In A World of Hawks

War is an extreme solution, yet today's media would have us believe it is a necessity.

Art by Dariusz Zawadzki

A mob of men and women march down a blockaded street, faces wrapped in keffiyehs and fists held high in the air. The world is bathed in black, white, red, and green for as far as the eye can see. The colors of Palestine. Protestors proudly wave flags as they roar, “From the river to the sea! No justice, no peace!”

I watch the video through my screen, a window to the madness, and find myself growing bored. For months, I’ve seen the same scene play out a thousand times. Haven’t these protesters overtaken enough campuses, fought enough cops, or harassed enough Jews?

Apparently not. Every week there seems to be another group of suburbanites armed with cardboard signs and untrained punches rooting for total Palestinian victory in Israel. Interestingly enough, however, many don’t even know what they’re supporting or why.

Though my own opinions on October 7th and the war may differ from those of these protesters, I can understand how they think. Social media algorithms overwhelmingly promote videos supporting Hamas, the PLO, and Islam to the uninformed. Emotional videos, advertisements, and celebrity endorsement are used to breed rabid support from viewers who are often young, impressionable, and otherwise ignorant of the harsh realities of the conflict.

I myself have been caught up in wartime fervor, such as when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. I loudly proclaimed that the West should support Ukraine, and felt a bit of pride whenever I saw the yellow-blue flag. Yet, after several weeks, my mind began to sober. War is a brutal affair, I remembered. In the news, I saw footage of Russian and Ukrainian men of all ages being bombed and shot down. Many were forced to fight against their own will. Ukrainian men were prevented from fleeing with their loved ones to safety and instead forced to fight alongside mercenaries and Nazis. My distaste for Zelensky set in. Every time I saw his face in a magazine or the paper, my stomach turned. But while the seduction faded quickly for me, it lasted for everyone else. Since the invasion, over $100 billion in taxpayer dollars have been sent to Ukraine in military aid from the US alone. Yet the war is still ongoing and America’s armories are increasingly depleted. That being said, when the massacre of October 7th came, I wasn’t surprised when liberal America threw its weight behind Palestine. Disgusted, yes, but not surprised.

The media seems to have a knack for swaying our emotions, and groupthink only makes the allure of “righteous” war seem all the sweeter. Almost a year since the Israel-Hamas war began and no one seems to have sobered up. If anything, support seems to have only grown. In 2024, we no longer live in a world of doves—only hawks.

Humans are a particularly brutal species. As the scholarly Ivan Karamazov observed in the novel Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These [soldiers] took a pleasure in torturing children… Doing it before the mothers’ eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.¹

Throughout history—both documented and undocumented—humans have found abhorrent ways to torment our fellow man. We’ve flayed each other alive, methodically dismembered foes, and brutalized children. In war, new torture methods are experimented with, be it the use of poison gas or drilling nails into the bodies of civilians for fun.

These sadistic impulses are rooted in mankind’s innate violence. Every human who has ever lived has harbored a spirit of violence and aggression, though it has its uses. Violence has helped mankind survive the horrors of the untamed world, and later the brutality of oppressive powers. It is natural, necessary, and vital to hone. Yet, the purity of it is delicate. In an instant, violence can bent into something dark and sadistic. It is like a siren calling out, trying to lure us into our own self-destruction. Through conditioning and education, many of us become aware of this bloodthirsty creature. We then repress it and hide it from the world, though it yearns to burst forward in a terrible rage.

In light of this possibility, some may say this is proof humans are inherently evil beings. However, this is an insulting falsehood. Though we may be tempted by lower passions, most human beings are neither “good” nor “evil.” Rather, we are somewhere in between. The bulk of mankind is made up of decent souls who are swayed and conditioned to support “good” or “evil” causes and ideologies, depending on circumstances, the environment, one's personality, and leadership. That being said, sadism and other perversions only become the norm when the masses are persuaded to accept them as standards to embrace rather than extremes to avoid. Warmongering is no exception.

Though most of mankind is decent, its leaders are often on the extreme end of morality. These men and women actively deny their sadistic ways and act as though their murderous, torturous desires were blessings from God. Our leaders are often self-serving sociopaths and psychopaths—human predators of the highest degree. While a serial killer may wreak havoc on a dozen families, a politician wreaks havoc on a hundred million. They and their media lackeys² are the ones who encourage the masses to embrace evil. They get to the top with charm, deception, bribery, and force, then sway trusting citizens towards extremism. Rather than serving their people, these leaders encourage innocent boys to give up their lives in faraway wars, to blow themselves up, or to behead other boys whose only crime is waving a different colored flag. The hawks who reside in cozy offices and liken wars to picnic outings are the most sadistic humans of all.

Look to the youth and you’ll see how they’ve been swayed. Nowadays, you can’t ask any Western youth what they think about Ukraine or Israel without hearing hawkish mantras. Peace is only acceptable under “total victory,” yet it’s rare to hear any genuine arguments on what such a victory would mean for all those involved or any understanding of the consequences that would come with it. Warmongering leaders have so thoroughly persuaded our youth that when one asks an American teen, “Why do you support Palestine?”, the answer given by the teen will be not only historically inaccurate but somehow also deeply anticapitalist and antisemitic.

Strange. How can one support war and yet not even know what it’s about?

Once upon a time, when someone didn’t know what a war was about, they kept judgment at a minimum or took the position of a dove. Then, if and when someone educated themselves on the matter, there was still a good chance they supported a quick end to the violence, or total avoidance of conflict altogether. Today, that simply isn’t the case.

We have so many idealistic hawks in the West today. Perhaps it’s because these youth do not know what war is actually like. To them, war is something distant and exotic, just a spectacle to enjoy via Call of Duty and cutesy anime girls. War represents an outpouring of pent-up aggression and energies, and to youth, it seems romantic and exciting. Activism is viewed through a similar lens. The thought of going down in the history books as a daring freedom fighter who risked life and limb makes the average college-age adult grow weak in the knees. It’s one of many age-old passions of the naive.

And yet, without knowledge of what one is supporting, hawkish attitudes and the virtues of self-sacrifice are folly! It’s herd mentality to a dangerous degree. Take the so-called “Queers for Palestine,” for example. How can someone support the formation of an independent state that would actively call for their humiliation and death?

The answer is ignorance. Political and media hawks bent the ignorance of leftist “queers” into blind support, so that all throughout June, pride parades were accented by the cries, “Free Palestine!”

Innocent Jews have been harassed and attacked throughout America by such willfully ignorant protestors. Many of these protestors are perhaps, at their core, decent humans who aren’t antisemetic, but their blind trust in warmongers lead them to believe in the merits of “anti-Zionism.” And at the request of the right media-backed influencer, these youth would descend into a bloody pogrom, destroying the progress the West has so carefully made.

Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic. Hopefully, I am.

In the end, the ideals of war, activism, and “being on the right side of history” without any real understanding of reality is dangerous and potentially fatal. It allows sadistic leaders to push the masses so far—to manipulate us up and down—until we find ourselves turning a blind eye to the raping of children, because we see them and their people as nothing but sub-human.

Ignorance lets the devil take hold us.

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Art by Dariusz Zawadzki

In light of the terror inspired by warmongers, a nation led by peace-seekers seems to be the preferable option. While this is true in many cases, the ideals of peace can lead us to fall prey to another breed of manipulators: smothering doves. These manipulators are pacifist extremists, believing in complete repression of all forms of violence and aggression—no exceptions.

Yet as the maxim goes, “As above, so below.” Pure pacifism is the twin of total war. Smothering doves work to defang nations of their military power under the name of “disarmament,” “deweaponization,” or even “reducing carbon emissions.” Their supporters—just as ignorant as the supporters of warmongering hawks—cheer on the efforts. They don’t realize that, in the end, their nation will be stripped bare and helpless to defend against powers even slightly more ambitious than they. Aggression must be honed, but never repressed nor used hastily. Easier said than done, I know. Perhaps Theodore Roosevelt said it best that a nation should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Though I digress.

Returning to the main point at hand, ignorance is the source of many—if not all—of man’s problems. It’s best to assume caution when seemingly everyone around you suddenly turns into a hawk or a dove. Wars and geopolitics are always messy, tangled affairs, and the only way to arm ourselves from manipulation is through self-education and empathy. Through these things, we will be able to see through the greed of extremists and understand that all suffer under war, from the most patriotic soldier to the most innocent newborn. By arming ourselves with wisdom, we will also be able to recognize those crucial moments when national aggression is necessary and to discern the moral underpinnings of a conflict.

Until then, however, we must not let warmongers turn us into blind sadists, nor smothering doves turn us into doormats.

1. Translation by Constance Garnett.

2. Though sometimes it’s the other way around.