Where Were You? -What the Victors Have Not Written, and Never Will -1-

On the first Monday of October 2026, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced. It went to the American psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth, together with two German scientists, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, the discoverers of the protein in the alga. But the news did not carry the whole story.
Scientists took the gene for the light-sensitive protein from the alga s eyespot and inserted it into a neuron, and the cell began to respond to light and to love it, as the alga had. Then Susumu Tonegawa s laboratory at MIT went deeper: it revived memories in mice, implanted others that had never happened, and even flipped the valence of a memory from terror to reward.
What a magnificent future awaits the treatment of many diseases, and what a frightening future awaits the world of politics.
In truth, what many ignored, and what the Nobel Committee mentioned only in passing in its scientific background before silencing it with the three-name rule, is Edward Boyden, the first author of the very paper on which the prize rests. The paper appeared in Nature Neuroscience in August 2005 with Boyden as first author, then Feng Zhang, then Ernst Bamberg, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth. Nor was Boyden the only one left out: Bamberg, Hegemann and Nagel s partner in the 2003 discovery of the light-gated channel and a co-author of the 2005 paper, was removed from the podium by the same rule.
Boyden at the time was a doctoral student at Stanford finishing his dissertation, and Deisseroth (this year s laureate) was finishing his postdoctoral fellowship and founding the laboratory in which the experiments were run.
Then there is Zhuo-Hua Pan, a retina researcher in the Department of Ophthalmology at Wayne State University in Detroit, who was ahead of everyone and behind in publishing: his experiments on the mouse retina preceded the Stanford experiments by months, and he submitted his paper to Nature in November 2004. It was rejected, and it was not published until 2006, in Neuron, by which time the Stanford paper had already made its wave.
What a future awaits the world of ethics!
And why wait for the future? Let us read the future through the past, taking as our example what happened recently in Syria. It switched the memories and events of Rwanda back on, and it proved to everyone that history does not merely repeat itself: the world erases no memory. It may switch one off, then switch it on again when the time comes.
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Where were you in 1994?
Syrians hear the sound of silencing, of mouths being shut, whenever they want to criticize even a little of today s failings, in the famous sentence: "Where were you fourteen years ago?"
In truth, Syrians were not the first to hear it. Rwandans heard it thirty years before them...
Yes, where were we all, across the world, in 1994, when the massacres in Rwanda mowed down humanity s dream of a real humanity on this planet?
And when the "Savior" came, everyone forgot who he was, and he has remained president of Rwanda to this day.
Today I am here to switch his memory back on, in the pages of the human-rights theorists and of those who applaud only the recipients of prizes.
Paul Kagame was born in Rwanda in 1957 and left it as a child for the refugee camps of Uganda after the massacres of 1959. He joined the army of the neighboring state, Uganda, under Yoweri Museveni in the Bush War, and in 1986 he became head of military intelligence in the Ugandan army. Note: Uganda, not Rwanda.
Then on to the classrooms of Uncle Sam s country, the classrooms where warlords practice the switching on and off of memories to perfection.
So when the Rwandan Patriotic Front crossed the border in October 1990, Kagame was at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, a U.S. Army base in Kansas. When the Front s commander was killed on the second day of the invasion, he came back from Kansas to lead the next phase, and he would later present himself as the son of the country who saved it.
Kagame was the product of two incubators: Museveni s army (Museveni is still president of Uganda today) and American training. He had a patron across the border who ran the battle from his own territory, and he himself governed, from the hills of Byumba in northern Rwanda, a state waiting for a state.
The Front entered Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in July 1994, after a genocide that killed some eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days. Here is one difference in time from what happened in Syria: a hundred days there, fourteen years here.
The other difference: Kagame did not take the presidency. He belonged to a Tutsi minority of no more than 15 percent of the population, so he put a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu, in the front window, by his own decision and no one else s, and kept for himself the vice-presidency and the Ministry of Defense, that is, the real power. Bizimungu stayed in the window for six years-;- Kagame removed him in 2000 and later imprisoned him.
The declared transitional period lasted nine years, followed by the 2003 constitution and elections at 95 percent, then 93, then the 2015 referendum that reset the term-limit-s, at 98, then 99.18 percent in 2024.
The sum of it: a memory switched off.
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Where were you in 2012?
In 2012, while Houla and Daraya were being slaughtered, UN experts published a report on Rwanda s support for rebels in eastern Congo. Britain, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries suspended their aid to Rwanda, then -restore-d it one after another.
A pulse was fired, then switched off, in the same year. Let us understand why.
The world did not accept Kagame because he was a democrat´-or-a liberator, but for three psychological reasons that accumulated in the collective consciousness.
The first psychological reason is the guilt complex: the guilt of the West. The United Nations withdrew while the genocide was taking place, and France had been the patron of Rwanda s old regime, so every criticism of Kagame is answered with "Where were you in 1994?" A permanent moral capital, inherited from his predecessor s crime, not from his own virtue. Exactly as with the new order in Syria, which inherited a moral capital in proportion to the crimes of the previous dictatorship.
The second psychological reason is the demand for security. Rwanda became an exporter of the political security that the great powers decide on, wherever and whenever they want. Rwanda s army under Kagame went into Congo, then the Central African Republic, then Mozambique. In 2022 Britain agreed with Kagame s regime to deport asylum seekers to it, an agreement cancelled in 2024 before it was carried out. And finally came the Washington agreement with Congo, under Trump s sponsorship, in December 2025, with Congo s minerals at its heart, one of the hidden causes of other, manufactured conflicts.
So Rwanda became a small state doing the work of the great powers. Now, brave souls, turn what you see here toward Syria and read the future.
The third psychological reason is love of one s image in the mirror. Kigali became clean: low corruption, the highest proportion of women in any parliament in the world, conferences and investment, a real "Singapore of Africa." And the West saw itself in Kigali: English in place of French, membership of the Commonwealth, conferences in its own language. It loved its image in the mirror. And so the legitimacy of achievement took the place of the legitimacy of the ballot box.
Against these psychological reasons, and the control of the collective consciousness, the crimes were switched off: the 1994 Gersony report, which estimated that Kagame s Front had killed tens of thousands of Hutu, buried in a UN drawer-;- the 1995 Kibeho massacre of displaced Hutu-;- and the 2010 UN Mapping Report, which said that what Kagame s army did to Hutu refugees in Congo could amount to genocide.
None of it cost Kagame anything. The world order decided that the victor is the one who writes history. But who said he writes literature?
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Where were you in 2025?
Let us return to the alga that is famous today, in the age of the pen s algae, which forgot to switch on all the memories.
Memory control has four documented operations in the laboratory, and each has a precise political counterpart that we see in Syria as we saw it in Rwanda.
First, the on switch. It appeared in the 2005 paper by Boyden and Deisseroth, and before that in Pan s mouse retinas in 2004: a blue pulse that switches the circuit on.
Politically: Rwanda s regime switches the memory of 1994 on every April in "Kwibuka," a hundred days of mourning, a calibrated pulse that lights the circuit of Western guilt on demand. And Syria s new order may switch Saydnaya on whenever it needs the same circuit.
Second, the off switch. It appeared in 2007 in two simultaneous papers, the first by Boyden with Xue Han, the second from Deisseroth s own laboratory two weeks later: a yellow light that silences the cell without killing it.
Politically: Rwanda s laws criminalizing "divisionism" switch the ethnic circuit off by statute. In the West, Kibeho, Congo and the Gersony report were switched off-;- a name was struck from the terrorism lists, and a bounty was lifted from a head.
Even the Nobel Committee works this switch on history: the three-name rule kept Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel and silenced Boyden, Pan and Bamberg, mentioned in passing in the scientific background and deleted from the podium.
Third, flipping the valence (Tonegawa laboratory, 2014). The very cells that carry a memory of fear were reactivated together with a reward experience, and their valence flipped from terror to reward without the cells changing.
This is the most precise neural definition of what happened in Rwanda and then in Syria: the same cadres, the same memory, re-paired, and the valence flipped. No new memory, only the old one with its charge reversed.
Fourth, and attend to this one: persistence of the trace (Tonegawa laboratory, 2015). Mice were given experimental amnesia-;- the memory could not be retrieved by any natural route, and then a pulse of light brought it back whole. The conclusion that overturned the textbook view of memory: forgetting is a failure of access, not a failure of storage.
This is exactly what applies to the international indulgences granted in politics: no erasure of crimes, only a block on retrieving them.
Did you know that most of the reports on Kagame and his regime, including the UN Mapping Report, are still in the drawer?
And in 2025, American and European sanctions were imposed on Kagame s officers. Imagine: after thirty years of tolerance, a pulse of light came and -restore-d the trace. Why?
No, not justice, not the international community, not human rights.
The reason is that Goma and then Bukavu fell into the hands of his allies in early 2025, so the expansion began to threaten the very minerals that had been protecting him, and Rwanda in Congo went beyond what the usefulness of the demand for security could bear.
Wait for the day the world sees the massacres on the Syrian coast in March 2025 and then Suwayda in July, in sound and image. Then, when the usefulness runs out, the predecessor s crime will have no room left in which to grant the successor his indulgences in advance.
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Where are you today?
Al-Mutanabbi says:
What use are his eyes to a son of this world, if light and darkness have become one to him?
Either you watch the whole truth, from the massacres of Daraya to the massacres of the coast, by way of a civil war in which Syrians killed one another and every side believed it alone held the right,´-or-you watch half-truths here and there, rest from the torment of conscience, and make your peace with the vileness of silence: the silence of those who thought they had won yesterday, and the silence of those who believe in today s victories.
The fire of minerals, oil and gas has consumed our simplicity, from the native peoples of America to every wronged person on this earth. The memory of blood will not be brought back by the light of a justice that will not come, but by the "usefulness expired" switch in the plans of the great powers. And while we still see the light and see the darkness, we know that the on and off switches change neither consciences nor facts, and that the memories will return, as the scientists discovered: whole.


To be continued...

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