This week’s readings included the incredible investigative reporting conducted by Azmat Khan uncovering the U.S. military’s systemic failure to avoid and detect harm to civilian populations during the “forever wars” in Iraq and Syria. Discovery of these institutional failures, as well as a disturbing culture among soldiers, was based on on-the-ground interviews, site visits, and military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. One part of Khan’s article that felt extremely resonant this week was the description of the video game-esque language used by soldiers that gamifies the murder of civilians. Similarly, the alleged killer of right-wing podcaster and media personality Charlie Kirk inscribed bullet casings with slang from video games and internet forum culture. These phrases, similar to the messages Khan discovered sent between soldiers like “this area is poppin” and “play time?,” point to a larger normalization of inhumanity and legitimization of violent tendencies by games in which the murder of civilians gives a player points in order to win. Evidence of violence translating from the screen into the real world is undeniable, as exemplified in these two cases among others. I found this idea to be well encapsulated in Nathan Taylor Pemberton’s September 14th opinion piece in the New York Times, in which he writes, “While the internet’s rot once felt safely bottled, or fire-walled, within a digital realm, this act of political violence may have punctured whatever barrier once existed. We can no longer ignore that we live in an era where the online and the lived are indistinguishable.”
Other readings from this week detailed the struggles Afghan refugees face gaining asylum in Germany amidst the rising tide of anti-migrant sentiment and the growing influence of the far right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to increase deportations and limit asylum applications. These accounts reminded me of my work this summer as an immigration case worker, where many cases involved Afghan families who had supported the U.S. military against the Taliban and were waiting in Pakistan for resettlement in the United States. Yet, unlike in Germany, Afghan refugee cases in the U.S. face an additional challenge: over this summer, President Trump issued an executive order that limited the entry of foreign nationals from certain countries under the guise of protecting national security, effectively a continuation of the ‘travel ban’ or ‘Muslim ban’ from his first term. Afghanistan is one of the countries on the list. Meanwhile, refugees in Pakistan too face uncertainty. In April of this year, the Pakistani government deported more than 19,500 Afghans. Many Afghans risked their lives to aid U.S. forces against the Taliban, with the promise of eventual safety in America. Now abandoned by U.S. forces, they face a seemingly impossible question: where can they find safety? They cannot return to Afghanistan without risking retaliation from the Taliban, cannot enter the U.S. under current legislation, cannot remain in Pakistan amid daily deportations, and now, as is evident in these articles, cannot rely on Germany, where immigration policies have grown increasingly hostile.
