Governments that say their wars had no alternative put a great deal of work into making that look true. If war and repression were truly destiny, they wouldn’t need a sprawling architecture of propaganda, censorship, and threat to seem unavoidable. The size of that effort is the best evidence that the wars were chosen.
The effort is on the record. Britain in 1914 didn’t drift into war; it jailed dissenters, censored newspapers, and staged public displays of unity to make slaughter appear necessary. Washington in 2003 didn’t stumble into Iraq; it manufactured evidence, sidelined inspectors, and saturated the media with mushroom clouds.
Israel today drafts new slogans by the week, bans words from classrooms, arrests protesters, and drills the claim that there is “no alternative.”
The goal is resignation: to exhaust the public into believing peace was never an option. That exhaustion requires constant maintenance, and its methods repeat across centuries. The maintenance runs on a schedule: once a campaign can forecast when you will change your mind, persuasion stops being an argument and becomes a scheduling problem.
- Ceasefires get dismissed as naïve.
- Diplomacy is mocked and called appeasement.
- Inspections are declared failures before they conclude.
Each alternative is discredited on purpose before it has a chance to work, so that once the killing is done, the government can say it had no other choice.
Washington in 2003 insisted UN inspections had failed even as inspectors reported they were working. Israel today insists there is “no alternative” to bombardment even as ceasefire proposals circulate. The lie works by foreclosing possibility and then rebranding the foreclosure as destiny.
Officials state the violence and its excuse in the same breath, the abuser’s “You made me do this” logic:
“We invaded Iraq to stop WMDs.”
“We are bombing Gaza to destroy Hamas.”
The act and its rationale are fused so tightly that to question the flimsy justification is to be branded a terrorist sympathizer or a denier of reality.
Language is systematically laundered to numb the conscience. Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation.” Dead children become “collateral damage.” The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is chillingly rebranded “mowing the lawn.” As I argued in Neutral Isn’t Fair, euphemism is infrastructure, the layer that keeps brutality palatable. History is given the same treatment. Munich 1938 is invoked to justify aggression, while the ghosts of the Nakba, Vietnam, or Chile are exorcised from the record. The history that gets cited teaches one lesson: more force is always the answer.
The bully perfects the art of playing the victim. Nuclear-armed states claim they “have no choice.” Global empires with bases on every continent insist they are besieged. This inversion is reinforced domestically. Decline stories, like those insisting people are getting dumber, recast structural sabotage as natural decay. Claims about consensus work the same way, like body-language pseudoscience, where projection masquerades as science. The myth names the mood; the systems analysis shows the mechanism.
Beneath the performance of “security” is a balance sheet. War makes money for some people while others die in it. Contractors profited from Iraq. Occupation turns stolen land into real estate.
Empire budgets for bombs and for the lies that make bombs usable. Abstractions about “complex systems” are used not as explanations but as evasions, making violence seem agentless when outcomes always have authors.
The final lie is the monster role: colonized peoples branded as savages, Black Panthers as predators, Palestinians as terrorists. These caricatures work as preparation for slaughter, and they should be named as such.
Governments pay for all of this because the claim of necessity would not hold up without it.
What is maintained so desperately is a system we made, and so something we can take apart.