Thread by @matt_cam

RT if you're old enough to remember when a morally compromised superpower could illegally invade a struggling sovereign nation over made-up nonsense on orders of a ruthless petro oligarch *without* the considerable inconvenience of our victims livestreaming our crimes in realtime

twenty years later it's astonishing to me now that the world's largest military openly bragged about slaughtering an almost entirely-defenseless army via "shock and awe," like as an actual strategy

Putin & Bush are both war criminals, full stop. But I've been wondering all day if the largest mass anti-war protest movement in history might actually gotten somewhere if the world had seen in realtime the stories & images from Iraq in its newsfeed the way now can from #Ukraine

I know most of the non-English-speaking world has been watching war crimes play out on social media for as long as there's been social media, but this is the first war I could scroll through & I'm just beginning to consider what this all means for the concept of war generally

also no coincidence that the world's first social media-ready war involves an actor who had years to play the president on TV before being the president on TV, a uniquely meme-able sense of national humor, one of the world's only true supervillains... and a whole lot of white ppl

(a supervillain in the sense that he has full control of both possibly the world's largest fortune *and* the world's second largest military and doesn't seem to have any moral, legal, or political restrictions on either; there's just no one I can think to compare that to)