We Are Done With This

Here are two videos put out by the White House. If you are a US resident, your tax dollars paid for these.

https://x.com/whitehouse/status/2029657893155311927

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2029741548791853331?s=20

I’ll tell you what’s in them in case you don’t want to click the link. The first shows videos clips of explosions in Iran alternated with SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “Want me to do it again?” The second is titled “Justice, the American Way” and shows movie outtakes glorifying violence, domination, and machismo, again followed by real bomb explosions from Iran and a deep voice intoning, “Flawless victory!”

These were produced in the days after 160 schoolgirls were slaughtered by a US missile in Iran.

To call these videos juvenile would be to insult actual juveniles. To describe their vibe as “frat-boy” would be to insult actual fraternity brothers. One commenter on X said, “Beavis and Butthead have hacked the White House X account.”

But the reader doesn’t need me to explain how depraved these videos are. There is more to be said.

The posts portray war as if it were a movie or a video game. For those perpetrating the war, it is indeed like that, in the sense that they experience no real consequences. Doubtless, their situation reports, their intelligence briefings, their strategy memos, their lists of targets, their military jargon of “theaters” and “assets” insulate them from the reality of wailing parents, screaming children, severed limbs, scarred lives, and ruined families.

Coming hard on the heels of the Epstein files, it is hard to ignore the common thread of depravity. In the files as well, human beings, especially women and children, were totally dehumanized into mere instruments of power, profit, and pleasure. Their suffering was inconsequential “collateral damage.” Worse than that, it was a source of revelry, mockery, and glee—the same triumphalist vibe as the White House videos.

The antidote to dehumanization is rehumanization. It is to recognize the truth of the human as precious and sacred, to recognize that none of us is made of better stuff than the other, and to act from that knowledge. You may think you already know that and do that. But are you sure? I’m not. The subtle habits of judgment, of instrumentalization, of dehumanization operate in most of us, just not to the extreme degree that they do in human traffickers or war hawks. I noticed those habits stirring in me when I read Secretary Pete Hegseth’s words: “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps...This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” This is the same attitude displayed in the White House videos. I felt a sickening wave of revulsion, not only toward the words but toward the person.

That hate reduces a human being to a placeholder, a cartoon. It neutralizes the curiosity that is required to create conditions that no longer produce or allow a Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth or Linsdey Graham or Marco Rubio to rise to power. What is it like to be them? What makes them into what they are? Even if some may be born sociopaths, most of their supporters and enablers are not. Besides, too often labels like “narcissist” and “sociopath” collapse a complex individual into a simple category, cutting off the possibility of understanding them. And understand them we must.

To understand does not mean to allow. These people must be removed from power. A massive social movement is brewing from the widespread disgust at the rhetoric and actions of the Trump administration and its enablers in Congress and the mainstream media, which generally despises the man but maintains the ideological infrastructure of imperialism. In fact the movement was already gaining momentum from the Epstein files and the Trump administration’s slow-walking of them. It has been gathering for many years.

“Anti-Trump” is much too small a bucket for this movement. After all, the Iran war is just the most brazen, naked, and undisguised episode in a series of imperialist wars going back to Vietnam, waged by Democrats and Republicans alike. Earlier wars—Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine—wore a fig leaf of “defending democracy.” The Iran war is just naked power. It shows in clear relief what we want to change. It shows is clear relief the depravity that has always hidden behind our reigning institutions. And so, this movement will not be satisfied by deposing Trump and replacing him with a Democrat who will re-affix the fig leaf to body of the rampaging monster our country has become. The attitudes on display in distilled form in the White House videos pervade our entire system. The whole system instrumentalizes and reduces human beings.

What is the higher vision an authentic peace movement may draw on? It comes from recognizing the inherent dignity and preciousness of each human being. Whether that human being is American or Iranian, a citizen or a migrant, Muslim or Hindu, Christian or Jew, black or white, male or female, gays, straight, or something else, all are worthy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A society built on that understanding devotes its resources toward healing: bodies, communities, places, soil, ecosystems, water, the addicted, the destitute, the hopeless. That aim is utterly incompatible with maintaining a trillion-dollar military. The gathering peace movement will not be content merely to stop the Iran war. We will not rest until the entire military machine has been dismantled, and until people around the world agree that it is not needed.

Some people say I am unpatriotic if I don’t want America to win this war. But what is patriotism, really? True patriotism does not seek to win at others’ expense, to dominate other nations by force. What is there to love about a country that does that? No, true patriotism seeks to fulfill the nation’s purpose in service to humanity. The people of our country do not resonate with the belligerence and callousness of these videos and statements and the barbaric war against Iran. We are done with that. Let all who call themselves patriots unite to forge a new version of America.