Unserious

Bombs and Barricades Do Not Mix

It feels as if we are not far from the moment where most governments will use the communicative infrastructures and tools now available to comprehensively falsify the news, where real wars will be fought without anyone but the people killing and being killed knowing about it and fake wars will be imagined in order to keep populations fearful or enraged.

Even at this moment, it is best not to make too much of any specific video evidence or the absence of such videos. It’s possible even now that if American bases or interests are struck in the fighting in the Middle East, most Americans won’t see video imagery of the strikes unless they look at international news sources, nor will they see much of the damage to Iran itself.

But you can still make something out of the incoherence of public reason coming from governments, whether about war or other matters. There are still obvious gaps between what they say and the long record of human reality that history offers us, at least until they also manage to suppress historical knowledge as well. Whether governments and their various apologists and propagandists use AI or hand-craft their writing and speaking, bullshit is bullshit.

To wit, over the weekend, I came across a philosopher arguing that the war in Iran must not end too quickly because the people of Iran need “external support” in order to complete an uprising against their tyrannical rulers, echoing a justification for the war that the American government discovered after it had already started dropping bombs.

It’s easy enough to demonstrate that the official American justification is entirely insincere both as intention and action. If the American government was really trying to aid Iranians in overthrowing their government, it would have acted a few months ago when they were in the streets challenging the regime, not months later, when many of the people in the streets have died. If it were really trying to help them, it would have chosen some other method than aerial bombardment.

Since I don’t expect either coherence or truth from Trump and his Cabinet, to say that they are lying and that their lies are nonsense is like remarking that the sun came up this morning.

I don’t know anything about the philosopher I came across, so I don’t know whether there’s a history there of programmatic dishonesty, but there are other pundits and a handful of academics who have made the same claim. I only know that the suggestion that people looking to be free from tyranny need “external support” is even at that level of abstraction a dubious assertion.

Since 1945, I can think of very few cases where a military intervention from another nation has been undertaken to liberate people from their own government’s tyranny and has succeeded in that mission. I can think of a few military campaigns that were undertaken in response to aggression from a neighboring country where the unintended side effect was to undercut or remove a tyrannical government. The United Kingdom didn’t attack Argentina to free its people from the junta, but the junta fell as a result of its military defeat. Vietnam did not invade Cambodia to rescue its population from the Khmer Rouge, but that was the eventual consequence of the invasion. Tanzania’s armed forces repelled an invasion of Uganda ordered by Idi Amin and went on to remove Amin from power, which led to a civil war within Uganda that eventually saw Yoweri Museveni come to power, which in the long term has simply led back to a less murderous sort of tyranny.

On the other hand, it’s easy to find post-1945 examples of “military interventions justified as attempts to liberate a population from tyranny” with many examples where the intervention did not succeed in that goal because the occupier was either uninterested in that putative objective, was profoundly incompetent in pursuing it, or was simply a different sort of tyrant—or all of those together or ad seriatim.

In the present war, there’s no real need to argue about either set of examples, because the one thing I’m really sure about is that there are no examples of sustained aerial bombardment of a territory somehow simultaneously facilitating a popular uprising against an authoritarian state with considerable military and paramilitary resources.

Taking to the streets while bombs are falling on the streets and on schools and homes, while oil fires are creating toxic smoke, is not something that people do. It is not an opportunity to be seized, it is a terror to be survived. And in many hearts, I am sure, hatred of a tyrannical government is now intermixed with hatred for bombardment by two foreign governments who inspire little love or trust in any civilian population in the Middle East, two governments who are ordinarily quite cozy with tyrants as long as the tyrants are quite cozy with them.

Desperate people sometimes let themselves believe that this time will be the first time that the death of a tyrant at the hands of a foreign power will be the end of tyranny. But this is also the kind of desperation that is more easily felt and expressed in diaspora, often by people who have long since made a better life for themselves somewhere else. It’s a different sort of hope against all odds when you are sheltered against the imminent possibility of sudden death from the sky, caught between the indifference of hegemons playing out their own unsympathetic calculations and the intimate regard of tyrants close to home.

I don’t need sophisticated forensic tools to prise apart AI-created disinformation and truthful reportage to know that anyone who thinks that an aimless campaign of bombing can create the conditions for a popular revolution is either painfully uninformed by reality or consciously disingenuous. I don’t need any special technical knowledge to know that someone who only cares about the enmity of Iran’s government has no sincere or consistent interest in the aspirations or feelings of Iran’s people.