Ideology and politics are antagonistic and incongruent with crime

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 17/11/2023

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Terrorism with crimes against humanity perpetrated in Israel, digital crimes under the command or protection of diverse regimes, the installation and operation of narco-States in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, the human trafficking and enslaving -in this 21st century- by Cuba, are only some of the crimes that is pretended to be shown with political justifications. The attempt to cloak the violations of human rights as ideologic, highlight the importance to reiterate that ideology and politics are antagonistic to, and incongruent with crime.

A crime is a serious infraction, it is “a voluntary action contrary to the law considered socially harmful, dangerous, or reprehensible.” The concept that “crime is related to the most significant and serious infractions that harm an entire community and not only a victim” is totally correct. Crimes against humanity are “any of those atrocities or crimes of an inhuman nature that are part of a generalized or systematic attack against a civilian population, that is committed in order to enforce the policies of a State or organization.”

Terrorism is “domination by terror” and the “successive occurrence of violent acts to instill terror,” it is based on the situation of defenselessness of its victims and the imposition of fear. Terrorism can originate from groups that present themselves as political proposals who, by using violence to cause terror, become part of the criminal effort, reducing their ideological or political arguments to mere pretexts or fallacies of justification. Terrorism can also come from the government, thus becoming “State-terrorism,” with the objective of instilling fear in the population and in this way be able to breed a behavior of subjection that would otherwise not be possible to occur.”

Ideology is “the set of fundamental ideas that characterizes the thinking of a person, community, or time-period, of a cultural, religious, or political movement.” It is understood that “political ideology is the set of fundamental ideas or proposals that characterize political parties or groups regarding as to how a State’s and/or society’s institutions should work,” it is further explained as “an ethical set of ideals, work and economic principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or important group that pretends to explain as to how society should function.”

Politics has different meanings such as “the art, doctrine, or opinion in regard to the State’s government,” “the activities of those who govern or seek to govern public affairs” and the “activities of a citizen when he/she intervenes in public affairs with his/her opinion, vote, or any other way. It is considered that “it is an activity aimed -in an ideological way- to the decision making of a group to reach certain objectives and also to the manner to wield power in the government.”

Conceptually and in reality, no crime or criminal activity can be acknowledged as a political ideology or part of it, because crime is an aggression to the human being and to society. Neither can politics be turned into the mechanism for the commission of crime in the exercise of disputing power, or in the exercise of discharging the duties of the government.

When narratives are presented to give either an ideological content, or political expression, to crimes that instead of protecting individuals and the society promote and foster violence that seeks to destroy them, we are facing new crimes of the non-democratic, dictatorial, tyrannic, or totalitarian regimes in which politics has been replaced by organized crime who has, and wields, power.

Neither terrorism, nor any other form of crime such as narcotics’ trafficking or digital crimes, or human trafficking, can be accepted or protected by politics with the argument of defending, promoting, or sustaining an ideology; to do this is simply to do propaganda of the criminal groups. There is no ideological argument that can justify the violation of human rights, assassinations, torture, the existence of political prisoners and those politically persecuted, the exile of millions of citizens who are used as a weapon of massive forced migration, the attacks against defenseless civilians, armed aggression, drug production and trafficking to destroy society.

Ideology and politics are concepts that represent values of defense of life and freedom, not of justification for crimes. Any distortion of those concepts that anyone pretends must be rejected to prevent the advancement and sustainment of transnational organized crime’s regimes who, under the cloak of dictatorships; with nationalist, communist, theocratic, antiimperialist, or any other type of argument, are today the foundations of terrorism, exercise State-terrorism, are narco-States, who attempt against human rights and international peace and security.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».