A large body of research demonstrates that imperialism\u2019s psychological costs don\u2019t 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.<\/a> Reviews across dozens of studies find markedly higher intimate partner violence (IPV) among service members and veterans<\/a>. The harm also spills over to children:<\/a> during Army combat deployments, substantiated child maltreatment in soldiers\u2019 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.<\/a> In the Air Force, severe child maltreatment increases post-deployment<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are not individual \u201cbad apple\u201d stories. They are the results of upholding state-sanctioned violence abroad plus inadequate social support on return. Patriarchal masculinity\u2019s emotional lockdown, where soldiers\u2014overwhelmingly trained in its logic\u2014cannot safely grieve, confess fear, or name moral pain. Instead, pain gets transmuted into aggression, both sanctioned in war and misdirected at home. The military\u2019s promise to \u201cmake men\u201d out of recruits is thus a promise to deepen the very wounds it will later deny or medicalize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Zoom out, and you can see how corporate media cushions this normalization, propagating asymmetrical and ahistorical views among the American public, as exhibited by coverage on Venezuela<\/a>, Cuba<\/a>, Iran<\/a>, Palestine<\/a>, etc. Liberals and conservatives in the U.S. have long endorsed expansive hard-power postures: A Pew Research Center poll in 2021 found 91% of Americans say it is “very” (69%) or “somewhat” (22%) important <\/strong>for the United States to be the world’s leading military power. <\/a>This sentiment is shared by 95% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats. In 2024, polls found that 68% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military.<\/a> In 2016, most Americans said torture of terrorism suspects could be justified<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The point isn\u2019t 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 \u201cdomestic mirror\u201d 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\u2019s distress, or treat love as weakness. When the state\u2019s violence is framed as necessary housekeeping, private violence more easily masquerades as conflict resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide in Gaza offers a stark example of how militarism dehumanizes the oppressor. Reports have described the \u201cGod-like\u201d feeling Israeli Occupation Forces (IDF) report when operating in Gaza\u2014total control over life and death. One soldier\u2019s account is even more disturbing: \u201cI felt like\u2026a Nazi\u2026it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”<\/a> 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 still refer to the IDF as “the world’s most moral army,”<\/a> while creating the world’s largest population of child amputees in history.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The broader public climate in Israel mirrors this mindset. The Institute for National Security Studies found 64.5% of Israelis were \u201cnot at all\u201d or \u201cnot very\u201d concerned about Gaza\u2019s humanitarian catastrophe.<\/a> A June 2025 report found 64% of Israelis saw no need for more reporting on Gazans\u2019 suffering.<\/a> In May 2025, polling showed a majority opposed allowing aid into Gaza at all.<\/a> And a Hebrew University poll in early June 2025 found 64% of Israelis agreed with the statement that there are \u201cno innocents in Gaza.”<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The toll on Israeli society and soldiers themselves is also measurable. IOF suicides rose to 24 in 2024, up from 14 in 2023\u2014a 71% increase<\/a>. Militarism not only authorizes the harming of others\u2014it 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\u2014whether slow (addiction, isolation) or abrupt (suicide). <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A 2025 report recorded 1,630 sexual harassment complaints from soldiers, with over one-third involving physical assault.<\/a> 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<\/a>, with prevalence likely far higher due to underreporting. This is the boomerang effect of normalized sexual violence against Palestinians that many Israeli citizens and politicians now endorse unequivocally<\/a>. The same emotional silencing that enables violent occupation and the starvation of children also starves men\u2019s capacity to love, ensuring that domination, not connection, becomes the central relational mode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mass attitudes don\u2019t emerge in a vacuum. Publics take cues from elites and media frames that bracket distant civilians as terrorists and collateral damage. 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\u2014defined as care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect\u2014could become a cultural counterweight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In both the U.S. and Israel, the structures of militarism don\u2019t simply harm those on the receiving end\u2014they 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\u2019ve 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 \u201care not innocent,\u201d the easier it becomes to accept the unthinkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prescription is not about making men \u201csofter\u201d in the clich\u00e9d 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\u2014and that means reimagining masculinity itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014and the harder it becomes to imagine peace as anything but a pause between wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire have asserted, colonialism \u201cdecivilizes” the colonizer, cultivating brutality, warping morality, and bringing back home the very violence it unleashes abroad. Patriarchal masculinity functions similarly: it trains men […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":8780,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/abughraib.webp?fit=420%2C335&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8772"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8856,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8772\/revisions\/8856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screenshot-2025-08-16-083638-2](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screenshot-2025-08-16-083638-2.png?fit=903%2C655&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
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