War as Content

 As of today, talk of War in Iran domestically is limited to Midterm voting implications and "Americans are tired of middle east wars" as if "Middle East wars" are an overused trope in a tv show that long since jumped the shark. The horror of "War" is an alien concept to us. War is something on the Screen, akin to a True Crime podcast.

 War-As-Television came into being with around the clock coverage of the Persian Gulf war. At any time you could turn on the television and watch the night sky over a country you likely could not point at on a map light up with missiles. Dead bodies and flattened city blocks were images you could conjure on command. As Jean Baudrillard puts it in his essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (link): 

"War stripped of its passions, its phantasms, its finery, its veils, its violence, its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics, as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy, whereas the American technological decoy only aims to deceive itself."

Spectacle then. War as a TV show. the Siege of Fallujah as an end-of-season climax (later rendered into a literal game to enjoy on your computer). Baudrillard talks of War as a decoy constructed to deceive ourselves that we were waging a War and not committing an atrocity. It's a facade that was never discarded. 

Today official Government sources still seek to deceive. But no longer is War a TV show, it's a TikTok, a Tweet, an Instagram Reel. Content for followers. A now famous quote from an Iranian Cleric, Shahab Moradi, made in the wake of the USA's assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 bluntly understands our cultural absorbtion into the Screen (link to article): 

"Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they're all fictional." 

And now, as the United States enters a new conflict against Iran, a conflict with no goal beyond general destruction, the White House gleefully posts combat footage cut to SpongeBob memes.