Enrique-Javier Díez-Gutiérrez
Professor at the University of León and author of “Soberanía Digital Educativa” (2026),
“Pedagogía Antifascista” (2025) and “Pedagogía del Decrecimiento” (2024).
The famous Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuściński once said that wars begin long before the first shot is fired and the first bomb is dropped. Wars begin with a change in the language used by the media, with a new narrative on our screens, with institutional silence regarding atrocities, and with the selective decision as to which victims deserve to be mourned and which are reduced to mere statistics. They begin when a society learns to look upon murdered and tortured human beings without feeling outraged. When the systematic destruction of entire villages becomes an everyday sight. When horror is no longer intolerable and becomes just another form of fast-consumed information, alongside commercials, sport and entertainment. We could call that “the pedagogy of genocide”.
The unpunished genocide we are witnessing in Palestine and Lebanon is a massive cultural, political and media operation designed to foster acquiescence, resignation and moral compliance in the face of barbarism. A genocide cannot be sustained by military force alone. It needs narratives, interpretative frameworks, rhetorical justifications and “educational” devices capable of fostering social indifference and political consent. It needs to teach people that some lives are expendable and that death is inevitable.
The contemporary war economy is not confined to the battlefield. It permeates social media, schools, the media, universities, films and TV series, and the cultural industry Militarised capitalism depends on societies that are emotionally conditioned to accept constant violence It depends on citizens who are accustomed to coexisting with televised devastation and with the idea that security justifies any moral exception. Genocide requires preparatory “pedagogy”: the pedagogy of dehumanisation.
That is why expressions such as “surgical operation”, “collateral damage”, “strategic targets”, “human shields” or “proportional response” are repeated over and over again. Technical language acts as ethical anaesthesia. Words cease to refer to specific individuals and lives and begin to manage acceptable levels of destruction. Thousands of murdered children become operational figures. Bombed hospitals are transformed into “suspicious infrastructure”. Military vocabulary replaces human vocabulary.
This “pedagogy of genocide” also operates through saturation. Images of mutilated bodies, destroyed cities and families buried under rubble appear daily until they induce moral fatigue. Overexposure does not necessarily generate consciousness; it often generates desensitisation. Repeated suffering ends up being consumed as spectacle. Tragedy ceases to be a political challenge and becomes part of the global news routine.
At the same time, any form of resistance and solidarity is criminalised. People who denounce genocide are accused of extremism, radicalism or anti-semitism. Universities crush student protests. European governments repress demonstrations. Intellectuals and journalists are singled out for questioning the official narrative. Censorship does not always come in explicit forms; it often operates through fear, job insecurity and symbolic exclusion. The message is clear: protesting against barbarism has consequences. The UN rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who has denounced apartheid and genocide in the Palestinian territories, has experienced this first-hand.
In this context, schools play a decisive role. We have been told for decades about education for peace, democratic citizenship and human rights. However, the major powers that fund educational programmes on coexistence are the very same ones that sell weapons, sustain military occupations and legitimise massacres. This is a deeply structural hypocrisy in a system that teaches human rights whilst normalising the extermination of entire populations when geopolitical and economic interests so require.
Cultural militarisation is also advancing through the audiovisual and digital industries. Video games, TV series, films and news platforms turn war into interactive entertainment. The figure of the hyper-technological soldier is portrayed as a moral hero, whilst civilian victims disappear from the narrative frame. Drones, smart missiles and mass surveillance are presented as necessary technical advances, concealing the fact that behind this technological sophistication lies a global machinery of death and control. The Lavender Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, designed by the Israeli regime, systematically carries out automated genocide in Palestine.
The war economy is currently one of the major drivers of contemporary capitalism. The armaments industry is making extraordinary profits whilst governments increase military budgets by cutting social rights. Thus, war ceases to be the exception and becomes a permanent economic model. Fear works as a profitable political resource: fear of the external enemy, of terrorism, of migrants, of those who are different. When a society is frightened, it accepts state surveillance, repression and violence more readily.
Palestine has become an extreme testing ground for this logic. Military technologies, surveillance systems and methods of population control are tested there, and subsequently exported to the rest of the world as ‘field-tested’. Genocide does not only destroy Palestinian lives; it also generates military knowledge for control and death, economic profit and ideological legitimisation for new global forms of authoritarianism.
However, any pedagogy of genocide must first destroy ethical memory. It requires us to forget that no life is worth more than another. It must erode our capacity for empathy and international solidarity. It must convince us that violence is inevitable and that history always belongs to the armed victors.
In the face of this, it is urgent to construct a radically opposed pedagogy: a pedagogy of life, human dignity, critical memory and ethical disobedience. Education cannot mean resigned adaptation in the face of horror. Education implies developing historical awareness and memory, critical thinking and active commitment in the face of injustice It means teaching people to identify the economic, media and political structures that turn extermination into administrative normality.
Because the greatest triumph of barbarism does not consist solely in destroying bodies, cities or entire peoples. Its greatest victory occurs when it succeeds in making societies witness genocide without rebelling. When mass death ceases to provoke moral outrage. When humanity learns to coexist peacefully with the intolerable
And that is precisely where the downfall of any democratic civilisation begins.
