To End All Wars
Butler Shafer at LewRockwell.com - a simple formula for ending war. Love your children more than you love the state. [lew]
There are few more depraved forms of child abuse than those found in parents not only allowing, but eagerly promoting, the sacrifice of their children to any purpose. This tendency is often brought on, I suppose, by a lack of awareness of the harm faced by the child. Politics feeds and depends upon an ignorance of the costs of its undertakings, a lack of awareness that government schools, the media, and other statist voices have no interest in helping people to overcome. If we were able to comprehend the consequences implicit in our present action, we would be less inclined to act without assessing the costs of our doing so.
If your child wished to participate in military action that others portray as "heroic" -- an image reinforced by movies starring the likes of John Wayne (who had the good judgment to remain out of World War II!) -- your sense of parental love and responsibility might dictate your taking him or her to visit a veterans hospital or cemetery to see the costs others have borne.
I disagree with those who do not want to see military caskets or the bodies of dead children shown on television. The sociopaths who tune in to Faux News in order to tune out to reality should -- along with other defenders of the war system -- be provided a steady showing of decapitated children, or bodies blown apart by cluster bombs. Likewise, parents whose children are of military age and inclination should be shown photographs of soldiers blown into many pieces by an artillery shell. The purpose of making such pictures available is not to gratify perverted tastes, but to give everyone a demonstration of the real costs of warfare.
There is no such thing as
There is no such thing as objective reporting. Every news program and every journalist has a bias. Many of their biases are so widely shared that nobody notices them, but they are still biases. The camera only points where it points and the reporter only hears what he hears. Even if the images are real and the writing reflects the experience, it is only a partial image, from a limited, hence subjective, perspective.
Some people may see the future benefit to some of the U.S. government's wars. If the war killed my son or daughter, however, no benefit that came out of it would be worth a damn. If it turned my family into refugees, no benefit that came out of it would be worth a damn. Selfish? Yes. Hell, yes!
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I agree but ....
Look, I agree that we should see military caskets or the bodies of dead children shown on television. The problem that I have is that some in the news media DO have a bias against the war and will ONLY show the bad side of things. They do this to serve their own agenda. These images should be shown, but the images of good things we are doing over there and of the people that are happy we are there (and there are many of them too) should be given equal air time.
However, way too often I see only some programs that obviously have an anti-war bias only show the negative. In this specific context, then this is wrong as it is not meant to inform but to influence. What I am writing is very objective and if you disagree then you are being intelectually dishonest.
I agree, as you stated, that people need to know the real costs of warfare, but they need to know the benefits too.
If in 10-15 years democracies are prevelant in the middle east and these countries are our allies instead of enemies, a lot of poepl are going to have to eat crow for their short-sightedness. Japan and Germany were not our allies in WWII, and it did not take 3-5 years to convert them either.
President Bush is doing what he thinks needs to be done to make us safe. Going at the root cause is long-term and there are prices to pay, but ultimately changing the dictatorial and extremist regimes that control those countries and support and promote extremeist groups is the only thing that is going to make a long-term and meaningful impact.
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