The wall on which the prophets wrote
is cracking at the seams
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams
When everyman is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
When silence drowns the screams?
Confusion will be my epitaph.
– Peter Sinfield, King Crimson, “Epitaph”
Note: The following is an online journal entry I wrote and posted on January 1, 2007, nearly 20 years ago during the height of the war in Iraq. In light of the war on Iran, I have slightly updated it today, March 7, 2026. Basically, I just substituted Iran for Iraq and left it more or less in its original form. The original essay could have been written today.
As the news from Iraq [Iran and the entire Middle East] gets worse and worse it’s a safe bet that even with the disturbing images we see on the nightly news and on the front pages of our newspapers, the media do not show us the real face of that war. They try to censor and shield us from the harshest of the realities — the dead and mangled bodies pulled from the rubble, the blood, the wailing of grief and shock — all in an attempt to somehow sanitize the sheer, unspeakable horror of what is happening there [iran, Gaza] and which shows no signs of diminishing. A nightmare that goes on day after day.
Turn to the Internet and you can get a more complete picture. How much do we need to see? How much to rouse us from our numbness? Much more, apparently.
My own sources of news and opinion is quite varied, but subjective. There is much I found in my research that leaves little to the imagination. You can choose for yourself what you want to see and know about what is going on over there.
I have seen the work of brave journalists and photojournalists, risking their lives at the scenes of carnage. Their photographs of Iraq and Afghanistan [now Iran and the Middle East] confront us with the truth in stark images [today in YouTube videos and countless reports from independent online journalists] of civilians experiencing indescribable suffering, injury and death. Words can only tell part of the story.
This makes the madness of war even more horrifying. It’s the numb, glazed expression of an Iraqi civilian [Iranian, Lebanese, Gazan] whose home has been bombed and destroyed, who has lost a limb, lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives and relatives, or who has a child whose future has been forever altered by injury and emotional scarring for life. That is what brings the reality to light.
This war in Iraq [Iran] is another sad chapter in the continuing story of human folly, zealotry, ignorance, delusion and self-righteousness that will be recorded for generations to come, and a reminder that there seems to be no time in human history, past, present and future, when the barbarity of war, destruction and terrorism have not reared their ugly heads. How much longer can civilization endure on this path?
Why aren’t the lessons of history learned?
Update, March 7, 2026: A lovely Spring is in the air here where I sit putting together this updated essay from 2007. But a cruelly unnecessary and unauthorized war of destruction and chaos threatens the whole world economic, social and political order. It threatens each of us in the U.S.
The historian Barbara Tuchman wrote about “the march of folly” throughout recorded human history. We are all about to pay the price once again for this, for the horrific genocide in Gaza, and for the destruction spreading across the Middle East daily. Now the stakes are immeasurably higher because what could occur is no longer “unthinkable.”
Charles Eisenstein posted a column recently that more forcefully explains what is happening and the underlying long-term and complex causes. Read it if you care to.
https://open.substack.com/pub/charleseisenstein/p/we-are-done-with-this?r=5964j&utm_medium=ios
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