Normalizing Genocide
An old man came into my work yesterday talking about how we should "carpet bomb" Iran. My stomach flipped the second I heard the phrase. I'd been talking to a friend the night before about the genocidal tendencies of the people in Israel, and we shared video clips of Israelis talking about the need for obliteration of the Palestinian people with a disturbing sense of casualty. They often used the phrase "carpet bomb". My friend and I discussed the level of propaganda and hate that must be required to push people to such a casual relationship with genocidal language.
And there it was right in front of me—not across the ocean in a faraway land. An old man felt so casual about his genocidal feelings that he saw no issue with the discussion of them with strangers in public. I wasn't the person he was speaking to, but I couldn't let the comments go unchecked. I tried to appeal to his humanity, which as you'd probably expect didn't work. So then I tried to appeal to logic, another failed path. The guy argued with me that Iran was involved in 9/11. It was clear that he was ready to blame anyone brown and Muslim for the horror we experienced 25 years ago.
That's clearly bigotry. Part of me wants to believe that he's just an idiot; that he doesn't understand that the language he's using is genocidal. But I also think he completely understands and believes in the notion he espouses to "kill them all" and with that, the harmless moron trope falls apart.
It's not the first time I've heard the phrase "carpet bomb"—Americans used the phrase with alarming frequency after 9/11. My grandpa argued fervently with my aunt (who was having none of his bullshit) that we should do just that in either Iraq or Afghanistan, maybe the entire Middle East, I don't remember. I was very young. I heard people I went to high school use those words too, and that was many years after the attack. But it's the first time I've heard the phrase in my home country and seen it for what it was. It's language of extermination, a passing reference to genocide. And it's not just normalized in places like Israel. The propaganda and hate that festers into that kind of talk isn't foreign to America.
To be fair, the majority of Americans don't think this way about our war in Iran. Not necessarily because most Americans have a heart and aren't hateful bigots, but because most Americans see the negative influence of such behaviors on our own lives. It's not the taking of innocent lives that many Americans resist, but the gas prices and the provocation of our adversaries. That's not to say that no Americans oppose genocide and the senseless killing of innocents. Many Americans do. But my country has a long-standing history of genocidal tendencies—its entire history, in fact. How do you decouple that from a society in which it's so deeply engrained? Can you? Will we? I cried in my office yesterday, because I'm not so sure we ever will. I fear that people in America will always feel comfortable proposing genocide to strangers in public. I won't give up the fight. But it's moments like that, that make the fight feel so. damn. futile.