From Belgrade in 1999 to today’s “democratisation” of Iran, the West keeps recycling the same script: demonise, sanction, then “intervene” in the name of human rights. It’s not liberation, it’s imperial management of a disobedient world – and it’s time Europe chose solidarity over NATO’s forever wars.

When the United States, NATO and their allies talk about “defending democracy” or “protecting civilians,” I hear the echo of old scripts. I heard it since 1999 NATO bombs in Yugoslavia, then in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine – where an entire people were reduced to a caricature, their suffering dismissed as the unfortunate price of “humanitarian intervention”.

I hear the same script today whenever Iran is framed as a monolithic “threat” rather than a complex society of millions of human beings. The same false choice between cheering for authoritarian regimes OR lining up behind US–NATO “humanitarian” wars.

The pattern is numbing in its familiarity:

first, manufacture fear with selective outrage and decontextualised images;  

then, personalise the enemy into one “madman” or “mullahs” or “regime”;  

finally, present sanctions, covert operations and open war as the only “responsible” choice. 

Any dissenting voice is smeared as an apologist for tyranny.

During the wars in Yugoslavia, Western governments and NATO‑friendly media blurred the line between a corrupt, nationalist leadership and the people it crushed.

Entire populations became pawns in someone else’s grand chessboard, legitimate targets of economic strangulation and, ultimately, of NATO missiles.

In Iran, too, collective punishment is sold as solidarity with “the Iranian people” even as sanctions destroy medicine supplies, livelihoods and hope. We are asked to believe that bombs and blockades are tools of liberation.

The truth is simpler and uglier: these wars are not fought for human rights but for geostrategic control, energy routes and the policing of a disobedient world.

Propaganda is the enabler that makes the unthinkable look inevitable and even moral, whether it is broadcast from Washington, Brussels, or NATO headquarters.

But scripts can be broken. That means fighting sanctions that punish societies, opposing interventions dressed up as peace, exposing media propaganda, and building a pan‑European, grassroots movement that can say, with credibility: not in our name, not with our taxes, not with our future.

DiEM25 was born from the refusal to accept there is no alternative to austerity, xenophobia and militarism. Our task now is to expose these war narratives, build transnational solidarity with people under sanctions and bombs – in Iran, in Ukraine, across the Global South – and force a new conversation in Europe: not how to wage the next war, but how to disarm imperialism itself. 

Join DiEM25 to turn this growing resistance into a hopeful, organised, European-wide anti-war force.

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