Showing the brutality of war on television is NOT ANTI-AMERICAN!

And it is not "anti-war." To show the brutality of war is to show the damn truth about war--that it is hell, that it is an act of fundamental insanity. There is nothing pro- or anti-war about showing the after-effects of napalm on human flesh, nothing pro- or anti- about showing pictures of dead women and children, and nothing pro- or anti- about showing what several hundred bombing missions can have on a city like Fallujah.

Perhaps it's been too long since Americans have seen war firsthand. It's been almost a century and a half since the Civil War was fought on US soil, and in that conflict hundreds of thousands of people died. Entire cities were reduced to ash. Farmland and animals were torched and slaughtered to bring about famine, and many innocent were no doubt killed. The war's effects lasted well into the 20th century, but that generation has been long dead and buried, the memories of that war reduced to little more than yellow pages and old pictures.

Maybe the problem really is that we've forgotten how bad war can be. We don't know the concept of war like people elsewhere in the world know war. There are still millions of people in Europe who knew the terror of occupation, slaughter, and relentless bombing coming from both sides in the war.

When we speak of war here in the US, we speak of war over there, but to the Germans, the French, the Poles, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, and countless other nationalities, war, in its rawest sense, means the destruction of their entire way of life. Their view of war is under the fire bombs of Dresden and under the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When they think of war, they think of the family members who died. They think of the misery of starvation and disease wrought by war. They think of all their childhood places reduced to smoldering piles of rubble. They think of war "on them" as opposed to "over there."

And those terms are rather important because it suggests two things: The ability to empathize and how one conceptualizes war. It has gotten to the point where war is portrayed as a video game in the US, but real war is anything but video games; it's about the consequences. There's nothing game-like at all about blood on the streets or blown up homes. It's real life, and what the news media does by whitewashing the war, reducing the names of the fallen to little more than scrolling messages at the bottom of the screen as the anchors talk about Natalie Holloway or something of little significance to the national agenda, is Orwellian.

Maybe if WW2 was as devastating to the US landmass as it was devastating to Europe or East Asia, if entire US cities were reduced to piles of burning rubble, if hundreds of thousands of square miles of countryside were ripped up and bombed and burned, if the countryside was scarred with miles of old trenches or dotted with white crosses noting those who died on that piece of land in battle like the fields of Normandy, France, if homes and small businesses and places of fond memory were swept away in the fires of war, maybe Americans would have been so affected by that experience that they would never have allowed the US to get mired in horrific conflicts like Viet Nam or current Iraq in the first place.

Because we wouldn't be conceptualizing war as a video game or something that is over there. We'd conceptualize war as a people once victims of war, and we'd have those fields of white crosses like the French do, those concentration camps turned museums like the Germans or Polish do, and those ground zeros like the Japanese do as harsh reminders of the toll of war.

Maybe, just maybe, we would have better recognized the face of corporatism as well and not have held the notion of "it can't happen here." For the uninitiated, "corporatism" and "fascism" mean the same thing.

If you truly loved the 1st Amendment, then you would realize that people may tell you things or show you things you may not want to hear or see, but if you choose not to hear what others may say, you will become separated from reality, from the truth, and a nation that does not respect the truth is a nation well on its way to abandoning any notion of freedom in the name of nationalism, in the name of patriotism, and it will be abandoned to the sound of boots marching.

made such a lasting impression on me. It was ugly and brutal and sad and it made me hate war.

I think it's such a disservice to the service people fighting 'over there' to regulate the war coverage to a scroll at the bottom of a screen or a 5 second going-to-commercial blip on the evening news. It makes it too easy for Americans to go about their daily lifes and push any awareness of the war to the far back of their minds. And how does that help the troops?

Thank you for the thoughtful post. Peace.

and CIA and corporate militias...

They see the dead and the tortured and the destroyed homes and hospitals and schools.

The corporations don't want you to know what war looks like so that the government can keep the next generation signing up to go defend freedom and liberty! Salute that flag! Shoot those people! Protect that oil!

:(

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I think you mean 'censoring' ... censure is what Feingold proposed. Impeachment, indictment, conviction, and imprisonment would be more like it, though.

:hi:

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That's my position. A society cannot make sensible judgments if it refuses to see reality for what it is.