By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez OP
The wars of yesterday and today are brutal rituals of territorial control as a space of privilege for a powerful group over the rest of the beings that inhabit it.
Modern expansionism, which began in the late 15th century with interoceanic voyages financed by European kingdoms that became nascent empires, was an enterprise of control of routes and territories that expanded throughout the world in a brutal manner as an unprecedented colonization project. libido dominandi The conquistador found in this "civilizing" enterprise his perfect justification in the religious armor that accompanied the wars of conquest: those lands had to be conquered in the name of God.
This is happening today in Palestine because of the greed of the Israeli state and the powers that support it to seize the territory of the Palestinian people, both Muslim and Christian. Such colonizing libido fuels the unbridled fury of Jewish settlers eager to seize more and more land in the West Bank and Gaza. This perverse logic leads a people who were victims of Nazism to now commit genocide against a brother nation.
A similar, but even more perverse, greed fuels the transnational war industry for the benefit of corporations that enrich themselves exponentially by creating armed conflicts to fuel the war machine that generates trillions of dollars in profits each year around the world. In this case, it involves the control of financial and industrial territories to feed the arms industry in every corner of the planet.
Israeli Zionism and Christian Zionism are two sides of the same coin. They write another disastrous page in the history of the greed for land as property, cynically manipulating the biblical promise of the land. Since the 19th century, this Zionism born in the United Kingdom was the one that paved the way for the later creation of the State of Israel, under the pretext of the Shoah. That same Zionism, in its version of perverse political messianism represented by the State of Israel, has now invented a criminal scenario with a Muslim enemy to be defeated in order to impose its military power in the Middle East, annihilating the Palestinian people and humiliating neighboring peoples, through the blatant manipulation of the Bible, as Mitri Raheb has shown in his essential book Decolonizing Palestine. The Bible, the land, the peopleThe Israeli machinery of drones, tons of missiles and millions of bots or automated accounts flooding social networks, has been spreading fake news throughout the virtual world that has left the entire world stunned, producing a “collective cognitive dissonance,” as analyzed in Brazil by João Cezar de Castro Rocha based on Leon Festinger's theory.
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And, strange as it may seem, the ongoing gentrification in many cities around the world, from Barcelona to Mexico City, is another expression of that same colonizer's will to dominate, now in its gentle version. hipster. Only this time, it's not about conquering territories to govern them through military occupation armies with the aura of an imperialist religious flag. I'm referring to the digital nomadic colonizers who take advantage of the power of their currencies, emboldened by their dreams of white and technological primacy, to inhabit residential neighborhoods in vibrant cities at a much lower cost than they would have in their countries of origin. Thus, these hipster herds nurture their cosmopolitan illusions enclosed in their urban bubbles, without coming into close contact with the population of the place they inhabit, but rather displacing them or subordinating them to their tastes and interests. This phenomenon represents the most recent and perverse version of settler colonialism that displaces previous inhabitants from their land.
For the past five years, I've spent a period of time each year in Mexico City's Hipódromo Condesa neighborhood, where the Dominicans have for almost a hundred years animated a parish that was a religious center for the Mexican middle class with aspirations for urban modernity, though not so much religious ones. Every year I return, I'm surprised to see that the former residents have left, selling their homes, converting them into Airbnbs, or outright opening hipster-trendy businesses, ranging from vegan restaurants and light ice cream shops to bistros with Mexican fusion menus. But what has surprised me most is the proliferation of businesses specializing in angels, candles, Tarot readings, physical therapy, Bikram yoga, and other types of yoga, as well as countless spas with massage menus ranging from reflexology to tantric, not to mention, of course, Reiki mixed with "ancestral" techniques from the heart of Mexico.
On the other hand, the Catholic parishes in that area of the city collapsed financially due to the lack of alms, but above all, their traditional religious population was aging. To the surprise of many religious ministers, in recent decades, La Condesa has become a laboratory for new religious expressions, as Hugo Suárez has documented (Images of Faith. Audiovisual Sociology of the Condesa neighborhood), a sociologist from Guadalajara, in a recent comparative study of the religious practices of residents of Condesa and Ajusco in Mexico City, one a hipster neighborhood and the other a working-class one. To complete this quick overview, it's important to note that in recent years, there has been an upswing in the number of believers in Catholic churches, especially in South America, characterized by a traditional Catholicism of intense and highly moralizing individual piety. This is an unexpected effect of gentrification in those parts.
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What criteria could help us understand the meaning spiritual From these old and new territorial control processes? Could humanity's religions pull from the vault of their memories some precious talisman that sheds light on us?
The second beatitude of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount captures the poetic message of Christ as He preached in Galilee in a provocative way. This beatitude literally says: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5). The Greek word for the meek is πραΰς (praus). This term is associated with those who resist the powers that want to push them aside because they are considered redundant in the community. In Galilee in Jesus' time, these meek They were those who resisted the Roman power of taxes or military occupation.
It is not, first and foremost, a question of understanding the meek as peaceful people according to the traditional reading of this text. Rather, it refers to those who resist violence without making a fuss, appearing invisible to the eyes of the world, because they deploy what today we might call strategies of resistance as survivors of many forms of violence.
On the streets of our cities, we see some of these people out of the corner of our eyes, passing by us like shadows lying on a sidewalk, or living in cardboard houses under a bridge, or even lurking in the garbage looking for a piece of bread, a cigarette butt, or a can of beer with a drink to take. They are the disposables of consumer society, the ones surplus to requirements in a shopping mall, and whom we might bump into by chance or carelessness when entering the subway or when rolling down our car window at a stoplight at any urban intersection. When we approach these peripheries very close to us, we discover that, despite the subhumanization that surrounds them, these people organize, care for, and support one another.
The promise of the land that Jesus announces to the meek It is subversive because it does not refer to the people of Israel, as imperial Davidic theology had previously intended and repeats today with its genocidal narrative. It is not about “possessing the land,” much less exploiting it, but about inherit it, that is, to receive it as a gift from the Abba who “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Jesus thus subverts the dominant narrative of his time, which consisted of distributing land according to religious strata that marked the economic and social scale, with the Temple playing a central role in Jerusalem as the religious capital of Judea.
Therefore, the Galilean's greatest audacity lay in saying that the "meek" will inherit the earth, thus opening the promise of the earth to the most vulnerable in society. A world reversed from that produced by gentrification.
To conclude these reflections, let us allow the Colombian poet José Eustasio Rivera to whisper that uncertain hope of those who resist colonization because they sense that, at the heart of their resistance, they are beginning to inherit the land:
XIV
I am a son of the mountain! For its coolest place
I search, always singing, for the resounding hive;
and in the silent caves my throat fills
of nectarean honeycombs and of stone almonds.
As I leave the waves, I fall asleep with pleasure
on the dead leaves that my dog gleans;
and through the branches, on my brown face
the afternoon sun sets its moving arabesque.
Inspired by a dream of distant tenderness,
I caress the flowers; I crown myself with vines,
and I embrace the trunks with deep emotion;
that later, when I concentrate my thoughts alone,
I seek the prize of the mountain, and in my spirit I find,
the flowering shoot of a sweet illusion.
Promised land, Bogotá, 1921.
eSwatini, July 12, 2025
