Joan Carrero: "We live in the empire of the lie"

Joan Carrero is a pacifist activist and founder of the S’Olivar Foundation, based in Estellencs, from where he has worked for decades for peace and justice in the Great Lakes region of Africa. He was one of the first conscientious objectors in the country and his career earned him several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2013, he received the Gold Medal of the Council of Mallorca. He promoted a lawsuit against the Rwandan president Paul Kagame and has repeatedly denounced the looting of minerals taking place in the Congo with the connivance of the Western world. He has just presented his new book ¿Is humanity heading towards Armageddon? Or towards the fullness of the Omega Point?You say that this is "the book that Pere Sampol was waiting for" and that he wanted to recommend to his colleagues. What is in this second volume that you believe Sampol considered especially necessary to explain?

— Pere stated to the media that reading La hora de los grandes “filántropos”, my second book, had radically changed his view of the world. Later on, at the presentation of Los cinco principios superiores, my third book, he gave an extraordinary assessment of it. Our friend Vicens Matas filmed a good part of his intervention, but he was interested in a more autobiographical book. A book in which I would explain more extensively what we had lived through in our fight for truth, justice, and peace in Rwanda and Zaire/Congo, my accompaniment of Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in the mediation between the government of Felipe González and ETA, etc.

— And it turned out that I was not able to publicly expose my intimacy or assume so much prominence. So finally, El “Shalom” del resucitado was released, a book in which the central protagonist is Jesus of Nazareth. When he had read it, Pere was bewildered and told me that such an absolutely mystical book could not be massively recommended to colleagues. Therefore, his request remained pending for a few years, until I decided to write ¿La humanidad va hacia el Armagedón? ¿O hacia la plenitud del Punto Omega?, in which I explain these personal experiences. Even though it has ended up becoming a book... of four volumes!

You write and follow major international conflicts from S’Olivar, in Estellencs, one of the smallest and apparently most remote places from the centres of power. Can the world be better understood from the periphery? What does Mallorca bring you to look at geopolitics with a certain distance?

— I try to follow in the footsteps of a marginal villager, a tekton –what today would be a stonemason or a freelance carpenter– who, moreover, lived in a small village in Galilee, a marginal region of Israel. And Israel, in turn, was on the margins of the Roman Empire. But it turns out that that villager first turned Judaism upside down, then the Empire, and, finally, the whole world. This marginality to which you refer is not only not a problem when it comes to carrying out great revolutions, but it seems to be a sine qua non condition.

— From the earliest biblical texts, from three millennia ago, in which the great figure is a Moses who did not know how to speak –possibly he was a stutterer–, to the recent mythology of J. R. R. Tolkien, in which only the small and peaceful hobbits can carry out the mission of saving the world, the paradox repeats itself: it is socially insignificant people –the prophets, David, Mary of Nazareth...– who generate great changes through higher laws, Los cinco principios superiores, which do not contradict conventional laws, but rather integrate them within a much broader scope. This is one of the two central questions of volume I. The other is the imperative need for Christians to integrate spirituality and political lucidity.

You advocate that we must continue to face the wounds of the Civil War. In the Balearic Islands, precisely this year, the democratic memory law has been repealed. What does this fact tell you about the way we still relate to our past?

— Are we sure we are talking about the past? When I started having the book in my head, in December 2025, the beatification of 124 priests, religious, and laypeople from the province, victims during the Civil War, was celebrated at the Cathedral of Jaén—the same one where hundreds of admirable Christians were imprisoned. Five were from my hometown, Arjona. One of them, Francisco de Paula Padilla, rector of the church of San Martín, became the Spanish Kolbe by managing to take the place of a father of a family and being executed in his stead. The more details I learned about all this, the more moved I felt. But when I began to verify that no saint or martyr of the defeated side seems to deserve canonization, something inside me told me that this was neither fair nor, by any means, evangelical.

— Reconciliation is not a thing of the past: it is an urgency of the present. And the canonization of thousands of Catholic martyrs is the future. My final conviction is that, if it continues to exclude the defeated and without recognizing its own serious responsibilities –before, during and after the War–, the Spanish Church will not contribute, with these massive beatifications of truly admirable martyrs, to the all-important task that Saint Paul called 'the ministry of reconciliation'. Rather, it will continue to prolong that anti-evangelical partisanship that the extraordinary Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer was already lamenting before, during and after the War. My analyses focus on the religious question, which was fundamental at the time. But they are also applicable to other issues, such as democratic memory.

You draw a parallel between the anti-communism that justified the '36 coup and the current Western 'Russophobia'. Isn't that a very risky comparison between radically different historical contexts?

— If our mental paradigm regarding the global geopolitical situation has been forged by the 'news' from 'our' televisions, by the analyses of 'our' experts 'of recognized prestige', by editorials and articles, whether from 'our' major media outlets or local media that limit themselves to reproducing the reports of 'our' major globalist agencies –media and agencies that, almost in their entirety, are owned by BlackRock–, we would certainly be facing a very forced comparison.

— But for quite a few years now, I have only informed myself through that documentation that shows us what the people of the deep state exchange among themselves when they believe no one is watching, reading, or listening to them. For example, WikiLeaks. And I only follow the analyses of those true experts who base themselves on this official and imperial documentation. This same documentation highlights how accurate the subtitle of volume I of my book is: we live in the Empire of Lies.

— This documentation shows us that, already since Brzezinski, the fundamental imperial objective is to break Russia and control the heart of the world: Eurasia, where the majority of the planet's wealth, population, and military potential are concentrated. Precisely the zone in conflict, Russia/Ukraine, is the center of this heart. But an operation of this kind is impossible without massive propaganda demonizing Russia. And the great cause that justified the Glorious Uprising was precisely the crusade against atheistic communism. Judge for yourself. The parallels are many. Even the Blue Division was sent to fight in besieged Leningrad. Just as now tens of thousands of Western mercenaries have fought against Russia.

When you denounce Western propaganda about Russia, where do you place Putin's responsibility in the invasion of Ukraine? Is there a risk that denouncing the interests of the West ends up minimizing those of Moscow?

— Kissinger, the other 'great man' of the Rockefellers, the Trilateral, etc., together with Brzezinski, was not very concerned about Israel and its surroundings. He even thought that this artificial state is unsustainable and that it will end up disappearing. It was Russia that concerned him. He was one of the hardliners who opted to betray the promise that had been made to the naive Gorbachev not to expand NATO further to the east.

— Other great North American figures of diplomacy were more lucid and honest: they warned of the great crisis in which we already find ourselves. Since I cannot go on at length, to demonstrate that Russia was intentionally provoked and pushed to defend its own existential security, I will only recall the secret 2019 RAND Corporation report. It declared that the only way to topple the Russian Federation was by forcing it to overextend its resources by intervening in Ukraine.

For more than twenty years, you and the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa have promoted the lawsuit for the murders of nine Spaniards and for the crimes committed in Rwanda and the Congo. At what point is that judicial battle today? Does it still have any real possibility of reaching the top-level officials of Paul Kagame's regime?

— As Pere said during our trip to the United States, when it comes to international issues there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Here, both the PP and the PSOE are responsible for the deactivation of universal justice. Neither one nor the other cares about doing justice for the ten exceptional Spaniards who were murdered by order of Paul Kagame. And even less for the millions of Rwandans and Congolese that he also murdered. As five WikiLeaks cables show, they preferred to follow the guidelines of the State Department: to change the law of universal justice and seriously accuse those of us who promoted the lawsuit.

— In addition to the serious accusations from the UN, published on the front page of El País and Público, to neutralize our lawsuit and the forty arrest warrants from judge Fernando Andreu, and also to whitewash the image of the great criminal Kagame –who provides Bill Gates with blood-stained coltan, but at an extortionate price for the Congolese–, the show of some millennium goals co-chaired by Kagame and Zapatero was set up in Madrid. In the historic photo, people like Ban Ki-moon, Bill Gates, and Miguel Ángel Moratinos provided cover for this criminal. But I believe we managed to burst that shameless display.

— Despite everything, the lawsuit remains active thanks to the accusation of terrorism. Above all, for the attack of April 6, 1994, in which the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated. An attack that triggered the hundred-day genocide.

After so many years pursuing accountability in Rwanda, do you feel defeated by the limits of Spanish universal justice or do you still believe that there will be some moment of accountability? And what would that mean for the families of the murdered Spanish aid workers and missionaries?

— There are those who fight to achieve immediate results. Others have missions with a horizon in History. They deserve praise and support. Personally, I have a horizon of eternity. In Los cinco principios superiores I argue that what is important is not the results. The fifth principle, and the superior one, is that of 'ineffective' dignity: doing what is right, 'uselessly' giving one's life if God so wills it. As Jesus gave it, and so many admirable martyrs.

— In this horizon of eternity, everyone, starting with Kagame and ending with those who followed the directives of the Deep State, will be held accountable very soon.

You speak of propaganda, fear and manipulation as political instruments. In Spain, the far-right continues to grow –the latest CIS places Vox at 16.6%, and other polls, even higher. What explains this rise? Is it just immigration and economic unrest, or do you see a deeper crisis of democracy?

— We have just seen in Germany that society no longer tolerates the great crisis that began to brew when, to harm Russia, the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed. But it turns out that Alice Weidel, the leader of the triumphant opposition, worked for Goldman Sachs. Are they going to foist another fraud on us like Obama and Meloni have been?

— If the socialist and progressive parties had not betrayed us, embarking us, for example, on exorbitant expenses of tens of billions of euros for Ukraine and NATO, would the most disadvantaged have a need for Vox?