The White House’s digital sadism in the face of the deaths of Iranians

The horror of war finds a new and perverse ally: the gamification of death. Under Donald Trump, the White House and the Pentagon turned the tragedy of “Operation Epic Fury” into a spectacle of digital mockery. While 1,230 Iranian civilians lie under the rubble, the official profiles of the US government flood social media with memes, videos inspired by Hollywood films and video game aesthetics, selling the extermination of human beings as if it were a game of Call of Duty.

Viral barbarism: blood turned into likes

The strategy is as sophisticated as it is cruel. 15- to 60-second videos, which have already accumulated tens of millions of views on X, TikTok and Instagram, mix real footage of drone attacks with computer graphics. In one of the most shocking content, the character SpongeBob appears laughing about explosions in Iranian facilities with the mocking caption: “Do you want to see me do it again?!”.

Other videos use the “kill” counter typical of shooting games while an F-35 fighter pursues real targets. Even Disney Pixar animations, like the character of Elio, are subverted to simulate the “touch” on screens that detonate hospitals and schools. For the “MAGA” crowd and young people co-opted by far-right aesthetics, the war stopped being a geopolitical tragedy and became nihilistic entertainment.

Goebbels’ echo: the pedagogy of dehumanization

This is not just bad taste, but a systematic tactic of dehumanization that finds direct parallels in Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine. Just as the Nazi minister portrayed Jews and enemies as “worms” in cartoons to justify the Holocaust, the current American administration turns Iranian girls into “points on the scoreboard”.

Goebbels used sadistic humor to numb the empathy of the German population. Today, the White House repeats the formula: by treating bombed hospitals as power-ups in a game and real deaths as recycled archival footage, the Trump administration seeks to stifle any critical conscience. The victim is stripped of his humanity until he becomes a disposable pixel in a presumptuous and domineering narrative.

While the memes go viral on social media, the reality on Iranian soil reveals an unbearable cruelty, marked by the massacre at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school, in Minab, which was hit by three missiles during class time. The episode, already classified by UNESCO as a war crime, resulted in the death of more than a hundred girls aged between 7 and 12, adding to a scenario of hospital collapse where thirteen units were hit and WHO doctors were forced to operate in tents without basic supplies.

In the midst of this rampant humanitarian crisis, the silence of the attackers prevails, with official posts that celebrate brute force without mentioning the names, faces or stories of the victims. Even the casualties on the American side, with the confirmation of six dead soldiers, are treated with superficial sadness by General Caine, never reaching the protagonism given to the epic videos that exalt the technology of destruction.

Gamified Injustice

By exchanging diplomacy for the promotion of death using multiplayer war games, Trump plunges the world into an era where the extermination of the “other” is celebrated with a laughing emoji. Behind every “cool” explosion on TikTok, there is the inconsolable crying of families in Tehran and the blood of children who will never see tomorrow. War propaganda has changed its format, but the sulfur smell remains the same.