War Without Death
Yet another really nice link from Janus, this one to Patrick J. Sloyan’s article Bodies? What Bodies?, which recounts the extraordinary (and extraordinarily successful) effort on the part of Bush the First to convince the U.S. population that no one actually died in the course of Gulf War I.
November 27th, 2002 at 2:05 pm
My god. I had no idea of the extent to which public perception of the (first?) Gulf War was managed. I’m sure the military feels that it’s their job to handle the messy details of war and that the public has no place seeing it, but this kind of thing is precisely why people are generally so indifferent about a second war in Iraq.
Bulldozing trenches full of live Iraqis ….
November 27th, 2002 at 2:28 pm
I was very young when the (first?) war with Iraq was going on (only 21 now), but luckily I was encouraged by teachers and parents alike to actually learn about what was happening. If you think that burying Iraqis alive in trenches was horrible then perhaps you shouldn’t really do a lot of digging (no pun intended) into what other things were done.
The sick part is that I remember seeing a thing on the History Channel about it, and whomever they interviewed in the army responsible for such an idea was PROUD of killing people in this manner.
War in the U.S. is like anything else. Publicity. Do you want the people responsible for your paycheck to know that you burned your enemy alive, or that among them were children? No… you just want to throw a body-count to them and add “And suspected sympathizers”.
I was going to add another paragraph here but I was asked about my digital camera and have lost my thunder.
November 29th, 2002 at 4:53 am
Congratulations on this fantastic article. Yes, some are not blind in the US!
December 1st, 2002 at 4:33 pm
The webpage linked from your name bothers me, Deathmaster. It seems to have no purpose but to demonize the US and Israel (why those two in particular I’m not sure, but I can guess). I think criticism should be encouraged — and this is part of what makes lies.com cool — but sensationalism in the interest of reducing a group of people to “the bad guys” is inexcusable.
Are many in the US blind to some of our questionable policies? Certainly. But one is just as blind to show a gallery of gory images and conclude that a nation is simply evil. The Japanese also committed numerous atrocities during World War II. The Palestinians have done inexcusable things to Israeli civillians as well. Few if any nations are blameless. The way to end this sort of violence is to criticize *all* such injustice and blindness in thoughtful fashion. I wish there were more Ghadis in the world.
December 1st, 2002 at 4:34 pm
Er … Ghandis I meant to say.
December 2nd, 2002 at 10:10 am
Wow. I actually meant Gandhi. I even think I’ve made that mistake numerous times in the past. My credibility is lost.