✅ UNCLEAR ❌

Incredible how some people are quite happy to dress things up in therapy speak, but not willing to give any energy to ‘hey King’s job was very traumatic and he’s still processing that’.

You absolutely don’t have to agree with (and indeed can violently disagree with) what people have done to still have empathy for them. I guess one of the things my own life experience to date has taught me is that being compassionate towards even people who you think have made terrible damaging decisions that have led to harm to themselves and others has benefits.

It is of course also your right not to get yourself tangled up in this and have an ethical strict line that you don’t cross.

Tom King has been writing for DC Comics for longer than he worked for the CIA at this point.

I, personally, am a big fan of people realizing they did something awful and attempting to atone for that. King has pretty clearly changed his mind about the US military given the way his Wonder Woman reads.

Tom King is a real-life white American man who invaded Iraq to punish Arabs for a crime that they didn't commit and he didn't suffer. You can't make up the impact of this real-life adult man based on your wishful headcanons for his racist, bootlicking superhero comics.

What is "our" cause? How do we help our cause by giving up our basic human dignity? Is our cause to coddle people who hate us? What is your cause? Doesn't it sound like you're the one offering perfomative compassion right now?

Excerpts from the foreword of the recent graphic novel The Flavors of Iraq by Feirat Alani and Léonard Cohen:

Since I got out of the Marine Corps in 2006, I felt I owed a moral debt to Iraqis, and to the city of Fallujah in particular. Though it still stings to admit it, I was part of the assault force that laid siege to Fallujah in late 2004. Over the course of a month, we turned the entire city to rubble and left an estimated 4,000–6,000 civilians dead in our wake. I know the damage can’t be undone, nor the debt repaid. But as an acknowledgment of wrongdoing and a gesture of remorse, I committed myself to campaigning for withdrawal and reparations.

[...] Over the last twenty years, the story of the invasion and occupation has been told almost exclusively from an American perspective that is so full of myth and omission that the entire collection of novels, films, memoirs, and journalistic accounts belongs in the fantasy genre. Not only are they historically inaccurate across the board, but they also share a common narrative form. American soldiers are the protagonists of these stories. To the extent that Iraqis are included at all, it is either as victims or villains; and, in either case, the need for Americans to save the day is implicit. According to this narrative, the invasion is not an act of aggression but an attempted liberation gone wrong.

[...] If Iraq through American eyes seems more the product of wishful thinking than reality, it’s because the framing, omissions, and narrative tropes that have characterized much of the fiction and nonfiction on Iraq have flowed downstream from US military propaganda. One of the lesser-known aspects of Operation Iraqi Freedom is that the way the story was told—the controlled perspective, the characterization of the actors involved, the focus on strategic themes, the tactical use of language—was as much a part of the battle plan as was the use of bombs and infantry. New trends in strategic thinking at the turn of the millennium gave propaganda a more prominent role in American military operations during the global war on terror.

Soft power, it was believed, would allow the military to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, reducing the need for deadly force. It didn’t actually work out that way. But the fact that our propaganda operations remain a lesser-known aspect of the war speaks to their success in constructing a popular (mis)understanding of the conflict that has been reproduced again and again in American pop culture.

[...] From The Hurt Locker (2008) to American Sniper (2014) and The Yellow Birds (2012), American pop culture has followed the model set by US information operations, pumping out story after story told through the familiar gaze of the American soldier. No matter that the invasion was a war crime. No matter that over a million Iraqis died in the course of the occupation. All ethical questions about the mission are, at most, a secondary plotline. And Iraq and Iraqis are just a setting in these stories about American soldiers and their struggles to heal the wounds of war.

That foreword was written by Ross Caputi, former U.S. marine, current anti-war activist. Not every veteran can do what Caputi does, but every storyteller can choose whether to use his platform for Iraqis, or to use Iraqis as his platform. And the people Caputi hurt still don't owe him forgiveness, or anything else.

Isn't it disturbing how Caputi's position—white, American, and a veteran of invasion—is leveraged to add credibility in a French Iraqi journalist's personal account of his own family's lives in Iraq?

The Flavours of Iraq was adapted into a series of animated shorts, officially uploaded to watch for free in English.