Whenever America starts a war with a nuclear power everyone starts yelling about WW3 and it's only just occurred to me that when Americans say 'WW3' they are at least partially expressing an anxiety that this time their government's blind aggression might have hit somebody who'll actually hit back.
I was gonna say 'like WW2' but then rapidly remembered that neither of the existing world wars involved like. much of any direct damage to civilian populations either because America's eternal wars haven't touched its own soil since like the 1860s. except for Pearl Harbour, which was literally One Attack in the whole of WW2 (and which was also primarily targeting a military base. and was in a colonized nation far from the mainland USA). I am not kidding if you look up 'attacks on American soil' every single thing since 1900 except individual attacks (Pearl Harbour and 9/11, basically plus a couple of border skirmishes with Mexico) is like 'America was attacked In The Gulf States' or 'America was attacked In Asia'. like mate where is the US? you can't count attacks on military bases as 'attacks on US soil' unless you need to bulk out the list which. look at the history.
Like imo one of the reasons the US is so comfortable being leisurely belligerent against Literally Any Country In The World is that it's been literally well over a century since the fight actually came to them. why WOULD the US government stop being blindly aggressive when the only costs are financial?
and instead of being primarily concerned about like. the actual thousands of people who are actually gonna die in these strikes. every time the US's unprovoked aggression hits a nuclear state of a state with a measure of international heft, the loudest concern from Americans is OH NO WHAT IF THIS ONE'S WW3
because. war is so abstract and foreign. because it's spent 150 years constantly happening Over There and only involving Americans who are in the military. foreign wars don't register as a threat because they're NOT a threat to Americans (the only Real People) and the way in which they're frightening is the abstract possibility that the other party might at some point bring America actually into the war. which has basically never happened so it's this vast unknown threat.
(the UK btw is also not immune to this but it's a wee bit different. our economy was permanently crippled by direct damage in WW2 and the Irish republicans got a lot of hits in so there's still some memory that War Has Consequences. but by and large we still approach war as something that Happens Elsewhere and are scandalised by the idea it might directly affect us at home. this is still a fairly abstracted and fictionalised threat to us which we treat as More Worrying than the actual bombings currently happening, but I just don't think it's as completely abstracted as the American relationship to foreign wars)
The Black Tom explosion in 1916 was a German terrorist attack on US soil and resulted in 7 deaths, hundreds of injuries, about half a billion dollars in adjusted damages, and complete annihilation of an island in New Jersey.
Also, WWII was a nuclear war.
SEVEN. SEVEN DEATHS. A CENTURY AGO. is the 'war has come to US soil' you wanted to pull?
Preliminary figures today (4 March) is 787 Iranians killed since 28 February. so forgive me if I say you're proving my point pretty effectively.
similarly yes you are correct WWII was a nuclear war. so far the only one. a war in which the US made the decision to kill over 200,000 people Over There on a different continent and then spent the next 80 years making sure nobody else would be able to either retaliate or do anything similar. And the American (and Western) relationship to nuclear arms remains primarily not 'Jesus Christ I cannot believe America killed close to a quarter of a million people in a civilian centre with one set of orders' but 'oh noooooo what if this means we have to mitigate our aggression in case they do something like this BACK TO US'.
so. again. my point. war in the American cultural imagination remains an abstract thing that THEY do to OTHER PEOPLE where the concept of any enemy action reaching people in civilian centres is so completely abstracted it just becomes a boogeyman and apparently we should still be talking about the 7 American civilians that were killed in a war that claimed in the region of 6-13 million civilian lives in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Seven. Fuck me. I thought I was being needlessly shitty when I wrote this post but you have really helped clarify that this actually is how warped American perspectives on civilian casualties are.
