Crusade against the Pope

Chapter 192: Garys is simple and unpretentious

For the first time, there was voting and the advantage on our side was so huge.

The two joys overlapped each other. This double joy brought more and more joy.

We should have had a dreamlike happy time.

However, why did it turn out like this?
It was me, it was me first. It was obviously me who came first, whether it was democracy, republic, or leading troops to rebel.

Elias was stunned by the election results, but he didn't dare to say anything for a moment. He didn't question it when Garys proposed the plan before. Could he question it again after the results came out?

I saw his face twitching uncontrollably for several times, he seemed to want to say something but stopped himself, with many words running through his mind.

Just when he was about to say something.

He was patted lightly, but Garys's big hand was right behind him!
"I, I obey the decision of the brigade committee!"

Garys led the applause, and then the people around him cheered too.

"Okay! Let's unite as one and create brilliance together! From now on, we will become bigger and stronger! Complete the unfinished business!"

After a few polite words, this team of about a hundred people decided who would be the leader.

Of course, in order to appease the people on Elias' side, Elias was elected and appointed as deputy captain.

Throughout this whole process, everything seemed to make sense.

Everyone expressed his opinion and elected the captain of the squadron and the military tribune of his choice.

Then these people, representing the wishes of the ordinary soldiers, elected Garys as the captain, taking into account the military prowess that Garys had previously demonstrated.

The people on Elias' side actually had nothing to object to.

In fact, the only one who was really feeling unbalanced was Elias. After all, it was not a happy thing that the duck that was in hand flew away.

To be honest, Garys knew very well that he was playing a dirty trick.

Voting by raising hands and cheering was indeed something that was done in the early days of Republican Rome, but voting by raising hands and cheering was abolished.

Moreover, in later generations, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem was also mathematically proved that it is difficult to derive the group preference order from the voters' individual preference order.

It can also be said that: as the number of candidates and voters increases, "procedural democracy" will inevitably move further and further away from "substantive democracy."

In short, it is generally impossible to reach a coordinated collective choice through the voting process.

With Garys, they started with a dirty trick, first to Elias, and "adjusted the voter structure".
By concentrating a large number of potential opposition voters, a constituency with absolute advantage for Elias can be created, thereby exchanging the other two squadrons for constituencies with relative advantage for Gairis.

This behavior undermines the fairness of the election.

But to be honest, Gellis is not a staunch supporter of any particular system, and he does not have any genuine love or support for the so-called voting democracy.

He is just a very simple person. He simply wants some people to die, simply wants some people to stand up, and simply wants some people to realize the truth - they hold the power to change the world in their hands.

What he needs more than the so-called sanctity of the vote is to make these people believe in something.

At least, in this era, it is better to believe that the will of the people can change the world than to pin our hopes on "tyrant" idols.

The other side of the "Holy Lord" is the "Tyrant", who usurps the rights of the people. How can they serve the people from the bottom of their hearts and pass on their legacy from generation to generation?
Therefore, from the very beginning, a system should be used to restrain [people with unlimited power].

Unlike the Celestial Empire which had a mature court system, the Near East was essentially lacking in true countries, with most of them being little more than warlord forces.

And the "tyrant" Isaac is a typical tyrant warlord.

The bureaucratic system and civil service groups in the Middle East are simply unable to refute or restrain the desires of the tyrants.

Then Garys simply adapted to local conditions and planned to give the tyrants in the Near East and the Middle East a little democratic revolutionary shock.

This wave is called "retro" and it goes back a thousand years in one breath!
……

The mountains were shrouded in low-hanging clouds, and the streams in the valleys were surging with the increase in rain.

The cold air was crisp and clear, with a moist scent from the recent rain.

Although the vegetation on the mountains is not as lush as in spring and summer, it is still dotted with dark green cedars and cypresses, which tenaciously resist the harsh winter.

A team of more than a hundred people is walking in the mountainous area of ​​Cyprus.

As a large island with an area of ​​1.5 square kilometers, Cyprus is about times the size of Shanghai.

There are two mountain ranges on the island, namely the Troodos Mountains and the Kyrenia Mountains, and between the two mountains is the central plain, namely the Mesaoria Plain.

The narrow Kyrenia Mountains stretch along the northern coastline; they are not as high as the Troodos Mountains and cover a much smaller area.

The Troodos Mountains cover most of the southern and western parts of the island, accounting for about half of the island's area.

Therefore, this third largest island in the Mediterranean has a large mountainous area.

It is precisely because of this mountainous area that it is so difficult for Isaac's soldiers to search for Nicholas and his gang.

After integrating Elias's dozens of people, Nicholas' original hiding place seemed extremely crowded, and the food reserves there were almost running out.

In order to train the team and carry out subsequent uprising activities, the First Battalion of the Cyprus Liberation Front must be transferred.

But where to turn? There are two choices before everyone.

One is to go to the village slightly on the edge of the mountains, which is Elias's hometown.

Over there, the villages are a little wealthier and everyone can eat better.

The other option is to continue going deeper into the mountains, which is Andre's hometown.

The villages in the mountains were naturally much poorer, but they were relatively safer and could easily avoid Isaac's eyes and ears.

After some discussion, Garys convinced Elias and Nicholas and others that the team should move into the mountains as a whole.

After entering the mountainous area, although life became hard, at least they could train their troops freely and recruit new soldiers from the nearby mountain people, which also helped the development of the subsequent uprising.

Andre, the leader, trudged along the road in the mountains of Cyprus.

He hadn't been back home for some time, and a feeling of homesickness gradually emerged.

The fresh mountain air, on the contrary, made his chest feel even more oppressive.

But when he led everyone, turned a corner and stepped onto the muddy path into the village, the scene before them suddenly made everyone stop.

The smell of death was in the air, and everywhere you looked, there were only burnt ruins.

Some ashes swirled in the breeze, the earth mourning the ruins.

When everyone stopped, Andre took a few steps forward and walked into the village.

Looking around, the broken walls, burnt trees, and debris on the ground all tell of the tragedy that once happened here.

Even the well that once provided water for people is now littered with broken wooden barrels and human heads of various sizes.

Andre's knees went weak and he fell to the ground, tears streaming down uncontrollably, wetting his dusty cheeks.

Everything he was familiar with, the people, the laughter, and the village, no longer existed.

Only this silent ruin and his heart-wrenching cries echoed in the empty space. The setting sun shone on him, making him look particularly sad.

……

The ruins seemed even more eerie and silent under the cover of night, with only the cold wind whimpering among the dilapidated houses.

The charred wooden beams cast dim shadows in the faint moonlight, like twisted fingers, as if telling a silent misery.

Gailis did not sleep with everyone else in the intact house in front of him, but sat on a nearby cliff, quietly overlooking the village that had experienced massacre and burning.

After a while, footsteps were heard, and without turning around, Garys knew it was Andre.

Andre sat down next to Garys and handed him a piece of bread.

“Is this the food you and your men found?”

Looking at Andre beside him, Garys' voice was a little dull.

Andre nodded, indicating that Garys was indeed the case.

Then they looked down at the ruins together.

The village had been burned down, but their team had nowhere else to go.

Even if we want to go to the village where Elias's family lives, it is impossible to travel overnight. It would be too dangerous to do so.

Therefore, their team had to spend the night in the ruins.

After seeing all this, Andrei became much more taciturn, but he still offered to lead some brothers to get some food nearby.

In order to fight against tax collectors, these mountain people would not pile up all the food in the village.

"Do you have something to say to me?"

"Indeed, I have something to say."

"what?"

Andre whispered:

"I once had a priest who taught me not to repay evil with evil, not to seek vengeance on my own, but to yield and leave it to the wrath of God, to love your enemies, and to pray for those who persecute you."

"But now I am filled with rage. I want to find those evil people who massacred the village one by one and kill them one by one!"

Listening to Andre's words, Gailis snorted, and then he said: "Then have you ever heard another sentence?"

"what?"

"Those who love the Lord hate sin because He protects the lives of godly people and saves them from the hands of wicked people. It is okay for those who love God to have a strong aversion and rejection of sin. In fact, it should be so."

Listening to Garys's words, Andre couldn't help but say another sentence.

"But shouldn't revenge and hatred be advocated?"

Garys naturally has his own response to this kind of question.

"Will you kill the family members of your enemies? Will you rape the wives and daughters of your enemies? I'm not asking if you have such thoughts, but whether you will do it."

There was a struggle on Andre's face. He had indeed thought about it, but if he really had to do it, his conscience was shaking violently at this moment.

Finally, Andre chose to speak the truth in his heart: "I might do it, maybe, I... I don't know."

Garys looked at the painful Andre and sighed slightly. No one is perfect.

At least, this strong man is already feeling pain at the possibility.

He is much better than Temujin. After all, Temujin has a famous saying: The happiest thing in a man's life is to kill people, take away all their property, wipe out their roots, make their relatives cry, and then rape their wives and daughters.

“Heavenly Father, He has given all men a gift, and that gift is freedom.”

“You have the freedom to hate your enemies from the bottom of your heart. You must cherish this freedom, because it is this freedom that makes you a human being.”

"If a person is indifferent even when his parents are killed and his wife and daughter are raped, then is he still a human being?"

"Therefore, hatred is justified for you, and even if you want to repent afterwards, you should remember what you have experienced."

"But letting you remember these things, remembering the taste of hatred, is not to let you inflict what has happened exactly, but to stop it from happening again."

Just like Garys had previously patched up the commandment "Thou shalt not kill".

Gillis is now also patching up Christian doctrine.

It is a great sin to inflict one's own misery on innocent people.

But if the purpose is to stop evil people from doing evil again, then remembering the hatred makes sense.

What Andre said was basically from the New Testament, and many of the words that Garys said in response to him were actually from the Old Testament.

The Bible is not a work written continuously by one person or one group of people in a short period of time.

In fact, the writing of the Bible spans at least a thousand years.

This means that many words in the Bible are actually contradictory if they are understood purely literally.

This means that although the Bible is the most classic religious text, there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people, and there are a thousand Bibles in the eyes of a thousand people.

Garys wants to pass on his understanding of the Bible so that more and more people can know Jehovah's true intentions.

“Remembering history is to prevent history from repeating itself, and remembering hatred is to prevent hatred from happening again.”

“Don’t let hatred blind you to the temptations of the devil.”

“The light has risen on the righteous and gives joy to those who are upright in heart.”

“The Lord will use your hands to spread justice on earth.”

"The Lord will protect you and kill all those who commit evil!"

When Garys said the words "kill them all", Andre's heart was deeply touched.

There, in the night, beside the burned village, Gairis, the saint from Jerusalem, made him a promise.

The little world of Cyprus is bound to be engulfed in the fire of justice.

　I spent some time reorganizing the subsequent story, and it is much smoother to write, but I didn't have enough time to update today, so the number of words is a little less than before.

　　I’ll make up for it tomorrow depending on the situation, and then publish an obituary.

　　Gustavo Gutiérrez, the founder of liberation theology, Peruvian Catholic theologian and philosopher, Dominican priest, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and professor at the University of Notre Dame, died on October 10, local time, in a monastery in Lima, the capital of Peru, at the age of 22.

　　Gutierrez is considered the founder and main theorist of liberation theology, an idea born in the late 20s that refocused the church's attention on the poorest segments of the population.

　　After his death, Vatican News called him "defender of the poor" (difensore dei poveri) and "founder of liberation theology" (teologo della liberazione).

　　
　
(End of this chapter)