No more endless war, no more endless violence
Halting the imperial boomerang, fascism, and the military-industrial complex
Everything old is new again. Talking heads on TV want us to bomb another Middle Eastern country, pundits are doing different versions of “the people of Iran yearn for democracy,” and politicians are calling Iran the center of all evil. To anyone who lived through the invasion of Iraq it’s jarring how the manufacturing of consent for war with Iran feels lazy, repetitive, unimaginative. It’s all the same tropes and narratives trotted out again, while Israel is (again) claiming that Iran is days away from nuclear weapons, even though U.S. intelligence says the country is still years away from those capabilities.
As you read this the U.S. could launch strikes at Iran. We’re on the edge. Trump is refusing to say that he’s working on an Iran-Israel ceasefire, instead ominously declaring that he wants a ‘real end’ to the conflict and that he wants Iran to “completely” give up. Nowhere is there mention of how Israel unilaterally started this conflict, and Trump is even dismissing information from the U.S. intelligence community in order to lie and insist that Iran is close to a nuke.
It’s all too familiar. The lies, the propaganda, the attempt to whip up national fervor against a country in the Middle East that is not attacking the United States and shows no signs of attempting to do so. This time there is at least one difference — people across America are deeply fed up with U.S. support for Israel after over 600 days of genocide in Gaza. Public sentiment is not rabidly eager to attack anywhere and everywhere in the Middle East as it was after 9/11.
But in the halls of power the story is different. We know all too well that 95% of the politicians in DC are happy to support Israel no matter what, happy to ignore genocide, and happy to fund the military-industrial complex through endless allocations to war and bombs. Trump has proposed a $1 trillion military budget for next year, and Democrats have voiced remarkably little opposition to this massive expenditure which could instead go to schools and healthcare and infrastructure and more. No, the underlying logic of this empire remains the same 22 years after the invasion of Iraq. Despite the utter disaster of endless wars the military-industrial complex and the armed forces themselves continue to be a black hole for our resources, at the expense of everyone else.
We’ve never really grappled with violence, here. The powers that be will never grapple with the truth of violence because their position is premised on it, perched atop a mountain of violence at home and abroad. What should have been a national reckoning after the disastrous, failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the entire ‘war on terror,’ never took place — we (mostly) withdrew from those countries and never fully examined how deeply and severely we had fucked up.
As George Orwell famously said, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” That is the organizing principle of the military-industrial complex. A continuous transfer of wealth and resources enabled by endless war. And this infinitely violent system goes unquestioned because both parties are complicit. Democrats claim to be anti-war, and the endless war continues. Trump claimed to be anti-war, and yet the endless war could reach new heights yet again.
So it’s on us. It’s on us to see through this nightmare charade. It’s on us to get to the roots of violence when our so-called leaders refuse to do so. The first step is seeing through the lies and the euphemisms used to hide the true cost and the true violence of war from us. The first step is ripping aside the thin veil of distorted language that allows vicious, bloody violence to pass under the radar of our anger and repulsion.
I had a great English teacher almost 20 years ago who sat us down and talked to us about the Iraq war. He didn’t tell us what to think, he just showed us great writing about the U.S. invasion and occupation and had us think a bit for ourselves. Some of the articles might have been slightly leading, like the piece seared into my mind about the use of euphemism in discussing war. I can never forget how the corporate media came to use “waterboarding” to refer to a mode of torture that is really repeated drowning. I can never forget learning that “an uptick in the violence” really meant hundreds of Iraqis and some American soldiers being killed. I can never forget how we were taught to be numb to war, to view it from thousands of miles away when up close limbs were being torn off and families were being wiped out.
And not much has changed. Israel fires mercilessly upon starving Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza and the headlines often read, “Gaza die approaching aid location” or something of that sort. Snipers shoot children in the streets of Rafah or Gaza City, and the headlines say “Children found wounded.” A pervasive distance, a numbness is still deliberately perpetuated surrounding the sort of violence that should tear our hearts in two.
Today there is social media, and there is good reporting out there. The media landscape has shifted radically since 2003, and although we know the many harms and damages of that change, there is no denying that seeing video directly from Gaza, and elsewhere, has weakened the ruling class's ability to manufacture consent. Hearing and seeing Palestinians directly on the devices in our hands has disarmed so much of the dominant narrative. And now we must hope that the pundits trying to whip us into an attacking fervor against Iran are just as ineffective as those trying to dismiss Israel’s genocide.
At the moment Democratic leadership is largely silent on Iran. Most of them are war hawks, unwilling to listen to their base’s hatred of endless war, uninterested in confronting how their addiction to the military-industrial complex has hurt them electorally. So we have to send a message, loud and clear. Any Democrat who supports Trump in attacking Iran will be removed.
It’s time for the Democratic party to be forced to change its relationship with violence. The endless wars in the Middle East are deeply immoral, murderous, and must be stopped. One of their many effects has been a generation numbed to violence, a generation where our foreign wars have come home in the form of hyper-militarized police and domestic terrorism and fascism. The endless dollars fed to war are coming back to haunt us as militarized police forces attack protests and ICE attacks people in our streets. It’s not hard to see how fascism is in part an ‘imperial boomerang’ where the home country begins to pay the price for its investment in violence, oppression, and the attendant dehumanization that those efforts abroad entail. We are the latest country to pay this price, and it’s time to stop paying.
It’s time to get down to the roots. It’s no surprise that Vance Luther Boelter, the political assassin in Minnesota, was a security contractor. We’ve trained generations of violent men, told them they have near impunity abroad, then brought them back home. And instead of getting down to the deep roots of this violence in imperialism and war, we’ve responded to shooters and domestic terror and January 6th with more investments in police and repression. It’s time for a paradigm shift. It’s time to unequivocally say no to war, no to spending billions bombing people overseas, no to spending billions attacking people at home with ICE and police and oppression.
At the core of this current moment, this fascist movement and Israel’s genocide and the attack on Iran is a question about how we want to live. The dominant narrative, rarely named but ever present, is that might makes right and violence is the tool that will solve every problem. More good guys with guns are always needed for every occasion, apparently. We have to reject this failed paradigm. Millions of us have to reject it clearly, have to stand between this government of ours and another vicious war. We must stand between the forces of fascism and yet another massive loss of innocent lives. It’s on us. - JP
America’s physical distance from most of the world’s countries has let us all pretend that we’re not a source of violence. In fact, our history has been nothing less than an endless series of wars against other people, far away, out of sight.
War means they can divide us more easily. War means there are "true patriots" and "subversives & rebels". More justification to round up those who don't toe the line.