Learning to kill children

Killing children is not easy; one must know how. In abstract terms, extermination proclamations of an entire people can be made, as Netanyahu or other genocidal leaders do, but the truth is that this job –annihilating creatures– cannot be done by just anyone. Who will go door to door, when the extermination of an entire race is decreed, to finish off all the children living there? Who will be able to pull the trigger or drop a bomb, who will aim with a squinted eye directly at the head of a child who barely stands a few feet tall? Who will plunge a knife into tender flesh and endure the sharp, horrifying screams? Very few people, in fact, could carry out the worst of acts, the most fatal and terrible: ending the life of a defenseless sprout. That is why soldiers must be trained to dehumanize the other in a process that is two-way. Because it is impossible to see “the enemy” in a creature if one has not suffered a significant erosion of one’s own humanity.

The murder of the innocent and defenseless is an extreme that we can all reject without a second thought, radically and unequivocally. But what about other acts of discrimination that also have a terrible effect on people’s lives? We would never kill a child, but would we accept that they starve? Would we deny food to someone who asks us for it or asks it of the society in which they live? The ignominious pact of María Guardiola in Extremadura with Vox (an act of submission by a female politician with an exemplary intent, a public humiliation that serves as a warning to sailors) is about this when she defends that “Spaniards first”. It is no novelty. The precursors of Abascal’s party, in less organized forms than the party he leads, have existed and acted for many years. One only needs to follow the work of photographer Jordi Borràs, who has dedicated himself to following the steps of the fascist movement over the last decades. I remember that, during the worst years of the 2008 crisis, we heard that one of these groups –in Valencia, if I remember correctly– was distributing food to those who could not afford it, but only to Spaniards. This means that if a hungry person approached them without the relevant ID, they had to go without food.

Those who believe that foreigners, legal or illegal, should not receive the aid established in the system we have, are they willing to accept the concrete effects this would have on concrete people? Effects such as the stomach ache of an adolescent who has nothing to take for breakfast during recess and who, if it weren't for the school lunch grant, could not have a single full meal a day. In Spain and Catalonia there is about 30% child poverty, which means that 3 out of 10 children may depend on school lunches to receive food. This in one of the most advanced areas of the world, where not only are there not too many people, but there is a lack of them to cover many jobs. Jobs so poorly paid that they don't even provide enough to feed a child.

When Aliança Catalana proposes to make access to public services, to registration, to extraordinary regularization stricter, what it actually does is fuel sadistic cruelty against a part of the population. Now that the psychopathic far-right –Spanish or Catalan– feels emboldened (due to a lack of empathy) by the global climate, I ask those who are willing to give them their vote: do you think my mother, for example, deserves not to be treated in a public health center for the simple fact of having been born in a foreign country? Do you think the delivery person who brings you your food at home should not have children and that if they do, they shouldn't go to school? This programmatic cruelty is not an abstraction: it has concrete effects on concrete people. As much as killing a child with one's own hands.