Unwellness Empire: Part III – Imperialist’s Burden
In this, the third installment of Unwellness Empire, let us examine the mental health of those who perpetrate and perpetuate imperial violence. As Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire have asserted, colonialism “decivilizes” the colonizer, cultivating brutality, warping morality, and bringing back home the very violence it unleashes abroad. Patriarchal masculinity functions similarly: it trains men to deny vulnerability, to equate worth with control, and to see domination as proof of manhood. Militarism is a hyper-concentrated form of this training—magnifying the psychological damage not only toward “the enemy” but toward oneself and one’s intimate relationships. The result is a quiet epidemic of moral injury, intimate violence, and social callousness.
A large body of research demonstrates that imperialism’s psychological costs don’t stop at the battlefield. Among male U.S. combat veterans seeking PTSD care, roughly one-third report perpetrating physical aggression against a partner in the past year. Reviews across dozens of studies find markedly higher intimate partner violence (IPV) among service members and veterans—especially where PTSD, alcohol misuse, and anger dysregulation are present. The harm also spills over to children: during Army combat deployments, substantiated child maltreatment in soldiers’ families rises by ~42%, with neglect nearly doubling and rates tripling among civilian spouses during deployment. Time-series analyses similarly show maltreatment spikes with departures to and returns from operations. In the Air Force, severe child maltreatment increases post-deployment, particularly where alcohol is involved.
These are not individual “bad apple” stories. They are the results of upholding state-sanctioned violence abroad plus inadequate social support on return. Patriarchal masculinity’s emotional lockdown, where soldiers—overwhelmingly trained in its logic—cannot safely grieve, confess fear, or name moral pain. Instead, pain gets transmuted into aggression, both sanctioned in war and misdirected at home. The military’s promise to “make men” out of recruits is thus a promise to deepen the very wounds it will later deny or medicalize.
Zoom out, and you can see how U.S. culture cushions this normalization, propagating asymmetrical and ahistorical analyses of the situations in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and Palestine. Liberals and conservatives in the U.S. have long endorsed expansive hard-power postures: in 2023, 57% of Americans said they would send U.S. troops to defend a Baltic NATO ally if invaded; 64% said the same for Germany. Even after years of lies and endless war, the military remains among the most trusted U.S. institutions. For years a majority of Americans approved of drone strikes, even as rights groups documented civilian deaths; in 2016, most Americans said torture of terrorism suspects could be justified at least in rare cases.
The point isn’t that Americans are inherently cruel and ignorant. It is that an imperial commonsense makes lethal policy feel routine, and in doing so, lowers the threshold for interpersonal harm. This is the “domestic mirror” of empire: the same emotional numbness that makes it possible to bomb unseen strangers also makes it possible to strike a partner, ignore a child’s distress, or treat love as weakness. When the state’s violence is framed as necessary housekeeping, private violence more easily masquerades as conflict resolution.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza offers a stark example of how militarism dehumanizes the aggressor. Reports have described the “God-like” feeling Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) report when operating in Gaza—total control over life and death. One soldier’s account is even more disturbing: “I felt like…a Nazi…it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.” Such admissions reveal the dissonance in Zionism between self-image and lived action, where recognition of moral inversion does not necessarily halt participation. Israelis and their supporters refer to the IOF as “the world’s most moral army.”
The broader public climate in Israel mirrors this mindset. A May–June 2025 polling wave reported by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found about two-thirds of Israeli Jews opposed increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza; a separate survey found 64.5% of Israelis were “not at all” or “not very” concerned about Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe. A June 2025 Haaretz report found 64% of Israelis saw no need for more reporting on Gazans’ suffering. In May 2025, polling showed a majority opposed allowing aid into Gaza at all. Another analysis highlighted an Israel Democracy Institute finding: 79% of Israelis said famine in Gaza did not trouble them. And a Hebrew University poll in early June 2025 found 64% of Israelis agreed with the statement that there are “no innocents in Gaza.” These are not fringe attitudes; they describe mainstream Zionist perspectives trained by violence and Jewish supremacy to see empathy for Palestinians as dangerous, even treasonous.
The toll on Israeli society and soldiers themselves is also measurable. IOF suicides rose to 24 in 2024, up from 14 in 2023—a 71% increase. Militarism not only authorizes the harming of others—it also incubates self-destruction among those tasked with carrying it out. Patriarchal masculinity tells men they cannot cry out in pain except through self-annihilation—whether slow (addiction, isolation) or abrupt (suicide).
An entrenched culture of sexual abuse, both within the IOF and in broader Israeli society, has been documented by human rights monitors and researchers, linking military occupation to elevated rates of sexual harassment, assault, and domestic violence. We also see this manifest in the genocide of Gaza, where IOF soldiers gleefully play with and wear of the underwear of Palestinian women they have murdered or displaced.
A 2025 report recorded 1,630 sexual harassment complaints from soldiers, with over one-third involving physical assault. Civilian statistics echo this normalization: the Israel Association of Rape Crisis Centers reported in 2023 that one in three Israeli women experiences sexual violence in her lifetime, and police records indicate over 50,000 reported cases of domestic violence annually, with prevalence likely far higher due to underreporting. Again, we see a familiar circuit: the same emotional silencing that enables violent occupation and the starvation of children also starves men’s capacity to love, ensuring that domination, not connection, becomes the central relational mode.
Mass attitudes don’t emerge in a vacuum. Publics take cues from elites and media frames that bracket distant civilians as collateral, and domestic costs as abstract. In the U.S., confidence in the military and years-long acceptance of drone warfare created a permission structure in which lethal solutions feel commonsensical . In Israel, it manifests in years of apartheid policies and normalized genocidal actions that many citizens now endorse unequivocally.
The feedback loop is cruel but straightforward: policy begets mindset; mindset ratifies policy. This loop is reinforced at the level of intimate life: the more domination is normalized publicly, the more it is replicated privately, closing off the possibility that love—defined as care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect—could become a cultural counterweight.
In both the U.S. and Israel, the structures of militarism don’t simply harm those on the receiving end—they erode the social and moral fabric of the societies that perpetuate them. Put plainly: cultures that normalize war and domination incubate private violence, moral injury, and democratic decay. Veterans return to families without the support needed to metabolize what they’ve seen and done, and too often the pain spills onto partners and children. Societies become acclimated to permanent war and large-scale violence, whether in drone strikes or sieges, until they can condone starvation, bombardment, or torture as ordinary policy. And the more a public is taught that some people “are not innocent,” the easier it becomes to accept the unthinkable.
The prescription is not about making men “softer” in the clichéd sense, but about dismantling the structures of patriarchal masculinity so that empathy is no longer treated as an enemy combatant. The only way out is policy and cultural transformation: defunding the military, ending impunity for war crimes; fully resourcing trauma-informed reintegration and family support; dismantling occupations and collective punishment; and building media literacies that resist the reflex to naturalize state violence. Healing, for everyone involved, starts where domination ends—and that means reimagining masculinity itself.
The lesson is as urgent as it is clear: societies cannot commit sustained violence against others without wounding themselves. The longer militarism is normalized, the deeper the wound runs—and the harder it becomes to imagine peace as anything but a pause between wars.
