MANUAL OF DEFEAT​

The spontaneous usually defeats the best conceived strategies, it is the hot against the cold, the passionate against the rational, the improvisation over the structuring, the guerrilla against the astute generals, the force of weakness against the weakness of force, Cain against Abel, the Government of Israel against Hamas, legality against terrorism, with collateral damages that have destroyed with reasons and unreasons the innocent, the victims, those who suffer the arrogance of the ones and the unreasons of the others?

Defeats are drawn with black, quick, merciless strokes. Victories require the slow reproduction of the portrait, with abundant medals of individual merit, selfish, mythologizable, transmissible for generations. The people, even if they win, if that were the case, do not have time to pose.

The important thing for the ones and the others, for those who rule in the factions, seems to be only to win. The how and the price is the least important thing. They will not know how to manage victory, let alone ruin. In full celebration, the victors will choke with greed, with insubstantial booty. The defeated, if they have not died, will live drowned in their misery, pain and depression. In the immediacy the conquest is forgotten, only the defeat and the manipulated stories will remain for centuries. The people will not recognize themselves neither in the museums nor in the mirrors, they will only cry before the tombstones and the horrendous memorials, before the votive flames.

Gaza is a new great collective defeat. It already is. Civilization has died a little with each victim, with the inhabitants of a territory seized, holed, demolished, with the kidnapped and murdered, with the innocent, with the desperate. Pain and suffering have no redemption. There is no resurrection possible, perhaps neither forgiveness nor mercy will ever come. There is nothing human in war, and even less in this one. There is no equality, no justice, no arguments, no vengeance to justify so much drama, so much vileness, so much misfortune, so much misfortune, so much tragedy, so much calamity. There is no possible reconstruction for so much dehumanity.

Men and women have ridden through History boasting of glory, or success, or victory, and we have done it over millions of dead, mutilated, starving people… Infamy, no doubt. Abuses and excesses adorned with ambition and some romantic contempt transferred to the story of those who seem to have dominated the conflict.

At this moment there is a certain desistance of the human characteristic. We are dominated by scopes: machines, screens, weapons, computers, artificial intelligences, by everything that should make those of us who call ourselves rational, the inhabitants of this small blue dot, part of a marvelous, magical, incomprehensible, incomprehensible in its magnitude, fantastic, admirable universe, enjoy ourselves. The mirror of progress is putting us before a mirror with no reverse side: we are discovering our capacity to renounce all hope, others, embrace, affection, fraternity, understanding of the unequal, support for the disadvantaged, scientific advances, knowledge of nature, the little things, and all in favor of who knows very well what. We are an extravagant defeat and we know that we are heading towards an end undesired by all. In a way, we are our own worst enemy and we lack the strategy to correct ourselves.

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ALBERTO BARCIELA, Spanish journalist, is vice-president of EditoRed.