Dancing with Demons: America’s Long Love Affair with War and Death

Nancy O’Brien Simpson 

Photo: Pravda.Ru by Петр Ермилин, https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/pdm/

США в Иране

Friends, be real. What would you say if Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on Kyiv and called it “peace”?  Boom!  Russia dropped the big one. Every child, every grandmother, every ordinary life gone. Would you think that was a good idea to end the Ukraine War?

That is not a hypothetical. That is us. We are the only nation on earth that has done it. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. We dropped atomic bombs.  We turned human beings into shadows burned onto walls and told ourselves it was necessary.

And we didn’t stop.

In Vietnam, we drenched entire regions in napalm. Over 400,000 tons. We gassed villages, then set them on fire. Families didn’t just die; they burned alive. Children ran screaming with their skin falling from their bodies. This is not ancient history. This is what we do.  

Iraq did not attack us in 1991, and we dropped 80,000 tons of bombs in a matter of weeks during Desert Storm. Eighty thousand tons. Try to picture it. You can’t. No one can. That’s the point. It’s easier not to see the families underneath.

Under Barack Obama, more than 26,000 bombs were dropped in a single year, 2016, across seven countries. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen. Twenty six thousand.  It is evil.  Pure evil.  

And now I sit on a quiet Sunday morning and hear a U.S. Ambassador Waltz casually defend bombing all of Iran's infrastructure, power plants, bridges, the lifelines that keep civilians alive, and call it “the right thing to do,” even when told plainly that is a war crime.

The right thing to do?  Like, really?  WTF?

No power means babies in incubators die. Patients on ventilators die. The elderly on oxygen die. Hospitals go dark. Food rots. Water stops. Heat disappears. Families don’t die in a moment; they die slowly, deliberately, in the dark.  It is evil.  

And we discuss this evil like it’s policy.

Call it what it is. Not a strategy. Not defense. Not peace. Call it by its name....evil.  

When we renamed mass bombing campaigns “shock and awe,” we turned terror into branding. When we assassinate people overseas and celebrate it, we sanitize killing into patriotism. We have built a language that protects us from the truth.

And the truth is this something in us has hardened.

I am not religious, but something is chilling, something demonic, about hearing human suffering dismissed so easily. About hearing entire civilizations spoken of as if they are disposable. When Trump said he would annihilate the Iranian civilization “in a night,” t;hat is not Trump being Trump.  That is evil speaking.  

So I am asking you, not as Americans, not as partisans, but as human beings

When did we start believing evil was a good thing? When did we stop seeing our brothers and sisters overseas as people? When did our hearts turn to stone?