![]() Services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide easy, global reach for all the non-state actors that have proliferated to further destabilize their opponents. Via social media, organizations such as the Russian Internet Research Agency weaponized information, on the cheap, to disrupt the operation of the nation-states that might yet wage conventional or nuclear war. Mercenary data brokerage by Cambridge Analytica put useful information extracted from Facebook into service for misinformation campaigns. The Iraq and Afghan Wars, it now seems clear, were manufactured for political and commercial gain, and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.Īnd those are just some of the “normal” wars-the military ones entwined with nation-states rather than with cartels, such as Los Zetas in Mexico militias, such as the Sudanese Janjaweed or paramilitary groups, such as ISIS. The Gulf War braided up the emerging 24/7 media ecosystem with the oil economy. Proxy wars became common, such as the United States’ support of the Afghani mujahideen to destabilize the Soviet Union rather than to support a Muslim revolution. Vietnam braided opposition to communism, itself a tenet of Cold War conflict, with democratic state building in a decolonizing region. During the Cold War, hot tensions became hopeless moils, conducted for political benefit as much as (and over time, more than) moral right. In the moment, tidy narratives often made conflicts seem straightforward, but history has unraveled their knotty strands. Iran is not believed to have nuclear weapons, although its ambitions to develop or acquire them have been at the heart of the American conflict with the country.Įven so, the fantasy of World War III helped hide the reality of what war had become: a tangled mess of statecraft, profiteering, and politicking. That has not changed: Global nuclear stockpiles have been cut by 75 percent since their peak, between 1965 to and 1986, but thousands of nuclear warheads are still spread all around the globe, each between tens and thousands of times more destructive than the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs detonated over Japan in 1945. ![]() Those who lived through this period can still feel how real the threat was. ![]() After the blasts comes the fallout, the depthless smoke of nuclear winter, the ensuing end of the crops that sustain our mortal bodies, and the certain starvation of those too unlucky to have survived the war. During the Cold War, it became a shorthand for a very specific kind of doom: global nuclear destruction. In doing this, they are reviving a received notion of “world war,” one mostly expended by the generations that precede them.įor three decades or more, World War III has been an anxious fantasy. And it’s notable that young people are mustering that old emblem to express their unconscious fears about the present. On TikTok, someone feigns illegally disposing of a draft notice, set to Britney Spears’s “Criminal,” which someone else collates in a thread on Twitter, which gets rolled up into BuzzFeed meta-content about World War III #ThatsWhatILike #turnitup #gymrush #BreakupWithBottled #fyp ♬ original sound - sarahfaithxxīut world war is not just a hashtag either. In that role, these memes fulfill the internet’s ability to fashion endless turtles of content about anything. ![]() World War III is not actually upon us, of course, but just #WWIII-a container for content. “Me chilling at home after ignoring my draft notice #WWIII,” says another, illustrated with a Spider-Man clip in which the hero’s aunt is interrupted during a prayer by the Green Goblin exploding through her window.Īlong with the memes came the counter-memes, chiding people for joking about war, or smarming at them over how little their comfortable life would be impacted by a new war in Iran. “Me and the boys on missile duty during #WWIII,” one reads, illustrated by a GIF of two soldiers running from a misfired mortar. The World War III memes are here, bursting onto the shores of TikTok and Twitter after American forces killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani this week.
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