The Dehumanization Game. How War Marketing Works

War as a Spectacle and an Internet Viral

On the morning of February 28, 2026, a Tomahawk missile struck the Shajarah Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab, Iran. At least 175 people died. Most were children. In early March, the White House X account published a short video. The caption read: “STRIKE.” The footage portrays enemy states as bowling pins. They fall one after another, hit by a ball painted in the colors of the American flag. Cheerful, stadium-style music plays in the background. The entire piece adopts the aesthetics of a sports broadcast—as if one were watching a match preview rather than a preview of death.

This very difference—between children under rubble and bowling pins falling to a stadium chant—reveals everything about how we tell the story of war today.

War as Sport and Entertainment

In his 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, French philosopher Guy Debord argued that images replace direct experience in the modern world. The spectacle represents a formation where “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Applying this category to the White House message reveals that violence follows the same logic. Producers edit it effectively and pair it with a catchy soundtrack. Bowling pins falling to the rhythm of stadium chants become products of the spectacle—easy to digest, like, and share. The infantilization of war reaches its peak here. No blood, no coffins. Only symbols of sports rivalry remain: we, the good guys, knock down them, the bad guys. This mechanism strips violence of its actual meaning.

Pop Culture at War: The Dehumanization Game

The aestheticization of war is not a new mechanism. The scene in Apocalypse Now, where helicopters attack a village to “Ride of the Valkyries,” highlighted the madness of war. Today, we face the opposite—a joyful aura surrounding violence. Years ago, writing about the Persian Gulf War, Susan Sontag noted that the new aesthetic of “precision strikes” caused the human body to vanish from the frame. “Smart” technology replaced it, and death became an abstraction. Today, it has become a spectacle.

Modern conflicts abound in pop culture borrowings that serve to dehumanize the enemy. On the Ukrainian side, the term “orcs” for Russian soldiers has become widespread. This clearly refers to Tolkien’s bestial creatures. Some call Russia “Mordor.” These labels, though understandable given the frustration caused by aggression, strip the enemy of their humanity, turning them into pure evil. Ukrainian media ethicists have appealed for caution, pointing out that such terms hinder future reconciliation.

On the Russian side, dehumanization takes more radical forms. State agencies call for the “total annihilation of Ukrainians,” and Russian media labels Ukrainian soldiers as “lab rats.” Tagging Ukrainians as “neo-Nazis” has become a synonym for pure evil, justifying “liberation” efforts. Russian propaganda adds a mystical dimension, accusing Ukrainian forces of occultism and satanism, while top officials speak of the need for the “desatanization” of Ukraine. Simultaneously, a narrative emerges claiming Russians are the victims of dehumanization; propaganda materials feature pleas like: “We are not orcs, we are Russians.”

The Language of Iranian Propaganda: Two Satans and a Cancerous Tumor

Iranian rhetoric provides particularly vivid examples. During the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini coined the terms “Great Satan” for the USA and “Little Satan” for Israel. One of the most frequent descriptions of Israel is a “cancerous tumor.” This metaphor carries a specific message: one does not negotiate with cancer—one must cut it out and annihilate it. Ayatollah Khamenei has used this term repeatedly. He also compared Israel to the COVID-19 virus, and his official website published a graphic featuring the phrase “final solution”—the same term used by the German Nazis.

In parallel, Iranian leaders reach for classic antisemitic narratives. In May 2025, Kamal Kharrazi, an advisor to Khamenei, accused Israel of striving to create a “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates—a goal allegedly derived from the Torah. He referenced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, adding that “Jews are a small minority trying to control the world.”

The dehumanization game unfolds on many fronts. The goal remains the same: to make killing easier and to ensure the victim is no longer perceived as someone with a face, a name, and a history.

War as a Video Game

In an analysis from March 12, 2026, the portal The Conversation describes how the White House video contains actual footage from Call of Duty, edited with materials from real airstrikes and “killstreak” animations. This represents a deliberate attempt to build a message on the foundation of virtual entertainment.

Citing the concepts of Judith Butler, The Conversation draws attention to the ethical dimension of this phenomenon. Butler asks: who is considered worthy of grief? She introduces the concept of “ungrievability”—a state where certain lives fall outside the ethical community, and their deaths do not constitute a loss. By turning people into bowling pins and avatars, the White House video denies victims the right to be mourned.

Younger generations understand this language intuitively—the language of crosshairs, scoring, and levels. Meanwhile, games have spent years trying to offer a critical commentary on this mechanism. Spec Ops: The Line exposes the emptiness of the military fantasy. The most radical example of a different perspective comes from Poland. This War of Mine by 11 bit studios flips the convention. The player takes on the role of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city. Accounts of the Siege of Sarajevo served as inspiration. The game shows death from the perspective of the victims, never the perpetrators.

War as a Spectacle – The Blurred Line Between Game and Reality

In Call of Duty, every death is clean and fast. In This War of Mine, killing someone—even in self-defense—leaves a mark. The creators rejected political entanglements. The point is not who is right, but that war always destroys people.

A computer screen separating the shooter from the victim blurs the difference between a game and reality. Victims become pixels. The White House video fits perfectly into this logic but lacks any critical distance. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth publicly celebrates Operation “Epic Fury,” while Wes J. Bryant, a former targeting specialist in the US Air Force, warns in The Conversation:

We are moving away from the principles and norms we have tried to establish as a global community since World War II. There is no accountability.

What Remains?

In the White House video, where war as a spectacle takes center stage, the mechanism mirrors that of Iranian propaganda. Its purpose is to make killing easier. Only the form differs. Iran does it openly and verbally, anchoring the message in religious rhetoric. Russia denies the enemy the very right to exist. Ukraine, in turn, responds with pop culture—a reaction to aggression, yet one that carries its own risks. Finally, the White House packages violence in stadium music and game aesthetics.

All these techniques lead to the same destination: a world where a crime ceases to be a crime because the victims have ceased to be human.

Worth reading: Betting on the Apocalypse: Can We Put a Price Tag on Tragedy?

Read this article in Polish: Gra w dehumanizację. Tak działa marketing wojny