The Grand Myth: Nationalism and the Death of Truth

By Rob C.

Art by Joe Heller

TL;DR: Chris Hedges warned us in “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” that nationalism becomes the salvation of failed regimes, and truth becomes war’s first casualty. Trump’s illegal Iran war is the prophecy realized: a criminal president facing Epstein file revelations launches war to manufacture meaning, rally the nation, and silence dissent. The media—just as Hedges described during the Gulf War—has become complicit, repeating lies, platforming propaganda, and choosing spectacle over truth. Argentina’s junta found salvation in the Falklands. Trump found his in bombing Iranian children. We’re watching the rise of nationalism and the killing of truth converge in real time, and the casualties—dead children, billions wasted, democracy gutted—are mounting while corporate media sells us myths and calls it news.

There is a passage in Chris Hedges’ “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” where he describes Argentina’s military junta in 1982, a regime drowning in its own brutality, saved by the Falklands War. The generals who had tortured and murdered their own citizens suddenly became heroes. National pride surged. Dissent became impossible. The machinery of propaganda transformed butchers into saviors.

Hedges wrote this as warning. We are living it as prophecy.

Donald Trump, facing the collapse of his carefully constructed mythology, has found his Falklands in Iran. The Epstein files close in. His approval craters. Investigations tighten. The walls contract around a man whose entire life has been built on escaping consequences. And so, as desperate leaders always do, he reached for war.

The Plague of Nationalism: When Failed Regimes Find Salvation in Blood

Hedges understood what we are witnessing: nationalism is not patriotism. It is something darker. It is the force that allows populations to suppress doubt, silence dissent, and embrace atrocity in the name of collective glory.

The Argentine junta understood this. Faced with economic collapse and mounting evidence of their crimes, they manufactured an external enemy. The Falklands—a remote archipelago most Argentines had never thought about—suddenly became sacred ground worth dying for. The propaganda was relentless. The fervor was genuine. And for a brief, terrible moment, the butchers were beloved.

Netanyahu understands this too. His government, mired in corruption scandals, found salvation in expanding war. Gaza. Lebanon. Now Iran. Each escalation drowns out domestic opposition. The mythology of existential threat—real or imagined—becomes the trump card that renders all other considerations irrelevant.

Trump has learned the lesson well. He stands before crowds speaking not of evidence or justification, but of strength. Of American greatness under assault. He wraps himself in the flag while violating the Constitution. He sends soldiers to die while hiding evidence of his crimes against children.

The plague of nationalism requires only one thing: a willing audience desperate for meaning. Trump provides that meaning through the oldest alchemy known to failed leaders—blood transformed into purpose, death repackaged as glory, criminality disguised as patriotism.

Dissent becomes impossible when questioning the war becomes questioning the nation itself. Critics are not merely wrong—they are traitors. And the slow work of accountability is drowned in the deafening roar of manufactured crisis.

When Journalists Become Stenographers for Power

Hedges knows the media’s complicity intimately. He lived it. Covering the Gulf War, he watched his profession abandon truth for narrative, trade skepticism for access. He saw journalists—good, ethical people—convince themselves that their nation’s cause was just, that questioning the war effort was somehow unpatriotic.

He wrote, with brutal honesty, that journalists during war always believe their nation’s cause is justified. The mythology adapts, but the complicity remains constant.

We are watching this death of truth unfold again.

Corporate media platforms administration officials who offer a dozen contradictory rationales for war—nuclear weapons, terrorism, aggression, divine mandate—and never demand consistency. They repeat claims about Iran being “days away” from nuclear weapons without noting these are the exact lies told about Iraq.

The myth-making is industrial. We are told the war will be quick, surgical, limited. The reality—$11.4 billion spent in seventy-two hours on ammunition alone—is mentioned briefly and forgotten. We are told Iran is the aggressor. The reality that we bombed them during negotiations is buried.

And when 145 children die in a school bombing, the story is buried, minimized, explained away as “collateral damage” in passive voice that erases American responsibility.

Hedges saw journalists embed with military units, their coverage shaped by proximity to power. Today’s journalists embed in Pentagon briefings, their coverage shaped by the same dynamics. They show explosions because explosions make good television. They repeat official talking points because challenging them risks access.

Truth becomes casualty not through censorship but through willing complicity. Corporate media chose ratings over responsibility, spectacle over substance. They became what Hedges described: accomplices to atrocity, dressed in the respectable clothes of the fourth estate.

Nationalism Requires the Murder of Truth

The plague of nationalism cannot survive without the death of truth.

You cannot rally a population around a lie if that lie can be examined. You cannot manufacture meaning from murder if the murdered are humanized. You cannot transform a criminal into a hero if his crimes remain visible.

The myth machine requires both components. Nationalism provides the emotional framework—the desperate human hunger for purpose, for belonging. The murder of truth provides the operational framework—the systematic erasure of facts that would destabilize the mythology.

Corporate media, politicians, and the Epstein class march in lockstep. They are not coordinating in smoke-filled rooms. They are responding to the same incentives, serving the same power. Corporate media needs war for ratings. Politicians need war to appear strong. The Epstein class needs war to enrich defense contractors and bury evidence. Trump needs war to manufacture the nationalism that will save him from accountability.

Dissent is marginalized through accusation. Thomas Massie, who champions the Epstein Transparency Act and demands congressional authorization for war, is attacked as unpatriotic. His crime is not disloyalty to America but to the myth. He insists on truth when truth threatens power.

What We Lose When We Embrace the Myth

One hundred forty-five children died in a school bombing. They had names. They had families. Their deaths serve no strategic purpose. They are simply the price the myth machine demands.

American soldiers die in the desert, not defending their nation but serving Netanyahu’s expansion and Trump’s criminal cover-up. They believed the mythology. They trusted the leaders. They died for a lie wrapped in a flag.

Iranian civilians die in “surgical strikes.” Their deaths are collateral. Their names unknown. Their humanity erased in the passive voice of official statements.

But casualties extend beyond the physical. Democracy dies when war powers are seized without congressional authorization. Our economy bleeds—$100 billion wasted in a month, gas prices spiking, food costs rising. The war tax falls hardest on those who can least afford it while defense contractors post record profits.

We lose our moral standing, our right to lecture other nations about human rights. We become what we claim to oppose—an imperial power that bombs children and justifies atrocity through mythology.

A Warning Realized

Hedges wrote his book as both memoir and warning. He had seen war’s seduction—the camaraderie, the purpose it manufactures, the way it transforms mundane uncertainty into something clarified and elevated. War gives meaning. But Hedges understood that this meaning is false, destructive. It is the opiate that allows us to tolerate the intolerable.

We are living inside that false meaning now. Trump’s war gives his chaos purpose. It transforms his criminality into leadership, his desperation into resolve. The mythology elevates him from accused predator to protector of the nation.

Millions of Americans, desperate for meaning in a world offering them economic precarity and existential dread, embrace the mythology. Not because they are stupid or evil, but because the alternative—acknowledging manipulation by a criminal to protect other criminals—is too painful to bear.

The myth machine offers them an enemy to hate, a cause to believe in, a purpose larger than their diminishing paychecks. It offers belonging. It offers the drug Hedges identified: war as meaning, death as purpose, mythology as salvation.

Truth dies so nationalism can thrive. Children die so leaders can escape justice. Democracy dies so power can consolidate. And we participate in our own destruction while waving flags and calling it patriotism.

Argentina’s junta found salvation in the Falklands until the mythology collapsed. Trump has found his salvation in Iran, but the Epstein files leak anyway, the truth emerges despite the murders, the mythology cracks under its own contradictions.

The question is not whether the myth will fail. It always fails. The question is how much we will sacrifice before we acknowledge what Hedges has been telling us: war is not a force that gives us meaning. It is a force that takes everything meaningful and replaces it with lies wrapped in flags and soaked in blood.

We can reject the narrative. We can demand truth. We can end the war. Or we can continue feeding the myth machine until it has consumed everything we claim to value.

The choice, as always, is ours.

F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!

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Thanks to Chris Hedges, one of the greatest journalists of our generation, whose unflinching commitment to truth-telling in the face of power has inspired countless others to do the same. His work reminds us that bearing witness is not optional—it is the essential act of resistance against the myth-making machines of war and nationalism. Thank you for the inspiration to speak truth to power, even when that truth is uncomfortable, unpopular, and dangerous.

-Robert Cain, author of “Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet”