If you want to understand how America chooses (and funds) its allies in a conflict, it helps to understand what America's own values look like in a conflict.
We have. Thank you for the necessary reminder. During the Vietnam era, media images of atrocities committed against the Vietnamese helped turn public opinion against the war. Today, no amount of photos of murdered children seems to penetrate our self-obsession. Strategies for today?
Maybe it's not a problem that's solved with what's become war porn at all. In 2024, do we really need to shock people into common sense or use visual aids to guide them to the basic, threshold level of decency toward other human beings? Assuming a different approach is needed 50+ years later, I might focus less on depicting how the "others" are adversely impacted and focus more on how we - citizens who have access to the corridors of power and influence - are personally impacted in adverse ways when America projects force, directly or through proxies, that shatter innocent lives half-way around the world. What's the moral stain that we bear by our silence and what happens when we carry that?
Columbine and a fierce bombing campaign on the Balkan peninsula occurred on the same day - which is not to argue there was any causation - but I do believe that government-sanctioned and government-delivered violence give license to citizen violence. If the government that acts in our name can slaughter people with bombs and electric chairs, can we expect that the citizens of that government will exercise restraint and not engage in violence directly by their own hand. If it's being done in their name, some number of those people are going to carry out that behavior on their own terms...which is to say that we pay a heavy price when we abide the violence committed by our government. The carnage abroad is, in my estimation, the engine that drives the violence we experience at home. We are stakeholders in the military escapades of the U.S. government. Our own children and families suffer from the adventurism and, if we could only see that more clearly, I think the people would react accordingly.
That is a profound argument. In addition to advancing that essential line of thought (in this time when thought may be dismissed as "elitist" and truth may be received with hostility) I think we also need to continue to dwell on the timeless injustice of the slaughter of innocents--as the student protesters are doing. It's driving the right crazy, though of course they're also capitalizing on it. If we refuse to accept their cynical spin that protest equals chaos, there's potential for reaching the consciences of some. In the Vietnam era, Americans were moved to different extents by the suffering of the Vietnamese, by the U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags, by shame at the role of our country, etc. Different reasons for rejecting the war eventually turned the tide. "Eventually," of course, will be too late for many Palestinians.
We have. Thank you for the necessary reminder. During the Vietnam era, media images of atrocities committed against the Vietnamese helped turn public opinion against the war. Today, no amount of photos of murdered children seems to penetrate our self-obsession. Strategies for today?
Maybe it's not a problem that's solved with what's become war porn at all. In 2024, do we really need to shock people into common sense or use visual aids to guide them to the basic, threshold level of decency toward other human beings? Assuming a different approach is needed 50+ years later, I might focus less on depicting how the "others" are adversely impacted and focus more on how we - citizens who have access to the corridors of power and influence - are personally impacted in adverse ways when America projects force, directly or through proxies, that shatter innocent lives half-way around the world. What's the moral stain that we bear by our silence and what happens when we carry that?
Columbine and a fierce bombing campaign on the Balkan peninsula occurred on the same day - which is not to argue there was any causation - but I do believe that government-sanctioned and government-delivered violence give license to citizen violence. If the government that acts in our name can slaughter people with bombs and electric chairs, can we expect that the citizens of that government will exercise restraint and not engage in violence directly by their own hand. If it's being done in their name, some number of those people are going to carry out that behavior on their own terms...which is to say that we pay a heavy price when we abide the violence committed by our government. The carnage abroad is, in my estimation, the engine that drives the violence we experience at home. We are stakeholders in the military escapades of the U.S. government. Our own children and families suffer from the adventurism and, if we could only see that more clearly, I think the people would react accordingly.
That is a profound argument. In addition to advancing that essential line of thought (in this time when thought may be dismissed as "elitist" and truth may be received with hostility) I think we also need to continue to dwell on the timeless injustice of the slaughter of innocents--as the student protesters are doing. It's driving the right crazy, though of course they're also capitalizing on it. If we refuse to accept their cynical spin that protest equals chaos, there's potential for reaching the consciences of some. In the Vietnam era, Americans were moved to different extents by the suffering of the Vietnamese, by the U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags, by shame at the role of our country, etc. Different reasons for rejecting the war eventually turned the tide. "Eventually," of course, will be too late for many Palestinians.