War is never really about what they say it is
War is never really about what the U.S. media says it’s about. After hearing two “good liberal” friends parroting the “no good options” talking point last week, I wrote this for them:
It’s about oil and money — imperialism — every time, and a military industrial complex whose shareholders will benefit from war.
Meanwhile, the most vulnerable — women and children — will suffer more, and more people will become the most vulnerable. This compromises our collective safety.
Meanwhile, privileged citizens become distracted by the warmongers’ greatest tool — coercing people to take sides, a false choice created to further expand a crevasse of polarization and disconnection. This false choice exploits the narrative lens of global saviorism that U.S. citizens are happy and trained to use:
“Peace may be stopping someone from attacking others,” my “good liberal” friends might say. “Peace is prevention of chaos and destruction.”
How short our memories are.
How shallow our analysis goes.
War renders us all so powerless.
How dare the U.S. claim to prevent conflict and uphold international law and human rights and sovereignty, when it is funding and supplying armies and militants and displacing millions of people the world over…for decades. Including a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 which has given rise to Neo-Nazism in Ukraine. Including NATO expansion. Of course the U.S. and its allies never “invade”, rather we are nation-building and protecting national security as most U.S. citizens currently watch bombing in Syria, Gaza and Somalia, genocides in Yemen, Ethiopia, Congo, and Myanmar, and starving of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan as if it all had nothing to do with us.
War is an exercise in hypocrisy.
War is gender violence.
War is ecocide.
War is a wealth-generator.
Chaos is inevitable under militarism, the cause and the result. Who gets to judge right and wrong military action in the midst of this chaos is dictated by colonial matrixes of power. A Putin, or a Trump, is a product and a figurehead of a system where elites profit from their chaos. They do not act unilaterally. They are merely mouthpieces for a worldview that treats war and violence as necessary and unavoidable.
Meanwhile, as thousands of people in Ukraine are in real danger and are fleeing, the U.S. sits in judgment after just pulling out of “a war [started] 20 years ago that saw our streets unscathed, our buildings untouched, our livelihoods safe, and civilian lives free from harm. The privilege is nauseating.” [Quote from @feminslay] That is, of course unless you are Indigenous, Black, or Asian-American.
War, you know, is enacted at home too. Some citizens here in the U.S., not “over there”, have never known peace.
War is a failure of humanity. It is the folly of toxic masculinity and the deepest disconnection from the land as source of Life.
“While the US hails the sanctity of Ukrainian sovereignty, it has prepared for war with Russia by violating Indigenous sovereignty, expanding US carbon infrastructure with the strategic aim of supplying Europe with fossil fuels once it is cut off from Russian energy.” ~Nick Estes
I may live in a white male dominated global society but the world that I am creating every day cannot be led by men in their current state. To keep building a new world with my communities is my realistic step. I do not identify with nation states, nor do I identify with people who would debate the fate of other peoples’ lives as within their domain of control. I do everything in my power to not let other people define my desires or expectations and I reject false binaries. Not only must we not choose sides, we must not agree that they exist.
Make no mistake, supporting drafted or undrafted soldiers who are serving or have served in the military does not have to be the equivalent of supporting the decisions of those who have the power to deploy them. Those two ideas have been conflated by the pro-war propaganda in my context for far too long.
“The enemy is white supremacy and systematic racism. The enemy is patriarchy. These structures not only create economic violence, death, hatred and inequity, but also strains and weakens the relationships between marginalized people.
“That is part of the plan.” ~Desiree Adaway
You see, safety has never been a promise to/for me or many other people in marginalized bodies. It has been a long journey to understand this and how it is related to things as conceptual as war in other lands, but it is my work on a fundamental level. The individual is the collective, and vice versa.
Violences, no matter the scale, have the same roots. That connection I cannot now unsee.
This is not about some kind of moral superiority for myself or the “humanitarians” or the “peacemakers.” It’s very practical in terms of how we all have to dismantle systems of oppression — in ourselves first.
The Hollywood narratives of a benevolent superhero nation and the mainstream media discourse will never reveal the true motivations of the elite, and the brokenness that compliance with patriarchal violence protects. And too few people will dig that deep.
These are the moments when the veil is lifted, and we get to see just how fundamental the changes have to be. In ourselves first, because we are all capable of this violence. Some just have vested interests and the power and resources to spread and enact violence on such a massive scale.
In this moment, U.S. citizens are no different than Ukrainians. No one of us can change the global politick. We can only operate in our own spheres of influence first.
The more that we can accurately describe the violence that’s happening — from our intimate relationships to the global configuration of nation-states — the more options and alternatives to violence we create.
***
Related Posts
