Seeds of Violence

The religious and political fanaticism of the most radical followers of Muhammad carries within it the seeds of crime and suicide, according to them, for the “greater glory” of Allah and his prophet. As September 11 approaches, we remember the emblematic terrorist attack on the symbols of economic and military power of the world’s most powerful country.

The United States is also a symbol of the current system in which we are immersed. Many parties and governments that have promised to abandon it have, sooner or later, either not wanted to or have not been able to do so. Some 3,000 people were killed in New York’s twin towers, of which 40 percent were foreign, and of course we regret and do not accept such madness by demented fanatics. Today we still reject this madness, and yet the horrific jihadi murderers of the Islamic State group continue terrorizing us.

Western governments always scream blue murder faced with these facts. However, one should ask oneself if this is because of the death toll, or because of the attack on the capitalist system. Well, when do world governments show similar concerns for the millions of children who die of hunger and misery every day at the doors of the sumptuous banquets of the rich Epulons of the capitalist system?

Since we believe that we are in possession of the absolute truth, whether economic or religious, we get worked up and become fanatics and fundamentalists like the terrorists, whom we accuse of absolute evil, but one, just as much as the other, sows the seeds of violence.

On a different September 11, the government of the United States, defender of truth and of our system, drove the terrible massacre in Chile, as it did in other Latin American countries in defense of the system, accusing as communist any of the starving population who protested. And memory takes me to another coup d’état, many years before, against another government democratically elected by the people, which erupted into a civil war at a cost of a million lives, in Spain.

Today Pope Francis has attacked the capitalist system and is now drawing detractors — but how to move from words to deeds? Will the pope, with his Vatican state, his bank and his ambassadors — papal nuncios — be able to provide practical signs of real change toward another more humane economic and political system, in which human beings and equal dignity for all are more important than money and the well-being of a few?

The truth we look for is found not in the powerful nor in the churches nor in the learned. It is found, despite its quietude, in the voice of the poor.