What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain? |
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What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain?
Under Trump, the US is unequivocally a force for evil in the world. It can seem morally intolerable to embrace happiness as our government massacres children.
The destroyed building of Shajarehâ’ye Tayyibe Primary School is seen after a US-Israel strike in Minab that killed 185 people, including dozens of students and teachers, most of them children, in Hormozgan, Iran, on March 21, 2026.
Iwas on a family hike when I learned that our country had obliterated the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. Using Tomahawk missiles developed and produced with the taxes that you and I pay, the United States executed a double-tap strike—a tactic designed to kill emergency responders—that murdered at least 168 people. Most of the victims torn apart by these US bombs were 7-to-12-year olds. Later reporting would describe the scene of the massacre: “children’s bodies lying partly visible” under the rubble, a “very small child’s severed arm” being pulled from the debris.
I thought of a sketch from the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb. The bit opens on a bunker with two SS officers. One walks worriedly over to the other. “Hans, I’ve just noticed something,” the Nazi says nervously. “Have you looked at our caps recently?”
“The badges on our caps, have you looked at them?”
“They’ve got skulls on them,” the Nazi interrupts. “Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?” He pauses, looking anxious. Then he asks the question that’s become immortalized in meme form: “Hans… are we the baddies?”
Trump’s nihilistic war on Iran is not the first disaster that’s made me think the United States might be a baddie. My first time cursing our government was when George W. Bush officially killed the Kyoto climate treaty. As a freshman in high school, I marched against the war in Iraq. I’m used to thinking of the United States as a dangerous actor on the world stage.
And yet, that was never all we were. There were always redeeming qualities. These counterpoints are exactly what the Trump regime has spent the last year stripping away—ending lifesaving international aid programs, clawing back the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate investments, blowing up any remaining commitments to democratic principles and international law.
And then came the war on Iran. There’s just no way to tell a story in which a character launches a surprise attack on an elementary school during a busy school day—tearing apart tiny bodies that were just hours earlier hugging parents and grandparents and siblings—and not have that character be the baddie.
In my algorithmic circles, there was a genre of social-media post that would pop up every few months during the course of Israel’s war on Gaza. Someone would share a picture of Israelis enjoying themselves—maybe a clip of a busy Tel Aviv beach full of good-looking young people sunbathing or playing matkot. And then someone else would repost the image with some version of the caption, “This is The Zone of Interest,” a reference to the Oscar-winning 2024 film by Jonathan Glazer.
The Zone of Interest depicts Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the disquietingly banal domestic life he and his family enjoyed in their flower-filled estate located just outside the walls of the Nazi’s most infamous extermination camp. At various points in the movie, we see telltale signs of the horrors being committed next door—a plume of crematoria smoke visible through the bedroom window, a stream of ash flowing into the river in which Rudolf and his kids are paddling, a distant rat-tat-tat of gunfire on the other side of the garden wall that only the family’s dog seems to notice. But throughout the film, the focus of the camera remains squarely on the Höss family and the cheerful life they insist on living in the shadow of humanity’s most evil crime.
It’s a disturbing movie to watch, and intentionally so. As Glazer said in his Oscar acceptance speech, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present—not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”
Though Glazer was clear—and courageous in his moral clarity—about the applicability of his film to the genocide in Gaza, I always had a conflicted reaction when I’d see those “crowd of happy Israelis = Zone of Interest” posts. On the one hand, part of me would think, “Well, wait, some of these people probably oppose what’s happening in Gaza. Are they really not allowed to enjoy a day in the sun because their government is committing war crimes that they’re not in a position to stop?” But another part of me would recoil at this joyful embrace of life. “If my country were directly committing atrocities, I hope I’d at least have the good grace to be deeply depressed about it,” I’d think.
Of course, we shouldn’t make false equivalencies.........