(Answer at the end).
VIRTUE
By Charles Kocian
Shocking images from the air bombardment of Gaza are in Internet. More than ten thousand civil casualties. It is difficult to see the devastation. Everybody agrees it is a disproportional reaction of Israel Government. In Paris, London, New York and other major cities, hundreds of thousands of protesters going to the streets asking Israel State to stop the indiscriminate killing of civilians, including more than 4,000 children in one month. Some countries have cut diplomatic relations with Netanyahu’s Israel. Angelina Jolie asked to stop the massacre in Gaza, describing it as a concentration camp for 2 million people. She said that the strikes on Gaza are a “deliberate bombing of a trapped population”.
Angelina Jolie asks Israel to stop air bombardment in Gaza.
This Palestine-Israel conflict started not in October 7, but after WWI. Its history details are controversial, but no matter what side anyone can take, it is obvious the general ignorance of the historic facts since 1900. This conflict also shows the complete diplomatic failure of the U.N. and the incompetent foreign policies of the State of Israel the last 70 years. The belief that air-bombardment will solve the problem is an error, accordingly to the last words Bertrand Russell ever wrote before he died. He was a legendary British philosopher and mathematician who also won the Novel Prize for Literature. Just before he died in 1970, he wrote a letter which content is relevant today, so here it is presented. He did not only predict what is happening today, but worse than that: he predicted the worse to come.
Here is what Bertrand Russell wrote in 1970:
Bertrand Russell receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950.
“The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination.
For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.
The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.
The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.
We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.
All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.
I invite you all to read the letter with thoughtful consideration.”
This letter written more than 50 years ago by one of the best thinkers of humanity, demonstrates the colossal diplomatic incompetence of the UN to solve the problem in Gaza. But the horrors in Palestine are not different of those during the Renaissance.
The psycopaths of the Inquisition burning people alive.
In the Renaissance we know about the Inquisition horrors. For example, they burned alive an early scientist like Giordano Bruno. We also know how they put in jail Galileo for life because he discovered that the Earth moves.
But in ancient Athens, where logic started with Aristotle, things were not perfect either. We know that the authorities condemned Socrates because he wanted to think by its own and he dare to question the status quo of its culture. He always started to think from the premise that he did not know nothing, that is, he wanted to think beyond prejudices. It was his way to discover new truths beyond its cultural imprinting.
Socrates condemned to death.
CONCLUSION
From the perspective of the evolution of the species, since man has been a man, at any given time, has had the opportunity to choose or not its reason. Reason is an activity that happens in the neocortex of our brain. But because to think is not automatic, it is an individual choice to turn ON or not our rationality and, at the same time, turn OFF the switch of the violent animal brain. We need rational self-control. The animal brain, located in the paleocortex, it’s only interested in taking sides. Its animal survival function is to identify if something is friend or enemy, life or death. He can see only black or white, but is not able to measure “how much” of black or white.
The paleocortex cannot understand algebra, geometry or mathematics, but reason does. Reason starts with the information we perceive with our senses, then it uses logic and mathematics to discover scientific truths. Scientific truths derive from good faith, evidence and rational integrity. Objective thoughts produces objective emotions. To be human demands us to make an effort to stand beyond emotions of irrational fear, guilt or rage. It demands us to stand beyond our cultural prejudices. The rational-animal, as Aristotle defined “man”, without reason (neocortex) is just an animal, and in war can act worse than the cruellest depredator. He can act like a psychopath without empathy.
Where is the rationality of the Security Council of the United Nations in relation to Gaza? Where is the diplomatic logic in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Do the U.N. leaders believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that says all men are born equal? Are the U.N. leaders morally fit if they cannot stop war-crimes? Rulers and ruled! Did you study the details of what happened in Gaza between 1900 and 1950? Rulers and ruled! Are you turning ON the switch of your neocortex or are you being dragged by your paleocortex by a contagion of collective anger? Who is in charge of your brain? Reason or fear? Science or mysticism? Good faith or bad faith? We can choose to answer these questions or die in a nuclear disaster.
Now the answer to question 76.
QUESTION N° 76
Is rationality man’s main virtue?
a) Yes.
b) No.
The answer is: a) Yes. To be a man, he needs to choose to act rationally. A rational behaviour makes man to succeed in life, therefore, rationality is his main virtue. But, without the decision to think at any given moment, that is not going to happen, because to think it’s not automatic. A reasonable man has rational-self-control and always observes its behaviour because self-deceit is always a threat.
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