When Hamas forces paraglided into a music festival in Israel, they slaughtered innocent civilians. They butchered men, they raped and kidnapped women, and they slaughtered people who mere moments prior were having the time of their life. It was a spectacle of violence on a scale that’s difficult to put into words. A truly animalistic, savage attack on par with very few others.
We’ve been wrongly denied the images showing the true scope of that violence. There are videos of people running away. There are pictures of bodies stacked in the aftermath, but there are a lot of censor bars. There are a lot of tarps. There is a lot missing–and some of the stuff that does exist isn’t on mainstream media channels. It’s on X. It’s on Telegram. That’s about it.
More footage exists of this attack. It undoubtedly does. It’s been deliberately suppressed by the media and by Israeli forces, and we are much worse off for it.
It is extremely important that you, me, and everyone else sees the brutality and violence inherent to war. We need to see the broken, mangled bodies, the blown apart skulls. The limbs strewn across the pavement. We need to see it because we need to understand that it’s real, that it’s happening, and most importantly: what that looks like.
War, to too many people, is merely theoretical. It’s something happening to some other group of people somewhere in the world. That doesn’t make it “real” to the average person. It’s someone else’s child dying. It’s someone else’s family kidnapped. It’s someone else’s apartment building raised to the ground by airstrikes. It’s some distant school bus in some distant country being blown to smithereens by a US-supplied bomb that your tax dollars paid for. It’s not really something you see on TV. Even now, the pictures you see out of Israel on Fox News, CNN, and everywhere else are typically just a static live shot of a skyline, perhaps with some distant building ablaze, with the occasional report of an artillery strike in the background. That isn’t what’s really happening. What’s really happening is that people are being pulled from their homes and forced into the back of armored Jeeps, never to be seen again. What’s really happening are children getting slaughtered en masse. What’s really happening, right now, is some Slavic enlistee blowing his own head off in a Donbass trench out of the intense and unimaginable fear that the explosive combat drone he hears circling above will get him next.
When we see the true horror of war, we are forced to pay a cost. When those images are burned into our brains we can perhaps understand a minute fraction of what war is. It’s still someone else’s kids, sure, but now: we can understand what is happening. It’s not a video game. It’s not a movie. It’s real. It’s happening to people very much like you and me. We can see, in the brutality, a human experience that we can relate to. If you think you’re uncomfortable with seeing images like that, imagine for a second what the mother of seven Afghan children must have felt when her entire family was wiped out for no reason by a US drone strike in the waning hours of the Afghan war in 2021. Do you think she felt discomfort? Do you think she had the privilege of looking away?
The detachment of the American people from the true and horrific cost of war has been intentional. When you don’t see the truth of war, when you don’t see the images, hear the screams of terror, and witness the brutality even second-or-third hand, it’s easy to file it away. When we sanitize it, it’s no longer a real thing. It’s easy to think about violent, brutal conflict in the same way you think about Federal Reserve interest rates, or Taylor Swift showing up at a Chiefs game: it just becomes news like any other, something vaguely in the background of your life. Nothing to personally regard, nothing that demands your immediate attention.
This was a lesson learned by the political and military elite during the Vietnam war–the last American war to feature a draft. The US couldn’t keep up the war in Vietnam because of the massive groundswell built up against the conflict in the streets of every American city. It was a deeply unpopular war made more unpopular by the fact that suburban mothers had to watch their sons get pulled out of their childhood bedrooms to go fight and die in a wet jungle to preserve the remnants of French Indochina that hung upon a casus belli that was at worst a deliberate lie cooked up by the twisted goons of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration and at best a miserable intelligence failure. When the kids in your neighborhoods are jumping out of planes and dying in the Tet Offensive, we as a people feel the cost.
So what did the political and military elite do? Well, they stopped using the draft. Now, the military was a fully volunteer force. Now, it was someone else’s kids going off to die, except this time it was in the desert. George W. Bush and company were able to lie about the Iraq War in part because we, as a people, didn’t really have to pay any meaningful cost anymore. Maybe, perhaps, you or someone you knew volunteered for service, but that’s totally different from someone getting drafted and dying in conflict. American volunteers tend to be from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. Casualties were devastating, sure, but for the majority of Americans it was happening to someone else. It was the poor kids dying–and only because they signed up. Everyone else continued their lives as they did before.
Of course, that’s not to say public sentiment didn’t ultimately turn the tide against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually it did. The American people correctly saw both as aimless quagmires in which our excuses to stay dwindled daily. Not even sending a fully volunteer outfit to a desert halfway across the world is enough of a detachment from the reality of war to divorce it from any political consequences for the Washington elite.
So they’ve developed a new ploy: we’re not even going to use our military anymore. We’re going to use someone else’s. Our poor kids aren’t going to fight against Russia in Ukraine. Instead, we are simply going to give a bunch of weapons and a blank check to Ukrainians so that their sons and daughters die instead of our poor kids. Are we going to use our funding as a leverage tool to sue for peace? Absolutely not. We are going to keep throwing money at the country until someone gives up. It’s been so effective so far that we’re about to start doing it again in Israel (not that they weren’t already getting massive military aid from us) without skipping a beat. Now, no real cost has to be paid by you. You’re paying, of course, in the form of your tax dollars, but the government wastes those even in peacetime. We’re not going to feel the cost. It’s not going to be real to us.
If that keeps up, we will never meaningfully demand peace.
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