Intuitively, Americans understand why collective punishment is wrong. Even Americans who hated and protested GW Bush felt the deep injustice and pain of 9/11.

Yet they can’t grasp this logic when it comes to war and sanctions. Why? I have some thoughts.

For one, enemies of American warfare (sanctions & conventional) are racialized populations. Ppl are not trained to see these groups of people as having the same complex thoughts, feelings, and aspirations as them. They’ll see them as brainwashed victims, but non complex ones.

So when sanctions are made against countries for “oppressive regime” purposes, the rationale is these people aren’t *really* feeling hunger and loss. It’s more abstract than that. The country is seen as a singular personified evil entity with helpless brainwashed victims, but...

The victims cannot rise up and take charge of their future on their own accord. The US government must “help” by destabilizing a personified and racially caricatured “regime”. The abstract victims can only feel pain by way of the regime in this narrative (the regime is all).

Second, there’s a collective delusion that sanctions don’t really last the way they do & that when there’s damage, it’s the regime’s fault only.

But this is akin to saying “don’t blame Al Qaeda for 9/11; Bush & co provoked them to begin with!”

Americans realize why that’s wrong: Bush’s badness doesn’t take away the moral outrageousness of jihadi extremist terrorism.

We know what effects sanctions produce. We know it collectively punishes a ppl for their govt. But we cant escape the mentality that they are humanitarian

US see themselves as complex ppl able to feel anguish over both Bush being terrible & collective punishment via terrorism. They see racialized populations they have been trained to villainize as simplistic; unable to oppose both their govt AND feel pain from collective punishment

When you support war and sanctions over diplomacy you’re imposing collective punishment at no cost to yourself while contributing to mass violence against a population you know very little about. And this is highly influenced by racist & nationalist propaganda.

The only way forward is choosing diplomacy and solidarity over collective punishment and war. That’s it. If you think there’s no other way but war, you haven’t thought hard enough- you’ve just been wired to think that war or sanctions are a solution. Never will be though.