Real War /Faux War
October 3, 2007 by demon princess
Like most Americans, I suspect, I’ve been riveted by the PBS 7-part series on WWII, told from the ground up (by the real people who experienced it) , and with benefit of newly unearthed contemporaneous video footage (some in color) & stills. It’s been nothing short of astounding, in my opinion.
I fervently hope that Bush & Cheney have been watching, too, since neither of them seem have personally experienced war, & seem not to understand the first thing about the reality of it.
As I’ve often said in my blog, it’s painfully obvious to me that Bush’s glorious & never-ending, overhyped war on Terror, that he so likes to compare favorably to World Wars I & II, in rhetoric anyway (”they hate us for our freedoms!”) is, in actuality, a tempest in a teapot compared to those conflicts, and anybody who’s been watching the series is sure to get that point, too.
George’s bungled war on Iraq, & Cheney’s upcoming strikes on Iran are less about people “hating us for our freedoms” than hating us for manipulating & overthrowing their governments with impugnity & trying to control their resources for our benefit. There’s nothing very heroic in that.
Are Bush & Cheney watching? I seriously doubt it. But if they were, they’d perhaps learn something from history, such as:
1. War is hell, & takes an abominable toll on those forced to fight it. It’s not a matter to be declared lightly on bogus & trumped-up “evidence” .
2. Germany’s concentration camps & gas chambers were filled with not only with the ethnically demonized but homosexuals as well. Here in America, we allowed hysteria & fear to get the best of us when we put innocent American cititizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps.
Today, Republicans openly demonize non-hetereosexual lifestyles with federal marriage amendments & state governments argue over whether to “grant” basic human rights to gays. Torture gulags here & abroad have been revived, & indefinite detention without charges, & no hope of ever being freed, awaits any loose Muslim man Americans opt to treat with suspicion rather than tolerance.
3. Everything old is new again–but this time, with a difference. This time it’s a cynical stunt engineered for extreme partisan ends to provide a justification for suspension of civil liberties at home & the demonization of those who stand between us & “our” oil.
Submitted, that if we had leaders who truly understood the causes & costs of war, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.
http://www.pbs.org/thewar/about_making_the_war.htm
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well said, miss demon. i would hate to see war time military service as a prerequisite for becoming commander in chief, but there should, at minimum, be some legitimate means of testing these potential “leaders” for evidence of what we’ve seen in this administration. it’s an excellent series. thanks for writing about it.