Their Wars, Our Lives

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a ritual that precedes every war.

It does not happen in a trench. It does not happen on a battlefield. It happens in a room — a clean, quiet room — where men in suits sit around a table and decide the fate of others.

Then they call it necessary.
Then they call it liberation.
Then they build monuments.
Then they do it again.

I. What They Planted in Us

Before a government can send young men to die, it must first teach them to want to go.

That is what school is for — not entirely, not consciously, but functionally. From the first day we sit in those chairs, we are handed a story: soldiers are heroes, sacrifice is sacred, and the greatest thing a person can do for their country is die for it. The story is told gently at first, with pictures. Later it hardens into something you're not supposed to question.

I am questioning it.

Because here is the part they leave out — the part that would unravel the whole lesson if spoken aloud:

The people who write the laws that send you to war are the same people whose children never go.

Not in Russia. Not in Ukraine. Not in the United States. Not in Armenia. Not anywhere, not ever, not once in the modern history of conflict. The wealthy find exemptions. The connected find deferments. The powerful find reasons. The rest of us find trenches.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not need to be. It is simply the oldest arrangement in human civilization, so normalized we have stopped seeing it — like furniture, like weather, like the way things are.

We were taught to call it honor.

I call it what it is.

II. The War No One Wanted

Look at Russia and Ukraine.

Two peoples bound by blood, by language, by centuries of shared grief and shared memory — killing each other in fields that were once farmland, in cities that were once home. And while ordinary boys are dying in the mud, the oligarchs on both sides are in Zurich, in London, in Monaco. They have not interrupted their dinner.

No ordinary Russian wanted this war.
No ordinary Ukrainian wanted this war.
No farmer, no teacher, no father, no mother, on either side of that border, woke up one morning and thought: yes — this.

And yet here we are.

This is the question that should keep every citizen awake at night: if no one wants the war, who does?

The answer is not complicated. Follow the money. Follow the power. Follow the contracts and the territory and the political survival calculations. At the end of every war, someone is signing deals. Someone is acquiring. Someone is stronger than they were before the first bomb fell.

It is never the people who dug the graves.

III. A Letter to the Men With Buttons

Mr. President

I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it.

While your son was booking out a restaurant for a dinner date, a boy from a village whose name you do not know was lying in a field you have never visited, with a wound you will never see, thinking of a mother you will never meet.

What was his name?

I do not think you know. I do not think you needed to know. That is precisely the problem.

You told us this war was necessary. You told us it was about freedom, about sovereignty, about civilization itself. You used large words because large words make small men sound important. But somewhere between the speech and the shelling, something got lost — the actual human beings you claimed to be protecting.

I am not only blaming you.

I am blaming the silence that keeps you safe. The silence of the press. The silence of the parliament. The silence of the neighbors who whisper but do not speak. The silence that we — all of us — have been trained to mistake for peace.

Here is what I believe with my whole chest:

Leaders are supposed to fear the people. The moment that reverses — the moment the people fear the leaders — democracy has already ended.

If you have a quarrel with another leader, go settle it. Book the stadium. Fight it out among yourselves, with your own hands, your own blood, your own sons. But do not send bombs into schools. Do not fire missiles into maternity wards. Do not make children — children who cannot vote, cannot protest, cannot even fully understand what is happening — pay the price for your ambitions.

They are the whole story.

IV. The Photograph I Cannot Forget

I recently saw a photograph.

I will not describe it in full. I will only tell you this: it was a long row of graves, and the graves were small.

I have been looking at it for days now. I look at it and I think about the morning each of those children had last — whether they ate breakfast, whether someone braided their hair, whether they laughed at something small and ordinary and completely forgotten. I think about the parents who now carry a weight that language was not built to describe.

And I think about the man — or the men — who made the decision, from their clean quiet room, that led to that row of graves. Whether they slept that night. Whether they are sleeping now.

There is no ideology worth a child's life.
There is no border worth a child's life.
There is no victory — ever, anywhere, under any flag — worth a child's life.

V. The Oldest Lie, The Oldest Truth

The powerful have always known something that the rest of us have been slow to accept:

If you can make a man believe he is dying for something sacred, you never have to tell him he is dying for someone's profit.

This is not modern cynicism. This is not social media radicalization. This is Thoreau refusing to pay taxes for the Mexican-American War in 1846. This is Wilfred Owen writing Dulce et Decorum Est from the trenches of World War One — "the old lie," he called it, that it is sweet and honorable to die for your country — and then dying at 25, one week before the armistice, in a war that solved nothing.

"Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

VI. The Homeland Is Not Yours in Peacetime

Here is the thing about the homeland: they only call it yours when they need you to bleed for it.

In peacetime, the homeland belongs to the developers and the ministries and the party donors. In peacetime, the land is rezoned and the wages are suppressed and the hospitals are underfunded and the young people leave because there is nothing to stay for. In peacetime, when you ask for something — for dignity, for a livable wage, for clean water, for justice — you are told to be patient. To wait. To trust the process.

Then a war starts, and suddenly: this is your homeland. Fight for it.

I find the audacity breathtaking.

And I am baffled — genuinely, deeply baffled — by the human beings who sit in rooms and end thousands of lives with the press of a button. Who feel the weight of nothing. Who return home from work and eat dinner while cities burn. Somewhere in the process of accumulating power, they lost the ability to understand that the people on the other side of those decisions are real. That they have weight and warmth and specific irreplaceable ways of laughing.

Or perhaps they never had that ability to begin with. Perhaps that is how they got to those rooms.

VII. This Is Not Someone Else's Story

In Armenia, we know this script by heart.

The wealthy find ways around conscription. They always have. An envelope here. A diagnosis there. A connection to the right person in the right office. The burden falls — as it always falls, everywhere, in every country, in every era — on the ones who can least afford to carry it.

The poor fight to protect a country that, in peacetime, treats them as an afterthought.

And then, if they survive, they come home to the same poverty, the same corruption, the same closed doors. Sometimes they are given a small ceremony. Sometimes a photograph in a newspaper. Sometimes nothing at all.

This is not uniquely our story. It is the story of every nation that has ever sent poor boys to wars decided by rich men. It is universal. It is ancient.

And it will keep happening for as long as we let it feel inevitable.

VIII. What Now

I am not going to end this with a list of policy solutions. You have read enough of those, and they have changed enough nothing.

I will end with this:

Stop celebrating war. Start interrogating it. Every time. Relentlessly. Ask who benefits. Ask whose children are going. Ask what happens to the contractors, the weapons manufacturers, the politicians whose careers depend on the continuation of the conflict. Ask why the ceasefire keeps not happening. Ask who is at the table and who is not.

Stop teaching children that dying for a flag is the highest expression of love. The highest expression of love is building something that makes dying for a flag unnecessary. It is harder. It is slower. It is less photogenic. It does not come with a monument.

Do it anyway.

And remember — burn this into you — that on the other side of every front line, there are people who are not your enemy. They are people who woke up that morning wanting exactly what you want: to feed their family, to keep their children safe, to live without fear, to love and be loved in the ordinary unspectacular way that is the actual point of being alive.

They did not choose this.
Neither did you.
Someone else did. And they are fine.

A Final Thing

I wrote this angry. I wrote it grieving. I wrote it because I looked at that row of small graves and I felt something close in my throat that has not opened since.

I wrote it because the world I inherited is on fire, and the people who lit it are still in their clean quiet rooms, still signing things, still very much fine.

I wrote it because silence — I have come to understand this fully now — is not neutrality.

Silence is a vote. It just happens to be a vote for whoever is already winning.

I refuse that vote.

Written from anger. From grief. From love.
From a deep and unshakeable belief that the world is capable of being better than this.
— Because at some point, silence becomes complicity.
And complicity has a body count.

Aram Khachatryan