Thou shalt not kill

HAVANA – The difference between war and peace is easily discernible. The difference between war and war isn’t.

Those who get excited at the start of every new war, the continuation of a previous one, sometimes lose sight of the qualities of peace and start to tune their minds to the sounds of gunfire. They then discuss the categories of gunshots, I mean, of aggression, the categories of war.

I won’t name them. They’re accessible to everyone, in every medium. From CNN to Harry Potter.

The recent murders in Florida of two teenagers at the hands of “law enforcers,” legal murders, in other words, legalized or suitable for legalization, lead me to think about the dictum “Thou shalt not kill.” Clearly, that mandate has, in the Old Testament and elsewhere thereafter, a relative value.

In his Psalms, David sings to life while sheltered by his god and to death for those who don’t know Him or obey Him. He who created God created war. Our America, not to go any farther, has similar examples, previous even to the ominous arrival of the European conquistadors. That’s because conquistadors existed before, and empires and vassals and innumerable massacres.

Because of my ignorance in history and cultural studies, I don’t know if the Romans considered themselves imperialists or if many of the anti-imperialists who up to 20 years ago supported the Soviet Union were aware that they were allying themselves to an empire. What I know, and did say at the start, is that there is a clear and sharp line between peace and aggression, between harmony and hatred, between forgiveness and the spirit of vengeance.

I do know that the ability to forgive should be the basis of the law and education, that is, of education first and the law second. I also know that we live in an era when the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize can be a white-shirt-and-tie killer, a native woman who defends the rights of her people, or an opportunistic bureaucrat who knows how to say Yes in seven languages.

Is there any consistency? No, that model of a song to the peace of the Lord is not much more consistent than David’s, although I must say that the Hebrew poet’s song is a lot more beautiful, at least in literary terms.

Beyond the empires there is a petty chieftain who lives inside us. This petty chieftain survives all holocausts; he survived Auschwitz and Hiroshima as he survived Waterloo and the Thermopylae. It’s all the same to him: a hot war, a cold war, an atomic bomb, a deluge.

The petty chieftain who at home doesn’t let his wife or children talk, who at work does not listen to colleagues or subordinates, who in the army, school, hospital or soccer game says, “Whosoever is not with me is against me” and incessantly invokes the “God of vengeance” is the first and only emperor. Let’s hope he’ll be the last one when he dies, but wars do not kill him. Rather, they strengthen him.

It is said that the past century was witness to a “humanization of the animals.” We suddenly realized that some among them had an individuality and were aware of it. I know that it’s worthwhile to distinguish between them because the belief in our animal superiority (cell phones notwithstanding) is based largely on that distinction. It’s not enough to be one; one has to prove it.

After exterminating thousands of them to take their meat, feathers, oils, bones, fangs, cartilage, blood, brains and even cells and after exhibiting them as proof of our superiority (in addition to doing business with all that), we came to the healthy conclusion that they were alive, that is, that they were not only raw material for our games of domination and consumption but that they could also be happy without our company, not to mention our help.

Precisely because of that, we decided to help them, just as more recently we have helped Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Syrians and other species, apparently without much sense of biological coexistence. How? By invading their spaces and imposing the rules of the game, first by fire and sword, later via the NGOs.

As Animal Planet tells it, in the 1950s Joy and George Adamson decided to adopt a lioness they named Elsa and prepare her for her return to nature. “Born Free” is the book that narrates that experience, acquired and told by Hollywood and other enthusiasts, as a new way to deal with the other animals, our inferior brethren.

After a fruitful coexistence with their protected feline friends, Joy and George Adamson were murdered by men, not by the lions, leopards or jaguars with whom they lived. A similar fate befell Jane Goodall, the protector of gorillas and chimpanzees.

The motive for the murders can be spoken in two syllables: money, something that the other animals don’t need. A feat that few human beings have achieved, it should be said.

How long it will take before we understand that the fate of the animal world is only one is something I won’t deal with that on this page. It is obvious that the fate of the buffalo and the native people was only one, once the rifles arrived on the plains of Dakota. It is also true that the fate of the Sioux was only one, a lot earlier than the debacle. But who would listen to them? They were also inferior animals.

The stratagem of dividing the animal world into inferiors and superiors has been so effective that inevitably it has corroded the spirit of humans ourselves. The children are inferior to the adults and the latter are superior to those other adults who today, with studied deference, are called “the elderly.” In turn, the elderly enjoy several prerogatives of superiority that they apply among themselves in an aleatory or planned way, including the prerogative of death.

Because the Commandments did not have – and have never had – a universal value, only tribal, i.e., fragmentary, “thou shalt not kill” is not only a command but also a half-truth or, which is the same, a proto-lie born of a divided, fragmented mind.

Apropos the murder of Reefa, that Colombian teenager electrocuted manually in Miami, when you read the instructions for the use and abuse of the device called the Taser, you notice that they are “instructions for the use of the X26 Taser electronic-control device on human beings, as opposed to animals,” whereas, beyond any instructions or distinction between humans and animals, the device is capable of killing.

In a simple administrative, legal-sounding sentence, we can see two of the key symptoms of our schizophrenia as a species. First, we assume that depriving another animal or plant of life has absolutely no consequence for life, as a general and universal phenomenon, and for human life as a specific reality.

Second, we forget (an educational gap that goes back to our formative years) that, though we are or think we are superior, we are, from a scientific or social point of view, nothing but animals.

Evidence of this is plentiful, and no doubt it’s necessary, because – despite being obvious and plentiful – no one pays any attention to it. So, schizophrenia becomes a generalized way of life that allows us to kill at will anything that is not part of ourselves, such as a dog, a tree, a child from a different country or of a different ethnic background, a woman who doesn’t love me, an individual who doesn’t think the way I do.

As to those administrative phrases with a certain legalistic odor and flavor, we have to admit that they are our laws: resolutions to settle accounts, an “end game,” in the common parlance, “killing two birds with one stone” and frequently killing some part of ourselves that, for the past thousand years, has refused to die.

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(Art by Paulie SVK)