The Dengue Fever
by Jorge Vargas
It has recently been released that researchers in Australia may have found a virus that kills off the mosquitoes that carry within them the Dengue fever virus. That virus has very severe and debilitating repercussions on human beings throughout the tropics - northeastern Australia, South Asia, central Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, the southern US, the Carib, and Peru's Amazon regions.
The insects only become carriers when they are 'old.' This new virus would destroy the mosquitoes before they reach that point in their development, thus erasing the virus until it mutates to infect the insects at a younger age, if the virus is able to make such an evolutionary leap.
It is a wonderful solution to a problem that, in some instances, can lead to death in human beings.
An excellent achievement for the human species. The ability to force and distort evolution by the utilization of human-altered viruses. The ability to destroy the carriers of the problem before it becomes threatening to us.
I heard of this news story just two days ago, and I have thought about it a bit, and I have realized that it reveals quite a bit about human nature. About humanity's greatness. About humanity's pitfalls.
Throughout history, humans have believed that killing off the future problem before it becomes a present problem is, at times, a necessary and even moral choice.
Imagine, for instance, the suffering that we would have been spared had Adolf Hitler been killed in the trenches of World War I - or, if for my people, if the British had fought just a little better during the U.S. revolutions of the 18th century.
But let us return to Adolf Hitler. After all, he, the monster incarnate, took the concept of pre-emptive action to a whole new level.
He believed that the Jews would bring destruction to the world by way of alleged Zionist plots that seeked to control and supplant. He saw in them great evil. He saw in them corruption, weakness and betrayal.
Thus, he sought to end the threat before it became truly threatening.
Thus, the rampant anti-Semitism that killed off millions of Jews in concentration camps and ghettoes throughout Europe.
Luckily for the world, the Germans lost that war and Adolf Hitler killed himself. His solution to a problem that only he and his Nazis saw never came to fruitition.
But we humans are not stupid. Disagreeable were his ideas, to be sure, and they remain disagreeable.
But the methodology and the logic behind the pre-emptive action itself are both, structurally speaking, sound. Pre-emptive action makes sense. Even if pre-emption can be used for pure evil.
And what better people to learn Hitler's lesson better than those that he tried to kill off?
Who else would have best understood his cruel, calculating logic so well that only sixty years later they would be employing it themselves, but this time with an added advantage? After all, who can criticize Israel of great crimes today without fear of being called anti-Semitic and of being a Nazi supporter and the rest of that rubbish?
Well, luckily, I am without fear of those accusations for they would be false and, more importantly, because I have a country that does not feel guilt for those crimes, since my land played no role in the atrocities of the 1940s and, as such, could not be accused of sharing in those disgusting sentiments that forced inaction upon the great nations of Europe and North America for so long.
The Israelis, like the Australian scientists looking to stave off the Dengue fever and like the Nazis who sought to end a threat that only they foresaw, are carrying out their own pre-emptive action.
They are not foolish. They know well that public opinion is turning against them in Palestine - not to be called a Palestinian Territory but, rather, Palestine if only to honor the history of a geography that I was taught well in my infancy. They know well that Palestinians are reproducing at faster rates than Israelis. They know well that their claims are illegitimate and that their plan of spreading into Palestinian lands is, finally, back-firing.
So, they employ their own solution. It even rhymes with the Nazi solution, though it is a term not as well known (if only because the Palestinians are not particularly good at Public Relations campaigns, unlike the Israelis who are masters at it): Ethnocide.
The indiscriminate killing of an ethnicity to such an extreme that the ethnicity would, essentially, end.
End before it becomes an even larger problem. End before it grows so large that humanitarians around the world will be calling, even more loudly than today, for that ethnicity to be given more land. End before England finally withdraws support for Israel. Before France withdraws support. Before Spain withdraws support.
End before the Russians finally do what they have been itching to do for decades: Tell Israel that enough is, really, enough.
End before the United States, a nation so prone to abusive, arrogant, and distasteful behaviour, finally backs off a bit on its so far unquestioning support for Israel's cruel campaign of ethnocide.
End before the world remembers that old phrase, that old promise of 'never again.'
That is the explanation for the grisly events unfolding in the Holy Land today.
It is not a particularly new explanation. Many know it.
But, now, who will act on it? Who, like me, will be unafraid of accusations? Who, like me, is willing to call a spade a spade and a criminal a criminal?
Or is only genocide illegal, while ethnocide is not?
