Sana Saeed@SanaSaeed
The streets should be filled with protests against the war on Iran - they’re quiet instead.
For years, the antiwar movement in this country has been worn down - piece by piece, argument by argument, until even its language was made suspect. But in these last three years, something more deliberate has taken hold: to be anti-war now is to be marked; it’s to risk deportation, violence, abduction and imprisonment.
And we watched it happen: we watched students - who have always been the conscience of any movement - be met not only with the force of the state, but with the violent compliance of the institutions meant to protect them.
Those who protested genocide - who named the most grotesque form of inequality for what it is - were made into harbingers of hate and violence. And when they were not being denounced, they were being policed by those who claimed mutual sympathies.
And that’s why there’s a fatigue - there was a repression that was so constant, so vast and so successful that all it left were fragments. Antiwar organizations and organizers are still out here, still organizing, still demanding - but the bodies just aren’t there because Americans ultimately are an obedient, distracted nation.