Illusion and Lies Fuel Apathy Towards Genocide
War Requires Illusion
Tempo previsto
16/4/2025
Richa case shows dangers of political sycophancy, warning of isolation's consequences.
In January 2009, a few weeks after Beto Richa's reelection as mayor of Curitiba (77.2%), a woman fell from an overcrowded bus and died instantly. The way the newsroom learned about it was appalling. A listener called the radio station and said, "A woman died on the highway". To which the journalist asked, "Are you sure she's dead?". "Unless she can live without her head, she is," the listener retorted.
The news caused a commotion. The victim was a general services worker, on a bus route that had been showing signs of strain for quite some time, as it was excessively violent even by the standards of the capital. I myself attended the burial. It took place in a simple cemetery in the Metropolitan Region, with the deceased's colleagues in uniform, as if they had gone straight from the cafeteria to the funeral.
When the news reached José Wille's anchor desk at CBN Curitiba, the popular commentator Luiz Geraldo Mazza said something like this: "This woman's death is a result of the 77%". Not far from there, from the PSDB's jubilation over a record-breaking vote, an approval considered glorious, Richa went on to become governor of Paraná and, beyond that, to the back of a police van.
To this day, I haven't been presented with plausible reasons for Richa's arrest (I wrote for O Globo about the matter, more than once, which gives me a sense of the national press coverage on the subject). Whatever he did, he offended someone who doesn't take offense. A journalist who advised Richa during his time as mayor explained it this way: "The people around Richa isolated him. He lost his bearings, and he easily fell into what they wanted from him". It makes sense, because I heard something similar from Euclides Scalco. In fact, that morning Scalco was so unwell, so very unwell, that Hélio Pugliesi said to him, "Don't be so sad, my friend".
I think the bitter medicine is to avoid flatterers.
Leia insights sobre a interação de humanos com modelos de linguagem de IA, e sobre os ODS no Brasil. Lab Educação 2050 Ltda, que mantém este site, é signatária do Pacto Global das Nações Unidas.
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Accessible leaders, free of sycophants, bolster justice, key to social peace.
War Requires Illusion
This article isn't exactly hopeful at a cursory glance. It tends to make more sense when, through difficult conversation, we achieve some freedom to think and act about wars without the interference of armies. After all, those who promote war can do nothing for peace.
I remember my first lessons on World War II. Well, how could I forget them? At the time, I found it utterly unattractive to learn the years in which it began and ended. I considered the dates meaningless due to my inexperience in relating events. Moreover, my young age didn't differentiate between what fits into one, ten, or a hundred years.
Generally speaking, and for the sake of argument, the Second War followed the First. And it was called "world" because those who named it so considered the entire world to be limited to themselves. Elementary school knowledge that remains relevant today.
(Parenthesis: Those who lived through the 1990s know that, in terms of forensic pathology – people run over, stabbed, corpses in decomposition – television abundantly supplied us with violent images. In the city where I grew up, a woman drowned her two children in a well and then threw herself in after them. On the lunchtime news program, I watched the small bodies floating. Another case involved a daughter who, with the help of her girlfriend, killed her mother and grandmother. Not to mention the rape, murder, and robbery committed against an elderly woman living alone on Rua XV.)
Ultimately, those who died and those who killed had some kinship with someone close. They were, in any case, considered degenerate, not exactly counted as people. This is without mentioning national cases like the Candelária Massacre, the murder of Daniella Perez, and the murder of Índio Galdino. (End parenthesis)
This is my argument: it's difficult to impress a Brazilian child.
Those common murderers, though extremely dangerous, committed their crimes clandestinely. They were discovered, and then televised, arrested, lynched, or killed by the police. But what they told us about the extermination camps was entirely different, and often more terrifying. There was something wrong about multitudes being murdered in broad daylight.
What we know about the genocide of Jews is etched in black and white in our memories, both through photographs and the brilliant cinematic work *Schindler's List* (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg. Thanks to new technologies, some of these memories can touch us even more profoundly. Using digital resources, I myself colorized a photograph of child survivors of Auschwitz taken by Alexander Vorontsov.
It is difficult to look at them and say: “We despised their families to the utmost, we chose who would be enslaved and who would be killed and incinerated in our four gas chambers with crematoria.” Because that is precisely what we did, in the role of humans. Shouldering responsibility for that atrocity is a lifelong burden, and I don’t believe there’s any other way to deal with it than to carry it, with shame and remorse, until my last day.
Confronting this inhumanity, however, is not the same as stagnating in lament. It is precisely the opposite. And, to move forward even minimally, we must shed two convenient illusions. The first is that all responsibility can be attributed to the Führer. Let us, even if this discomfits us to almost unbearable levels, be consistent. No single man could have undertaken the Third Reich without assistance. In 1935, the Nazi Party enacted the racial discrimination laws, and Mr. Hitler was not alone – as official footage attests.
The other classic illusion is that the "world" of the Second World War did not prevent the genocide simply because it knew nothing. Now then. Upon further reflection, I don't even consider it an illusion anymore – since not every illusion is necessarily a misconception – but rather a blatant lie. With the illusion, we achieve a certain psychic relief, which frequently converts into proud satisfaction: "I would never have done something like that." With the lie, we maintained the idea that we possess a power that, in truth, we do not.
Since the Gulf War, another ridiculousity of the nineties, international military conflicts have also become television programs. This is not a figure of speech. Literally, wars are simultaneously television programs. One needs little intelligence – sometimes not even that – to understand that the images we consume are the creations of a single person. Someone holds the camera, chooses when to press REC, when to stop, from what position what he sees will be viewed, what enters or does not enter the frame. In the case of AI-generated content, someone will have to write the prompt. In this way, the media product of war integrates the general arsenal of war. Those with more or fewer resources to create and propagate stories consequently have more or less war power. It is fair to ask what the destructive reach of a weapon of this kind is.
Since the spontaneous constitution of a public sphere, and its progressive and irreversible decay, public opinion has been used to legitimize or delegitimize the actions of the State. If I convince Brazil that I am "good" and the other is "evil," then Brazilians tend to pressure their government in a specific direction, the product of which varies from support on digital social networks to proposals in the United Nations Security Council. Telling the best story, however, has nothing to do with telling the most accurate story. This quality criterion is restricted to citizens who are not easily moved by the appeals of the masses – people who, in each social circle, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
On the path to the finally. So, if the world had known about the annihilation of humans in World War II, it would have acted to protect the Jews. I guarantee that with a clear mind, and three or four videos of the apocalypse in Palestine, one can guarantee with one hundred percent accuracy that it is a lie.
Not even the adequate terms to address war crimes in Palestine have been used appropriately in different parliaments around the world. The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that "the closer one looks, the more Netanyahu resembles Trump," in the worst sense. The article states that "about eighty percent of Israelis blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government for the Hamas catastrophe, according to a poll by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv."
In Brazil, Congresswoman Carla Zambelli – a woman born to be a donkey and who will never become a mare – published an image depicting a US and Israeli eagle attacking a Palestinian rat. I am persuaded, by myself, not to expect this human project to grasp the enormity of its own bestiality.
Faced with nominal lists of thousands of civilians killed by Israel, the response of the “world” is so weak, languid, flaccid. Perhaps this is the moment for this awareness: we are incapable of preventing violence merely by knowing that violence exists. I am warning you now: in the coming hours, Palestinian children will be brutally murdered or maimed, and those who survive will have witnessed their families and friends explode. Knowing this changes absolutely nothing.
A few hours ago, a Palestinian boy went to retrieve a ball when a bombardment occurred directly behind him. His nephew’s back was injured. But the nephew is better off than Saleh al Qaraan, whose head was obliterated in the explosion.
Accustomed to daily encounters with animal posts on Instagram, I saw a tabby cat leap onto the lap of a Palestinian man, where the pale body of a dead child lay. The kitten nestled in, closing its eyes. This, alongside the mother, who, with the dead baby wrapped in white cloth, refused to cease kissing it. Or the countless videos of children experiencing panic attacks within hospitals.
On an individual level, my work or yours against the war seems insufficient. We cannot count on, at least not now, the prudence of the wise finding a space on the world leaders' agenda. But whether or not we defend Palestinian civilians, now, at every opportunity, speaks volumes about what we have learned about our own wickedness.
Disturbing reflection on the Palestinian tragedy, the international role, and humanity's moral limits.
Some time ago, I searched for Palestine on Google Maps and found it in the middle of the ocean. At the time, I concluded that the world had ended, at least a certain project of the world, upon finding a people I love so much and who love me, drowned in the hatred in which someone, somewhere, had drowned them.
Today, after the murder of hundreds (the number is imprecise, but staggering) of Palestinians who were in a hospital, I realized that the world has ended for them, that the apocalypse, the end times, has arrived for those human beings. They witnessed shame, hunger, and then died.
Imagine with me. Suddenly, a foreign authority orders you to leave your home. Fleeing with nothing, your journey is one of thirst and hunger. Then you see rubble, dust, friends, and family sprawled on the ground, some dismembered, others unburied. Then you too die.
If this, which is true, does not also make it true that we have reached the end of the world, then what would constitute the end of the world? Natural disasters, however terrible, are at least honorable. No one can blame the volcano. Genocide with the support of religious groups is the end of the world.
The stance of the international community is insufficient. Humanity is excessively paralyzed in its reaction to wars; the powerful are not truly powerful. They are nothing more than men of the market! And a market of souls, as described in the Book of Revelation.
