The Unreality of War

PM,
interesting article. I`ve been discussing this very thing amongst friends of mine, and some of us believe that too much is being shown on television (and then there`s ammi who comments on how we`re not being told everything--`ello!! this is the media afterall). but definitely, whether this is seen by some as infotainment, or by myself as just too much to deal with, I would definitely consider the merits of regulation. When the parents of some of the soldiers themselves are talking about how scary it is to watch and hear about their children in a particular division, one`s got to wonder...
regards,
ana

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Ras,
The adolscent in question is not particularly mentally chanllenged in any way I know of. In fact, he`s way above average intelligence AND generally quite socially concerned, as mentioned above.
rgds,
PM

PM,
has someone explained to the young lad what those ``zabardast

dhamake`` really mean?

Ras

PM,

Yes, the fictive and ``Hollywoodization`` of our media presentation of this war is disturbing in itself. It effects a kind of consumption of violence/violence as entertainment spectacle as Hobbes wrote. This in itself should be enough to set our alarms off-what kinds of mythologies do we knowingly participate in: the ``white trash`` hero trope for Hollywood star (Eminem in Eight Miles), the American soldier sent off to fight in a hostile country of color (Black Hawk Down), etc? If mythologies can be powerful metaphors of a country`s desires and self knowledge, isnt what we are witnessing on primetime what mythologies become if become tangled in our own lies-an inability to distinguish from fact or fiction, AND know what it is like to experience the realities that 2/3s of our world experiences on a daily basis? Complicate this condition with the responses we are being trained to have by our media-patriotism, bloodlust by proxy, simplistic moral conceptions of the institutions in our lives? Last night, after the BBC and some US news was forced to broadcast images of Iraqi people who were mourning the deaths of their loved ones, Fox shockjocks reminded us of the debt Europe owes us ``for saving`` them from Hitler, Mussolini and Tito. Pavlovian.

As I sat writing the previous posts, Oprah was on. Her guests were a whole battalion (or whatever) of faujis. She homours them for their bravery blah blah blah, and then, (I thought I heard a drumroll- or was that just her tone of voice?) she announces, to that Kodak has donated a digital camera for each of the servicemen to record their momentous undertaking. Uproarious cheers follow! ...close-up of camera box... wide smiles all around... Ms Winfrey goes ``yeeeah``, punching the air... backgorund music loudens....cut to commercial break.

Is THIS for real?!? Denial as a sort of coping mechanism, maybe? Or just old-fashioned arrogance of ignorance?

so much for `liberation` --

did we ask the Iraqis if they wantted to be `liberated` by the Texas Oil -- before sending our precious American boys to die for the PDERSONAL agenda of this Juvenile `president` -- ``he tried to kill MY daddy``.

the difference between the Guf war I and Gulf war II --

in Gulf I -- the Iraqis were the agressors -- in Gulf II -- WE ARE THE AGRESSORS -- and Iraqis are DEFENDING their homes and their children -- nothing surprising about that.


Hostile Reception by Iraqis Surprising Some Troops

By Thomas Frank
Staff Correspondent
Newsday)

March 29, 2003
Central Iraq -- Many soldiers who have pressed deep into Iraq are surprised at the opposition they have encountered and disturbed at the number of Iraqis who are not welcoming U.S. forces as their liberators, but fighting them as invaders.

The hostility has come in widely reported battles, such as the surprisingly lethal attack on marines in the southern Iraqi city of An Nasiriyah, and in obscure encounters. Thursday, an unseen gunman fired at a convoy of Army attack helicopters in central Iraq on a non-combat repositioning flight.

``I honestly don`t think the Iraqi public wants us here,`` said Chief Warrant Officer Sean McNeal, 33, whose Apache helicopter was nearly hit by rifle fire as he flew over a tiny desert outpost of a few homes. The shots forced the convoy to alter its route to avoid any developed area and led McNeal to conclude ``these people are not going to give up as easily as everyone expects. They`re going to fight.``

The encounters, often with attackers in civilian clothing, have confounded soldiers who said military commanders had told them to expect Iraqi public support and a quick campaign.

Chief Warrant Officer Jesse Oliver said yesterday that before the invasion, an army general told him and other soldiers they would need ``five days of hard fighting.`` Oliver added, ``it`s already taken longer.``.......

Not all soldiers are surprised at Iraqi reaction. ``We are invading their country,`` said Chief Warrant Officer Glen Woodard, 37. ``I`d be by my window with a shotgun, too.``(Newsday)

Samina, Hobbes,

Interesting thoughts. Without wishing to make this too much of an academic affair (that just seems inappropriate at this time and place, sorry), allow me to say that both alienation as well as primal bloodlust play a part in our uncomfortable fascination with violence. Who among us has not longed for or dreamt of something untoward happening merely to shock/shake us out of our existential comas. To this extent, I think many of us do wish, at some level, for more televised gore. Hopefully, this lust will be tempered, as Samina points out, by spriritual, emotional, intellectual mediations.

However, I`m not as convinced as I once was in the alienation-by-modernity/mechinization theory as an explanation for this fascination, for were it true you`d expect to find less, not more, blood and gore in the Urdu dailies and tabloids than in the English ones, given the respective readership-- and even allowing for stylistic and `political` restrictions.

My chief concern in this piece is not so much the `voyeuristic` side of the affair. Whatever its degree and origins, I think it still leaves enough space for thought, reflection and decision. It is the glamourization of the event --perhaps even complete with blood and gore-- and the (resultant?) indistinguishability between reality and fiction (in this case, paplable suffering and filmic suspended disblief) that I sought to address. The latter aspect has some pretty sinister implications, if you think about its potential as a manipulative tool.

Admittedly, I`m a little confused myself. Thanks again for the valuable input.

re. #1,
Urstruly, the casualty figures of the Dresden levelling are, I am almost relieved to say :), quite shocking!
What about Berlin? And London? (ok.. i``m being lazy here, I admit)

Hobbes,

Certainly we live with the reality of disconnection in many aspects of our lives; from the languages, customs, systems of interaction and belief that disappear daily, the mythologies each country invents, erases, reinvents for themselves, our forced or self directed movements towards places that are new or that will help us``progress``.

Arguably, alienation is a human condition as accute as any other. Are/were we never alienated from something, or have we not understood the loss of an idea, a feeling, an experience or reality? I don`t think so.

But I do agree with your last point-the experience of modernity that some of us live has forced us into participation of violence of proxy-the spectacle without the tangible brutality of it. A participation that is presented like a video game or as Patrick pointed out, a Hollywood movie- a constructed and imaginary fairytale.

We need to be fed this fairy tale because otherwise we would be awake to the the reality of this violence by proxy.

And I`d like to point out that people who understand the many deliverances of violence-tuition cuts, lack of adequate educations, disenfranchisement of political voice, the dehumanization of living in circumstances umameliorated by social services-are most likely less sanguine about the US`s campaign-media packaging and all.

It`s ``infotainment`` amigo - If it`s on TV, it cannot be without ``entertainment`` value, perhaps not entirely, but ceratinly it cannot be far in the minds of producrs and advertisers. It`s dangerous and unhealthy.

Samina

Is it our bloodlust? or is it that our lives no longer seem to us to the the stuff of our dreams, our ambitions. It`s almost as if an ``alienation`` from the struggle to to live, to be the persons we imagine ourselves to be, to realize that person.

Locked up in our homes, gaurding our privacy, locked in our cars, in our offices, in our jobs, constrained by our imperatives of securing ourselves and our progeny - where is it that the person we imagine ourselves ot be even has the slightest chance to imagine being, existing, experiencing, fulfilling.

We were once ``real``, we knew of death, we knew of brutality, not just intellectually, but emotionally, we experienced it, survived it, we were alive in it.

There is a French theorist who has written that for the modern age, there is something subconsciously satisfying about watching a car crash, in other words, each of us has a primal instinct that responds to violence. Whether our impulses are conditioned by biochemistry (the body going into chemical overdrive upon the stimulation of fear, excitement). Hence, ``rubbernecking`` (cars that slow down as they pass a car crash to look at the car, the inhabitants, the damage), or the why our media, as Micheal Moore so memorably pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, the emphasis on blue collar crime and not white collar crime, etc.

And yet, most of us understand that our primal bloodlust is mediated/informed by the intellectual, spiritual and emotional consciousness that for the all the spectacle, an entity is assaulted, that there is something MORALLY wrong in violence. This struggle between violence and non violence is probably one of the most basic paradoxes of humanity.

And yet we are witnessing the interpreting, excusing and SANITIZING of violence against a people who are already in danger of humanitarian crisis, by institutions who have fed us spectacle night after night. I dare our media to broadcast the full time period of the most intensive US strikes-explosions, disturbing sounds and destruction from start to finish.

Last night, the BBC broadcast images of Iraqi people-women, men and children demented with pain and grief after the bombing of a civillian marketplace. For every godforsaken ``glorious`` explosion- I dare our media to show the truth-how the human beings who are being bombed- are surviving this.

This is pathology.

Haunting Thoughts After a Battle
By STEVEN LEE MYERS


ITH THE THIRD INFANTRY DIVISION, in central Iraq, March 28 — It troubles him, now that the battle is over. Sgt. Mark N. Redmond remembers shouting ``qiff,`` Arabic for halt, but they did not halt. The Iraqi fighters just kept coming.

Sergeant Redmond`s unit spent three days and nights fighting for the bridge at Kifl, a village on the Euphrates River about 75 miles south of Baghdad. By any military definition — the territory seized, the number of enemy killed, the mission accomplished — the unit`s fight ended in victory. After victory, though, comes rest. And with rest comes reflection.

``I mean, I have my wife and kids to go back home to,`` he said, sitting atop a box of rations back at his base camp, whiling away a lull as unexpected as it was appreciated.

``I don`t want them to think I`m a killer.`` (NYT)
________________________________________

no soldier -- you are NOT a killer -- our president is -- He is the Supreme KILLER --

you are just obeying the orders -- as the Germans did.

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Patrick!

...will comment on this later...am out for the moment...btw...go get some life insurance;)

...t