War Crimes
I have posted an essay at The American Liberalism Project which begins to address the problem of a corrupt and unprofessional press in America. Clearly the only organization that did their due diligence in the run-up to the Iraq War was the Knight-Ridder organization (purchased by McClatchy Newspapers) since that time. Taking off from an article in Smirking Chimp by Danny Schechter, I am becoming more and more convinced that it is folly to believe that the media can self-regulate any better than the banking or insurance or stock markets can. They can’t, and they need to have their real feet held to a real fire, especially when war is concerned.
War is the ultimate sanction one people can exert against another. We have lots of euphemisms for getting us into the state of war, but basically war is a people-to-people exercise in which, typically, the process of diminishing the humanity of the other side begins almost immediately and does not end until hostilities are over. You get expressions like gook, hun, slope, raghead, haji, and various other epithets thrown around that reduce the opponent to a sub-human category, one that is easy to kill. And kill we do! The high estimates from Iraq are that about a million Iraqis have died since the invasion, some by direct fire, some by mistake, some for the lack of care, some by starvation, and others by the hand of their own countrymen. The point is that war kills and it kills the human spirit and anesthetizes it to reason, compassion, and logic.
Propaganda that drives a country to war is deliberate falsehood, spin, and mendacity. It is worse than libel for the result is death for large numbers of people. I am more and more convinced that the American media are complicit in the deaths of our own soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. I think we should do something about it as a people and as a political party.
JB