I Don't See Humanity. I See Bodies.

 

I Don't See Humanity. I See Bodies.

(A Brief Antisthenic Manifesto for Times of Murderous Abstraction)

Luis Fernando Gutiérrez Cardona

1. The Horse and the Bomb

Antisthenes used to say: "Plato, I see a horse, but I don't see horseness." With that, he dismantled the Theory of Forms. There are no essences floating in the sky. There are only concrete horses: the ones that sweat, limp, run, or collapse.

Today we should say: "I see a man gutted by a bomb in Gaza, a woman fleeing her burning home in Ukraine, a child murdered in Iran. But I don't see humanity." Because when they announce that "humanity is going to the Moon," they lie. It wasn't humanity. It was some more or less anonymous names, and now it's not: they've turned it around. Humanity shits in latrines while watching the spectacle on a box.

Language is not innocent. Talking about "humanity," "culture," or "progress" is usually the elegant way to hide a corpse.

2. Erasing a Culture in One Night

We hear the leader, surrounded no longer by swastikas but by golden plastics, say we must "erase a culture of crazy bastards." Antisthenes would ask: What is a culture? A set of songs, prayers, recipes, ways of tying shoes? That doesn't get erased in one night.

The final solution against ninety million people and a millennial tradition takes more than one night. And one madman.

The trick is the same: disguise violence with a name. Antisthenes would say: "Don't say 'we're eliminating a hostile culture.' Say 'we're going to kill these men, rape these women, and burn their homes.' If you can't say it like that, then don't do it."

Putin doesn't literally say "Ukraine doesn't exist." He says it "never had a real statehood." But he meant: Ukraine has no right to exist as a nation. "The people living there have no right to decide, to breathe without my permission." But here's the concrete truth: Ukraine doesn't exist. What exists is that soldier bleeding out in a trench. Ask him if he exists.

Let Putin, the American negotiator, and the new führer of golden plastics sit down to negotiate impositions—an oxymoron in itself. Meanwhile, the world bleeds. And its blood is more real than all their words.

3. The Stupidest Phrase in the World (Said by a Man in a Tie a Few Hours Ago)

A few hours ago, the chief U.S. negotiator with Iran declared to the media: "We haven't made progress in the talks because they haven't accepted our conditions." Then he went home, satisfied, thinking himself brilliant.

It's hard to conceive a stupider phrase. For lack of intelligence, and for lack of thought. Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil: the tie-wearing executioner filling out forms while the trains depart.

Let's translate the phrase into the language of bodies:

- "We haven't made progress" → We're still dropping explosives on people who bleed.

- "They haven't accepted our conditions" → We demand the other do what we say. Since they don't, we keep killing. And we blame them for it.

The whole phrase, grounded, sounds like this: "We're still killing people because the people we're killing refuse to sign a document saying they accept us killing them with the right to do so."

That's obscenity. And the worst: the man who said it went to sleep, convinced he'd done his duty. Eichmann slept soundly too.

#Antisthenes #war