From emotion to judgment

We live in a society that consumes more reality than it is capable of digesting, analyzing and interpreting.. Accustomed as we are to feeding on images and value judgments, we are losing the ability to form our own criteria through the study of different points of view.. That famous phrase from Groucho Marx comes to mind: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”. And the thing is that by trying to believe some we have lost the ability to interpret others, regardless of who they are.

The wars that we live through the plasma of screens, networks and any means of communication in the different variants to which we have access, represent, on too many occasions, a crude simplification of an extremely complex reality, which greatly exceeds the possibility. to synthesize it in a few images – of very high emotional impact – and some short and appropriate phrases to the case.

We thus speak of technological warfare, networked, cyber, multidomain, automated systems, information, asymmetric, total… incorporating more and more categories without knowing for sure what they mean.. The truth is that war continues to respond to the most primitive and ancestral of drives, imposing our will on the 'other' by any means we have at our disposal, resorting to the use of force.. And in the use of these means, the only thing that differentiates one contestant from another is the voluntary restriction on the excessive use of force.

In this sense, submission to the laws and customs of war, respect for the lives of civilians and non-combatants – terrorists are not considered combatants in the strict sense – are the true indicators of respect for the Ius in bello. .

A technological environment, one could say futuristic, is enthusiastically described to us: sensors, remotely manned devices, observation satellites, autonomous combat systems supported by AI, high precision and lethality ammunition, systems of a range and precision never seen before, etc

And all of this is true, except that the subjects who are the object – objective – of these systems are soldiers, people in vehicles, in the open field, in trenches, in rest areas, in homes or restaurants, in reality everywhere.. Modern war, said Sir Rupert Smith in his book The utility of war, is war between people, the front lines are on the battlefield, in the rearguard, in cities and in intangible cyberspace.

They fight for land, for will, for emotions, for international support, in short, to impose a narrative that allows some to be praised and others to be demonized, being aware that the victims and the target audience coincide, they are people. .

I ask the reader to abstract the caption and the sound from what he sees and hears on a daily basis and to try to discriminate – without having to assign a priori roles of heroes and villains – the scenes of war between invaders and invaded, between offended and offenders. , Between good and bad. You must have a solid and well-founded criterion to be able to interpret facts and actions that instinctively produce approval or rejection in us, simply because we are conditioned to do it in a certain way.. Gaza, Ashkelon, kyiv, Donetsk, Lugansk, are names, places and feelings, especially if you were born and live or die in them.

That is the true face of war, that of those who suffer it in their flesh, that of those who live and die without being aware of when and why.. Images are representations of reality, not reality itself.. Between the emotion that an image produces and the judgment we make about it, only judgment mediates. Let's cultivate it.