My interest in Haiti deepened two years ago while I was in Jamaica. Being in the Caribbean made the region’s history feel less distant and more interconnected—the legacies of slavery, empire, resistance, and the long afterlives of colonial rule.

And now, before August ends, I find myself remembering Haiti again.

August carries a sacred and revolutionary memory for the Haitian people. On August 14, 1791, enslaved Africans gathered at Bois Caïman, an event remembered as a spiritual and political preparation for revolt. Then, on the night of August 22–23, the uprising began, igniting the Haitian Revolution.

The land we now call Haiti was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, one of the richest colonies in the world, its wealth extracted from sugar and coffee through the brutal labor of enslaved Africans.

In the long night of empire, Haiti was the first to break the chains.

Born of fire and faith, the enslaved rose from the plantations and declared that masters did not own their bodies, their future, or their God. What followed was not simply a slave revolt but a revolution that overturned the racial, economic, and political order of the Atlantic world.

On January 1, 1804, after defeating Napoleon’s forces, the revolutionaries declared independence and reclaimed the Indigenous name Haiti—Ayiti. The first independent Black republic was born.

But the world that preached liberty could not abide Black freedom.

France, humiliated by defeat, later demanded an enormous indemnity in exchange for recognition—payment for the supposed “loss” of land and enslaved people. Haiti was forced to purchase recognition of the freedom it had already won.

The cruelty of the arrangement is difficult to overstate. The formerly enslaved were made to compensate those who had enslaved them. The nation celebrated for liberté and the Rights of Man placed a financial price on Black freedom.

France did not simply refuse to celebrate Haiti’s liberation. It made Haiti pay for it.

And Haiti paid dearly. Money that might have built schools, roads, hospitals, institutions, and a stronger national economy instead flowed outward in debt payments. The burden did not disappear with one generation. It became part of the economic architecture inherited by those who came after.

This is colonialism after colonialism.

The flag may change. The empire may formally withdraw. But the ledger remains.

The cross that had once stood beside the whip now stood beside the ledger. Forgiveness was preached to the enslaved, while restitution was granted to the enslavers.

The United States was hardly an innocent observer. A nation proclaiming liberty while maintaining slavery feared the example of a successful Black revolution only a short distance from its shores. The United States refused to recognize Haitian independence until 1862, nearly sixty years after Haiti became free.

Later came direct intervention. From 1915 to 1934, the United States occupied Haiti, controlled its finances, reshaped political institutions, and deepened patterns of foreign domination that would outlive the occupation itself.

Again, Haiti was sovereign—but never entirely permitted to exercise sovereignty on its own terms.

Western Christendom also has questions to answer.

Churches were often eager to send missionaries but far less eager to confront the economic and imperial structures that continued to wound Haitian life. Christianity frequently arrived carrying European assumptions about what counted as proper religion, civilization, and culture. Haiti was told not merely to believe differently but, too often, to become less African.

Vodou, which had helped sustain memory, community, resistance, and spiritual imagination among an enslaved people, was demonized as something primitive or dangerous.

Yet Bois Caïman itself reminds us that spiritual life and political liberation were never easily separated in the Haitian struggle. Faith could be a language of submission, but it could also become a language of revolt.

This history matters whenever Haiti is casually described as a “failed state.”

Failed?

Compared with what—and after what history?

To speak of failure without speaking of slavery, extraction, indemnity, foreign occupation, intervention, political manipulation, and economic isolation is to begin the story far too late.

Haiti did not simply fail.

It was punished for succeeding too soon.

It shattered one of the foundational lies of the modern world: that enslaved Africans were incapable of governing themselves, incapable of freedom, incapable of overthrowing the system that reduced them to property.

Haiti frightened empires because it demonstrated that Black freedom was not merely an idea. It could become a nation.

None of this means romanticizing Haiti or denying the failures of Haitian governments, elites, institutions, and political leaders. A history of external domination does not erase internal responsibility.

But internal failures should not be used to erase the imperial history that helped shape the conditions in which those failures occurred.

That is precisely what I mean by imperial mess.

Empire does not simply leave when the colonizer departs. It leaves debris: debt, distorted economies, fragile institutions, racial hierarchies, cultural wounds, and patterns of dependency that can persist for generations.

Haiti may be one of the clearest examples of this afterlife.

And still Haiti endures.

Its music, faith, memory, language, art, spirituality, and defiant joy continue to rise from the ruins like a psalm. Haiti’s story is not only a story of suffering. It is also one of extraordinary resistance—the refusal of a people to surrender the freedom their ancestors won at unimaginable cost.

Two hundred thirty-five years after the uprising of August 1791, Haiti still bears witness to a truth that empires have never found easy to accept:

Freedom may be sabotaged, indebted, invaded, and betrayed—but a people who have once broken their chains cannot easily be made to forget that they were born to be free.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

August 25, 2026

For decades, the United States has used economic pressure to force Cuba into submission. Sanctions, restrictions, and efforts to choke off the flow of fuel are justified as leverage against the Cuban government. But electricity does not distinguish between governments and ordinary people. When fuel disappears and power plants shut down, families, hospitals, schools, workers, and neighborhoods sit in the dark.

This is engineered darkness.

The logic is familiar: make daily life unbearable, intensify economic pain, create desperation, and hope that suffering will produce political surrender. Energy becomes a weapon. Darkness becomes pressure. The hardship of ordinary people becomes part of a geopolitical calculation.

Then China enters the picture with a very different response.

Rather than further restricting Cuba’s access to energy, China has provided solar technology, financing, and equipment and has supported the expansion of Cuba’s renewable-energy capacity. Whatever one thinks about China’s global ambitions—and they should certainly be examined critically—the contrast in method is difficult to ignore.

One weaponizes scarcity. The other builds capacity. One seeks leverage through control over fossil fuel. The other helps Cuba harness the sun’s abundant energy.

That choice is particularly significant. Oil must be extracted, transported, purchased, shipped, and delivered. At every point, access can be controlled or interrupted. Sunlight is different.

You can blockade oil. But you cannot blockade the sun.

What China supplies is not the sunlight itself, of course, but the technology that enables Cuba to turn what already falls freely upon the island into usable power.

This is more than a story about energy. It reveals two different politics of power and two different ways of gaining influence.

The United States relies heavily on coercion: sanctions, financial restrictions, isolation, and economic pressure. It exercises power by withholding and constraining. The wager is that enough hardship will eventually produce compliance.

China practices another form of statecraft: building, financing, supplying, investing in infrastructure, and creating economic partnerships. Such assistance is never without interests. No great power acts without calculation, and Chinese influence should not be romanticized.

But the difference in method matters. A moral difference exists between gaining influence by increasing another society’s vulnerability and gaining influence by helping it build something it needs.

And ordinary Cubans live that difference.

Geopolitical strategy becomes painfully concrete when food spoils because there is no refrigeration, when water cannot be pumped, when transportation stops, when hospitals struggle, when children cannot study, or when families wait through sweltering nights for the electricity to return.

For them, power politics is not an argument between Washington and Beijing.

It is experienced in the conditions of everyday life.

That may be the most important question powerful nations should be asked: Does the power you exercise make ordinary people’s lives more precarious—or more livable?

Eleazar S. Fernandez

August 21, 2026

Odysseus survives not because he is the strongest warrior, but because he is versatile and cunning and learns to adapt. He changes course when circumstances demand it. He improvises, listens, waits, disguises himself when necessary, and discovers new paths when old ones disappear. His strength lies not in rigid certainty but in resilient responsiveness. He bends without breaking.

Such adaptability also requires recognizing our limits. To change course is to admit that our first plan may not be sufficient, that we do not control every circumstance, and that we may need the wisdom of others. Odysseus survives because he gradually learns that cleverness alone is not enough. The journey exposes his limits, corrects his pride, and teaches him when to act, when to wait, and when to listen.

There is a lesson here for all of us. We often imagine maturity as remaining the same regardless of circumstance. Yet life rarely unfolds in straight lines. Careers shift. Relationships deepen or fracture. Illness interrupts our plans. We migrate across countries, cultures, and identities. The people who flourish are not always those who resist change most fiercely, but those who navigate it wisely.

To be polutropos is not to be rootless. Odysseus never loses sight of Ithaca. Home remains the horizon that gives meaning to every detour. Adaptation without direction becomes aimlessness. Conviction without flexibility becomes rigidity. Wisdom lies in holding both together: the capacity to change while remaining faithful to what truly matters.

Perhaps this is one of life’s deepest callings—not merely to endure change, but to be formed by it. Every unexpected turn becomes an invitation to grow in humility, patience, imagination, self-knowledge, and hope. We do not emerge from life’s journeys unchanged; if we are attentive, we emerge enlarged.

The goal, then, is not to avoid the winding road and many turns but to travel well.

Through life’s many turns, who are we becoming?

Eleazar S. Fernandez

July 26, 2026

Yet democracy and capitalism are not the same. Democracy is a political ideal grounded in the equal participation and shared power of citizens. Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership and control of capital. They may coexist in some forms, but they are not identical.

Distinguishing democracy from capitalism is not the same as rejecting markets. Markets can foster innovation, creativity, and prosperity. The point is not that markets should be abandoned, but that no economic system should be placed beyond democratic scrutiny. Democracy loses something essential when it can no longer ask whether existing economic arrangements serve the common good.

The confusion matters because it has become an unquestioned presupposition. Once accepted, it narrows our political imagination before the conversation even begins. We stop asking whether there are other ways of organizing economic life because we have already assumed that none exist.

As wealth becomes concentrated, economic power increasingly becomes political power. Those who control capital gain disproportionate influence over elections, legislation, lobbying, media, and public policy. Democratic institutions may remain intact, but their priorities can gradually shift toward protecting concentrated wealth rather than serving the common good.

This confusion also explains why proposals such as universal health care, stronger labor protections, affordable housing, or greater public investment are so often dismissed with a single label: socialism. The label ends the conversation before the ideas themselves are considered. Instead of asking whether such policies strengthen democracy, promote human dignity, or expand opportunities for all, ideological slogans replace democratic deliberation.

Perhaps the more serious threat to democracy is the unquestioned assumption that only one economic system is compatible with it. The triumph of an ideology is complete when it no longer appears as an ideology but as common sense—as the natural and inevitable order of things. Those who defend it often believe they stand above ideology, when they are simply expressing one of its most powerful forms.

A healthy democracy should be confident enough to examine every economic system—including capitalism. No economic arrangement should be immune from democratic reflection or public accountability.

If the mere questioning of capitalism immediately feels like an attack on democracy, perhaps that reaction is itself worth examining.

What if the first task of a healthy democracy is not to defend the prevailing economic orthodoxy, but to recover the freedom to question it in light of what promotes the common good, distributes power more justly, and enables both people and the earth to flourish?

Eleazar S. Fernandez

July 16, 2026

For many people, critical thinking means identifying weaknesses in other people’s arguments. It means spotting logical fallacies, exposing contradictions, and challenging unsupported claims. These are important skills. But by themselves they do not make one a critical thinker. They merely make one a critic.

Critical thinking begins at a deeper level.

It asks us to move beyond evaluating arguments and examine the assumptions, narratives, and frameworks that make certain arguments persuasive in the first place. The task is not only to ask whether a claim is true or false, but to inquire into how meaning is constructed, what interests are at work, what remains unspoken, and what alternative possibilities have been excluded.

Over the years, this changed the way I thought about teaching. I became less interested in helping students accumulate information and more interested in helping them examine the lenses through which information is interpreted. The goal was not simply to evaluate conclusions but to understand the processes that produce them.

These questions matter far beyond the classroom.

We live in an age saturated with information. Data, opinions, statistics, expert analyses, podcasts, videos, and social media reach us every hour. The problem is no longer a lack of information. The problem is our inability to make sound judgments about it.

We are all vulnerable to intellectual blinders. We search for evidence that confirms what we already believe. We trust voices that belong to our own tribe. We mistake repetition for truth and familiarity for evidence. The result is not deeper understanding but deeper entrenchment.

Critical thinking is not a weapon for defeating opponents. It is a discipline for resisting manipulation, questioning easy certainties, and refusing to let our own assumptions remain invisible. The greatest danger is not ignorance—it is certainty that has stopped asking questions. Critical thinking does not make us right. It makes us teachable.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

July 10, 2026

This assumption reflects a powerful inheritance from the Enlightenment. It gave us confidence in reason, respect for evidence, intellectual inquiry, and the conviction that ideas should be tested rather than merely accepted. These remain important achievements. I continue to believe that evidence matters and that arguments should be examined critically.

Yet experience gradually complicated this picture.

Again and again, I watched people encounter the same evidence and arrive at very different conclusions. Facts that challenged existing beliefs often strengthened rather than weakened them. Public debates generated more heat than light. Social media multiplied information at unprecedented levels, yet confusion, polarization, and conspiracy thinking seemed to grow alongside it.

The problem, I came to realize, was not simply ignorance.

In many cases, people possess more information than previous generations could have imagined. Vast libraries of knowledge sit in our pockets. Data, statistics, expert opinions, historical records, and competing interpretations are available almost instantly.

Yet greater access to information has not necessarily produced greater wisdom.

The issue is not a shortage of information. It is the difficulty of making sound judgments about information. Facts do not interpret themselves. Evidence does not speak with a single voice. Information always requires discernment.

This realization changed how I think about education.

The central task is not merely the transmission of information but the cultivation of judgment. Not simply information, but formation. Students must learn how to weigh evidence, recognize assumptions, evaluate competing claims, and distinguish persuasion from truth. They must develop the capacity to ask not only what is being said, but how meaning is being constructed and whose interests are being served.

The challenge before us is not primarily educational in the narrow sense. It is deeply human.

In an age overflowing with information, wisdom depends less on what we know than on how we learn to interpret, evaluate, and judge what we know.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

June 30, 2026

The demonstration was playful. Yet it carried a profound truth. The stranger is never merely a stranger. Hidden within the foreign is the possibility of friendship.

And yet the transformation is not automatic.

The German language itself hints at a deeper tension. Between Freund (friend) and Fremder (stranger) stands an uncertain threshold. The stranger can become a friend, but the stranger can also become an enemy. Hospitality and hostility emerge from the same encounter. Both words trace their roots to the Latin hostis, which once meant “stranger” before it came to mean “enemy.” The guest and the enemy are linguistic cousins.

Hospitality is never pure welcome. Every invitation contains a boundary; every welcome carries the possibility of refusal. The philosopher Jacques Derrida recognized this ambiguity and coined the term “hostipitality” to describe it.

This tension has become painfully visible in contemporary politics. Migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers often arrive first as fremd—foreign, unfamiliar, unsettling. Public discourse then presses toward a decision: Will they become Freunde or Feinde? Friends or enemies? Neighbors or threats?

The answer is rarely determined by the stranger alone. It is shaped by the fears, grievances, hopes, and narratives of those who receive them, especially when strangers are recast as threats in the service of White nationalist dreams of cultural purity and national decline.

The pastor’s wordplay remains with me because it captures both a possibility and a warning. The distance between a stranger and a friend may be smaller than we imagine. Yet the distance between a stranger and an enemy may be equally small.

Perhaps that is where our humanity is tested—not in whether strangers exist, but in what we allow them to become in our imagination and narratives. From there, much is already decided.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

June 9, 2026

When only two deadly options are placed on the table—annihilation or domination—fear becomes the architect of political judgment. The past catastrophe becomes the sole lens through which the present is interpreted. In such a framework, any alternative to force appears naïve, and any call for justice appears dangerous. The imagination is trapped between survival through power and destruction through vulnerability.

But this is precisely where moral imagination must resist. To say, “never again,” cannot mean “never again for us alone.” It must become a universal commitment. Otherwise, it risks turning into a justification for policies that reproduce suffering for others. When trauma is translated into permanent suspicion and suspicion into perpetual militarization, the cycle of insecurity deepens. Fear protects, but it also imprisons.

These binaristic framings also erase the possibility that security and justice might coexist. They assume that dignity for one people requires subjugation of another. Yet history suggests the opposite: domination breeds resentment, resentment breeds resistance, and resistance perpetuates insecurity. In this cycle, no one truly becomes safe.

The narrowing of imagination is therefore not merely rhetorical—it is dangerous. It prepares societies for endless war by convincing them there is no other path. The task of moral imagination is to reopen what fear has closed: to envision shared security, mutual recognition, and a peace not built on conquest. Without that expansion, humanity remains trapped in tragic choices between past horror and future violence, unable to imagine the difficult but necessary work of a just and lasting peace.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

June 3, 2026

But accents are politicized and weaponized.

A native Filipino speaking English does not usually receive the same hearing. Neither does a Tamil speaker. The very same linguistic difference that sounds sophisticated in one body may sound broken or inferior in another. Some accents are romanticized; others are marginalized. We pretend to hear language, but often we hear power.

I discovered this in myself one day while calling London to book a hostel. Somewhere in my imagination, I expected a James Bond accent—the polished sound of Britain projected by film, empire, and prestige. Instead, the voice on the other end carried a Tamil accent. For a brief second, my expectations collapsed. Perhaps that was a Pentecost shock for me. It exposed how deeply the politics of accent had already trained my ears.

The New Testament contains a striking scene about accent and power. Jesus had already been arrested. Jerusalem was tense. Peter lingered nearby, trying not to be recognized. Then a servant girl looked at him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean” (Matthew 26:69). Peter denied it. But later, others confronted him again: “Surely you are one of them, for your accent betrays you” (ESV, Matthew 26:73).

Peter’s tongue exposed him before his theology and politics did.

He sounded Galilean. He did not speak with the accent of Jerusalem, the religious and political center. His voice carried the margins within it. The countryside clung to his syllables.

Who is heard as “having an accent” and who is heard as simply speaking normally is shaped by the politics of power. Those at the center often imagine themselves accentless, as though their speech were universal. But everyone has an accent. The accent of the powerful simply becomes invisible because it has become the norm.

Perhaps Pentecost speaks directly into this reality. The miracle in Acts is not that Galileans suddenly spoke like Jerusalem elites. They remained Galileans. Yet people from many nations heard and understood them in their own tongues...in their strong accents. Pentecost shattered not language, but the politics and hierarchy of hearing.

The Spirit did not teach Galileans to sound like Jerusalem elites. The Spirit taught the world to hear beyond the grammar of power.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

May 26, 2026

In some parts of the world, multilingualism is often celebrated as a mark of sophistication. To speak several languages is associated with education, cosmopolitanism, and cultural privilege. The polyglot is admired as worldly and intellectually accomplished. Yet in much of the Global South, multilingualism often emerges not from privilege but from necessity. It reflects histories of displacement, unequal power, and the pressure to navigate systems built by others.

For many colonized and marginalized peoples, one language is never enough. A person born in a remote village may first learn the language of home and kinship. To participate in regional life, they need to learn a dominant regional language. Beyond that, access to education, government, and citizenship may depend on fluency in a national language that is not their mother tongue. Finally, economic mobility often requires learning an international language, frequently the language of a former colonizer such as English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese.

In places marked by repeated colonization, individuals may inherit several linguistic burdens at once. They may speak the language of home, the language of the nation-state, and one or more colonial languages simultaneously. Diasporic communities experience additional layers of negotiation. Migrants may preserve the language of their country of origin while adapting to the dominant language of their adopted society and other languages imposed through educational systems.

Language, therefore, becomes more than communication: It becomes a way of survival within systems shaped by empire. Language, in this sense, is both a burden and a tool: a painful reminder of domination and, at the same time, a means of negotiating structures designed without their best interests in mind.

Yet the colonized do not simply absorb these languages passively. They also reshape, translate, hybridize, and repurpose them. The language of empire can become a language of negotiation, critique, and resistance. Colonized peoples have often used the master’s language to expose the violence of empire itself, “speaking back to power” in words once imposed upon them. What begins as survival can also become an act of defiance.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

May 24, 2026

Later in the day, a dog barks—sharp, playful, or alert. In the United States, it becomes woof. In the Philippines, aw-aw. In Spain, guau guau. In France, ouaf ouaf. Italians say bau bau. Germans wau wau. Russians gav gav. Greeks gav gav. The Dutch woef woef, and Swahili speakers add mbwa. Again, one bark, many hearings. The dog has not studied linguistics. We have.

Or perhaps there is something we don’t fully understand. Perhaps animals, too, develop patterns of sound shaped by place, environment, rhythm, and relation. Perhaps a dog in one landscape does not sound the same as a dog in another. I do not know.

What is certain is that humans do not hear sound neutrally. We hear through memory, culture, and language. The bark reaches us already translated by the worlds we inhabit.

These small, familiar differences tell us something profound: we do not hear the world raw. We hear it through the grammar we inherit. Language does not create sound, but it shapes how sound becomes meaning. Our ears are trained long before we leave our homes or begin formal education.

Animals inhabit this same world—filled with birdsong, thunder, rain, and human voices—but they do not translate sound into syllables or symbols in the way humans do. They hear tone, rhythm, intention, and presence. A dog listens relationally. Or so I think. A rooster announces dawn not by explanation but by participation. Animals are not lesser listeners; they are different ones. They remain closer to immediacy, while humans turn sound into story.

This difference matters when we turn to Pentecost.

Pentecost is often interpreted as a miracle of tongues, but I think it is more deeply a miracle of hearing. The people who were speaking were all Galileans — “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” (Acts 2:7) — yet the gathered foreigners responded in astonishment: “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” (Acts 2:8).

The emphasis of the text is important. The miracle is not that difference disappears through the creation of one sacred language. Difference remains. Languages remain. Histories remain. Yet understanding becomes possible without the erasure of difference. One event, many hearings. One Spirit, many tongues. One human world, many ears.

Pentecost affirms what the rooster teaches every morning: a sound can be one and still be heard in many ways. Unity does not require sameness. Communion does not demand uniformity. The miracle of Pentecost is not sameness. It is understanding without erasure.

This has urgent implications for our pluralistic world. We live amid many languages, cultures, religions, and moral traditions. The temptation is always to treat difference as noise, as confusion to be overcome, as a problem to be solved. But Pentecost suggests a different posture: difference is not an obstacle to truth; it is the medium through which truth travels.

Pluralism does not mean that all sounds are identical, nor that all interpretations are interchangeable. It means acknowledging that our hearing is partial, conditioned, and situated—and that others may genuinely hear something we do not.

The danger is not many tongues. The danger is the insistence that only one hearing counts as faithful, rational, or real.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

May 21, 2026

In more than two centuries of national life, the United States of America has formally declared war only five times, yet historians count over 400 military interventions abroad—a pattern that suggests war has become less an exception than a recurring instrument of policy. A question attributed to Arundhati Roy is on target: “Do we really need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?”

The historical record is sobering. The United States fought wars against Native nations throughout the nineteenth century while expanding westward. It fought the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), which redrew the map of North America. At the end of that century came the Spanish–American War (1898), followed by U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines. The twentieth century brought involvement in World War I and World War II, conflicts that reshaped the global order. After 1945, the Cold War era saw military interventions in Korea, Vietnam, and numerous covert operations tied to regime change and geopolitical rivalry.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the pattern continued. The United States intervened in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and the Gulf War against Iraq (1991). After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by prolonged military involvement in Syria and other regions through air campaigns, special operations, and military partnerships. Even outside formal wars, the United States maintains a global military presence across hundreds of bases.

Like other addictions, belligermania promises security and control but often produces deeper instability, trauma, and long-term consequences both abroad and at home. It feeds on fear, national pride, and powerful economic interests tied to the machinery of war. When war becomes habitual, it reshapes a nation’s imagination. Military force begins to appear natural, even inevitable, while diplomacy and restraint are dismissed as weakness.

Yet addictions can be confronted. Recovery begins with recognition—acknowledging the costs of permanent warfare: lost lives, devastated societies, and the erosion of democratic accountability. A recovering nation would learn to treat war as a tragic last resort rather than a reflex. It would invest more deeply in diplomacy, international cooperation, conflict prevention, and economic justice.

Breaking belligermania will require more than new policies; it will require a transformation of imagination. A nation long accustomed to war must learn the disciplines of restraint, diplomacy, and shared humanity again. Until then, the machinery of war will continue to turn—producing new enemies, new graves, and new reasons to fight.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

May 19, 2026

Such linguistic distinctions deserve closer scrutiny. The United States has long participated in proxy wars across the globe, backing forces that advance its strategic interests while allowing Washington to maintain a degree of distance from the conflict itself. From Latin America to the Middle East, proxy warfare has been a recurring feature of great-power politics. Yet the label is rarely applied to US actions. Instead, the vocabulary of alliances, partnerships, and security cooperation softens the perception of influence and control.

In the case of Israel, the question becomes especially provocative: who is truly shaping whose decisions? The United States consistently provides vast military assistance, shields Israel diplomatically in international forums, and often aligns its regional policies with Israeli security priorities. When such support becomes nearly automatic, observers inevitably raise an uncomfortable question: Is the relationship still that of a powerful patron supporting a smaller ally, or has the dynamic shifted in ways that complicate the usual narrative?

The familiar phrase asks whether the dog wags its tail. In this situation, critics sometimes wonder whether the opposite may be occurring—whether the tail has begun to wag the dog. The US is Israel’s proxy in the Middle East.

Raising this question is not simply a rhetorical provocation. It exposes how geopolitical narratives are shaped by power. Those who dominate global discourse often define the vocabulary itself. By naming their own relationships as alliances and those of their adversaries as proxies, powerful states normalize their influence while delegitimizing others’. The struggle, therefore, is not only about military power but also about narrative power—about whose language defines reality and whose actions are judged by it.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

May 9, 2026

This tension is embodied in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Confronted with the catastrophic violence of Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer faced a profound ethical dilemma. To do nothing was to allow evil to continue its destruction. To act—especially by joining a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler—was to step into morally dangerous territory. There was no safe or uncontaminated option.

Bonhoeffer chose to act.

He did not do so with the assurance that he was fulfilling God’s will, nor did he seek the comfort of moral certainty. Unlike those who cloak their decisions in claims of divine sanction—as if God’s will were transparent and securely on their side, such as fundamentalist Christians and White Christian nationalists—Bonhoeffer refused such theological safety. He did not act to preserve his soul or guarantee his righteousness. Instead, he accepted the burden of responsibility, knowing that action in a broken world may involve guilt.

For Bonhoeffer, the greater danger was not making a morally risky decision—it was retreating into passivity to remain innocent. Such withdrawal, he believed, was itself a failure of responsibility. To stand aside while others suffer is not moral purity; it is complicity.

His life reveals a deeper kind of courage: a willingness to risk everything—not only reputation or life, but even one’s moral standing—for the sake of others. It is a courage that refuses paralysis, even in the face of judgment, including divine judgment. Responsibility, for Bonhoeffer, demanded action without guarantees.

This posture is not defiance against God, but humility before God. Bonhoeffer does not justify himself; he entrusts himself. He acts and then places his life under divine mercy rather than moral certainty.

In the end, his witness challenges a powerful temptation: the desire to keep one’s soul safe while the world burns. True ethical life may demand the opposite—that we risk ourselves for the sake of others and leave the verdict to God.

He did not act to save his soul—he acted, and entrusted his soul to God’s mercy.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

April 29, 2026

Nowhere is this more painfully visible than in the entanglement of contemporary Jewish and Palestinian identities. What is “independence” for one is al-Nakba, catastrophe, for the other. What is experienced as “security” is imprisonment. What is called “settlement” is lived as displacement. These are not simply competing narratives; they are identities forged in mutual opposition, each shaped by history, trauma, and fear.

As Rashid Khalidi observes, the Palestinian voice is often permitted only when accompanied by an Israeli echo. This is not simply a political imbalance; it is epistemic exclusion—the silencing of a people’s experience unless validated by the dominant other. Adding cruelty to their suffering, Palestinians have often been prevented from lamenting in public, as Jewish suffering—particularly the Holocaust—has been granted a near monopoly in the global moral imagination. One is left to ask: “Is there anything more cruel than this absence—that you should not be the one to…lament your [own] defeat?”

Marc Gopin, a Jewish scholar of peacebuilding, names this dynamic as “negative identity”—an identity shaped by trauma, where one acts out of repetition and fear. This danger intensifies when suffering is monopolized. The Holocaust, in its undeniable singularity, can be invoked in ways that silence other histories of suffering, particularly Palestinian displacement. Yet it is also a tragic distortion. When suffering becomes monopolized—when one’s pain is elevated as singular and incomparable—it risks, as Rosemary and Herman Ruether warn, a loss of solidarity with others’ suffering, breeding further division.

Yet Jewish voices themselves have challenged this. Marc Ellis, a Jewish theologian, insists that the Holocaust cannot be mourned in isolation from the suffering that has followed in its name. “To move forward,” he writes, “is to understand that when redemption is a disaster for the other, redemption cannot be claimed.” There is no redemption for Jews apart from Palestinians, nor for Palestinians apart from Jews. Their futures are bound together.

One cannot lead out of a damaged self. As Gillian Rose, a Jewish philosopher, reminds us, politics does not happen when we act on behalf of our own woundedness, but when we risk acting for the good of all. Moving forward requires more than competing claims; it demands mutual recognition of shared pain, even as particular histories are honored.

Only those who can mourn together can begin to heal together.

The Age of Civilizational Rot—that is where the United States is now.

In recent rhetoric, Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Pete Hegseth echoed the same language. The vision was clear: destroy infrastructure, collapse society, reduce a people to vulnerability. Iranian officials responded by pointing to their millennia-old civilization and warning that such rhetoric signals moral decline, not strength.

The phrase “turn them back to the Stone Age” imagines a world without electricity, hospitals, or modern systems. It suggests primitiveness. Collapse. Regression. Yet the Stone Age itself was not morally backward. It was technologically simple. Small communities lived by cooperation. They shared. They survived together. Their tools were stone, but their relationships were human. The Stone Age lacked technology, not dignity.

To reduce a society to those conditions by force is something else. It is deliberate dismantling. It is the destruction of water systems, homes, and hospitals. It is the manufacturing of suffering. The Stone Age emerged over millennia. This is imposed in moments. This is violence.

The contrast is stark. The Stone Age represents technological infancy. The Age of Civilizational Rot represents a period of ethical decay. One speaks of tools. The other speaks of choices. A society with stone tools can live with restraint. A society with advanced weapons can embrace domination. Technology does not define civilization. Morality does.

The Stone Age was not morally backward; it was technologically simple. But the deliberate destruction of another society belongs to the Age of Civilization Rot.

If forced to choose, the Stone Age is the lesser loss. Hardship without electricity and sophisticated technology is survivable. A world that celebrates destruction is not. When annihilation becomes strategy, humanity steps backward—not into prehistory, but into the Age of Civilizational Rot—which is the current state of the USA.

Iran may not possess the technologies that the United States commands, but I would rather be labeled Stone Age than belong to the Age of Civilizational Rot.

USA—you are in the Age of Civilizational Rot.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

April 8, 2026

God did not spare me from witnessing this evil unfolding. There was no exemption for age, faith, or service rendered. Instead, I am being made to see—fully, lucidly, without anesthesia. That is its own burden. Not despair, but knowledge. Not panic, but recognition. To live long enough to discern clearly, and to see clearly enough to grieve honestly, is not a consolation prize. It is a vocation, even when it wounds.

What has collapsed is the myth of moral exceptionalism—the belief that power will somehow discipline itself, that dominance will naturally generate restraint. What stands exposed instead is beastliness without frenzy: not disorder, but command; not desperation, but confidence.

Once this is seen, it cannot be unseen.

It is from this place—of clarity without innocence—that I now look at the world’s most powerful state. Unlike other states branded “rogue,” often acting from desperation or survival, this one represents a far more dangerous form of lawlessness. It is not a rogue born of economic and military weakness, but a rogue armed with immense power, global reach, and the confidence that comes from idiocy and impunity.

It violates the UN Charter not because it lacks the capacity to follow it, but because it believes it does not have to. International law becomes optional—invoked when useful, ignored when inconvenient. When a leader signals that his own morality is the only limit (Trump), law ceases to restrain power. It becomes decoration. When a top U.S. official dismisses “rules of engagement” as “stupid” (Hegseth), the message is unmistakable: legal and humanitarian restraints are treated not as moral guardrails but as obstacles to be swept aside. Calling rules of engagement “stupid” signals a dismissive posture toward legal and humanitarian constraints in war.

A state with the ability to kidnap national leaders, bomb sovereign territories, impose sanctions that devastate civilian life, and extract resources under the language of order or security is not preserving stability. It is a revealing power unmoored from accountability. There is no higher authority capable of policing such a state, because its power shields it from consequence. Madness combined with capacity is more dangerous than desperation. Cruelty backed by institutions is more lethal than chaos.

When international law is dismissed as “stupid,” and power becomes the only law, the world slides toward anarchy and ruin. This is no longer deniable. It is glaringly despicable. The danger is not coming—it is here. What remains is whether silence, accommodation, and moral numbness will complete the descent.

The last veil has fallen—what remains is the shadow of doomsday.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

04-07-2026

There are moments when frustration rises—when consequences arrive and old warnings echo in memory. The instinct is to measure responsibility and assign it carefully. But a deeper truth interrupts that impulse. Like the work of labor unions, the gains never remain only with those who fought. Everyone benefits—even those who disagreed, opposed, or actively worked against it. The struggle protects even its critics.

This does not make their opposition harmless. Often, the very people who benefit most from change fear it most. Anxiety about status, identity, or stability persuades them to defend arrangements that quietly harm them. They vote against their own material and moral interests because belonging feels safer than truth. Yet social reality does not respect intention. When injustice hardens into policy, suffering spreads beyond those who endorsed it. Economic precarity, repression, and environmental harm never stay confined. The bell never tolls selectively; it tolls across the whole community.

Here lies the paradox: solidarity operates even when recognition fails. Justice refuses to distribute itself only to the morally deserving. The person who opposed the strike still benefits from the eight-hour day. The citizen who dismissed civil rights still lives under their protection. The voter who empowers repression still depends on liberties preserved by those they resisted. Public goods are indivisible.

For advocates, this can feel bitter. Why sacrifice for people who deny you, even endanger you? Yet the answer is also the moral ground of the struggle. The point is not reciprocity but community. To act for justice is to accept that one’s labor may protect even one’s opponents, because the alternative is a world where protection belongs only to allies—the logic of tyranny.

So, the irony remains: those who cut the tree still eat the fruit. And precisely there lies the nobility of justice.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

March 25, 2026

His statement is not merely a proposal for administrative reform. It is an indictment of the deepest structural injustice within the United Nations itself.

In the General Assembly, nearly two hundred nations gather as nominal equals. Each country has one vote. The world can debate, condemn, and declare. But it cannot compel. The Assembly represents humanity’s voice, yet its decisions remain largely symbolic.

Real authority resides elsewhere.

It lies in the Security Council—fifteen members, but only five hold decisive power: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. These five permanent members possess the veto, the ability of a single state to nullify the will of the entire international community.

One country can silence the world.

This is not democracy among nations. It is hierarchy written into law.

The result is a system where international law often disciplines weaker states while shielding the strongest. Resolutions calling for peace, ceasefires, or accountability repeatedly collapse when the interests of one permanent member intervene. The Security Council does not merely manage conflict; it exposes the asymmetry of global power.

Prime Minister Sánchez has challenged this reality directly. Calling for the abolition of the veto and for broader representation—including India, African nations, and Brazil—he has articulated what many in the Global South have long understood: legitimacy cannot coexist with structural inequality.

The deeper question now emerges: can the United Nations evolve from a chamber of managed inequality into a house of equal peoples?

If the veto remains in place, the answer is doubtful. As long as a handful of states retain the authority to override the collective will of humanity, the UN will continue to mirror the old imperial order rather than transcend it.

The call from Spain should therefore not remain a solitary voice. Middle powers, emerging nations, and the Global South must begin a coordinated effort to reform the institution itself. Expanding representation, dismantling the veto, and rebalancing authority are no longer procedural debates; they are conditions for restoring global legitimacy.

History changes when structures that once appeared permanent are finally confronted.

The question before the world is no longer whether the United Nations needs reform. The question is whether the international community has the courage to dismantle the old architecture of power and build a global institution that truly reflects the equality of peoples.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

03-14-2026

For decades, Washington has treated regime change as a strategic instrument: remove a government, install a compliant one, and stability will follow. Yet the historical record shows the opposite. Again and again, regime change leaves nations destabilized, institutions shattered, and societies trapped in cycles of violence whose consequences last generations.

Consider the overthrow of the elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh during the 1953 Iranian coup d’état. The United States restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, whose regime ruled through repression and the notorious SAVAK secret police. The short-term objective—protecting Western strategic and oil interests—was achieved. The long-term consequences were explosive. Decades of authoritarian rule fueled the anger that culminated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. What was meant to secure stability instead produced enduring hostility and geopolitical tension.

The destruction unleashed by regime change became even more visible in the Middle East. The 2003 invasion of Iraq removed Saddam Hussein but dismantled the Iraqi state itself. Institutions collapsed, the army was dissolved, and a massive power vacuum emerged. Sectarian violence engulfed the country, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The chaos enabled extremist movements such as the Islamic State to seize large territories. Afghanistan offers another sobering lesson. After the United States invasion of Afghanistan removed the Taliban in 2001, twenty years of war followed. When U.S. forces withdrew in 2021, the Taliban returned to power, exposing how fragile the externally constructed political order had been.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the consequences were equally destructive. The U.S.-supported 1954 Guatemalan coup that removed Jacobo Árbenz plunged the country into decades of military rule and civil war that killed more than two hundred thousand people, many of them Indigenous civilians. In the Caribbean, the removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004 deepened cycles of instability, violence, and external dependency that continue to haunt the country today. Venezuela offers a more recent example. Years of sanctions, political pressure, and external confrontation destabilized the country long before the dramatic 2026 U.S. operation that captured President Nicolás Maduro and removed him from power. Yet even this act of regime change did not resolve the crisis. It opened another period of uncertainty over legitimacy, governance, and foreign influence.

Africa offers further sobering examples. The removal and assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo opened the door to the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, whose kleptocratic rule hollowed out state institutions and destabilized much of Central Africa. Decades later, the 2011 intervention in Libya—supported by the United States and NATO—toppled Muammar Gaddafi but dismantled the Libyan state without creating a viable political order. Libya fractured into rival governments and militias while weapons and instability spread across the Sahel.

Across these cases, the lesson is unmistakable. Regime change destroys political structures far faster than it can build stable ones. External powers may remove leaders, but they cannot reconstruct the social and institutional foundations that hold societies together. What follows is devastation—broken institutions, civil conflict, authoritarian backlash, and generations forced to live with the wreckage.

If regime change is the answer, the United States should be the first place to start. But even that is not enough. The deeper systemic change required is a conversation for another time.

Eleazar S. Fernandez

March 9, 2026