Show Really All - or Nothing. Op-ed author Ryan Sager wants U.S. television to show the complete tape of the Nicholas Berg killing. He wants Americans to be brutalized by images of a man's beheading, and pretends that this would show Americans "the justness of their cause".
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I'll make a deal with him: yes, let's show the beheading, but only if we also show equally graphic footage of Iraqi men, women, children, and babies being killed by American bombs from planes too high to shoot down, and of Iraqi kids in the last minutes before they died from starvation because of our "sanctions".
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But we don't have up-close videotape of those crimes, do we? The only images we saw of this war were from a distance, just as the only images we saw of the last war were of video-game "violence", with Americans on tape whooping with delite as buildings were ripped apart when "smart bombs" exploded in them. We weren't ever to think that people were in those buildings and were also ripped apart - to whoops of delite from our heros.
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Even the most sinful of U.S. atrocities, the shooting in the back of some 5,000 Iraqis who were doing what we told them to do, leaving Kuwait, but were nonetheless butchered on the highway from the air by pilots who didn't see the faces of the men they slaughtered (well, you don't see the faces of people you shoot in the back, do you?), was never shown to us except in nonhuman terms: a long column of burned out jeeps and trucks, metal, not flesh. No blood, no agonized faces of the men murdered en masse by the good old USA. No, all the killing our side does is antiseptic, sanitized for your viewing pleasure.
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So, Mr. Sager, until and unless you find and display footage of the very-human beings murdered by the American military, no, I do not consent to unbalanced 'proofs' of the 'inhumanity' of one side in an inhuman conflict.
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Our butchers really are not one whit better than their butchers. Quite the contrary. They are fighting back against foreign invaders from a country they never attacked. We are not fighting back against invaders who attacked us for no reason and occupy our country against our will. We are the worse butchers for that, and for having killed hundreds of times as many of them as they have of us. Show it all, or show nothing. (Responsive to "Show It All", May 13, 2004 New York Post)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:04 PM