By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 11, 2026

A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and in which one ordinary Hollywood clip could cause trauma, a different sort of damage is done to those of us subjected to endless streams of bloodless, normalized slaughter, and easy normalized war.

How does one teach civics to children when top government officials and subservient media outlets are serving up gleeful normalized sadism? The U.S. president posts “snuff” films of boaters. Many suspect him of — among several other evil motives — striving to distract from an ongoing news story about the long-term abuse of girls by the wealthy and powerful. If you turn to fiction for respite from general disgust and nausea, you struggle to find films that are not about murder, perhaps landing on a film being heavily promoted by Netflix called “Priscilla” about a 14-year-old girl dating Elvis. Where does monstrous reality end and heroic fiction begin?

If you read countless reports of “conflicting narratives” about an ICE officer killing a woman in Minneapolis and are bewildered by the news that there exist both a video of the thing and completely contradictory reports of what is in that video, then you find yourself watching a sadistic murder and facing the fact that government officials and so-called journalists are asking you to disbelieve your eyes.

Not just your eyes, but your brain as well. The ICE murderer had learned to shoot people during the war on Iraq, which we know about through countless fictional and “news” accounts in which shooting people was a “service” to thank the shooter for. Now you’re expected to carry that belief over to Minneapolis where dwell humans who are supposed to matter, unless none of them are supposed to matter anymore, unless videos of reality are supposed to be dismissed as “all right because we know it’s not real” just like killing people in video games. The U.S. President talks about a fictional serial killer as some sort of honorable elder statesman but a real video from Minnesota as imaginary.

Only we all know it’s not imaginary, because of all the people (or robots) online telling us not only that it’s acceptable but also that it’s glorious. One must constantly remind oneself that the most powerful videos one shares to make others feel the horror of a war or genocide exist because some participants in that war saw those videos as celebratory. This growing and putrefying war culture has an impact. It increases crime. It harms children. It makes me ill.

There has long been a big “debate” over whether media violence contributes to real world violence, as there has been over whether fossil fuels damage the climate, or cigarettes (or video games) are addictive, or forever chemicals cause illnesses, or nonviolent activism racks up successes, or whether any other fact exists despite huge amounts of money being spent to say it doesn’t.

We ought to be able to predict that imitation-obsessed primates would imitate what they see and hear over and over and over, that money is spent on advertising for a reason, that lies are repeated incessantly for a reason, that those mass shooters who are not actually veterans often pretend to be at war for a reason, and that video games that didn’t lead to killing wouldn’t be developed by and used in training by militaries. But we don’t have to predict anything. The serious studies have been done. I recommend a book by Rose A. Dyson called Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy.

This book documents the evidence that violent media contributes to real violence, as well as the evidence of a decades-long campaign to distract us from that fact, or to shift blame onto parents and children rather than media producers or distributors. Just as oil companies would prefer for you to worry about your personal duty to turn off the lights when you leave a room (which, yes, you really should do), the manufacturers of murder entertainment inc. would prefer that you blame yourself for watching their swill (which, yes, you really should do — but not at the expense of failing to blame them).

What do we know and what can we do about it? I encourage you to join an online book club with Rose Dyson and find out.

The post Our Computers and Televisions Spray Toxic Sludge appeared first on World BEYOND War.

From World BEYOND War via this RSS feed