Where Are The American People??
What do you do when there is a war in which neither side deserves to win? The American attack on Iran has opened wide the reality of the situation for the rest of the world, but the American people appear to be completely paralysed, unwilling or unable to rise to the occasion and react effectively.
We are at the point where nearly everyone on Earth knows that the president of the United States belongs in a straitjacket in the secure ward of a mental institution, preferably in the Hague, not in the White House. He says and does things every single day that would disqualify any prior president, Democrat or Republican, from waking up still in office the next morning.
But the American institutional and public response is not only tepid, it is embarrassing on an international scale. The response is limited to memes on social media and the occasional No Kings rallies, after each of which the population return to their day jobs supporting the oligarchy that props up the regime.
The war being waged by the American president on a far-off land does not feel real enough or dangerous enough to a cowed population.
The institutions whose very existence are meant to curtail the power of the presidency are doing the opposite. Those wishing to oppose through legal means find themselves constrained by their constitution, while the president they need to depose shares no such respect for that same foundational document or the ground rules it enumerates.
As many people have died across the Middle East in this pointless war in the last month as died in New York on 9/11. Half of them are civilians. But the dead, for the most part, are not Americans, so opposition is limited to half-assed scheduled protests and the occasional pointed meme.
The Americans see Iran as a country run by a religious autocracy, imposing questionable moral values on their population. But the Americans, too, are a religious autocracy, imposing questionable moral values on their own population.
The Americans see Iran as a country that actively interferes in the politics and stability of other nations. But the Americans, too, actively interfere in the politics and stability of other nations.
The Americans see Iran as a country willing to launch unprovoked attacks on its adversaries. But that is exactly what the Americans have done in this war.
The Americans see the government of Iran as problematic, and the people in need of liberation through regime change. But the American government is just as problematic, and the people are in need of liberation through regime change.
Iran has a higher literacy rate and higher average education than the United States. Unlike the US, the country even has a universal health insurance plan. Meanwhile, the president of the United States says the government cannot afford medicare or child care because it needs to pay for its military, whose 2026 budget including the special requests to pay for this war are estimated at $1.7 trillion — which would make the Pentagon the 15th largest country in the world by GDP.
It is impossible to look at this war and describe it as just or warranted. Two countries who engage in religious persecution of their more secular populations are going to war for no good reason, but only the United States chose to wage this war. Worse, Iran has been preparing for this moment for generations, hardening defences, alliances, strategy, and tactics against an American attack they assumed would come sooner or later.
No rational president would wage such a war. Nothing tangibly beneficial can be achieved by conducting this war. It exists only to exercise the irrational vision of the rapture and armageddon by the religious fundamentalists controlling the White House and the Pentagon, and to suppress one of history’s worst-ever sex trafficking and child rape scandals in which the president and his closest supporters are at the very core.
There are no good guys in this war. It should not be fought. It serves no purpose. No good can come of it.
Americans will die in this war, if the president continues to prosecute it as he is threatening to do. They will do so in far larger numbers than they realise at this point in the process, as the country completely loses control of a war it started without a plan or a purpose. Whether we want to be or not, other countries will be dragged into it some way, some how, as Iran activates its networks and alliances and weapons systems to force America’s traditional allies to pick sides, in an effort to isolate the dying empire.
The lack of serious and effective opposition in the United States, at all levels, tells the rest of the world that Trump does, in fact, represent the American psyche and the country’s collective self-image and objectives. He is objectively insane, but his country, in spite of numerous processes and methods available to address his abuse of power — power he should never have been allowed to hold in the first place — allow him to continue.
Americans seem to believe Trump’s lunacy is someone else’s problem to solve. Their slacktivism will lead to nuclear confrontation and possibly deployment because nobody thinks they have any role in stopping it. Someone else, surely, will come to their senses and save the country and the world!
They are taught through their education system about American greatness, about American individual and collective heroism, how the good guy always wins — and how Americans are always the good guys. The true lessons of history, plainly visible to the rest of the world, are not learned or understood in a country eager to destroy itself through wilful ignorance.
This is not a matter for this fall’s midterm elections, likely to be stolen by the crippling corruption the country is allowing to fester. It is not even a question that can wait for tomorrow. It is a matter for today, and the people of the United States are simply not rising to the challenge.
Where are they? What are they waiting for?
