For those of you reading this in the year 2045 and wondering what the hell I’m talking about, let me start with a little bit of context. And for those of you who are going to wonder where the hell I’m going with all this, I promise there is a point to this, if you stick with it. As of today, May 15th, 2019, the possibility of armed conflict between The United States and Iran is becoming a real possibility to consider. Just today, the US ordered non-emergency personnel out of Iraq and advised US citizens not to travel there. With the backdrop of a series of other tensions, it seems like the United States is at the very least getting ready for the possibility of a war, moving vulnerable people away from the area.

Let’s just assume war is a forgone conclusion, which very much isn’t the case, but we need to talk about what to do if it happens. Assuming we don’t all die in a torrent of hellfire and nuclear explosions, we are gonna find ourselves stuck in a war, a war that could do a huge amount of damage to all the the work that has been done advancing leftist politics over the past few years.

It’s no secret that support for the current government goes up in wartime. This probably has something to do with how long our previous wars in this century were dragged out, but I digress. The left asks for something very human and compassionate from people. We ask you to think about other people, about the conditions of people in foreign countries, about the atrocities committed in the name of the state.

But a war asks for all of that to be sidelined. There’s no time during a war to think about other nations, we have to be thinking about ourselves. There’s no time to ask ourselves if we can justify all the things we do in the name of America, because war frames them as a necessity. Wartime shuts down honest discussion about the worst parts of American life and society, because it asks us to focus on how proud we are to be American, in the name of morale and supporting the troops.

Innuendo Studios pointed out that if you can get people beating their chests about how proud they are to be an American, it makes it impossible to critical of their idea of America effectively, they tune you out and refuse to listen. War is very effective at doing this to people. The American media system gets people to the point where they refuse to hear any criticism of America, no matter how valid, because part of them believes that to even listen to the criticism would make them Un-American.

So how do we convince people not to go to war if they see global policing as quintessentially American? How to we criticize the actions of the military of people use the troops as a stand-in for all of America? Simply put, we need to hijack the rhetoric. If we can somehow frame war and violence as fundamentally Un-American, then the left can use the language of patriotism to attack unjust wars and even the administration supporting them.

As much as I know it makes some of you uncomfortable to use the patriotic language of the right wing, the reality of the situation is that at some point, we all want to rehabilitate America. We want to, at some point, turn America into the project we have completed, not the system to rail against. So at some point, we are all going to have to stomach the language of being proud of a country, and if doing that sooner allows us to get more people on our side and end military occupation in the middle east, then we have an obligation to.