“We are all complicit,” Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs wrote recently regarding the war in Iran. “If you are an American, you paid your government to murder those little girls and those Tehran cafe-goers. Money was withdrawn from your paycheck in the form of federal income taxes.” He goes on to do some missile purchase accounting to further a rather axiomatic point: tax dollars tie us to our government’s actions: to the war in Iran, the genocide in Palestine, and the twenty-odd years of who knows what in Afghanistan and Iraq.
At face value, I can’t say it makes much sense to think that my median-income adjacent tax contributions funded the massacre of schoolgirls. Moreover, I — alongside Robinson and much of the nation — are not complicit in war and genocide through the faux umbilical cord of federal taxes. What I am, rather, is increasingly tired of virtue signaling by self-flagellation (a turn of phrase I should credit to my sister).
There are two main issues with Robinson’s complicity narrative, one of which is material and the other psychosocial in nature. But there’s also the literal meaning of the word: if you didn’t support or personally conspire in the war on Iran or in Israel’s carnage around the Middle East, then you simply aren’t “complicit.” Yet instead of releasing ourselves from shame-infused soliloquies and toward the harder job of creating effective resistance, we insist on hitting ourselves over the head with such terms like a 2×4.
My argument here is not that we shouldn’t be desperately spurring action against the war in Iran. That’s exactly what’s needed. But it’s worth stressing that the terms of said action are important. The idea of “complicity” isn’t helpful here. The war on Iran is, like many things, partisanly understood. We know by now from personal and political outcomes that calling people out as “complicit” doesn’t land on the doorsteps of the other side. It’s something the…
Auteur: Clark Randall
