This week, the president of the United States declared the coming of “Power Plant Day and Bridge Day,” the USA’s promised destruction of Iran for refusing to surrender to American power and the continued restrictions on the Straight of Hormuz. President Trump promised that should Iran not take a deal, ‘Power Plant Day and Bridge Day’ would see Iranians bombed back into “the Stone Age, where they belong.” The night before his deadline elapsed, he said an entire civilisation would die, never to return. What you’re reading there is the intent to commit war crimes, and genocide.
How did we get here?
When I was a child, we all understood America as the “world police” removing international threats to freedom or safety. A myth and self-justification if ever you’d heard one, but the narrative has come so far apart they aren’t even pretending to be moral or good anymore, giving up the weakness of international law in favour of “maximum lethality,” per Secretary of Defense (or War, as he’d rather be known) Pete Hegseth. The Americans aren’t interested in Iranian life, just Iranian oil – they’re saying it openly. You might see media describe this as potentially amounting to war crimes, but that’s just trying to soften the blow. Destroying desalination plants, civilian power plants, bridges; these are war crimes, especially when you’ve already declared the enemy military threat removed. Honestly, I’m no lawyer but at this point the only real question seems to be whether the category of war crimes can cover it all, or if crimes against humanity should come into play.
Trump’s political career has lined up nicely with the normalisation of several concerning things; war crimes, far-right politics, and the decline of trust in each other and basic science. Not a great legacy. Source.
But hey, the Americans aren’t taking us into this bold new future of international slaughter alone. Russia has been massacring civilians in Ukraine since 2022, the RSF in Sudan have been using sexual violence and starvation as weapons of war, and the past few years have seen the IDF disguise soldiers as civilians to attack hospitals, strap civilians to their vehicles as a shields, and shoot hostages they came to rescue, while the hostages were unarmed and waving a white flag, just to list a few cases. Over the past few years, it feels like we’ve sunk deeper and deeper into a pit of international impunity, where the strong and well-armed do essentially whatever they want with little, if any, consequences.
I’ve wondered where it began, this descent. When I think about the outrage over the My Lai massacre and the Vietnam War, or over the genocide during the breakup of Yugoslavia, it seems like another whole reality. People were imprisoned over these things, perpetrators had their careers ended over war crimes and civilian deaths, men were convicted in courts. I don’t think people care less now than we did then – it’s not that we don’t want to see justice done, to see war criminals face consequences for their crimes. Everyone I’ve asked is somewhere between shocked and outraged by it all. Nobody thinks this is okay. But what we’ve lost is the belief that anything will get done about it.
There was no switch, which shifted us from punishing war crimes to enabling them. Our descent into darkness has come over a thousand incidents, each a little step only a fraction ahead of the last, but all of them leading us down. Perhaps the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq was the first key step, an illegal war over fake WMDs which no one was punished for pursuing. Up to a million dead, over a lie, and all those responsible washed their hands of it and walked free. And this normalisation of cruelty hasn’t only happened on the international stage – how many Western countries have hardened their policies on immigration? How many have gotten ‘tough on crime’, been punishing the unhoused, or ‘cracking down’ on drugs? How used have we become to the idea that authorities don’t really care about anything but themselves? We’re still shocked, but we’ve stopped believing our anger matters. We’ve become spectators to the ruination of the planet, and the slaughter of the innocent.
This picture might have aged poorly, but at least we can rest assured there is precedent for the US prematurely declaring victory in the Middle East. Source.
I want to stress two things about this normalisation – I want to affirm for you, wherever you are, that it’s real. We’re expected to accept and move on from things that should destroy political careers, atrocities that should put people in prison. If you live in the West, there’s a real chance your government is asking you to accept policies that twenty or fifty years ago, would have been unthinkable. In the USA, conservatives are talking about the flaw of empathy – they renounce and condemn basic human decency. But I don’t just want to tell you that, because our cynicism and disenchantment won’t fix anything alone. We need to do something, not only to help make the world better but for our own souls – it’s in our resistance and denial of cruelty we’ll find ourselves again.
Most of the time, anger isn’t a helpful feeling, but I think we should let ourselves be angry over this. The casual violence and horror, the mounting war crimes and abuse, are sickening. We were told we live in the Golden Age, but I will not accept that. There is no room in the Golden Age for genocide and war crimes. You don’t need me to tell you what you can do to influence your country’s politicians – pressure, voting, protesting, everything has its place and I’m hardly an expert on your political system. But something we can all do is to stop telling ourselves that we’re powerless, or that this is ‘just how things go.’ If this is business as usual, then the business needs to be shut down and something new set up shop in its place. This may be how Empires behave naturally, but it’s not how humans do things.
If this really were the Golden age of humanity, this would never have been allowed to happen. Don’t forget – someone has to supply the guns, the bombs, the diplomatic cover. The pretense of progress is not the real thing. Source.
We know how it ends if we let atrocity and cruelty become normal – we saw it repeatedly in the 20th century. It ends with genocide, WMDs, and millions dead. I don’t want us to go there again, and if the powers that be insist on doing it anyway, I don’t plan on letting this be remembered as anything other than it was. Atrocity isn’t normal; it never was, and it never will be. We exist to love, to care for one another and to built each other up. The threats of war crimes and genocide are a disgrace, and we shouldn’t let the atrocities of our time rest until the people responsible have faced consequences.
– The Teaspoon
The Teaspoon Brigade 
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