Editor's Note: This essay was originally submitted to us as part of our Spring 2026 Creative Review, which includes an excerpted version. Check out the rest of that issue as you absorb the full version of Villar's careful analysis below. —Marisol Cortez
In 1968, James Baldwin said of the Vietnam War: every bombed village is my hometown. He said it as a Black American who understood what it meant to be targeted by the instruments of a state that did not recognize your full humanity, who understood that the same logic that produced the napalm drop over a Vietnamese village had produced the redlining of American cities, the police precinct, the prison cell. He said it because he had spent enough time looking at the machinery of power clearly, without the softening lens of patriotism or exceptionalism, to understand that violence organized by empire is never entirely local. It has a return address. And the people it falls on—in Da Nang, in Fallujah, in Gaza City, in South Beirut, in the outskirts of Caracas—are someone's neighbor. They are the woman who straightened her clothes before leaving, the child doing arithmetic at the window, the nurse who will not come home.
I think about Baldwin's words now, from the Philippines, from Quezon City, from a country that knows something about what it means to be on the receiving end of American strategic interest. I am not in Gaza. I have not stood in the rubble of a hospital in Khan Younis, or walked through what remains of a neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut after the Israeli Air Force—equipped, funded, diplomatically shielded by the United States—finished with it. I have not watched the Orinoco Delta fill with the consequences of sanctions-engineered scarcity in Venezuela, or seen the particular way poverty compounds itself when a small Caribbean nation is denied access to financial systems because of decisions made in Washington for reasons that have more to do with geopolitics than with governance. I have not been there. But I know enough, and have read enough, and have listened enough to people who have survived enough, to understand that distance is a choice. And the choice to maintain it, to watch from across an ocean as the bombs fall and say this is not my war, is also a political act, also a statement about whose humanity counts and whose does not.
The bombs that fell on Gaza beginning in October 2023 had American components. This is a procurement record. The Joint Direct Attack Munition kits that guide American-made bombs to their targets—the BLU-109 bunker-busters, the 2,000-pound MK-84s that the Biden administration paused briefly and then resumed shipping—these are weapons with serial numbers and manufacturers and Congressional appropriations behind them, weapons paid for in part by a defense budget that, in fiscal year 2025, topped $919 billion. In the same fiscal year, the United Nations estimated that fully ending global hunger would cost approximately $40 billion annually.
The math is not complicated. The United States spent almost 23 times the amount needed to end world hunger on its military budget alone, then debated whether to continue sending the bombs.
Let me try to be specific about the places, because specificity is what empire works against. Empire prefers the broad stroke, the strategic framework, the security interest. It does not prefer the specific name, the specific street, the specific child who was there before the strike and was not there after. So let me try.
In Gaza, as of May 2026, over 72,000 Palestinians have been killed according to the Gaza Ministry of Health—a figure that, because it excludes those buried under rubble whose bodies have not been recovered, is widely understood by epidemiologists to be a significant undercount. A Lancet study published in July 2024 estimated that the true death toll, accounting for indirect deaths from disease, starvation, and the collapse of medical infrastructure, could exceed 186,000. More than seventy percent of Gaza's housing stock has been damaged or destroyed. The territory's entire university system has been obliterated. Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical facility in the Strip, has been raided twice and rendered non-functional. A people's entire institutional infrastructure—schools, archives, hospitals, universities, the physical record of their existence as a civilization—has been systematically destroyed, with the material assistance of the United States government.
In Lebanon, the Israeli military conducted a campaign beginning in September 2024 that killed more than 3,700 people and displaced over a million—roughly a quarter of the country's population—in a matter of weeks. The southern suburbs of Beirut, a dense urban environment home to hundreds of thousands of people, were struck repeatedly with American-supplied ordnance. The village of Aita al-Shaab, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the region, with a history stretching back centuries, was reduced to rubble. Buildings that had stood through the Ottoman period, through the French Mandate, through decades of Lebanese civil war and Israeli occupation and Syrian intervention, did not survive this.
In Iran, American sanctions—maintained and expanded across administrations, justified on nuclear grounds but with effects felt most acutely by ordinary Iranians—have systematically restricted access to medical supplies, disrupted food supply chains, and contributed to economic conditions that, according to a 2023 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, disproportionately harm the poor, the elderly, and the chronically ill. The bomb does not always fall from the sky. Sometimes it arrives as a sanctions regime. Sometimes it looks like a bank that will not process a payment for insulin because the counterparty is Iranian.
In Venezuela, two decades of American economic pressure—sanctions that have targeted the oil sector, frozen assets held abroad, cut off access to international credit markets—have contributed to what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described in 2019 as an economic and humanitarian crisis. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015, the largest displacement crisis in Latin American history, larger than any movement of people in the hemisphere since the Haitian revolution. Whether one supports or opposes the Maduro government—and there are serious arguments against it from multiple directions—the effect of American economic warfare on ordinary Venezuelan lives is not a matter of significant empirical dispute.
People have left their homes, crossed hostile borders on foot, separated from their children and their parents, for reasons that include the policy choices of a government in Washington whose sanctions were calibrated for political effect and whose architects knew, or should have known, what those effects would be.
In the Caribbean, smaller island nations—Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, which the United States invaded in 1983—continue to exist in the shadow of American financial and political dominance, their development constrained by debt structures, trade arrangements, and financial system dependencies that reflect the accumulated burden of centuries of colonial extraction followed by decades of neocolonial economic management. Cuba remains under a blockade that has been in place, in various forms, for more than sixty years. Haiti, the first Black republic, the country that abolished slavery through revolution, has been made to pay, in one form or another, for that revolutionary act ever since—through French reparations demanded at gunpoint in the nineteenth century, through American occupation from 1915 to 1934, through the support of successive brutal governments, through the IMF structural adjustment conditions attached to post-earthquake aid, through the management of Haitian politics by international actors whose paradigm of development have consistently failed to translate into Haitian wellbeing.
Here is what I know from the Philippines, from our own history with American military power, that I think is relevant to all of this.
The Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 after the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars following the Spanish-American War—purchased us, as though we were real estate, as though the three hundred years of Spanish colonization had produced a people who were available for purchase—killed somewhere between 200,000 and one million Filipinos, depending on the methodology and the political will of the historian doing the counting. American soldiers wrote home about water torture, about burning villages, about the order from General Jacob Smith to kill everyone over the age of ten in the island of Samar because the Filipinos there had resisted American occupation with the same ferocity and the same claim to self-determination that the American founders had celebrated in themselves. Mark Twain wrote against it. Many Americans did not know about these atrocities because the war was not covered in ways that made its full human cost visible to the American public, and some of what was covered was described in terms that would be recognizable to anyone who has followed the media coverage of Gaza: the language of security operations, of counterinsurgency, of civilizational necessity.
What the American colonial administration built in the Philippines—the public school system, the civil service, the infrastructure of a modern state—was real, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But it was built on top of a conquest that killed hundreds of thousands of people and suppressed a revolution that had already declared independence, and it was built for purposes that were as much about American strategic interest in Asia as about Filipino welfare. The Pensionados, the Filipino students sent to American universities on colonial scholarships, came back educated in the American model, which meant educated in ways that served American interests as much as Filipino ones. The English we speak today—and I am writing this in English because it is the language of my formal education, the language of the institutions that formed me, the language of a colonial system that decided Filipino languages were insufficient for modern thought—is the inheritance of that educational project.
I speak the language of the people who conquered us, and I do so fluently, and sometimes I think about what that means and what it costs and what it purchases, and I do not arrive at a clean answer.
What I do arrive at, thinking about the Philippines' relationship with American military power, is a clarity about the difference between the rhetoric of American foreign policy and its actual structure of interests. The United States maintains, in the Philippines, access to military bases under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. It conducts, each year, the Balikatan joint military exercises, the largest in the world, involving thousands of American and Filipino troops. It has, in recent years, dramatically expanded its military footprint in the northern Philippines, in Cagayan and Ilocos Norte, provinces within striking distance of Taiwan and the South China Sea. The American strategic interest in the Philippines is real and substantial. What the Filipino interest in the American strategic presence is—what ordinary Filipinos get in exchange for hosting the infrastructure of American power projection in Asia—is a more complicated question, and one that the Philippine government has not always answered on behalf of ordinary Filipinos.
The point is that American power is current, is present, is active, and that its effects are traceable in real time in Gaza and Lebanon and Venezuela and the Caribbean and here, in this archipelago, in the bodies of people who did not choose to be born in the path of someone else's strategic calculation. Baldwin understood this. He understood that the bomb does not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, between the civilian and the combatant, between the child who has political opinions and the child who does not. He understood that the person who drops the bomb, or who appropriates the funds, or who provides the diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council, has already made a decision about whose life is worth protecting and whose life is the acceptable cost of a strategic objective. And he understood that this decision—this hierarchy of human value—is not unrelated to the hierarchies that organize American domestic life. The same country that decided that Vietnamese villages were acceptable collateral damage had decided, for most of its history, that Black American lives were acceptable collateral damage too. They flow from the same source.
There is a word in Filipino—damay—that gestures toward something like shared suffering, participation in another person's grief, the willingness to be present in someone else's pain rather than at a comfortable remove from it. When someone dies, you go to the wake. You sit with the family. Damay is solidarity, which closes distance, which looks across. It assumes that the other person's loss is also, in some sense, yours, because you recognize that their humanity and your humanity are not separate things, that what happens to them also happens to the fabric of the world you share.
I think this is what Baldwin was reaching for. The claim that the logic producing both, the logic that decides certain lives are available for destruction in service of a strategic objective, is the same logic. And that recognizing this—refusing the comfortable fiction that these are separate problems, separate wars, separate peoples with separate fates—is the first political act. Everything else flows from it or does not flow at all.
The Philippines has known what it means to be a bombed village. We have known it from the Spanish galleons that enforced Manila's commercial monopoly at the cost of provincial autonomy and indigenous self-determination. We have known it from the American artillery that leveled Intramuros in 1945 and from the counterinsurgency campaigns in Mindanao that have continued, in various forms, for decades. We have known it from the Marcos dictatorship, which declared martial law with American approval and which tortured and disappeared and killed thousands of people while the United States maintained its military bases and its alliance and its public silence on the matter of human rights. We have known it from the extrajudicial killings of Duterte’s drug war, which killed somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000 people depending on whose count you accept, and which proceeded with American-supplied weapons and American diplomatic ambivalence.
Knowing this—carrying this history—makes us, or should make us, people who recognize the machinery when we see it operating elsewhere. People who do not need to be persuaded that the stated justification and the actual logic of a military campaign can be different things.
People who know what it looks like when a state decides that a civilian population is the acceptable cost of a political objective. We have seen it from the inside.
The question is what we do with that knowledge. Whether we use it to build a politics of genuine solidarity with the people of Gaza and Lebanon and Venezuela and the Caribbean and every other place where the bomb is currently falling or where sanctions are currently tightening or where displacement is currently fracturing families and communities and the physical inheritance of civilization. Whether we understand that the anti-militarism question and the economic justice question and the climate question and the decolonization question are the same question. They are all asking: who gets to decide whose life is worth protecting, and what do the rest of us do when the answer is wrong?
I want to be honest about the limits of what an essay can do. It can name things. It can insist on specificity against the abstraction that power prefers. It can try to close the distance between a reader in one place and a human being in another place who is currently living through something that the reader's government is funding or enabling or failing to stop.
But naming is not nothing. The tradition that Baldwin worked in—the tradition of the essay as a political act, the long sentence as a form of witness, the first person as an insistence that a thinking, feeling, situated human being is present in the argument and refuses to be laundered into false objectivity—understands that how we describe the world shapes what we believe is possible in it. If we describe the destruction of Gaza as a security operation, we have already conceded the terms. If we describe the displacement of seven million Venezuelans as a humanitarian crisis without a cause, we have already agreed not to ask who caused it. If we describe the blockade on Cuba as a policy disagreement, we have already decided not to count the people who could not access medicine because of it.
Every bombed village is my hometown. The sentence works because it refuses abstraction. It says: this is not somewhere else, this is here. These are my people, because we share a humanity that the bomb's logic denies, and because denying that denial—insisting on it, writing it down, saying it out loud in the face of the strategic framework and the security interest and the necessary collateral damage—is the minimum that witness requires.
Baldwin knew that calling this by its name was the first act of resistance. Necessary, in the way that seeing is necessary before you can move toward something or away from something or against something. You have to say: that village is mine too. That rubble was someone's home. That name on the list of the dead is a name, is a person, is a grandmother who told stories and a daughter who did arithmetic at windows and a child who simply, entirely, without geopolitical complication, missed her mother.
Every bombed village is my hometown. We are all, if we are honest, inside the sentence.
The question is whether we are willing to live there—in that discomfort, that implication, that refusal of comfortable distance—and what we decide to do from inside it.
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Avril Shakira Villar is a writer from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is the winner of the One Room One Hour essay competition by Jack Wieland and one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her pieces appear in Adi Magazine, Evanescent Magazine, Arcana Poetry Press, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines.
