Now, after I’m done criticizing him, I think John Aravosis brings up a really critical point:
Does the edited and sanitized coverage of news by American media give us a warped view of war? Would Americans react differently if we saw “graphic and horrific pictures,” not only in Lebanon, but in Iraq? The U.S. government won’t even show pictures of the caskets of the soldiers who died for their country.
Imagine if we had to face a daily barrage of death and destruction. Would Americans become immune or would they begin to realize the horrors of war?
In 2003, I think to a lot of people war was like a video game. As one wag put it in the first Gulf War, “I love the war. It’s my favorite TV show.” Michael Moore was criticized for putting real and disturbing (if de-contextualized) war footage in Fahrenheit 9/11.
We need to see those images. Otherwise it’s just too easy to rationalize war into a series of metaphors and maps and slogans and tools. In war, human beings are burned, pierced, crushed, and dismembered. No one wants to think about that
This is the central role of war journalism: to show the people involved as people. The question of desensitization (or indeed of fomenting even greater blood-lust) is real, but to my mind the risk of shielding us from the physical reality of war is even greater. In a democracy, one can’t expect the public to make informed decisions when such basic, fundamental human experience is hidden.
The realities of war should not be scrubbed from the front pages and daily broadcasts of our news. The death and maiming that results from war are part and parcel of military action and should never be separated from the action itself. These are the costs our society bears. Only by a relative comparison can a society decide whether the lives of its sons and daughters are worth the sacrifice.
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As I said in a previous comment on this site, being a soldier is public business. Dying as a soldier is public business, as well. All military members know this to be the case, so the privacy issue the Republicans constantly raise is purely a cynical attempt to sanitize what they intuitively know would prejudice public opinion.
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I firmly believe if the American public saw, up close and personal, in living color, what war is, they would be more thoughtful and responsible in supporting the use of military force.
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The Republicans have managed to fetishize the military in ways that corrupt and distort what our military is for and what it does, and the American public, duly anesthetized, has no real compunction to object.
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Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning explores in graphic detail the opiate that is war for those whose lives, through extended experience, are informed by conflict and violence. Highly recommended.