The People Are Never the Enemy
Wars are fought by ordinary people — but they are never started by them. How to see through manufactured division and choose clarity over hatred.
There is a war happening right now.
Not just in the Middle East — though the bombs falling on Iran, the missiles striking Gulf bases, and the drones darkening the skies over Lebanon are real enough. There is also a war happening inside the mind of every person who opens their phone in the morning and no longer knows what to believe.
I have been feeling it too. The grief when I see innocent people dying. The confusion when people I respect seem to be on opposite sides of an uncrossable line. The exhaustion of trying to hold clarity in a world that rewards outrage.
So I want to offer something today.
I want to offer a lens.
The Pattern That Keeps Repeating
History does not repeat itself exactly. But it rhymes — and if you learn to hear the rhythm, the pattern becomes unmistakable.
The Jewish people did not cause the Holocaust. The Tutsi people of Rwanda did not cause the genocide of 1994. The Iraqi people did not cause the 2003 invasion that destroyed their country.
In every case, ordinary people — neighbors, farmers, teachers, mothers — were turned against each other. Not because of ancient hatred. Not because one group was inherently evil. But because a deliberate, manufactured narrative made it possible to see a human being and think enemy instead of person.
In Rwanda, a government-backed radio station broadcast instructions — literally telling people who to kill and where to find them. Eight hundred thousand people died in one hundred days. In Germany, the propaganda ran for a full decade before the killing started. Ordinary people. A weaponized story. Catastrophic result.
The mechanism is always the same: find a target, dehumanize them, manufacture fear, direct the energy, and profit from the chaos.
The enemy has never been a people. It has always been concentrated power, without accountability, using divided populations as its instrument.
What Is Happening Right Now
As I write this, the United States and Israel have launched strikes on Iran. Iran has struck back. The conflict has spread across the region. People on every side are dying — soldiers, civilians, families who wanted nothing to do with any of this.
The stated justification? Nuclear weapons. Regime change. Self-defense.
But intelligence assessments told a different story. A long-range delivery system capable of reaching the US homeland was estimated to be roughly a decade away. The Arms Control Association stated plainly that Iran’s programs did not pose an imminent threat. And Iran’s own Foreign Minister had publicly described a deal as “within reach” — negotiations were active right up until the strikes began.
The fear of a nuclear Iran is real. Reasonable people disagree about whether diplomacy had run its course. But the question still stands — the question that every clear-eyed person must ask: who benefits?
Defense contractor stocks surged in the days following the strikes. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is publicly available market data. Follow the money — not with hatred, but with clarity.
The point is not to replace one enemy with another. It is to see the system clearly enough that you stop being moved by it.
The Weaponization of Faith
Now let me address the part that is creating deep confusion for many Americans — the theological layer.
There are powerful voices in this country — some in government, some in pulpits — framing this war as biblical prophecy unfolding in real time. The End Times. God’s plan. Enemies of Zion being scattered.
I want to be careful and respectful here. People’s faith is real. It is intimate. It is often the most meaningful thing in their lives. But there is a critical difference between having faith and having your faith weaponized.
Religious language in wartime does not cause wars. It mobilizes populations to support them. It shuts down critical thinking by activating something far deeper than logic — identity, meaning, eternal stakes.
When you believe God is on your side in a war, you stop asking the questions that matter most: Is this war just? Is it necessary? Who is paying for it? Who is dying in it?
That is the psyop. Not the faith itself — the weaponization of the faith. And it has been used against every tradition. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus — no community is immune to having its deepest beliefs turned into a tool for someone else’s agenda.
How to Find Truth in the Noise
In the shamanic traditions I have trained in, there is a principle called seeing with the eyes of the jaguar — the willingness to look directly at what is, without flinching, without the filter of what you wish were true. In Vedantic philosophy, it is called viveka — the faculty of discernment that distinguishes the real from the projected.
Both traditions agree: the capacity for clear seeing already lives inside you. But it requires practice, especially now.
Here is what I have found helpful:
Go to primary sources. Read what leaders actually said — not the headline about what they said. The gap between the two is often exactly where the manipulation lives. Iran’s Foreign Minister called the deal “within reach.” Two days later, bombs fell. Read both statements. Let them sit side by side. Your own intelligence will do the rest.
Follow money and power — structurally, not conspiratorially. You do not need to believe in a shadowy cabal. You just need to look at who profits when a particular narrative becomes dominant. Defense stocks surging after strikes is not hidden information. It is on CNBC. The question is whether you let yourself see it.
Triangulate across adversarial sources. Read outlets that hate each other. Al Jazeera and Fox News. The BBC and RT. The Arms Control Association and the Pentagon. Find what they agree on — that overlap is usually closest to the ground truth.
Notice what is happening in your body. This is the one most people skip, and it may be the most important. Fear, outrage, and tribal activation literally suppress your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain that thinks clearly and weighs evidence. The algorithm knows this. It feeds you content designed to keep you emotionally activated, because activated people click more, share more, and think less.
When you feel your nervous system hijacked — the tight chest, the racing thoughts, the urge to share something right now before you have verified it — that is the signal to pause. Breathe. Come back to center. Then look again with fresh eyes.
This is not weakness. It is the most sophisticated form of intelligence available to a human being.
The People Are Never the Enemy
Here is what I know — as a healer, as someone who has studied trauma and wisdom traditions across cultures, as a person who has sat with suffering in clinical rooms and in ceremony circles:
The Iranian people are not your enemy. The Jewish people are not your enemy. The Muslim world is not your enemy. The Christian world is not your enemy.
They are all — like you — trying to protect what they love. They are all — like you — afraid of what they might lose.
Even those who support this war are not your enemy. Most are acting from genuine fear, not malice. They, too, are caught in the machinery.
The real division has never been between peoples, religions, or nations. It is between those who profit from our division and all the rest of us who pay for it — in blood, in grief, in the slow erosion of our capacity to see each other as human.
You do not have to choose a side in the manufactured narrative.
You can hold grief for every innocent person killed — Iranian, Israeli, American, Lebanese — without that grief requiring you to hate anyone. You can hold skepticism for every narrative offered without becoming cynical. You can maintain clarity about the mechanisms of power without losing your compassion.
And you can still — still — choose love as your operating system.
That is not naivety. In a world that profits from your hatred, choosing to see clearly and love anyway is the most radical act available to any human being.
See clearly. Stay grounded. Choose love.