Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)

by Serj Tankian

It’s that very feeling that’s informed a lot of the work I’ve done as an activist. When I wrote and published that essay, “Understanding Oil,” two days after 9/11, I was thinking not only about the terror of all those who perished on that Tuesday morning, but also all those who’d been bombed before and would be bombed after that event. It was called a War on Terror, but the one thing war is most effective at producing is terror. The phrase “collateral damage,” used so often during war, is a cold euphemism for the killing of innocent people. Having that imprinted on me as a child, I can never be flippant about one country launching an attack on another, or worse, a government doing it in my name. So, when I talk about a desire for peace—in the Middle East, in Artsakh and Armenia, in Ukraine, wherever—I talk about it as someone who knows what it’s like to live with the opposite.