In a World of Manufactured Wars, Who Belongs in the Circle of Human Concern?

US and Iran have co-created decades of collective trauma. How do we uncover the full truth beyond allegiance and ideology, and back into our shared humanity?

Who belongs in the circle of human concern? The Iranians? Palestinians? Israelis? What about the millions of other people all over the world caught in wars we rarely hear about?

When you hear news reporters or social media influencers assigning ultimate blame over deeper understanding, whose story are you hearing? When you repeat what you hear, whose story are you telling?

As tensions between the US and the Middle East escalate, it seems that we’re in another situation where questionable claims about weapons of mass destruction are being used to justify escalating war. And so the cycle continues: violence begets violence, an eye for an eye, and ancient cities tragically reduced to rubble. Currently, human conflicts drive 80% of the world’s humanitarian crises.

People all over the world want and need peace.

What happens when we zoom out from today's polarized headlines and trace the deeper patterns? Below, we explore how the governments of both the US and Iran have co-created decades of collective trauma, and why only a more whole, nuanced perspective can move us forward.

To begin, we invite you to pause and reflect on a powerful quote by historian and poet Aurora Levins Morales on the deeper work of transformation in the face of the destructive war machine.

There are people who believe this is human nature. It is not difficult to find a nearly endless supply of such historical repetitions: emancipated slaves turned slaveholders; persecuted religious minorities from England who burned, hanged and crushed heretics and witches; newly independent colonies creating their own categories of the economically and culturally suppressed second class.

I watch my relatives reenact the horrors of holocaust, insist they are fighting for their survival against ruthless conspirators, live increasingly militarized lives, believe they have no choices, become more and more like their wounds. What are we to do? It is not enough to feel shame. It is not enough to point out the "ironies" and use them to condemn the atrocities of a new generation of perpetrators.

As people committed to social change, to creating just and peaceful societies, we have a responsibility to understand how the unjust and violent societies we live in sustain and recreate themselves, how brutality reproduces …

How the son of a Polish Jewish refugee [Paul Wolfowitz] can become the key strategist of world conquest for the grandson of Prescott Bush, who laundered money for Thysen, Nazi Germany's most prominent steel manufacturer, who used Jewish slave labor in his operations. How the granddaughter of a sharecropper [Condoleezza Rice] growing up in segregated Birmingham, hearing the church bomb explosion that killed her schoolmate, could advise the descendant of Virginia landlords [George W. Bush] on how to recolonize the Middle East.

We have learned about the cycles of abuse within families, about the way a child who is beaten and abused … can become an adult who feels like a victim while acting like a perpetrator. But, somehow, as activists, we have failed to see the immense implications of that knowledge. Over and over I see movements of liberation get stuck at the same place, the moment when we "other" the agents of our oppression, without trying to understand why they are as they are and how we can prevent more people being that way in the future. If we even begin to ask those questions, we are rapidly drawn to the places where we ourselves have been most deeply wounded. In the exact place where it is most difficult to understand how anyone could do as our enemies have done and still be human … is the place of greatest potential illumination.

— Power-Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change by Steven Wineman (Foreword by Aurora Levins Morales)

No Good Guys in War

As President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, maintaining dominance over Eurasia—including key countries like Iran—has long been viewed as essential to preserving US global power.

In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, after he moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. The US and UK installed the Shah, a brutal dictator who handed over nearly half of Iran’s oil to American companies. With CIA funding and training, his secret police (SAVAK) tortured and killed thousands of dissidents. The Shah was eventually overthrown in a violent revolution in 1979.

In the 1980s, the US supported Saddam Hussein as he launched brutal chemical warfare attacks and mass slaughter against Iran. Simultaneously, even as Iran was labeled a state sponsor of terrorism, the US secretly began selling weapons to Iran in secret through the Iran-Contra operation. Profits from those illegal sales were funneled to the Contras, a CIA-backed death squad in Nicaragua tied to drug trafficking and widespread atrocities. Journalist Gary Webb later exposed how the CIA’s support for the Contras allowed a flood of cocaine into American cities, catalyzing the crack epidemic in Black communities across the US.

Post-9/11 media and political fearmonging fueled widespread 'Othering' of Muslims and exaggerated the threat of terrorism from within Muslim communities.

Yet lost in the fear is a deeper truth: nothing breeds terrorism like destabilizing countries. According to security analysts and human rights researchers, US drone strikes in the Middle East have consistently fueled extremism, traumatized entire communities, and contributed to the disturbing rise in suicides among US drone operators.

Pakistani tribesmen protest against US drone attacks, which killed thousands of people in the region since 2004–many of them children and civilians. Photo: T Mughal/EPA

Then came Syria. In its push to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a key Iranian ally, the US funneled weapons to Iran’s enemies: Al Qaeda and ISIS. ISIS itself was created at Camp Bucca, a US prison in Iraq operating from 2003-2009 in the wake of an invasion launched on false claims about weapons of mass destruction. This notorious facility was often called a “terrorist university,” as the prison camps served as incubators for extremism that radicalized young Iraqis.

While ISIS and Al Qaeda were publicly condemned, these groups actually served US strategic interests by destabilizing Syria and weakening Iran’s regional allies. And the War on Terror itself radicalized Islamic extremists all over the world against the US. One ISIS leader said it best: “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no [ISIS] now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”

While the US has played a central role in fueling today’s instability, Iran’s leadership has also carried out grave abuses through its own brutal repression at home and the Islamic extremist groups it funds (Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza).

These groups have been linked to the use of civilians as human shields, sexual slavery and torture of women, and brutal repression of dissent.

According to the UN and human rights watchdogs, Iran executed at least 975 people in 2024—the highest number since 2015—with many victims from ethnic and political minorities. Iran’s harsh punishments against its own people involve hanging people from cranes, executing gay men, murdering women who refuse to wear their hijab, and torturing dissidents and journalists.

'Israel Bombs Us Without Mercy and Hamas Doesn't Care If We Die'

Iran provides about $100 million annually to Hamas, who controls Gaza. Amid Gaza’s deepening humanitarian crisis driven by Israel’s relentless bombing campaign, public dissent against Hamas has been growing. Earlier this year, protests erupted in Gaza where thousands of Palestinians openly blamed Hamas for years of violence, repression, and failed leadership. Demonstrators were heard shouting, “Out, out, Hamas, get out” and “Hamas are terrorists,” while displaying banners saying, “Hamas does not represent us.” As one Palestinian activist put it: "We’re persecuted by both sides ... Israel bombs us without mercy and Hamas doesn’t care if we die.”

The growing Palestinian dissent against Hamas remains largely unspoken in Western pro-Palestinian activist groups.

22-year-old Uday Nasser Saadi al-Rabbay was abducted from a refugee shelter in Gaza after joining protests against Hamas. For hours, he was tortured and then returned to his family as he lay dying.

They caught him, tortured him, slashed his arms with knives, stabbed him with screwdrivers,” [Uday Nasser Saadi al-Rabbay’s] mother said. “They stabbed him 170 times. His whole body was stabbed and pierced, and the blood was pouring out.” When they were done … they dropped his body off a rooftop. A note was pinned to his clothes: “This is the price for all who criticize Hamas."
— The Family of a Murdered Gaza Protester Speaks Out, The Free Press

Uday Nasser Saadi al-Rabbay is not the only Palestinian who has been kidnapped, tortured and/or murdered by Hamas for challenging their power. Hamas has even shot Palestinians while pretending to be IDF soldiers.

Across social media, attempts to question Hamas' role in Palestinian suffering is often dismissed as Zionist propaganda by pro-Palestinian voices, even when it reflects the actual perspective of those living under Hamas in Gaza. At the same time, attempts to question Israel or condemn its human rights abuses are censored by free speech crackdowns under this current administration.

Israel is the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, receiving more military aid than any other country in the world. This alliance gives Israel unmatched political influence, including US vetoes at the UN and billions in annual military support. Backed by American weapons and war profiteers, Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza have killed over 44,000 people, displaced nearly 90% of the population, and left 96% of children in Gaza fearing imminent death.

In [Netanyahu's] 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the US to do Israel’s fighting for it. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He was told ... that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
— How the US and Israel Destroyed Syria and Called it Peace, Common Dreams

Despite the monumental implications of the strategic US-Israel alliance driving war in the Middle East, we can’t overlook the disturbing cases of American campus protesters glorifying the violent attacks against Israelis on October 7th and using Hamas symbols in banners and protest signs. Protesters have been caught on film screaming "We are Hamas." Before October 7th, the human rights abuses and sexual violence Hamas committed against Palestinians were extensively documented. Yet considerations like these are now too often being overlooked.

Moving Beyond Groupthink

On one side, we have the Iranian Supreme Leader endorsing the campus protests. Al-Qaeda and Hamas have praised the campus protestors, while Houthi-run universities in Yemen have welcomed expelled students to continue their education there. Yet do they really care about justice or liberation? They torture women, kill dissidents, and carry out terrorism at the expense of the very people they claim to protect.

On the other hand, neoconservatives and American war hawks are acting as though the pro-Palestinian movement is a threat to the soul of the nation if Iranian leaders are supporting the campus protests. Yet these same voices have stood by as US torture programs, drone strikes, and covert regime change operations traumatized the Middle East. They've said very little about the tens of thousands of children dead in Gaza.

Authoritarian regimes only invoke human rights when it advances their own power. How do we condemn violence and oppression without being hijacked by either side’s propaganda?

Without space for nuance, we risk confusing groupthink with liberation. We may even mistake slogans repeated in echo chambers for genuine conversations. In this environment, social power is concentrated into the hands of those who best promote the most polarizing ideologies.

Too often, calls for nuance are dismissed as false equivalencies or the practice of “both-sides-ism.” Both-sides-ism is when two sides of a story are treated as if they’re equally true or fair, even when one has far more evidence—or causes far more harm—than the other. Yet far too often, this accusation is used as an intellectual shortcut to assert social power over another person by refusing to address their perspective. This term has only recently gained traction, as social media echo chambers and polarized news cycles have made meaningful dialogue across differences feel nearly impossible.

What if we worked with our differences, not to keep score or assign blame, but to deepen our understanding? We don’t need to choose between condemning the Islamic Republic terrorist network, Hamas’s brutality, Israel’s war crimes, or US imperial violence. How do we expand the circle of human concern, rebuilding our ability to uncover the full truth beyond allegiance and ideology, and back into our shared humanity?

Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination. The ability to acknowledge blind spots can emerge only as we expand our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic makes this expansion possible.
– social activist and poet bell hooks

People everywhere, all over the world, are turning away from the cycles of fear and control that justify war. Instead of believing the divisive stories told by corrupt authorities to keep us divided and obedient, they're seeking out their own answers within their humanity.

In this light, the whole idea of good guys vs. bad guys breaks down. The trance of outrage and certainty across all sides of today’s discourse begins to dissolve. We move beyond polarization, self-censorship, and demands that only one version of the story is allowed.

Our mini-film, Transforming the War Machine One Human Story at a Time, weaves together some of the most powerful real-life stories of people all over the world proving we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.

Click here to watch Transforming the War Machine One Human Story at a Time