as a “clash of civilizations” (Samuel Huntington) or financial interventions in regions with “sick cultures”, such as Latin America, or in lands with terrorists of other religions such as the Middle East, where, in Iraq alone, they left more than a million dead, without a name and without a well-defined figure, as tradition establishes.
This slave morality was and is a common practice. In 2021, for example, the conservative’s favorite California gubernatorial candidate, Larry Elder, argued that it is reasonable for whites to demand compensation for the abolition of slavery since blacks were their property. “Like it or not, slavery was legal,” Elder said. “Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War.”
Elder is a black lawyer through his mother, father, grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. That is, a descendant of private property. By the same logic, Haiti paid this compensation to France for more than a century.
The California candidate’s proposal responded to movements calling for compensation for descendants of slaves. An argument against it is that we do not inherit the sufferings of our ancestors (something science has begun to question) and each one is responsible for their own destiny. Something very much of the Protestant ethic and world view: one is lost or saved alone. The Protestant doesn’t care if his brother or his daughter goes to hell if he deserves Paradise. Who is not happy in Paradise?
But the past is not only alive in culture. It is alive in our institutions and in how class privileges are organized. It would suffice to mention the electoral system of the United States, a direct legacy of the slave system, by which rural and white states have more representation than more diverse states and with ten times their approval. Through this system, in 2016 Trump became president with almost three million fewer votes than Clinton.
Post-slavery segregation is also alive today, with black, Chinese, and Latino ghettos crowded into large cities as an inheritance of the freedom won in 1865, but without economic support. In order not to continue with the policies of urban segregation with the layout of highways or the criminalization of certain drugs, all with the declared intention of keeping some ethnic groups in a state of perpetual servitude and demoralization. For not continuing with the fortunes amassed in the past that were transmitted to groups and families as in the Middle Ages, titles of nobility were transmitted.
I believe that Latin Americans are, at least, a few centuries behind in terms of economic reparation for destroyed democracies and dictatorships imposed at gunpoint. From the dispossession of half of the Mexican territory to reinstate slavery to the dictatorships in the protectorates, the banana wars at the beginning of the 20th century, the multiple massacres of workers, the destruction of democracies with the sole objective of eliminating popular protests and protecting the interests of large companies such as UFCo., ITT, Standard Oil Co., PepsiCo, or Anaconda Mining Co., all crimes officially recognized by Washington and the CIA, would be more than enough arguments to demand compensation.
However, as the logic of banks and investors indicates, reparation is always required from the victims. The same could be said of Europe that, for centuries, enriched itself with hundreds of tons of gold and thousands of tons of silver from Latin America, or massacred tens of millions of Africans while stealing astronomical fortunes that prove “the way success” according to Vargas Llosa.
Washington is not in a position to moralize, neither inside nor outside its borders. But his arrogance stems from his historical ignorance or, more likely, from his faith in popular forgetfulness. Of course, since we are here to contribute, we remind him of his long history of killings and sermons. We remind you that there are a few pending accounts.
Of course, I can understand that the solutions, although possible and fair, are “too utopian”. That is why I would like to suggest, as my grandmother used to say on her farm in Uruguay: “gentlemen, You look prettier with your mouth shut”.
Hugo Godoy. Ecuador. Diagnóstico Social – La frontera salvaje 200 años de fanatismo anglosajón en América Latina. Mayo 3, 2022
Washington, hablemos de reparaciones
El presidente Joe Biden ha anunciado su intención de excluir a Cuba y Venezuela de la Cumbre de las Américas programada para el 22 de junio. El subsecretario de Estado, Brian Nichols, explicó que no se puede invitar a países no democráticos.
Decidir qué países pueden asistir a una cumbre regional no es considerado autoritario por un país que es el responsable histórico de miles de intervenciones militares sólo en la región, de varias decenas de dictaduras, golpes de Estado, destrucción de democracias y matanzas de todo tipo y color desde el siglo XIX hasta ayer, bajo el ejercicio autoritario de imponer a los demás países sus propias leyes y violar todos los acuerdos con las razas inferiores que dejaron de beneficiarlo.
Washington y las Corporaciones a las que sirve no sólo han sido los promotores de las sangrientas dictaduras capitalistas en la región desde el siglo XIX, sino también los principales promotores del tan mentado comunismo y de la realidad social, política y económica actual de Cuba y Venezuela. Ahora que el gobernador Florida ha firmado una ley para enseñar sobre los males del comunismo en las escuelas, sería estimulante que los maestros no se limitaran al menú de McDonald’s.
Todos esos crímenes y robos a punta de cañón han quedado impunes sin excepción. En 2010, el gobierno de Obama pidió perdón por los experimentos con sífilis en Guatemala, pero nada más que una lágrima. La impunidad, madre de todas las corrupciones, ha sido reforzada por una especie de Síndrome de Hiroshima, por el cual todos los años los japoneses le piden perdón a Washington por las bombas atómicas que le arrojaron sobre ciudades llenas de inocentes.
Gran parte de América latina ha sufrido y sufre el Síndrome de Hiroshima por el cual no sólo no se exigen reparaciones por doscientos años de crímenes de lesa humanidad, sino que la víctima se siente culpable de una corrupción cultural inoculada por esta misma brutalidad. Hace unos días una señora recibía a su hermano en el aeropuerto de Miami envuelta en una bandera estadounidense mientras le gritaba en castellano: “¡Bienvenido a la tierra de la libertad!”. Es la moral del esclavo, por el cual, durante siglos, los oprimidos se esforzaron en ser “buenos negros”, “buenos indios”, “buenos hispanos”, “buenas mujeres”, “buenos pobres”. Es decir, obedientes explotados.
Todo esto se enmarca dentro de los intereses económicos de un imperio (“Dios puso nuestros recursos en otros países”) pero el factor racial fue fundamental en el fanatismo del amo blanco y del esclavo negro, del empresario rico y del trabajador pobre. Actualmente, los movimientos contra el racismo en Estados Unidos han cedido a un divorcio conveniente por el cual el pensamiento y la sensibilidad global, macro política, se anula para dejar lugar a la micropolítica de las reivindicaciones atomizadas. Una de ellas, la heroica y justificada lucha contra el racismo pierde perspectiva cuando se olvida que el imperialismo no sólo es un ejercicio racista, sino que históricamente fue alimentado por esta calamidad moral.
Antes de la aparición de la excusa de “la lucha contra el comunismo” la justificación abierta era “poner orden en las repúblicas de negros”, porque “los negros no saben gobernarse” ni explotar sus propios recursos. Una vez terminada la guerra fría se recurrió al racismo disfrazado de “choque de civilizaciones” (Samuel Huntington) o las intervenciones financieras en regiones con “culturas enfermas”, como América latina, o en tierras con terroristas de otras religiones como en Medio Oriente, donde, sólo en Irak, dejaron más de un millón de muertos, sin nombre y sin una cifra bien definida, como lo establece la tradición.
Esta moral del esclavo fue y es una práctica común. En 2021, por ejemplo, el candidato favorito de los conservadores a la gobernación de California, Larry Elder, afirmó que es razonable que los blancos exijan una reparación por la abolición de la esclavitud, ya que los negros eran de su propiedad. “Guste o no, la esclavitud era legal”, dijo Elder. “La abolición de la esclavitud les arrebató a los amos blancos su propiedad”. Elder es un abogado negro por parte de madre, padre, abuelos y tatarabuelos. Es decir, descendiente de propiedad privada. Por la misma lógica, Haití pagó esta compensación a Francia por más de un siglo.
La propuesta del candidato de California fue una respuesta a los movimientos que reclaman una compensación para los descendientes de esclavos. Un argumento en contra es que no heredamos los sufrimientos de nuestros antepasados y cada uno es responsable de su propio destino. Algo muy de la ética y la visión del mundo protestante: uno se pierde o se salva solo. Al protestante no le importa si su hermano o su hija se van al infierno si él se merece el Paraíso. ¿Quién no es feliz en el Paraíso?
Pero el pasado no solo está vivo en la cultura. Está vivo en nuestras instituciones y en cómo se organizan los privilegios de clase. Bastaría con mencionar el sistema electoral de Estados Unidos, una herencia directa del sistema esclavista, por el cual estados rurales y blancos poseen más representación que estados más diversos y con diez veces su aprobación. Por este sistema, en 2016 Trump se convirtió en presidente con casi tres millones de votos menos que Clinton.
También la segregación post esclavista está viva hoy, con guetos de negros, chinos y latinos hacinados en las grandes urbes como una herencia de la libertad ganada en 1865, pero sin sustento económico. Para no seguir con las políticas de segregación urbana con el trazado de autopistas o la criminalización de ciertas drogas, todo con la declarada intención de mantener a unos grupos étnicos en estado de servidumbre y desmoralización. Por no seguir con las fortunas amasadas en el pasado que se trasmitieron a grupos y familias como en la Edad Media se transmitían los títulos de nobleza.
Creo que los latinoamericanos están, por lo menos, unos siglos atrasados en cuanto a una reparación económica por las democracias destruidas y por las dictaduras impuestas a punta de cañón. Desde el despojo de la mitad del territorio mexicano para reinstalar la esclavitud hasta las dictaduras en los protectorados, las guerras bananeras a principios del siglo XX, las múltiples matanzas de obreros, la destrucción de democracias con el único objetivo de eliminar protestas populares y proteger los intereses de grandes compañías como UFCo., ITT, Standard Oil Co., PepsiCo, o Anaconda Mining Co., todos crímenes reconocidos oficialmente por Washington y la CIA, serían argumentos más que suficientes para exigir una reparación.
Sin embargo, como lo indica la lógica de bancos e inversores, la reparación es siempre exigida a las víctimas. Lo mismo se podría decir de la Europa que, por siglos, se enriqueció con cientos de toneladas de oro y miles de toneladas de plata de América latina, o masacrando decenas de millones de africanos al tiempo que les robaban fortunas astronómicas que prueban “el camino correcto del éxito” según Vargas Llosa.
Washington no está en condiciones de moralizar, ni dentro ni fuera de fronteras. Pero su arrogancia procede de su ignorancia histórica o, más probable, de su fe en la desmemoria popular. Claro que, como estamos aquí para aportar, le recordamos su larga historia de matanzas y sermones. Le recordamos que hay unas cuantas cuentas pendientes.
Claro, puedo entender que las soluciones, aunque posibles y justas, son “demaiado utópicas”. Por eso quisiera sugerirle, como decía mi abuelita en el campo, “señores, calladitos se ven más bonitos”.
Like a century ago, the Nazis continue to gain ground based on their own frustrations. Frustrations, not only for realizing, alarmed, that they are not a superior race but only pathologies of evolution. Frustrations, not to notice but to feel the inevitable decline in well-being that arises from the loss of vampiric power, that power enjoyed by all empires that call themselves civilized, developed, clean, orderly, peaceful, while they export their crimes and miseries to other corners of the planet in the name of civilization, progress, peace, and freedom.
We still don’t know if it will take another total war, like World War II, for all that human scum to go back where they belong, that is, to their private sewers, for another hundred years.
Nazism is not just an ideological issue. It is a deep and chronic moral illness with different names and with the ability to seduce even its own victims before sending them to concentration camps or before dropping two atomic bombs on them for being disobedient.
Fascism is like that. It has always been this way, and it will never, ever change. It doesn’t matter how pretty he looks, with his blue eyes and his phobia of personal hygiene.
One specialty of a dominant power is its ability to hijack the achievements and merits of others, from material progress to social progress. Thus, capitalism, neoliberalism, and the new radical ideology of business (whereby even the small and long-suffering businessmen and entrepreneurs believe they are members of the same union as Elon Musk, the Walton family and Donald Trump), has convinced the world that we owe all the economic, technological, scientific advances and even the bread we eat to its benefactor order. This insanity, easily refutable but fossilized in popular superstition, is as absurd as the idea that capitalism and democracy go together, when history shows that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it has meant the opposite. Big businesses and corporations have promoted multiple wars and dictatorships in multiple poor countries, with the exception of the country where the power and the interest of order and good example came from. One of these problems (only one but of vital importance), was noticed and denounced on the television network by the same President and General Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, at the time of saying goodbye to the presidency: the obscene alliance in his country between the military power and the corporations. Long before, president Rutherford Hayes had done the same in 1886: “This is not the government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations ”.
Democracy is another example of perfect kidnapping, just as the official religions were, whereby even Jesus ends up being the protector of capitalism, the spokesman for the unbridled ambition of billionaires, and blesses wars, and dictatorships of all kinds. When democracies were unavoidable in multiple countries, they were colonized through the big press, and the new mass media such as radio and cinema.
In the United States, at the end of the 19th century, the white slavers, defeated in the Civil War, rebelled against the new rights of the blacks. They created the oldest terrorist group in existence, the KKK, and the uprisings, lynchings and even direct attempts at coups d’état, banana republic style, became popular. Some were successful. On November 9, 1898, a mob seized the court of Wilmington, the largest city in North Carolina, and declared “Independence of the White Race» based on the “superiority of the white man” and the constitution of the country, which “It had not been written to include ignorant people of African origin.” The blacks, the majority of this city, have managed to participate in the last elections, electing some representatives. The next day, two thousand armed whites stormed the streets, destroyed and burned businesses and the only newspaper in the city run by the inferior race. Unsurprisingly, word got out that some blacks have opened fire on the white hooligans, for which the order was “kill any bloody black who shows up.” To bring order, the governor ordered the soldiers who have returned from Cuba (where they kidnapped other blacks from their own revolution) to take the city. As a result, a few hundred blacks were executed and thousands had to leave their homes. The government and its representatives, elected at the ballot box, were replaced by a dictatorship that will never be called a dictatorship, but the government of responsible and peaceful citizens who restored «law and order» and the will of God. Sound recent?
Even feminists, fighters for the female vote like Rebecca Latimer Felton, will recommend lynching the blacks who won the 1898 elections in North Carolina, since the more educated and the more they participate in politics, the greater threat they pose to the virginity of the defenseless. White women. Lynching was (is) an institution established by the superior race that, not without irony, fears the physical and sexual superiority of the inferior races. Felton, a champion of modernizing education, kept insisting that the more money that goes into educating blacks, the more crimes they commit. For years, she argued that giving him the right to vote would lead to the rape of white women. Although from generations immemorial rapes were generally committed by white men against young black women, the pornographic fantasy of power never rested and Felton recommended a thousand lynchings a week to reduce the sexual appetites of these dark and ignorant men that she considers gorillas. In 1922, for 24 hours, the racist feminist became the first United States senator from Georgia. The second woman was Kelly Loeffler, also from Georgia, who, in January 2021, lost to an african american candidate Raphael Warnock. That same day, thousands of white fanatics stormed Congress in Washington, where the electoral college proved her defeat.
In the 20th century, as a way to avoid the catastrophe of the white race announced by Charles Pearson, the word race was replaced by communism. Semantic castling is so effective that it will outlive generations of misfit critics, unpatriotics, and all manner of radical left-wing extremists. In Latin America, the more radical extreme left was also an inevitable collateral effect of imperial power. Neither Cuba nor Venezuela nor any other pro-independence experience would have been what they were and what they are without the persistent and profound intervention of Washington and the megacorporations from the north. The extreme right however, from the military dictatorships to the sheltered democracies, also justified in the reaction against the reaction, too. Theodore Roosevelt had put it in writing in 1897: “the democracy of this century needs no more justification for its existence than the simple fact that it has been organized so that the white race will have the best lands in the New World.” Rich whites, to be more precise.
Now in the United States, the events present and to come will move the political spectrum a bit to the left, which, due to the generational change, was already going in that direction before the conservative reaction led by Trump. Trump will not win the support of the Pentagon because of a functional difference between the US and Latin American armies. They have always been complementary: that of the United States is in charge of the international level and those of the Third World of domestic matters, not fighting any war with other armies but repressing popular demands within their countries.
In the United States, popular and progressive movements were central to its most profound social changes, from the abolition of slavery, the struggle for labor rights, the women’s vote, to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s ( as we recalled above, these movements were also frequently hijacked by the reaction of the wounded power). The extreme right, on the other hand, is the permanent reaction in favor of the masters, of those above, almost always led by the same slaves and foremen from below. Now, in the United States, as in Europe and Latin America, the extreme right is a collateral manifestation of social and political power that, with the frustration of its powerless members, creates a social instability that becomes a threat to them. interests of the power they serve. Suddenly, Wall Street and the dominant corporations cry out for the “restoration of order.” Unpredictability is the second biggest enemy of investors. Unpredictability is the second biggest enemy of investors.
For more than a century, Latin American governments have promoted a model of national development based on land privatization and privileging the interests of foreign investors rather than the rights of workers; policies that in fact promoted economic growth without development. In many cases, this kind of economic growth instead increased inequality and poverty. Democratic or dictatorial governments implemented these policies by hook or by crook, which often forced the people to choose between renouncing their rights or submitting to the brutality of power concretized in armies who served the creole oligarchy in the name of “national security” against foreign invaders. In such armies, often the most deprived individuals were the most zealous and violent guardians of the privileges of others.
This domestic and national economic policy was concretely connected to the interests of international corporations. The social structure in which creole elites of the postcolonial era served the ruling classes mirrored the relationship between the indigenous nobility who served the Spanish crown. In the 20th century, such power lodged itself in traditional commodities-export ruling classes and transnational foreign companies, which were often supported by direct interventions from superpower governments. Despite repeated attempts to prove otherwise, Latin American history cannot be understood without taking into account the history of U.S. interventions, from the Monroe Doctrine (1823) to the dozens of U.S. military interventions in Latin America. The latter includes the annexation of more than half of the Mexican territory in mid-19th century, a long list of military interventions leading to the dramatic establishment of bloody puppet dictators throughout the 20th century, which left hundreds of thousands murdered, and the destruction of democracies such as Guatemala or Chile in the name of freedom and democracy. Large multinational corporations, such as the United Fruit Company in Central America, Pepsi Cola in Chile and Volkswagen in Brazil, motivated or supported many of these coups d’état. The dominant creole classes in turn supported the overthrow of legitimate governments because they stood to gain more from the export business of cheap natural resources than from the internal development of their nations.
The extreme violence that resulted directly from these social inequities generated internal displacements and international migrations, especially to the United States, the world hegemonic economy. Yet many immigrants arrived in a country that denied them the same individual rights that had been withheld from them in their home countries. As Aviva Chomsky illustrates in her new book, Unwanted People: Histories of Race and Displacement in the Americas, the United States’ history of racially motivated class stratification and anti-labor policy dovetailed with the shape that the country’s immigration took in the 1960s.
Unwanted People presents a selection of historian Aviva Chomsky’s writings, which explores the roots of these problems from the concrete perspective of groups who have experienced the effects of this violent history. Chomsky’s work is always incisive and challenging. Each text dismantles modern myths about Latin American immigration, U.S. history, and the labor movement. Specifically, she highlights popular superstitions about immigration that are exacerbated by international reporting and the “master narratives” that have been consolidated by a strategic forgetting, both from U.S. and Latin American perspectives. Chomsky brings these challenges to the dominant narratives of colonial history to bear on topics ranging from the United States’ global and colonial economy to an analysis of the colonial history of Africa in the movie Black Panther.
In “The Logic of Displacement” and “A Central American Drama,” Chomsky analyzes two apparently different realities that are nevertheless connected by their subterranean logics. The historical displacement of Afro-Colombians, she argues, has been caused not only by racism but also by the logic of economic convenience. Chomsky questions the historical explanation of La Violencia in Colombia (initiated with the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948) as a simple dichotomy, “liberal versus conservative,” and reviews the interests of the white Catholic elite of Antioquia over Afro-Colombian regions, rich in natural resources. Thus, in Colombia there is a case similar to that of others on the continent: the internal displacement of rural, indigenous or afro-descendant communities for economic reasons (gold, platinum, wood) is executed “voluntarily” through the purchase of property accompanied by violence inflicted by paramilitary groups, which functioned as an extralegal arm and ally of the armies and the governments of Latin American countries.
Leftist guerrilla groups emerged as a counter to the paramilitary groups that represented the typically conservative right interests of the government. These also served largely as an excuse for military and paramilitary violence. Although it could be argued that the guerrilla groups’ amplification of regional violence also played a role in the displacement of people, Chomsky argues that displacement was not one of their objectives, as it was in the case of paramilitaries, who furthered the interest of the big businesses laying claim to the land and its natural resources. Meanwhile, the impunity of those in power contributed dramatically to the scale of this movement’s violence.
Neoliberal economic policies combined with an increasingly militarized southern United States border had an impact on Central American migration and was the direct result of United States foreign policy.
Internationally, displacement was not always due to direct military actions, but it was always the result of economic forces. The United States increased control of immigration, especially immigration of the displaced poor, as a solution to the increased migration that resulted from years of interventionist foreign policy. The Mexican-American border, which had been permeable for centuries, became a violent wall in 1965, forcing job seekers to avoid returning to their homes in the south as they used to do. This reality was aggravated by the policies and international treaties of the new neoliberal wave of the 1990s, such as NAFTA, which financially ruined the Mexican peasants who could not compete with the subsidized agriculture of the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. conservatives attacked leftist guerrilla and community groups, such as the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, who resisted such policies.
Neoliberal economic policies combined with an increasingly militarized southern United States border had an impact on Central American migration and was the direct result of United States foreign policy. In Chomsky’s words:
“U.S. policies directly led to today’s crises in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Since Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the reformist, democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, it has consistently cultivated repressive military regimes, savagely repressed peasant and popular movements for social change, and imposed economic policies including so-called free trade ones that favor foreign investors and have proven devastating to the rural and urban poor.”
As Chomsky rightly points out in her book They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (2007), it is no coincidence that when racial discrimination became politically incorrect in the 1960s, it was replaced in the law and in the political and social discourse by national discrimination. This, coupled with the fact that Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants were no longer returning to their countries because of widespread violence, made the new border policies even more dangerous and sometimes deadly for both migrant workers and those fleeing political and social violence, mostly people from the Northern Triangle of Central America.
This sequence of historical events has countless consequences in the present. However, politicians, major media, and U.S. citizens only see the faces of children, men and women speaking a “foreign language” (though, of course, Spanish is older than English in the United States). Political and news discourse represents immigrants as “invading” cities to take advantage of the services and benefits of American democracy, which strips immigration politics of its historicity. It is a false logic that turns workers into idlers, imagines welfare abusers when in fact immigrants sustain the care economy with their labor and their taxes, and sees the victims of neocolonial trade policies as invading criminals. In a recent interview with Aviva Chomsky about the current myths that dominate the social narrative in the United States today, she explains:
“I’d say there are two [myths]: one, that immigrants are criminals, and two, that immigrants come here to take advantage of the United States. In a way, these are connected—by turning immigrants into ‘bad hombres,’ Trump helps to erase history and the disasters that U.S. policy has helped to create in the countries that immigrants are currently fleeing, especially in Central America.”
Unwanted People, a collection of Aviva Chomsky’s writings, approaches complex discussions about race, labor, and immigration in the United States from the more nuanced perspective of a historian. Often conversations about immigration center on the subject of labor, and yet, as Chomsky illustrates in the essays collected in her new book, labor in the United States has its own troubled history. With a focus on New England, and especially Boston, Chomsky connects the history of labor struggles dating back to the 19th century to modern-day discussions about race and immigration. By uncovering hidden histories that challenge the dominant narratives about the working class, Chomsky reveals the importance of discussing racial justice alongside economic justice. Rather than participating in the shrill and polarizing rhetoric of political and media hype, Chomsky invites us to look to the economic and political history that has led up to this point. As Chomsky points out, “Until we are able to acknowledge and understand the past, we will not be able to act in the present for a better future.”
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. It is an adapted excerpt from the foreword by Dr. Sarah Parker and Jorge Majfud to the new book by Aviva Chomsky, Unwanted People (University of Valencia Press, 2019).
Dr. Sarah Parker is an associate professor in the English department at Jacksonville University. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the history of medicine to French feminist theory.
Jorge Majfud is a Uruguayan American writer and an associate professor at Jacksonville University.
«What is at stake today is not only protecting the West against the terrorists, home-grown and foreign, but—and perhaps above all—protecting the West from itself. The reproduction of any one of its most monstrous events would be enough to lose everything that has been attained to date with respect to Human Rights. Beginning with respect for diversity. And it is highly probable that such a thing could occur in the next ten years if we do not react in time.» (Feb. 2003)
The struggle is not—nor should it be—between Easterners and Westerners; the struggle is between tolerance and imposition, between diversity and homogenization, between respect for the other and scorn and his annihilation. (Photo: Ansel Adams/Department of the Interior/Flickr)
The West appears, suddenly, devoid of its greatest virtues, constructed century after century, preoccupied now only with reproducing its own defects and with copying the defects of others, such as authoritarianism and the preemptive persecution of innocents. Virtues like tolerance and self-criticism have never been a weakness, as some now pretend, but quite the opposite: it was because of them that progress, both ethical and material, were possible. Both the greatest hope and the greatest danger for the West can be found in its own heart. Those of us who hold neither «Rage» nor «Pride» for any race or culture feel nostalgia for times gone by, times that were never especially good, but were not so bad either.
Currently, some celebrities from back in the 20th century, demonstrating an irreversible decline into senility, have taken to propagating the famous ideology of the «clash of civilizations»—which was already plenty vulgar all by itself—basing their reasoning on their own conclusions, in the best style of classical theology. Such is the a priori and 19th century assertion that «Western culture is superior to all others.» And, if that were not enough, that it is a moral obligation to repeat it. From this perspective of Western Superiority, the very famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallacia wrote, recently, brilliant observations such as the following: «If in some countries the women are so stupid as to accept the chador and even the veil, so much the worse for them. (…) And if their husbands are so idiotic as to not drink wine or beer, idem.» Wow, that is what I call intellectual rigor. «How disgusting!»—she continued writing, first in the Corriere della Sera and later in her best seller The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli International, 2002), refering to the Africans who had urinated in a plaza in Italy—»They piss for a long time these sons of Allah! A race of hypocrits.» «Even if they were absolutely innocent, even if there were not one among them who wished to destroy the Tower of Pisa or the Tower of Giotto, nobody who wished to make me wear the chador, nobody who wished to burn me on the bonfires of a new Inquisition, their presence alarms me. It makes me uneasy.» Summing up: even if these blacks were completely innocent, their presence makes her uneasy anyway. For Fallaci, this is not racism, it is «cold, lucid, rational rage.» And, if that were not enough, she offers another ingenious observation with reference to immigrants in general: «And besides, there is something else I don’t understand. If they are really so poor, who gives them the money for the trip on the planes or boats that bring them to Italy? Might Osama bin Laden be paying their way, at least in part?» …Poor Galileo, poor Camus, poor Simone de Beauvoir, poor Michel Foucault.
Incidentally, we should remember that, even though the lady writes without understanding—she said it herself—these words ended up in a book that has sold a half million copies, a book with no shortage of reasoning and common sense, as when she asserts «I am an atheist, thank God.» Nor does it lack in historical curiosities like the following: «How does one accept polygamy and the principle that women should not allow photographs to be taken of them? Because this is also in the Q’uran,» which means that in the 7th century Arabs were extremely advanced in the area of optics. Nor is the book lacking in repeated doses of humor, as with these weighty arguments: «And, besides, let’s admit it: our cathedrals are more beautiful than the mosques and sinagogues, yes or no? Protestant churches are also more beautiful.» As Atilio says, she has the Shine of Brigitte Bardot. As if what we really needed was to get wrapped up in a discussion of which is more beautiful, the Tower of Pisa or the Taj Mahal. And once again that European tolerance: «I am telling you that, precisely because it has been well defined for centuries, our cultural identity cannot support a wave of immigration composed of people who, in one form or another, want to change our way of life. Our values. I am telling you that among us there is no room for muezzins, for minarets, for false abstinence, for their screwed up medieval ways, for their damned chador. And if there were, I would not give it to them.» And finally, concluding with a warning to her editor: «I warn you: do not ask me for anything else ever again. Least of all that I participate in vain polemics. What I needed to say I have said. My rage and pride have demanded it of me.» Something which had already been clear to us from the beginning and, as it happens, denies us one of the basic elements of both democracy and tolerance, dating to ancient Greece: polemics and the right to respond—the competition of arguments instead of insults. But I do not possess a name as famous as Fallaci—a fame well-deserved, we have no reason to doubt—and so I cannot settle for insults. Since I am native to an under-developed country and am not even as famous as Maradona, I have no other choice than to take recourse to the ancient custom of using arguments.
Let’s see. The very expression «Western culture» is just as mistaken as the terms «Eastern culture» or «Islamic culture,» because each one of them is made up of a diverse and often contradictory collection of other «cultures.» One need only think of the fact that within «Western culture» one can fit not only countries as different as the United States and Cuba, but also irreconcilable historical periods within the same geographic region, such as tiny Europe and the even tinier Germany, where Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Bach and the skin-heads, have all walked the earth. On the other hand, let’s not forget also that Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan (in the name of Christ and the White Race), Stalin (in the name of Reason and atheism), Pinochet (in the name of Democracy and Liberty), and Mussolini (in his own name), were typical recent products and representatives of the self-proclaimed «Western culture.» What is more Western than democracy and concentration camps? What could be more Western that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the dictatorships in Spain and Latin America, bloody and degenerate beyond the imagination? What is more Western than Christianity, which cured, saved and assassinated thanks to the Holy Office? What is more Western than the modern military academies or the ancient monasteries where the art of torture was taught, with the most refined sadism, and by the initiative of Pope Innocent IV and based on Roman Law? Or did Marco Polo bring all of that back from the Middle East? What could be more Western than the atomic bomb and the millions of dead and disappeared under the fascist, communist and, even, «democratic» regimes? What more Western than the military invasions and suppression of entire peoples under the so-called «preemptive bombings»?
All of this is the dark side of the West and there is no guarantee that we have escaped any of it, simply because we haven’t been able to communicate with our neighbors, who have been there for more than 1400 years, with the only difference that now the world has been globalized (the West has globalized it) and the neighbors possess the main source of energy that moves the world’s economy—at least for the moment— in addition to the same hatred and the same rencor as Oriana Fallaci. Let’s not forget that the Spanish Inquisition, more of a state-run affair than the others, originated from a hostility to the moors and jews and did not end with the Progress and Salvation of Spain but with the burning of thousands of human beings. Nevertheless, the West also represents Democracy, Freedom, Human Rights and the struggle for women’s rights. At least the effort to attain them, and the most that humanity has achieved so far. And what has always been the basis of those four pillars, if not tolerance?
Fallaci would have us believe that «Western culture» is a unique and pure product, without the Other’s participation. But if anything characterizes the West, it has been precisely the opposite: we are the result of countless cultures, beginning with the Hebrew culture (to say nothing of Amenophis IV) and continuing through almost all the rest: through the Caldeans, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Hindus, the southern Africans, the northern Africans and the rest of the cultures that today are uniformly described as «Islamic.» Until recently, it would not have been necessary to remember that, while in Europe—in all of Europe—the Christian Church, in the name of Love, was persecuting, torturing and burning alive those who disagreed with the ecclesiastical authorities or committed the sin of engaging in some kind of research (or simply because they were single women, which is to say, witches), in the Islamic world the arts and sciences were being promoted, and not only those of the Islamic region but of the Chinese, Hindus, Jews and Greeks. And nor does this mean that butterflies flew and violins played everywhere. Between Baghdad and Córdoba the geographical distance was, at the time, almost astronomical.
But Oriana Fallacia not only denies the diverse and contradictory compositioon of any of the cultures in conflict, but also, in fact, refuses to acknowledge the Eastern counterpart as a culture at all. «It bothers me even to speak of two cultures,» she writes. And then she dispatches the matter with an incredible display of historical ignorance: «Placing them on the same level, as if they were parallel realities, of equal weight and equal measure. Because behind our civilization are Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Phidias, among many others. There is ancient Greece with its Parthenon and its discovery of Democracy. There is ancient Rome with its grandeur, its laws and its conception of the Law. With its sculpture, its literature and its architecture. Its palaces and its amphitheaters, its aqueducts, its bridges and its roads.»
Is it really necessary to remind Fallaci that among all of that and all of us one finds the ancient Islamic Empire, without which everything would have burned—I am talking about the books and the people, not the Colliseum—thanks to centuries of ecclesiastical terrorism, quite European and quite Western? And with regard to the grandeur of Rome and «its conception of the Law» we will talk another day, because here there is indeed some black and white worth remembering. Let’s also set aside for the moment Islamic literature and architecture, which have nothing to envy in Fallaci’s Rome, as any half-way educated person knows.
Let’s see, and lastly? «Lastly—writes Fallaci—there is science. A science that has discovered many illnesses and cures them. I am alive today, for the time being, thanks to our science, not Mohammed’s. A science that has changed the face of this planet with electricity, the radio, the telephone, the television… Well then, let us ask now the fatal question: and behind the other culture, what is there?»
The fatal answer: behind our science one finds the Egyptians, the Caldeans, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Jews and the Africans. Or does Fallaci believe that everything arose through spontaneous generation in the last fifty years? She needs to be reminded that Pythagoras took his philosophy from Egypt and Caldea (Iraq)—including his famous mathemetical formula, which we use not only in architecture but also in the proof of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity—as did that other wise man and mathematician Thales. Both of them travelled through the Middle East with their minds more open than Fallaci’s when she made the trip. The hypothetical-deductive method—the basis for scientific epistemology—originated among Egyptian priests (start with Klimovsky, please), zero and the extraction of square roots, as well as innumerable mathematical and astronomical discoveries, which we teach today in grade school, were born in India and Iraq; the alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians (ancient Lebanese), who were also responsible for the first form of globalization known to the world.
The zero was not an invention of the Arabs, but of the Hindus, but it was the former who brought it to the West. By contrast, the advanced Roman Empire not only was unfamaliar with zero—without which it would be impossible to imagine modern mathematics and space travel—but in fact possessed an unwieldy systemof counting and calculation that endured until the late Middle Ages. Through to the early Renaissance there were still businessmen who used the Roman system, refusing to exchange it for Arabic numerals, due to racial and religious prejudices, resulting in all kinds of mathematical erros and social disputes.
Meanwhile, perhaps it is better to not even mention that the birth of the Modern Era began with European cultural contact—after long centuries of religious repression—first with Islamic culture and then with Greek culture. Or did anyone think that the rationalism of the Scholastics was a consequence of the practice of torture in the holy dungeons? In the early 12th century, the Englishman Adelard of Bath undertook an extensive voyage of study through the south of Europe, Syria and Palestine. Upon returning from his trip, Adelard introduced into under-developed England a paradigm that even today is upheld by famous scientists like Stephen Hawking: God had created Nature in such a way that it could be studied and explained without His intervention. (Behold the other pillar of the sciences, rejected historically by the Roman Church.) Indeed, Adelard reproached the thinkers of his time for having allowed themselves to be enthralled by the prestige of the authorities—beginning with Aristotle, clearly. Because of them he made use of the slogan «reason against authority,» and insisted he be called «modernus.» «I have learned from my Arab teachers to take reason as a guide—he wrote—but you only adhere to what authority says.» A compatriot of Fallaci, Gerardo de Cremona, introduced to Europe the writings of the «Iraqi» astronomer and mathematician Al-Jwarizmi, inventor of algebra, of algorithms, of Arabic and decimal calculus; translated Ptolemy from the Arabic—since even the astronomical theory of an official Greek like Ptolemy could not be found in Christian Europe—as well as dozens of medical treatises, like those of Ibn Sina and Irani al-Razi, author of the first scientific treatise on smallpox and measles, for which today he might have been the object of some kind of persecution.
We could continue listing examples such as these, which the Italian journalist ignores, but that would require an entire book and is not the most important thing at the moment.
What is at stake today is not only protecting the West against the terrorists, home-grown and foreign, but—and perhaps above all—protecting the West from itself. The reproduction of any one of its most monstrous events would be enough to lose everything that has been attained to date with respect to Human Rights. Beginning with respect for diversity. And it is highly probable that such a thing could occur in the next ten years, if we do not react in time.
The seed is there and it only requires a little water. I have heard dozens of times the following expression: «the only good thing that Hitler did was kill all those Jews.» Nothing more and nothing less. And I have not heard it from the mouth of any Muslim—perhaps because I live in a country where they practically do not exist—nor even from anyone of Arab descent. I have heard it from neutral creoles and from people of European descent. Each time I hear it I need only respond in the following manner in order to silence my interlocutor: «What is your last name? Gutiérrez, Pauletti, Wilson, Marceau… Then, sir, you are not German, much less a pure Aryan. Which means that long before Hitler would have finished off the Jews he would have started by killing your grandparents and everyone else with a profile and skin color like yours.» We run the same risk today: if we set about persecuting Arabs or Muslims we will not only be proving that we have learned nothing, but we will also wind up persecuting those like them: Bedouins, North Africans, Gypsies, Southern Spaniards, Spanish Jews, Latin American Jews, Central Americans, Southern Mexicans, Northern Mormons, Hawaiians, Chinese, Hindus, and so on.
Not long ago another Italian, Umberto Eco, summed up a sage piece of advice thusly: «We are a plural civilization because we permit mosques to be built in our countries, and we cannot renounce them simply because in Kabul they throw Christian propagandists in jail (…) We believe that our culture is mature because it knows how to tolerate diversity, and members of our culture who don’t tolerate it are barbarians.»
As Freud and Jung used to say, that act which nobody would desire to commit is never the object of a prohibition; and as Boudrillard said, rights are established when they have been lost. The Islamic terrorists have achieved what they wanted, twice over. The West appears, suddenly, devoid of its greatest virtues, constructed century after century, preoccupied now only with reproducing its own defects and with copying the defects of others, such as authoritarianism and the preemptive persecution of innocents. So much time imposing its culture on the other regions of the planet, to allow itself now to impose a morality that in its better moments was not even its own. Virtues like tolerance and self-criticism never represented its weakness, as some would now have it, but quite the opposite: only because of them was any kind of progress possible, whether ethical or material. Democracy and Science never developed out of the narcissistic reverence for its own culture but from critical opposition within it. And in this enterprise were engaged, until recently, not only the «damned intellectuals» but many activist and social resistance groups, like the bourgeoisie in the 18th century, the unions in the 20th century, investigative journalism until a short time ago, now replaced by propaganda in these miserable times of ours. Even the rapid destruction of privacy is another symptom of that moral colonization. Only instead of religious control we will be controlled by Military Security. The Big Brother who hears all and sees all will end up forcing upon us masks similar to those we see in the East, with the sole objective of not being recognized when we walk down the street or when we make love.
The struggle is not—nor should it be—between Easterners and Westerners; the struggle is between tolerance and imposition, between diversity and homogenization, between respect for the other and scorn and his annihilation. Writings like Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride are not a defense of Western culture but a cunning attack, an insulting broadside against the best of what Western culture has to offer. Proof of this is that it would be sufficient to swap the word Eastern for Western, and a geographical locale or two, in order to recognize the position of a Taliban fanatic. Those of us who have neither Rage nor Pride for any particular race or culture are nostalgic for times gone by, which were never especially good or especially bad. A few years ago I was in the United States and I saw there a beautiful mural in the United Nations building in New York, if I remember correctly, where men and women from distinct races and religions were visually represented—I think the composition was based on a somewhat arbitrary pyramid, but that is neither here nor there. Below, with gilded letters, one could read a commandment taught by Confucius in China and repeated for millenia by men and women throughout the East, until it came to constitute a Western principle: «Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.» In English it sounds musical, and even those who do not know the language sense that it refers to a certain reciprocity between oneself and others. I do not understand why we should scratch that commandment from our walls—founding principle for any democracy and for the rule of law, founding principle for the best dreams of the West—simply because others have suddenly forgotten it. Or they have exchanged it for an ancient biblical principle that Christ took it upon himself to abolish: «an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.» Which at present translates as an inversion of the Confucian maxim, something like: do unto others everything that they have done to you—the well-known, endless story.
First translated in 2007 by Bruce Campbell, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota
Postscript to “Human Sacrifices and the Politics of Cruelty”
On February 28, 2025, the same day we published “Human sacrifices and the politics of cruelty” in Argentina’s Página12, Elon Musk literally repeated one of the conceptual centers of the article (the psychopathic nature of successful billionaires and kidnappers of governments and pseudo-democracies):
“The greatest weakness of the West is its empathy”:
My Pagina12 text recalled:
“We are surprised to see how a president, a prime minister, a senator or a successful businessman, with a seductive conviction, make decisions that will lead to the pain of millions of people. They usually excuse themselves with something abstract and arbitrary like efficiency and resort to reversing the meaning of values and emotions that have been defined for thousands of years in a simple and understandable way, such as compassion and solidarity.
A contemporary example is the numerous leaders that the capitalist system has elevated for their high functionality. The writer Ann Ryan was at the forefront of the reaction against the post-war consensus that defeated the sadism of fascism in the West. In 2024, President Milei of Argentina said in Washington that “social justice is violent.” An outburst encapsulated 60 years ago in pills for consumption against any form of social sensitivity, such as Ryan Ann’s: “evil is compassion, not selfishness…”
Immigrants not only don’t vote but likewise their economic power and ability to shape the media narrative are irrelevant. (Photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In June of 2019, President Donald Trump announced the scheduling of raids for hunting down illegal immigrants in the 10 biggest cities in the United States, which commenced on July 14. The fact that big cities were selected rather than big farms, which are unable to gather their harvests without illegal immigrants, most probably stems from a phenomenon that I have pointed out before, which is that in the United States, minorities (blacks, Latinos, Asians) are politically underrepresented, not just because illegal immigrants don’t vote but also because the votes from citizens of those groups are worth several times less than a white vote in a low-populated ultraconservative state, all of which calls into question the supposedly democratic nature of the entire political and electoral system, not to mention the economic and financial system: one citizen, one vote.
For historical reasons associated with the marginalization of land ownership and because of present-day necessities, minorities are concentrated in large cities in the service sector. They reside in the most populous states, each of which has as many senators as any sparsely populated state. Since the 19th century, such largely rural states have been conservative bastions. To come up with the same population as California (40 million) or New York (20 million), which are two progressive bastions known for being more receptive to all kinds of immigrants, it’s necessary to add together the populations of more than 10 conservative states (the gigantic state of Alaska has a population of less than 1 million people). Nonetheless, each of these large states possesses only two senators, while a dozen conservative and thinly populated states possess 24. Texas is the inverse exception but not according to its internal dynamics.
An accurate representation of this structural reality must also include, among other characteristics, the fact that so-called populist governments quite often strive to make a big splash with spectacular and symbolic decisions when they might have done the same thing in a more discreet way. Leftist populist movements tend to play this same card with more powerful antagonists, which is what empires of various stripes are. Right-wing populist movements tend to play the same card by attacking and demonizing the governments of poor countries when the latter get the idea of toying with independence, or by going after the most defenseless sectors in a society such as poor immigrants or workers. Immigrants not only don’t vote but likewise their economic power and ability to shape the media narrative are irrelevant.
In the case of right-wing populism, which is an expression of elite interests misleadingly conflated with the frustrations of the working class who are manipulated into directing their vigilante fury at the undesirables below their socioeconomic level, we can at least say that it’s a kind of cowardice raised to an exponential degree. Without even considering that post-humanist fanatics (fanatics are those working-class people who defend elite interests against their own interests, not those elites who simply defend their own interests) tend to wave the diverse and contradictory flag of the cross at the same time they rend their garments and thump their chests while claiming to be the followers of Jesus, a man who preached about indiscriminate love and surrounded himself with marginalized people. He who was crucified alongside two other criminals by the imperial power of the day and the always necessary local collaborators.
Different studies (Derek Epp and Enrico Borghetto) have shown that the greater the social and economic differences separating elites from the working class, the greater the media coverage given to problems related to immigration and crime. This is just as much the case in prominent countries as in peripheral ones, in rich ones as in poor ones. One other characteristic must be added, one that even shows up in papers written by university students. The debate (or perhaps more accurately “social verbalization”) is laid out with its axiom and corollary from the very beginning when it is presented as “the immigration problem” rather than “the challenge” or “the great immigration opportunity.”
Although President Donald Trump lost the election in 2016, he made it to the White House because of an electoral system invented for protecting Southern slaveholding states in the 18th century (today, liberal states like California need twice as many votes as the Southern states they subsidize through taxes to get an electoral vote) and characterized by racist discourse, as in Europe, barely disguised by the eternal and cowardly excuse of legality, which, as I’ve already analyzed previously, has historically been promoted and respected when doing so was convenient for the groups holding power. The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is another example: designed to favor Irish immigrants in the late 1980s (the least welcome immigrants throughout the 19th century before becoming “white” in the 20th century), suddenly it was considered absurd and inconvenient when politicians realized the law favors mostly non-white immigrants. Of course, there are a few notable and heroic exceptions to this rule, like the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965; these exceptions and examples of social progress have been always thanks to demonized people fighting for social justice. Racism is neither created nor destroyed. It is only transformed.
The date July 14, 2019, which marked the start of a round of raids on illegal immigrants, is an arbitrary one but is consistent with the fascist psychology that loves untimely and symbolic decisions taken against any specific working-class group that has been demonized as “the others,” such as everyday Jews, everyday Muslims, everyday immigrants. Of course, not just any illegal immigrant but rather the poorest, most desperate and with the darkest skin. The other illegal immigrants, if they are white, go unnoticed. Or if they are white women, they can even become the First Lady in spite of the fact that her parents were (by free choice and because it was required for registering as “mountain climbers”) members of the communist party in some European country. Further proof is that immigrants do the work that the nation’s citizens refuse to do.
Tribalism, the fascist, racist misogynistic horde and disgust for the equal rights of others—all of these will pass away. We don’t know when, but I’m convinced that it’s a global reaction to everything that has been accomplished in this sense, whether how little or how much, in the last few centuries. And it’s an entirely expected pretext for a worsening conflict between those who are increasingly fewer and have increasingly more and those who are increasingly numerous and feel but don’t understand that they are being pushed aside and, in the best-case scenarios, are being turned into docile, grazing consumers. It’s a historic process that cannot be perpetuated, that will explode in an uncontrolled catastrophe nobody wants, not even those at the top who are so accustomed to expanding their zones of influence during each controlled crisis, such as the one that will come in 2020.
The powerful old men who rule the world have an existential advantage, which is that they won’t live to see the fruits of their hate and greed. That’s why they don’t care about anything in the long run, even though they say the exact opposite over and over. This is especially true if they think they’ve managed to buy a penthouse in the kingdom of the Lord by virtue of paying alms and praying five minutes per day with their heads bowed. For them and for the working class, «time is money.» This is a myth that can only be busted by considering that no mountain of gold can buy them additional time. Since they can’t amass time, they instead amass gold while destroying the lives of the weakest and most desperate—of the youngest who far and away have more time than gold. It’s a sin for which they won’t be forgiven.
JM, August 2019.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
WCU welcomes Uruguayan-American scholar and author Jorge Majfud.
In the first event, Dr. Majfud will join Dr. Benjamin Francis-Fallon (WCU History) in a panel about Immigration and the evolution of the Latino Voting Bloc in the US.
Join us also the following day, when Dr. Majfud will engage in a dialogue with Dr. Alberto Centeno-Pulido (WCU World Languages) about immigration, racism, and the role of intellectuals in the public sphere as explorers of the human experience.
Escritos Críticos 
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