Memorial Day for Real People

Posted on May 31, 2006 in Festivals Journalists & Pundits

Here are part of the thoughts written by Norman Solomon for Memorial Day:

We remember that onslaughts of media spin followed by exuberant coverage of high-tech U.S. air attacks can shift public sentiment drastically almost overnight. That’s why opponents of reckless and deadly policies should draw little comfort from the Pew Research Center’s mid-May report that at the moment “the American public strongly prefers non-military approaches to dealing with Iran’s nuclear technology program,” with just 30 percent in favor of “bombing military targets in Iran.”

We remember that, no matter how much glorious rhetoric and how many chronic euphemisms are brought to bear on public opinion, most of war’s victims are not — by any definition — combatants or enemies. As New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent, has pointed out, “In the wars of the 1990s civilian deaths constituted between 75 and 90 percent of all war deaths.”

We remember that, although it received scant and fleeting U.S. media coverage when released by the Lancet medical journal in late October 2004, a study using sample-survey techniques found that about 100,000 Iraqi deaths had occurred over an 18-month period as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq — and, according to the study’s data, more than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes.

We remember that it’s easy for hot-dogging pundits to sit in TV studios or in newsrooms to cheer on the use of cutting-edge technology by the Pentagon. Those pundits leave it to others to bury the dead and to deal with the anguish of losing relatives and friends.

Honor humanity, not the bombs, not the money.