The Map that Murders and the Mind that Masks

Hello Interactors,

This one attempts to balance the privilege of cold analytical escapism with the gruesome rehumanization of past, present, and future atrocities. I end up trying to make sense of the political psychology that leads to such jubilant violence. While it can be understood, its the very intelligibility that makes it so intolerable.

PRESSURE, POWER, IMPUNITY

In 1965, as my umbilical cord was being severed in Iowa, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were cutting the ears off innocent dead Vietnamese children. And their parents. The shriveling cartilage served as “proof” they were killed. They’d string them into necklaces or hoard them in “ear bags” as trophies. Their commanders demanded a tally. This morbid ritual, born from the military’s obsession with numeric “success” metrics amid “search and destroy” orders, exposed not just individual moral depravity but a systemic disregard for human life.

Such barbarity serves as just another example of America’s enduring pattern of defying Geneva Conventions on civilian protections, proportionality, and prohibited weapons. These atrocities are wrapped in bureaucratic euphemisms like “collateral damage”; all to evade accountability and perpetuate unchecked imperial violence.

When barbarity returned like a boomerang to hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, the term “collateral damage” was absent. But “search and destroy” came back. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes the president

“to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

These expanded interpretations of and the idea of a “continuing, imminent threat” led to doctrines that allowed drones and bombs to be used as sanctioned forms of force across borders. Targeted killings are domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints.

As my own kids were being born in 2004, U.S. drones were flying across the skies over Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond, vaporizing wedding parties, schools, and outdoor markets, shredding innocent men, women, and children into mangled flesh mixed with bone fragments. These ‘Hellfire missiles’ were sold to the public as possessing surgical precision. These “precision” killings, justified as “targeted” under the euphemism of “signature strikes,” leave behind charred craters, orphaned survivors screaming amid the rubble, and “double taps” that slaughter first responders rushing to the scene. And here again the body-count calculus of modern warfare dehumanizes the dead as mere “collateral” in an endless cycle of remote-control atrocity.

However, unlike in Vietnam, groups controlling casualty numbers and combatant definitions created incentives to undercount civilian deaths to bolster the claims of legal precision. Because such reasoning was long classified, external scrutiny relied on leaks and sporadic court‑ordered disclosures.

Obama deployed 10 times more drones than Bush. They all occurred in legal grey zones. They were justified through broad claims of self‑defense against “imminent threats” from non‑state actors operating in countries not formally at war with the United States. Legal assessments have found that many attacks did not meet the threshold of an “armed conflict” — meaning strikes there should have been constrained by international human‑rights law — thus violating requirements of necessity, last resort, and proportionality.

Recent incidents, like the Iranian Khamenei killing, further expose gaps between law and practice. In the case of the 2020 killing of Iranian General Soleimani, scholars argue that the official rationale failed to meet the UN Charter’s Article 51 requirement of an actual armed attack. Since then, the U.S. and its allies have instead advanced an even more squishy view of “imminence” to justify anticipatory defense against imagined potenti