I left the United States, the country of my birth, more than 10 years ago, in 2013. At that time, the country was terrorising the northwest frontier of Pakistan with repeated and deadly drone strikes — “Hellfire” missiles fired from “Predator” aircraft. The United States was not at war with Pakistan, and it did strike me that this secretly run CIA operation of bombing across the border with Afghanistan was very similar to the bombings of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, for which Henry Kissinger was accused of international war crimes. But by 2013, I well knew that there would be no accountability imposed by either the international community or by the American public.AdvertisementThe so-called “War on Terror” was already 12 years old, and nothing in the preceding years promised any reckoning so late in the game. Also in 2013, one of the few true “American patriots” of that time, Chelsea Manning, was brutalised by the United States government, and her broken face and body were paraded in front of the media. Meanwhile, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba’s “Camp X-Ray,” where even children — shackled and hooded, already tortured and “interrogated” — were being brought from anywhere in the world that the CIA chose to abduct them from, had been open for 12 years. “Black sites,” where torture — and at times murder — had been carried out, had been opened in several hidden corners of the earth, dependent on “extraordinary rendition,” conducted again through secret state channels, without any public oversight or transparency regarding how and where these torture chambers were in operation.The war in Iraq had already been 10 years in motion. Baghdad, a city of 6 million people, half of whom were under the age of 18, had been “shock and awed” into rubble and anarchy. The so-called Battle of Fallujah in 2004, ignited by the capture and killing of a few black-suited private mercenaries employed by the United States government, was the largest civilian massacre event since the Vietnam War. The pictures of grievous torture in the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq came out a few months later. In one operation in Afghanistan around this same time, “prisoners” captured on the “battlefield” were airlifted in airtight shipping containers and unloaded as ready-made corpses in the U.S. barracks at Kandahar. In 2013, the Patriot Act, which deeply curtailed civil rights and legalised Orwellian mass surveillance over the entire American population, had just been renewed by the “anti-war” president, Barack Obama. He had run for president five years earlier on promises of ending wars and shutting down “Camp X-Ray.” Instead, he had expanded robotic killing across international borders and overseen the persecution of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.In 2004, I myself had joined a PhD programme in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, a programme claiming to be on the cutting edge of the “critique of power” in academia. At every meeting I attended, at every conference on violence, war and power, at every round table on mass death and impunity, and in every classroom I stepped foot in, I brought the “War on Terror” to the table, reminding gathered scholars of the gross injustices being committed in our names — of the torture regimes, of the shredding of international law and sovereignty, of the civilian massacres happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan, of the use of white phosphorus, depleted uranium, carpet bombs and starvation.AdvertisementIn short, no one much cared to engage in these topics — even at the storied University of Michigan, a bastion of “radicalism” and protest. Provisions of the Patriot Act gave NSA agents, in cooperation with the FBI, the authority to ask any librarian at the university to turn over any individual’s borrowing and usage records. In addition, a gag order was imposed on librarians to the effect that they could not reveal to anyone whose records were requested. I begged my colleagues and cohorts to take some action: Let’s at least petition the university to make its policy clear on whether or not university librarians were expected to accept or deny such FISA orders. There was no interest.If such was the climate at the university, the mood of the general public remained similarly amnesiac, apathetic and, by this time, only mildly aware of the senseless brutality going on in their names. Increasingly, I turned my focus to the moral collapse of the country, the vacuity exercised in the face of the brokers of death, dislocation and despair. The collective conscience of the country could not survive if humanity were of any consequence whatsoever. It is a historical rule: If the population dances while Nero fiddles, the empire cannot stand.It bewildered me how this juggernaut of complicity and connivance managed to roll along for so long. I thought the ultimate collapse of the collective conscience would come sooner. I wanted no part in it. With my PhD in hand, I had no intention of paying taxes to the heartless machine of death and destruction that my country had become. In my early years in Canada, tens of millions fled the annihilations perpetrated by my own country of citizenship. Their displacement and mass migrations from countries destroyed by America sent shock waves of rightist revival across Europe. The most historically rooted xenophobia of all was jolted awake on the continent — the wretched masses of the “Muslim world” washing up on its white shores.you may likeMeanwhile, in the United States, a New York City property baron — a carnival barker and crypto-fascist — announced his intention to run for the most powerful office in the world and was quickly drawing minions. It was not lost on me that Barack Obama had run in 2008 on an anti-war platform, and now, eight years later, this unabashedly racist charlatan was still running on an anti-war platform. In the vacuum of conscience that had long been the condition of forever wars, that same clown was anointed. And now, ten years later, the United States is again bombing a sovereign country that posed no direct threat to it, into rubble.As I watch events unfold now from my small apartment in Toronto, Canada, with the unprovoked and illegal war against Iran following closely on the heels of genocide in Gaza, I, for one, am not surprised, however disgusted. Without a reckoning for crimes committed against humanity and the revocation of any and all international law and civilisational standards, no hope can be held out for change. A society, as a whole, ingests the crimes committed in its name; it swallows them, and they become part of the fabric of its collective body — a poison that drips into the heart of the whole. No, this dangerous and illegal aggression against Iran does not surprise me, and I am grateful for my separate peace in Canada. As an American citizen, however, I do not foreclose the possibility that, finally, the conscience of the country will awaken. I will be there in mind, body and spirit when that day comes — but I do not keep myself up at night waiting. It is long past time.Janam Mukherjee is an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University