Violence Is Violence—No Matter the Idea

I’ve seen what real violence looks like. I’ve walked through the streets of Baghdad after Saddam fell, where hatred exploded around every corner. Bodies in alleys. Trunks filled with the dead. Streets littered with people murdered for nothing more than who they were, what they believed, what sect they were born into. Sunni. Shia. Kurd. Different ideas, same brutality.

Every day, fear was a living thing. You could smell it. You could feel it in your chest. Mothers screaming over their dead children. Fathers dragged from homes. Neighbors turning on neighbors with knives, guns, and fire. This wasn’t random. It wasn’t abstract. It was personal. And it was everywhere. Not just innocent bystanders caught in attacks targeted at us. Iraqi on Iraqi violence was prevalent.

We were targets. My buddies and I—they wanted us dead. But we were hard targets. And the majority, long oppressed by a brutal minority for decades, was ready for vengeance. That’s the reality: violence is never abstract. It multiplies, it spreads, and it doesn’t care who’s cheering from a safe distance. People here clap over a single death. But when those deaths start piling up, when someone comes to your door, I hope no one’s cheering.

Online, I see people celebrating political violence today, acting as if it’s moral, as if ideas can be defended with applause. They think a single death is proof of righteousness. But bad ideas don’t get snuffed out by violence—they die when confronted with better ideas. If your idea requires killing to survive, maybe it isn’t a good idea. And trust me, the violence you imagine back home will never measure up to reality.

Most people aren’t arguing to understand. They’re arguing to win points, to appear righteous, to climb a moral ladder that doesn’t exist. They applaud violence while knowing nothing about it. They’ve never smelled the smoke, never heard the screams, never seen the streets littered with blood. Their morality is performative. Hollow. And disgusting.

Violence is violence. Cheering it is complicity. Celebrating it in the name of an idea—whether sectarian, political, or tribal—changes nothing except showing how detached you are from human suffering. Different ideas don’t make violence moral. They make it universal. And until people truly understand that, cheering will remain what it is: ignorance pretending to be righteousness.

MicG