Peace demands many renunciations and many conversations with nationalists

We had, at least I had much, hope that a miracle would be granted to us (it takes faith, my dear!), namely: living without war, without bloodshed. From the history of the scientific world, there is a special record (for me) of that hope, when Einstein and Freud exchanged letters under the title “Why War?” In general and specific terms, they concluded, prompted by the League of Nations (which would become the United Nations — “damn communists!”), that the origin of war is patriotism.

When I talk about this subject, about a choice to be a pacifist, I meet resistance from people of different lines of thought. Whether a simple man or an enlightened one, it is laborious to sustain the argument that peace depends on a numerous portion of small and large renunciations, and that hoisting a country’s flag and calling it greater than the others is a risk.

Very quickly the Ukraine–Russia reality arises, whereby one could ask “but what if a country invades your territory?”, and we fall into what I call “aiming at the bishop to hit the priest,” which is to go on affirming: patriotism is the origin of war. Or was it not on nationalist foundations that we committed shameful errors against life? Germany above all! Jews underground! How many millions dead in Europe during the Second World War? In a simple count, about three billion kilos of human flesh rotted.

In today’s Ukraine, did you also see on television bodies being thrown into mass graves? I even thought, on that occasion, “it must be archive footage from the Second World War.”

In Brazil, a more sophisticated “nationalism,” with the consent of psychiatric medicine, killed sixty thousand people in Barbacena (MG) (in Portuguese). Three million kilos of human flesh that rotted. Of the dead at the Colônia hospital, about 70% did not even have a diagnosis of mental illness. They died because they were poor, because they were rebellious, because they got pregnant by someone who could not disappoint his own conservative family. The bodies were sold to medical schools, after dying on straw soiled with human urine and feces.

But despite all these things, we will have to talk every day (including with nationalists).

At the start of this text, I referred to a hope. I had in mind what was a kind of collective fantasy, probably there is an appropriate name for what occurred, but I do not know it, that the first round of the elections would free us from the outrage that is Brazil’s public stage in 2022.

Out there with your people, tell me, have you been meeting depressed people, anxious people, people losing hair? Is it a consequence of the pandemic? Of political polarization? The fact is that, as a poem by Vinicius de Moraes puts it, women are going mad, and legions of them mourn the absence of their men (poem, in Portuguese). Whatever it was, or whoever was more or less responsible, we wanted it to have ended. That was our sincere hope.

It happens that it did not turn out that way. We in journalism will have to talk daily about the substantial changes on the public stage. Basic philosophy lesson: if a change is substantial, it has truly soured the lunchbox for those who hoped to relive the plastic grandeur of the newscasts of old. Now, my dear, “catch this,” here is what will be fun: we will necessarily overcome this difficult moment.