'It's in Our Power'.

thoughts on the war.

The last few days have me thinking about a cartoon by the Russian director Lev Atamanov. Released in the Soviet Union in 1970, It’s in Our Power is fairly explicitly a piece of propaganda, but it’s still wonderful. The cartoon begins by centering on a small egg. Cracks in the shape of a swastika ripple across the shell, and from the egg emerges an almost comically goosestepping baby eagle. Off to the side two caricatures of American power — a banker, and a general — watch the eagle and laugh at its antics. How silly, how harmless! But then they realize that they can use the eagle, so they feed it coins, bullets, bombs, steadily fattening it up. Once the eagle is big enough, it breaks free and flies away! Away it goes on its mission of death and war, wreaking havoc across the world in the name of American freedom and commerce!

But there’s one scene in the cartoon that I find so frightening, and sad. As the fascist eagle swoops above, characters from all across the world begin to flee in terror. Lovers in Paris watch in horror. Toddlers on a park bench point in disbelief. And then there is a montage of mothers running as they hold onto their babies: Europeans, East-Asians, Africans, Middle-Easterners, everyone sprinting in terror and attempting to shield their children from the atrocities. The message is harsh but correct; whenever anyone launches a war, they are releasing evil, an evil that consumes everything. The ultimate victims of wars are the innocents, specifically children, and there is no escaping that. To wage a modern war at all is to accept that some children will die, which regardless of your professed ideology is the logic of fascists and monsters.

When the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Iran on February 28^th, it was only inevitable that children would be killed. It was not a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’. Yet it happened in this war instantly, during the first round of U.S-Israeli airstrikes, when missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girl’s elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab. At least 168 people were massacred in the attack, many of them parents, teachers, and young girls. Online there are terrible images of dusty backpacks covered in blood, and reports of severed arms and bodies beneath the rubble. In a photograph shared by the Guardian, a crowd of mothers mourn at a mass funeral, with one mother holding a picture of her two young daughters killed in the attack.

A hundred different commentators, pundits, ‘journalists’, and public officials are desperately trying to paint different images of what this war is, because the war is spiraling out of their narrative control. They’re using typical bureaucratic jargon; these are ‘surgical strikes’, or a ‘tactical combat operation’. No; it is a war of massacres, like the one at the school. If you watch American TV networks you’ll see endless loops of jets launching off of aircraft carriers, plumes of smoke, drone strikes, and occasional views of debris. But you’ll very rarely see what this war ultimately is, which is; dead civilians, frightened mothers, and screaming children. As Adam Johnson wrote today, the American mass-media is largely not mentioning the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on the school. To show those images would reveal what this war really is, which is; evil, stupid, and pointlessly cruel.

This war is so stupid and pointless that even the American government can’t decide why we are fighting. At first it was ‘regime change’, but then they downgraded it to a ‘limited operation’. Now officials are disputing that it’s even a war, while the CIA actively plans armed uprisings in Iran. Whatever their rationale, this is an atrocity that seeks to kill innocent people. The strike on the school was deliberate, according to respectable outlets. Nobody buys the lies that the Trump administration are selling regarding this war. But the government doesn’t care. “I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling,” Trump said. The government is lying, but they can’t even agree on what lies to tell.

Talking about this administration’s ‘strategy’ is pointless anyways. There is no strategy. The U.S. government is a hammer, and the only vision guiding it is the compulsion to break things it dislikes. It did this with Venezuela, when it kidnapped the president. It’s doing this with Cuba, as it tightens a brutal oil blockade that is punishing people on the island. And it’s threatening this with Greenland too; ‘let us buy you, or we will invade you’! That’s not to mention the violence that the government has enacted at home; mass deportations, extrajudicial roundups, the murder of American protestors. All this government can offer is violence and resentment.

Much of this is because of Trump, of course. There’s a very telling interview that he did in January of this year, where he was asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on what he could do globally. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me… I don’t need international law.” Yikes! But he isn’t wrong. The U.S. government rarely follows international law, unless it is beneficial to them. The United States is not even a member of the International Criminal Court! If anything, Trump is being crude but honest. The U.S. government has never cared about laws or rules. They will do whatever they want.

When the videos of the Iranian school attack first surfaced, the destruction looked eerily familiar to what so many of us have seen from Gaza. For years people have seen live-streamed what the United Nations itself calls a genocide. Regardless of what the U.S. or Israel says about the operations against Hamas, the war was ultimately a massacre of innocent civilians. As of last year at least 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, likely more. Gaza was clearly a war crime. The ICC itself issued arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, claiming charges of “war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder…”.

Yet the U.S. government allowed these war crimes to occur. It is only because of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump that the genocide in Gaza was able to happen. Not only that, but they largely approved of it. At any moment the U.S. government could have ended the slaughter of children, but the leaders of both the major American parties refused to do so. Both the Democratic and Republican parties, despite their differences, fundamentally agreed that the genocide was tolerable. It is almost a miracle to find an issue that both parties agree on, but here in America the massacring of mothers and children is truly bipartisan.

But Americans by and large do not agree! From July of last year, only 32% of Americans approved of what was happening in Gaza. As of February, more Americans sympathize with Palestine than Israel — something that has never been recorded before. Only 23% of adults under 35 support Israel after their actions during the genocide. When it comes to this war against Iran, the numbers are even more stark. Depending on the poll you choose, nearly 90% of Democrats oppose America’s war on Iran. 90%! But the leadership of the Democratic party is less oppositional. An article from Jim Newell in Slate illustrates this rather well. Elected Democrats are focused on the ‘process’ of the war, and not the implications. What bothers Senator Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is that they weren’t adequately briefed about the child massacres, not that Americans are killing families to begin with.

In America right now there is extraordinary pressure to think and act certain ways regarding this war. You are supposed to offer tepid opposition, while publicly admitting how nasty and mean the Iranian regime is. I don’t care: the United States government is far more dangerous and violent right now than Iran, Venezuela, or whatever country the Trump administration decides to bully next. The U.S. is the most powerful country that has ever existed, and it has a nuclear stockpile of approximately 5,000 warheads. Please, be serious: right now the biggest threat to global peace and wellbeing is the U.S. government, not some drones being launched from Iran.

In the United States you’re also supposed to speak in flowery patriotic language whenever you disagree. There’s always a contingent of online liberals who think that the path forward is to provide a ‘positive nationalism’, or to march about and talk about how great American democracy is. This is dumb, and wrong. There is no such thing as a positive nationalism. Wrap yourself in the flag all you want, but just know that it’s the same flag painted on the side of missiles being launched at girl’s schools and hospitals. It’s the same flag stitched into the uniforms of the ICE agents killing civilians, too.

The path forward is not what Democrats and pundits propose, which is to meticulously sculpt your beliefs and behavior according to what polls say on either this war or any issue. It is to be honest about what you believe in and then push the world forward in whatever ways you can. That requires removing obstacles. Right now the biggest threat facing the world is that the United States government will plunge the globe into a third world war. It sounds a bit dramatic, but these are the stakes. Yet the liberal-left party in the U.S., the Democratic Party, the party that should be stopping this, is barely putting up meaningful opposition. They are a significant obstacle. At least some elected Democrats are finally recognizing that this will likely escalate into a ground war, but their concerns are exclusively that American troops will be on the ground in Tehran. But why should I only care when American troops are in danger? My biggest concern is not that Joe-Schmo from Omaha might get shot at: what matters is that we are already killing thousands of civilians, and that there are more massacres to come.

It is unacceptable that this is happening. That’s the most banal thing to say, but it’s true. This is the most powerful country ever, and its vast resources could be aimed at any range of global or domestic problems. Instead the government is being wielded to essentially shield pedophiles, enrich the ultra-wealthy, and massacre children. It is enough to drive you mad! The normalized cruelty of this government, and its worldview, is a kind of poison that threatens to spread into everything. There is something so blatantly evil about everything occurring: it is the era of ‘might equals right’, a crescendo of death, an eerie echo of the early twentieth century. I’m reminded of what Freud wrote about the ‘death drive’, the innate psychological desire that some posses to destroy and kill, “…an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms.” This compulsive need to kill, torture, and destroy is now the guiding ethos of the U.S. government and its fascist worldview. There is no strategy or vision, only death and humiliation. This government does not care how many people die abroad or at home. All that matters is its march of destruction. It is the embodiment of that eagle from the Soviet cartoon: a creature of evil, bringing death under its wings. It is all so terrible. What makes it so additionally unbearable is this sense of relentlessness, as if the violence will simply go on forever. The explicit political pattern that is unfurling in America seems untenable, too: a fascist administration, then a milquetoast Democrat, followed by a far-right regime that is somehow even worse. It just cannot keep happening. Something has to break.

I think it’s good and necessary to be against this war, but being against it is not enough. There must be an alternative vision. An endless montage of mothers and children fleeing American bombs cannot be the future. And this country just cannot keep shuffling between leaders who want to do more or slightly less killing. This is all a bit fruitless to go on about as an individual, of course. The whole point of this current world order is that powerful institutions, specifically the United States, have smashed all organizations that offer alternative visions of the future. People have been pummeled into thousands of atomized shards, and become nihilistically addicted to their sense of political impotence. I am often bitter and cynical about the future myself. But there are alternatives, and there always have been. Just a few days ago I was walking through the city, angrily despondent about the news of the war, when I heard bullhorns and shouting a few blocks away. Suddenly there were red flags, black flags, pride flags, Palestinian flags, flags from all across the world, and people shouting and screaming ‘NO!’ to war, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people marching and chanting. Thousands of words have been spilled about how these marches and protests are not enough, and I agree. But it was heartwarming to see all of these people of good conscience out and about. It reminded me that I was not alone, and that there are millions more of ‘us’ than of ‘them’, which is something that this government wants all people to forget. It reminded me of the ending of that Soviet cartoon, It’s in Our Power. As the fascist eagle flies and brings about its death and destruction, a few people begin to resist. Children make origami’s and throw the papers at the beast. A writer types an essay, and it magically lifts from the typewriter and flies away. And at a protest, in front of the U.S. capitol building, thousands of shreds trickle out of the thousands of people who are gathered in opposition to the terrible war. All of these papers coalesce into a mighty dove, which is finally strong enough to fight back against the eagle. Perhaps it’s a bit romantic. Some part of me wonders if much more is needed to be done. But this is not the worst way to begin. At the very least you can gather together, see that you are not alone, and remember the ultimate truth that the U.S. government wants you to forget: that a much better future is still in our power.

‘It’s in Our Power’, Lev Atamanov, 1970