A Beautiful, Critical Mind

Posted on March 28, 2003 in War

Here are a few reasons why I distrust reports of atrocities or even information about the progress of a war that originate from government sources or the US mainstream media:

• During the First Gulf War, a pilot crashed in Iraq. News agencies quickly posted his picture to the front pages, claiming that his bruised and battered face was due to his having been beaten by the Iraqis. After the war, when he was returned, he confirmed the Iraqi story: the bruises were the result of being badly tossed around when his airplane crashed.
  
  
  
• The oft-quoted cry of the air force colonel who screamed at the members of a press conference: “Why do you keep calling it ‘bombing’? It’s not bombing, dammit. It’s air support. Air support, dammit!” He got a Double Talk Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for that one.
  
  
  
• During the Vietnam War, the enemy death count was routinely inflated astronomically for the evening news. By 1969, every last person in South and North Vietnam should have been dead according to these figures. The whole intention was to suggest that we were “winning the war in Southeast Asia” when it was a stalemate at best.
  
  
  
• While the Panama Invasion was underway, we were told that it was a clean campaign with virtually no casualties. After the week long adventure, it came out that 3,000 Panamanian civilians died when the US shelled a neighborhood where it was believed Noriega was hiding out.
  
  
  
• Medical students at the University of St. George were allegedly the key reason why we invaded Grenada. They reported afterwards that they received knocks on their doors by Grenadan soldiers who said “Keep your heads down. The Americans are invading and we don’t want you hurt.”
  
  
  
• The Right routinely spreads false stories about their political opponents, such as the one about Jane Fonda torturing prisoners when she visited the Hanoi Hilton or the one about her shooting down an American B-52. They now control the White House and the Media. Be afraid, be very afraid.
  
  
  
• The Lusitania, it turns out, was carrying munitions when it was torpedoed. It was not, therefore, a neutral ship. Nor did the cargo help the passengers who died when it exploded. German consul officials in NYC warned that this would happen when the ship set out. “Don’t sail on the Lusitania,” the ads said. “There are bombs aboard and we’re going to sink it.”
  
  
  
• Official American casualty figures for civilian deaths at Nagasaki and Hiroshima are a fraction of what others estimate for these holocausts.
  
  
  
• In the film Hearts and Minds, an American officer is shown saying that “the Vietnamese don’t think of death in the same way we do”. The next scene showed a girl crying over a dead family member. Today, apologists say that Muslims don’t think of death in the same way we do.
  
  
  
• One night when I was in Osijek, Croatia, I heard a loud explosion. This wasn’t a shell: those shriek as they come in and there was no shriek. In the morning, the word on the street was that soldiers had dynamited a Serb’s house. (A common happening in both Osijek and Zagreb.) When I got back to Zagreb, people asked me about the “shelling” that the government radio declared to be the source of the noise.
  
  
  
• The source for the Kuwaiti incubator story turned out to be a Madison Avenue PR firm.
  
  
  
• The United States received plenty of reports about the Nazi extermination camps, but it chose not to believe them. It even bombed a few.
  
  
  
• Herbert Hoover investigated allegations of war atrocities against Belgian civilians by German soldiers during World War 1. Not a single one could be confirmed. They were entirely the work of British and French military propagandists.

Fortunately today we have nongovernmental agencies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. War fans don’t like these organizations for the simple reason that they are unbiased, neutral, and apply a single standard to all participants in the war. “They make the United States look bad” is the whine of apologists. To which the response must be like that of Picasso when the Nazis came to his studio and asked him if it was true that he’d painted Guernica. “No,” Picasso snapped. “You did.”