Chapter III

The Conquest of Childhood

Every society educates. It cannot be otherwise.

Parents teach. Teachers teach. Religious institutions teach. Governments teach.

The question is never whether a society educates. The real question is what it seeks to plant in the minds of its children.

Every generation inherits an invisible legacy: a language, a history, a gallery of heroes, a catalogue of grievances, a sense of right and wrong.

No child chooses that inheritance. It is received long before the child acquires the ability to question it.

That is precisely why childhood has always been the most coveted territory for every political, religious, or ideological project.

Adults can argue. They can compare. They can doubt.

Children trust.

They instinctively accept as true what they learn from the people they love. That trust is the foundation of human learning. It is also the reason childhood is uniquely vulnerable to indoctrination.

The difference between education and indoctrination is not that one transmits values while the other does not. Every education transmits values.

The difference appears when the right to ask questions disappears.

Education equips people to think. Indoctrination supplies the answers before the questions can even be asked.

Education strengthens judgment. Indoctrination replaces judgment with obedience.

Education prepares citizens. Indoctrination produces believers in a single unquestionable truth.

Chapter IV

When Suffering Ceases to Be a Tragedy and Becomes a Political Asset

There is a profound difference between experiencing a tragedy and building a political project around that tragedy. Confusing the two leads to moral and analytical mistakes with far-reaching consequences.

Every war produces victims. Every occupation leaves humiliation in its wake. Every terrorist attack destroys families. Every airstrike deepens resentment.

This is the raw material.

But raw material alone does not create an ideology. What transforms suffering into a political project is the meaning assigned to it.

Two people may endure exactly the same loss and reach entirely different conclusions. One may decide that no other human being should ever experience such pain. The other may become convinced that the only possible response is to inflict the same suffering on the enemy.

The difference lies not in the event itself. It lies in the interpretation that a community chooses to give it.

That is why revolutionary, totalitarian, and terrorist movements never merely display suffering. They organize it. Classify it. Select it. Narrate it. And ultimately give it direction.

Every photograph. Every funeral. Every name. Every ruined building. Every dead child. Every grieving mother.

All of these can become memory. Or they can become propaganda.

The difference is not in the image itself. It is in the way the image is used.

The most effective propaganda rarely needs to invent tragedy. Real tragedies already exist. Its task is to prevent those tragedies from being understood in any other way.

Suffering ceases to be a shared human experience. It becomes the exclusive property of one community.

Its own victims occupy the entire stage. The victims of the other side gradually disappear. And once they disappear from the collective conscience, the moral limits on harming them begin to disappear as well.

This mechanism is as old as history itself. It did not begin in Gaza. It did not begin in the Middle East. It appears in almost every prolonged conflict.

Every society remembers with extraordinary precision the injustices it has suffered. With equal ease, it forgets—or justifies—the injustices it has inflicted.

Memory ceases to be a bridge toward understanding. It becomes an instrument of mobilization.

But there is an even deeper transformation.

Suffering itself acquires political value.

Every new victim reinforces the existing narrative. Every attack seems to prove that the enemy always deserved to be hated. Every act of retaliation fuels the desire for another.

The conflict becomes a closed circuit. Consequences become causes. And those causes generate new consequences.

Violence is no longer perceived as a failure. It becomes the fuel that keeps the entire system alive.

Here lies one of the greatest achievements of any extremist movement. It does not have to win the war. It merely has to prevent the war from ending.

As long as new victims exist, there will always be new stories to tell. As long as there are new stories, new generations can be recruited. And as long as new generations are recruited, the movement will always find reasons to survive.

It is an extraordinarily perverse logic.

Peace itself becomes a threat.

Because lasting peace forces uncomfortable questions.

Why are we still poor? Why do our institutions remain weak? Why do the same leaders remain in power? Why do our children still have no future?

As long as conflict dominates public life, those questions can be postponed indefinitely. The external enemy becomes the explanation for every internal failure.

That does not mean the enemy is imaginary. It means the enemy’s existence can be used to prevent any serious examination of one’s own society.

At that point, suffering no longer belongs to its victims. It belongs to the narrative.

And once tragedy is transformed into a political asset, reconciliation begins to drift further away.

Because rebuilding cities is no longer enough. Signing peace agreements is no longer enough. Even defeating an armed organization may no longer be enough.

Something far more difficult must be contested.

The meaning of suffering itself.

That is the real battlefield. Not the one fought with missiles, but the one that determines whether a child will grow up believing that a parent’s suffering should inspire the construction of a different future—or the continuation of a war that will ultimately consume that child’s own generation.

Perhaps that is why peace can never depend solely on the silence of weapons.

It depends on whether one generation finds the courage to break the chain that turns every victim into the justification for the next.

Until that happens, the incubators of hatred will never lack their most abundant raw material:

Human suffering.