Many years after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, a popular Chilean journalist who had been tortured in Villa Grimaldi, was asked what effect it had had on her. She pondered her answer, which was odd because she was usually very much on the ball, and finally replied: “Perdí la felicidad.” Literally: I lost my happiness.
Another one of Pinochet’s innumerable victims told me that her reply made a tremendous impression on him. When she said what she said, he realised: That was exactly what had happened to him!
I did not understand, then, what on earth he was going on about. I mean: Is anybody more than momentarily “happy”?
But the other day, reading about the five Palestine Action defendants who dismissed their lawyers in order to address the jury personally, I finally understood. They had committed vandalism (red paint, broken windows, etc.) against an Israeli arms factory and are facing gargantuan penalties as “terrorists”. The defendants’ lawyers had been given a gag order. The defendants themselves, however, could not be prevented from giving the jury a piece of their mind. I read a short piece that quoted some of their statements, including the following:
Ms —- recalled how she went on local marches and national demonstrations while her “mental health plummeted watching what was happening and feeling helpless to stop it.”
An email to her local MP came back with an “automated response,” she said.
Ms —-, who worked at a nursery, spoke about “the conflict of going to work — teaching young children — and going home to watch videos of children losing everything”.
She felt “sick going to bed feeling helpless witnessing massacres” and felt “compelled to act in defence of those children.”
Now this was something that I could understand and relate to!
People are not all born “happy”. Among “healthy” children of parents who can afford to care for them, some are no doubt happier than others. There are sure to be many factors that determine why people are different in that respect. Whatever those factors are, I for my part have been a joyful sort of person.
Life in Europe tends to take the following course: School, secondary school, infatuations, professional training, finding a partner, buying a home, making children, etc. There are dramas, large and small all along the route, from periods of stressful unemployment and inability to pay bills, to loss of loved ones, serious accidents or illness. We find comfort in our church, mosque or synagogue and the equivalent holy texts, if we are believers.
Personally, I have taken greater comfort from the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights, which I thought were more substantial than millennia-old texts. They contain the rules that the entire global community agreed to try to follow and to consider “Law” – International Law.
I fear those who put their trust in the holy texts are better off than me now.
Remember the Canadian Prime Minister’s astounding speech at Davos? Mark Carney spoke about the end of what he called a “pleasant fiction” in a world where, routinely, “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
The PM admitted that
The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.
No, I am not digressing. The post-WWII global order was predicated NOT on “Pax Americana”, (which was not peace in any way, shape or form – on the contrary) but on the understanding that cultures, religions and political systems differ, and that when interests clash, disputes must be resolved through the United Nations.
Or so we thought. Now we see that it was all a charade. The US no longer even pretends to respect the UN. It flouts, and has flouted from day one, every rule in the book of international law.
***
In my country, children were taught that evil would be punished. As an adult, I learn, and re-learn every single day: evil is rewarded.
That the world is governed by such awful principles as those now openly and unabashedly espoused not only by the USA (including its Congress!), but also by its European vassals, is sickening. Yes, watching feel-good films can distract us for a few moments, but more and more people suffer from a general sense of disgust.
Like the former victims of Pinochet – I have lost the capacity to be joyful. I have not been tortured, it is true. I have not even been incarcerated and killed without a trial like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese. I have not lost my wife or husband or sons or daughters to killers simply because they are not “Jews”. I have not been imprisoned or lost my job, scholarship or residence permit for attending demonstrations.
What has happened to me is merely that I have lost faith in mankind. It is true that not all people are nearly as evil as Netanyahu, Ursula von der Leyen, Lindsey Graham, Nancy Pelosi or Javier Milei. In fact, very few are. But people like them are the people who run the world.
After WWII, Norwegians asked themselves: Had we been German, would we have been proud to kill Slavs and Jews? The thought was horrifying. After all, in terms of ethnicity, Norwegians and Germans are very close.
Since then, we have learnt that the genetic difference between what used to be called “races” of homo sapiens is hardly worth mentioning. Some, it is true, tolerate salt, milk and other substances better than others.
That means, I am very much afraid, that we all could become just as homicidal as Israelis and Nazis.
I used to hope that the UN and the shared principles enshrined in its Charter and Human Rights Declaration would protect our moral condition. But alas, the one country that has done most to undermine the two is the USA, staunchly backed by Santa Ursula’s army of European warmongers.
The human species is in the process of self-extermination. Should we even bother to grieve its demise?