In the wake of the Trump administration escalating his predecessor's foreign policy by dropping the “Mother of all Bombs” in Afghanistan, an act of indiscriminate murder on a scale not seen since World War II (when America unilaterally decided that we alone possessed the right to nuclear apocalypse), I find it necessary to remind the public of why American empire is morally evil. It’s tragic that I must continually remind people of how America’s foreign policy is murder on a global scale, but I cannot in good conscience allow the cheerleading of war to continue without protest. Empires throughout history rely on human suffering to build themselves up and inflict even more suffering in order to maintain their power. This state of affairs, in which an imperial power maintains itself, is called hegemony. That process of keeping up the status quo of hegemony, is called imperialism.

These seemingly meaningless buzzwords are common in academia, but it’s important to have complex words to name complex evil. Make no mistake, whatever the media has told you, our country is an empire, not a "representative democracy." Our politicians are largely determined by big money donors, both visible and invisible, and America is primarily interested in keeping revolutions, revolts and any notion of independence for indigenous people securely under wraps in the global South. I was too young to have a political opinion on the War in Iraq, but my parents understood that the War was just an excuse to plunder Baghdad and institute regime change. My father especially, a Guatemalan, shares a similar history to that of the Syrian people – in 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of the Guatemalan Revolution was ousted from his democratically elected seat because the United States deemed him a “communist threat” for his land reform policies. Also horribly similar to Iraq and Syria, there were corporate interests at play – the United Fruit Company, the one you all know as Chiquita Brands International, was responsible for lobbying the American government to overthrow him.

Whatever you think of the Syrian government, you need be wary of war propaganda, of how our media portrays the suffering of non-white peoples. Why are they showing you what they are showing? What purpose does it serve to show how a bomb is made? And ask yourself also – if the nation of Syria topples like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Guatemala and so many others, what happens in the wake of imperialist war?

It destroys a country and scars a people forever. I know. Ask my father.