Dub Shanty

Dub Shanty is a pseudonym for a poet based on the Isle of Man. Their work explores complicity, silence, and the stories empires tell.

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The Long War

They say we’ve had two world wars—

as if history files cleanly,

as if peace is a thing with edges,

neatly folded into the archives

like a uniform no one wears anymore

But the war never ended.

Not really

It changed shape.

Changed faces.

Changed terrain

From trenches to deserts,

from sandbags to sanctions,

from boots in the mud to drones in the sky,

from barbed wire to bandwidth

The front just moved.

We gave it new names:

“conflict,”

“crisis,”

“operation,”

“intervention.”

We softened it with acronyms,

coded it into airstrikes,

packaged it for prime time

We called it Cold.

Called it Civil.

Called it Just

But we didn’t stop it.

We outsourced it

We didn’t bury it.

We franchised it

They say the American Revolution ended.

It didn’t.

It scaled up

From redcoats to redlines.

From muskets to markets.

From tea parties to tax havens

The Empire didn’t fall—it pivoted.

Still conquering.

Still consuming.

Still baptising blood in the name of liberty

They traded powdered wigs for lobbyists,

picked up PR instead of pitchforks,

and built democracies with walls you can’t see

Now war is a business model.

Now it lives in our phones,

our food bills,

our flood maps,

our refugees

Now it’s Gaza.

Now it’s Rafah.

Now it’s Tel Aviv, Tehran, the Red Sea ports.

Now it’s holy cities wired with grief,

where prophecy and policy are indistinguishable

Now it’s the prayer rug and the sniper scope,

the olive grove and the airstrike.

Now it’s Donetsk.

Now it’s Taiwan, Sudan,

the aisle in your supermarket

where the tinned goods used to be

We think peace is what we had—

a pause between bloodshed.

But maybe peace was just

the chapter set somewhere else

We are not post-war.

We are post-truth.

Post-shame.

Pre-collapse

Still inside the long war,

chapter by chapter,

with the pages getting thinner

and the ink starting to run.

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