The War Comes Home
What begins with war abroad ends with a knock at your door. The regime isn’t coming. It’s already here.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
— George Orwell
“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.”
— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
She was on her knees when they took her.
It was just past dawn, though the sky was already thick with surveillance drones. The helicopters had circled all night, their rhythm indistinguishable from the fear in her chest. She had covered her children’s ears and whispered stories of safety that she no longer believed. There was no knock at the door. Only the crash of entry, the thunder of boots, the crackle of radios. The child in the doorway — eight, maybe nine — stood frozen. One of the men, faceless behind a visor, raised a weapon not to fire, but to signal: Do not move. Do not speak. Do not remember.
They said nothing. No name was asked. No warrant shown. Only the hiss of plastic cuffs, the flick of a flashlight in her face, the mechanical closing of the van’s rear doors. She screamed for her daughter, but the silence had already begun.
We do not know if this was an immigration raid or the capture of a political dissident. We do not know whether this happened yesterday or tomorrow. Whether this was the United States or what remained of it. Whether this was a republic in retreat, a colony in revolt, or a nation that simply stopped pretending.
We only know this is what it looks like when fear becomes law and law becomes the mask worn by power.
This is what it looks like when the war comes home.
In recent days, the world watched missiles cross oceans. The strike on Iran, a sovereign nation battered but unbroken, was framed as surgical, necessary, defensive. But those who speak in euphemisms always hope the truth will not echo. For when a government looks outward with such fury, it is often to mask the thing it fears most at home: the awakening of its own people.
Within hours of the strike, the machinery began turning. The old music of national emergency played its familiar chords. Officials warned of terror threats. Sleeper cells, they said, hidden among us, waiting to erupt. They spoke in grave tones, offering no evidence and needing none. The story was the evidence. It always is.
And as the media mouths their lines, the regime has moved swiftly. Troops were ordered into Los Angeles, not for defense, but for demonstration. A show of force to silence unrest. A message to remind the people who now decides where they may gather and how long they may speak. What had begun as protests against immigration raids ended with armored vehicles rolling down city streets. Uniforms once worn abroad now stalked the boulevards of Boyle Heights.
It is easy to lose your bearings in a moment like this. Easy to believe that each event is separate, that the war overseas and the raids at home are matters of different logic. But the distance between them is no greater than the breath between accusation and arrest. This is a choreography. A precision dance of fear and distraction, violence and narrative, designed to pull the future from beneath our feet.
The border, once geographic, is now psychological. It winds through every airport, every protest, every courtroom, every phone screen. It is enforced not only by agents in tactical gear but by bureaucrats with pens, by judges who decline to act, by journalists who decline to see.
A man is detained at an airport. He is a lawful permanent resident. His name is Persian. His donation history includes a gift to a peace organization. He is questioned. His phone is searched. He is held. No charges are filed. But his name is entered into a system now primed to remember and never to forgive.
What we are witnessing is not the breakdown of democracy. It is its redefinition. The machinery still functions. The forms are still followed. The judges still convene. But the soul has been extracted. What remains is process without principle, law without justice, punishment without trial.
And still, the media call it complicated.
They speak of unrest, not resistance. Of stabilization, not suppression. They count broken windows, but not broken lives. They broadcast the fires, but not the cold silence that follows when a community is emptied of its people.
We are not living through chaos. We are living through control.
There is no border between war and home. There never was. What we build to contain the outsider is always, eventually, used to imprison the neighbor. And when the language of threat becomes the common tongue of governance, no one is safe but those who speak it fluently and serve it faithfully.
Some will say this is dramatic. Some will ask for restraint. They will warn against hysteria. But history does not ask whether a warning is comfortable. It asks whether it was spoken in time.
And so we must ask:
When a mother vanishes before her child’s eyes, when soldiers police our cities, when a name can be a sentence and silence a verdict, what exactly are we waiting for?
When will we stop calling this a moment and begin calling it a regime?
And if this is a regime, then who will remember that we had another name?
We write not from fear but from memory. We write because there is still time, however brief, to raise the signal.
We write because someone must.
Because there is a child still standing in the doorway. The van has disappeared down the street. The morning is quiet again. And the question hangs in the air like smoke.
Where were you, when the war came home?
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