If Westerners Could Wrap Their Minds Around What War Really Is
Drop Site News has a new article out which includes incredibly disturbing witness accounts of the carnage from a double-tap airstrike by the US-Israel alliance on a densely populated part of Tehran.
Here’s an excerpt:
“We were sitting here around 8:00–8:30 p.m. and suddenly there was the noise and explosion. We got up and a few people ran away. We turned around to get our belongings and we saw that blood was spraying everywhere. Someone’s hand had fallen on the floor, a head had fallen on the floor,” said Shahin, a witness who had been at the cafe and asked to be identified by first name only. “There were scalps torn off, hands severed, a few people were laying here all cut up and two people were martyred.”
…
“One hit and it wasn’t that bad but when the second one hit, suddenly everything exploded. The windows all shattered. Whoever had hookahs were thrown to the floor,” Shahin said. “One of my friends whom I don’t know that well he was sitting here. His hookah was in his hands until the last moment. He was severed in half. Half of him was thrown to the side. I put him back together and placed him where he was. A piece of his brain was thrown here on the floor.”
War is the worst thing in the world. Westerners talk about it like it’s a fucking video game, like “hurr durr, we just go in there and achieve our objectives and win,” when really war means shredding human bodies to bits.
Children burning to death in front of their parents.
People holding their own guts in their hands as their life slowly slips away.
People getting trapped under rubble and dying excruciatingly slow deaths of suffocation or dehydration.
People picking up pieces of their beloved family members.
Westerners are able to hold this compartmentalized video game mentality about war because war isn’t something that happens to us. We’ve never had bombs dropped on our neighborhoods. We’ve never had the experience of seeing a severed hand on the ground after an explosion and trying to figure out who it belonged to. We’ve never had the experience of seeing our child’s shredded body after a blast and thinking about how we’d carefully helped them dress that precious body for school just hours before.
We just see the movies. The propagandistic war documentaries. The sanitized news reports.
It’s not real to us. It’s not personal. It’s just this cutesy Hollywood image of sexy Good Guys doing flips and spin-kicking evil Bad Guys off cliffs.
You know this is true, because if it wasn’t then nobody would support US wars. If westerners had an actual, visceral understanding of what war really is and what it actually means, and if they could truly, deeply grasp that the people on the receiving end of those airstrikes are human beings just like them, there’s no way they’d support inflicting such nightmares upon their fellow man.
Which is why everything in our civilization is aimed at hiding that reality from us. War is made to look heroic and glamorous. Middle easterners are framed as deranged subhuman savages. The flesh-and-bone consequences of western warmongering are hidden from public view as much as possible.
They need to do this because the western empire depends on war. War is the glue that holds the empire together. They need the mass-scale bloodshed to continue, and they need the public to provide no resistance to the bloodshed. The empire cannot exist without war. Peace cannot exist without the removal of the empire.
You watch these bespectacled pundits and pampered politicians babbling about war the way they’d talk about their plans to remodel their kitchen or take a trip to Paris, and you just know if actual war ever showed up on their doorstep they’d literally soil themselves. They’d never recover. They’d spend the rest of their lives in shock and trauma, because what they saw would have shaken them irreparably to their very core.
It would impact them in this way because war is the worst thing in the world. Anyone with a functioning empathy center and a truth-based worldview would move mountains to prevent war from happening. And yet we are ruled by sociopaths who actively seek it out. War is the worst thing in the world, and we are ruled by the worst people in the world.
The world will never know peace until we cease to allow such creatures to rule over us.
_________________
The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
I’ll put Israelis in the “westerner” category and say, they absolutely know what war looks like. They have front row seats. While eating popcorn. So as much as I’d like to think “westerners” wouldn’t support war if they knew…I doubt it. Because it’s happening to brown people. They even ignored what happened to Good and Pretti so…
This is the truth. I wouldn’t wish war on anyone, but sometimes I feel the people of the US needs just one small invasion, one day of bombs falling from the sky, one moments experience that matches even a fraction of life in a war zone , and the world would be a different place.