War’s Daughters

45 Responses to “War’s Daughters”

1. Ryan Says:
   January 20th, 2005 at 11:24 pm

   One’s screaming in empty primal terror, the other’s just empty…

   That juxtaposition is a bit too hard to see…

2. bruce in oz Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 4:17 am

   “….ask not what you can do for your country, ask what my country can do for me…”
   Jenna or not-Jenna…Coronation Day, 2005

   peace

3. Republicus Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 8:02 am

   I see the old Soviet propaganda machine is still hard at work.

4. nax Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 8:22 am

   So do I. But I think we are looking in different directions.

5. Iron Fist, LGF Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 8:58 am

   As I posted on Little Green Footballs, this is what really matters. Please feel free to use this quote (with my name) everywhere for the inspiration:

   #90 Iron Fist 1/20/2005 09:32AM PST
   Fire and Force, Fist and Faith, let our friends draw strength from us, and our enemies tremble.
   I think they are about to find out what an angry America is really capable of.

6. iron fist flaccid penis Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 9:07 am

   getting drunk and terrorizing children. we should be proud.

7. prozacula Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 9:10 am

   Iron Fist seems like a real great guy. I bet Jesus would share his views, too.

   When Jesus said ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’, I can only assume he was talking about guns, not actually people who make peace.

   Also, how can people take themselves seriously when they spend time reading something called little green footballs? Right off the bat, the name doesn’t exactly lend itself to serious discourse.

8. Liberal Kansas Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 9:28 am

   Hey Iron Fist LGF,

   Seems a shame just to kill the little girl. Why don’t you rape her first?

9. Diana Says:
   January 21st, 2005 at 10:05 am

   >>Fire and Force, Fist and Faith, let our friends draw strength from us, and our enemies tremble.<<

   Bejus! Sounds like a Jim Jones follower before the Kool-aid finished ‘im off.

10. Jack K. Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 10:15 am

    …since when did little girls become our enemies? I sure missed that memo somehow…

    …it is edifying to learn, however, that exposure to one of the real - but seldom-seen - costs of war is “Soviet Propaganda”. Maybe if I switch to cheaper whiskey so I can afford to settle in for an extended bout of hard drinking, I too can become that smart…

11. herkimer Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 11:35 am

    http://www.lowculture.com/archives/2005/01/aiiiiiiieeeeeee_1.html

    http://www.lowculture.com/archives/2004/10/fine_daddy_ill.html

12. Kevin Hayden Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 11:44 am

    The Mr. can fist irons all he wants, if the iron’s a consenting ore, but I don’t recall when the majority of iraqis were ever our enemies, not even now.

    So it must be that our friends can draw nothing from us except the conclusion that we are a nation of sheep ready to follow any sociopath who tells us to kill anyone, friend, foe, nun, child.

    With friends like that, who needs enemas (except for those fisting iron, of course).

13. herkimer Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 11:44 am

    I thought these links from low culture were appropriate, but they didn’t show the first time. I’ll try it again.
    >aaaaaaaaiiiiieee

    fine, daddy

14. bruce33 Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 12:20 pm

    I feel as if I’m living in a non-stop Twilight Zone episode. The program won’t end and it keeps getting worse.

    My country is now unashamedly, nay, arrogantly, evil.

15. Republicus Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 6:25 pm

    So it must be that our friends can draw nothing from us except the conclusion that we are a nation of sheep ready to follow any sociopath who tells us to kill anyone, friend, foe, nun, child…

    Some of us might well have concluded that during the Kosovo conflict when Madeline Albright dropped a bomb on a Serbian tram and burned everyone inside to death.

16. Zeus55 Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 7:01 pm

    I will not sleep tonight. I was keenly aware that our government was “burning down the village to save it,” but why do children have to suffer? These innocent lambs deserve the chance to be carefree in their childhood years. George Bush and his Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight have once again shown the world that they are true barbarians. They MUST be stopped!

17. Kenneth Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 7:33 pm

    While all wars have civilian costs, I can’t help but marvel at the stark contrast between intervening with the rest of NATO to halt active genocide, and picking a fight with an impotent nation that poses no real threat.

    Yes, the US government is officially evil.

18. L. Pollard Says:
    January 21st, 2005 at 7:43 pm

    Yeah. About right.

    One is graced with over 200 years of republican democracy.

    The other is graced with over 20 months of imposed democracy.

    You can see the similarity, right?

    greyiago, this is partially directed at you. As you drive around Iraq, you can see that the bloodied daughters will eventually be the ones attending their parents’ inauguration as the new President of Iraq, right? It’s all worth it in the end.

    The end is worth the means, right all you war veterans? Right, all you occupiers? Right, all you freedom figters? Right, all you ECP soldiers? Right, all you patrollers? Right, all you convoy security people? Right, all you perimeter security folk? Right, all you…all you….all you….ALL OF YOU?

    THE BLOOD IS WORTH THE SACRIFICE, RIGHT?!?!?!

    FUCKING RIGHT?!?!??!!?

    FUCKING ANSWER ME!!!!!!

19. Republicus Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 10:02 am

    I can’t help but marvel at the stark contrast between intervening with the rest of NATO to halt active genocide, and picking a fight with an impotent nation that poses no real threat…

    You’re right. When the French and the Germans are with us, we can do no wrong.

20. shystee Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 12:09 pm

    Anything or anyone associated with Clinton’s Penis or France = Bad
    Jenna Bush = Hot
    Screaming Bloodied Iraqi Girl = Unfortunate, but necessary to maintain my sense of being a tough guy.

    -Rethuglicus

21. Yasonyacky Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 12:28 pm

    Some of us might well have concluded that during the Kosovo conflict when Madeline Albright dropped a bomb on a Serbian tram and burned everyone inside to death.

    Madeline Albright? A B-2 bomber pilot? Who knew???

22. bruce33 Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 12:49 pm

    Hey Republishit,
    Yeah, I know all about Al(half)bright. I know she told, iirc, Leslie Stahl that it was “worth it” to starve, impoverish and immiserate 500,000 Iraqi children to death. You know, some of us Americans actively opposed the gov’t’s sanctions on Iraq because we understood that they were delibertately imposed to prop up Saddam by weakening the Iraqi people. We’ve seen citizenry rise up all over the world and overthrow their (US-supported) dictators without our help, e.g. Phillipines, Iran, Romania, Indonesia, etc. Some of us Americans called Democrats could vote for Clinton, at least once, and then be active participatory citizens and oppose his administration’s stupidity, mendacity and cruelty. But all I see out of the vast majority of so-called “Republicans” and “conservatives” are a bunch of brown-shirted toadying brownnosers to their masters. Now I know how your shirts turn brown.

23. cereal breath Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 1:18 pm

    the biggest distinction between these two images is that the little girl will be able to wash the blood off her hands with soap and water, while the blood on jenna’s hands (and all those who support this war) does not come clean so easy.

24. Kevin Hayden Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 2:58 pm

    Republicus: change the subject all you want, but you’re still wrong:

    1) If Albright raped a nun, does it clear Bush’s soul for raping a nun?

    2) I’m not familiar with the example you cite or who was responsible. Show me some evidence that you didn’t make that up out of thin air.

    3) The Serbs were committing atrocities throughout. In Iraq, the only cited threat was Saddam. He was captured a year ago and the killing goes on anyway. Only against enemies WE CREATED.

    4) And again, you assume that anyone who opposes Bush’s war supported Clinton. Maybe in your world all your choices are partisan for one party and oppose to others, but that’s not how my world works. Bastard politicians of every stripe draw my censure, because anti-human politicos who harm life are my enemy, as much as any official criminal.

    I can be for America and for the promotion of life yet be a sworn enemy of any president who I feel is an enemy of this country or of humanity.

    So peddle your weenie justifications elsewhere. And hope your karma doesn’t bounce back to hurt your children, Mr. Pro Child Abuser.

25. thehim Says:
    January 22nd, 2005 at 9:05 pm

    I see the old Soviet propaganda machine is still hard at work.

    That would be the same Soviet Union that invaded Afghanistan and got stuck there fighting insurgents for 10 years as its economy fell apart? Or the same Soviet Union that limited freedom and democracy so that a small number of people became ungodly rich and didn’t have to live by the same strict rules as everyone else?

    How does it feel to be a mouthpiece? Personally, I recognize that people on both sides of the aisle can do their share of that, but if you can’t figure out which side is blowing more smoke up your ass right now, it’s probably because your head is blocking the entrance.

26. Republicus Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 6:30 am

    My goodness we have an angry, self-righteous bunch of folks here. Actually, I was looking for the photo juxtaposition you no doubt published years ago with Chelsea Clinton on the left and the Serbian collaterial damage child on the right. What’s that you say ? Check the Pravda archive ? Hey, thanks !

27. Republicus Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 6:31 am

    I’m not familiar with the example you cite or who was responsible…

    How soon they forget.

28. Republicus Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 6:58 am

    http://www.no-nukes.org/nukewatch/sp00inevitable.html

29. Mondo Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 9:27 am

    Iron Fist, you are a punk bitch. Why don’t we fight cuz I think youre nothing but a fuckin sissy who hides behind his keyboard

30. Mondo Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 9:34 am

    Isn’t it funny how they always claim Clinton. Look, Clinton was a poor excuse for a Democrat and Albright was dead wrong. We were lied to about the genocide in Bosnia the same way we were lied about the extent of Saddams genocide. The difference is we did not provide Mislovec the weapons, Saddam we did. So quit with the CLinton Cock talk. Its been 5 years. Take responsibility and quit blaming a guy who at the very best got us out of debt and could actually talk to people without cue cards and an earpeice.

31. jus' sayin' Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 1:19 pm

    Why do Republicans hate little children?

32. A Tabla Rasa Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 1:24 pm

    Odd how they scream “get over it” when it’s something the Democrats are upset about and yet they’re still going on about Clinton. As if “He did it too!” were an excuse for Bush, et al, to do something orders of magnitude worse. People died in Kosovo by American hands, and we were wrong then, but that’s no excuse for Bush doing the same thing in Iraq, let alone for the scale of destruction we’ve rained on Iraq. And, as Mondo said, we helped create and stabilize Saddam. We ignored his genocide and his behavior with his people when it suited us. They say that Saddam killed 300,000 people. Between the Gulf War, the effects of depleted uranium, the embargo, and the Iraq War we’re about tied with Saddam. America as you describe it is a farce, Republicus.

33. bruce33 Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 2:10 pm

    Republifuck,
    You said, “My goodness we have an angry, self-righteous bunch of folks here.” Angry, yes. Go back and read your own post for the self-righteousness, you stupid GOP lickspittle.

34. Morrigan S Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 5:41 pm

    This is why I will never support this president. It’s been years since Clinton was in office, and yet idiots like Republamoron try to use him as an excuse to justify something like this. There is no excuse. Here family did not have to die except for the sad fact that they were in the way of Shrub’s financial backers making a killing.

35. bruce33 Says:
    January 23rd, 2005 at 9:14 pm

    An open challenge to repusicus, iron wrist, el al.:

    Can you so-called “Americans” demonstrate that you’re not merely brown-nosing, up-sucking sycophants to your GOP masters by being critical of the Bushite administration’s policies concerning anything? That’s my difference from you and what makes me a real American and you guys/gals craven, toadying nazi-party wannabees. I can vote for a person or party and then still fight to hold them accountable to their promises or simple human decency, which the picture above demonstrates is beyond your ken.

    Oh, btw, contrasting Clinton with Bush: Clinton did a lot of bad things and probably deserves to be hanged by the neck until dead after his war crimes trial. However, he managed to do a helluva lot more good than anything the Bushistas have accomplished and Bush has committed evils at least a full order of magnitude beyond anything Clinton committed. Scale matters.

36. O'McSomething Says:
    January 24th, 2005 at 10:13 am

    Isn’t this where Lileks is supposed to juxtapose a picture of sweet Gnat with some poignant suffer-the-children prose? Guess not.

37. Mr Ed Says:
    January 24th, 2005 at 1:15 pm

    Bruce, you seem to have some anger issues. You may want to seek professional help.

38. Monolycus Says:
    January 24th, 2005 at 5:36 pm

    I don’t know where to begin. How does one find something to say to bridge the gap between a human being and someone who would spout partisan rhetoric when looking at these pictures side-by-side? I’d like to be witty and urbane, but I have no rejoinder to toss at someone who thinks that newly orphaned children are “Soviet propaganda” or evidence of America’s might… or even that it is all right because one’s old political bugbears might have done worse in the past. The reality hinted at in these pictures is bad enough, but some of the responses to them have made me even sicker.

39. Republicus Says:
    January 26th, 2005 at 12:44 pm

    It’s not the photo which is Soviet-like propaganda. One can look at that photo alone and draw one’s own conclusions. It’s the juxtaposition of the photos and the angry mindset that finds it informative or clever that reeks of untruth.
    Chelsea Clinton was pretty much off limits 92-98, so you didn’t see juxtapositions of her with dead Serbian children. Except in Pravda, maybe.

40. Freespeech Says:
    January 26th, 2005 at 12:46 pm

    It’s not the photo which is Soviet-like propaganda. One can look at that photo alone and draw one’s own conclusions. It’s the juxtaposition of the photos and the angry mindset that finds it informative or clever that reeks of untruth.
    Chelsea Clinton was pretty much off limits 92-98, so you didn’t see juxtapositions of her with dead Serbian children. Except in Pravda, maybe.

41. Lextlionis Says:
    January 26th, 2005 at 10:59 pm

    1)How many of you have actually seen soviet propoganda?
    2)How many of you have actually heard about what happened in bosnia from bosnian lips?
    3)How many of you believe the american propoganda machine in its stories of modern conflicts?
    4)How many of you have actually done the research to back up any of your statements? (reading one book by a guy who claims he did doesn’t count)
    5)How does bashing each other in a sophomoric display of testosterone further a conversation?

    I am willing to bet that 1,2, and 4 are incredibly low percentages, and that 3 is a really high number…

42. Monolycus Says:
    January 30th, 2005 at 6:37 am

    Republicus (or Freespeech, probably both), I am not angry as I write this. I am inexpressably sad. It is not an angry mindset which finds the photos together informative as nobody has actually articulated what that message is and yet we have all tacitly understood and responded to it. Nor do I recall Chelsea Clinton being a sacred cow from 1992-1998, and even if she were, it has has no bearing upon what is going on today or the message we are presented with here. Only an “angry mindset” would draw the conclusion that it does.

    Unfortunately, this particular brand of hypocrisy (viz. being or becoming the very thing one uses to justify their opposition to others) is an incredibly common thing these days and even has a psychological name: enantiodromia.

    Enantiodromia is the tendency of any phenomenon as it becomes more polarised to resemble its diametric opposite. Allow me to explain. The only nation in the world to use atomic weapons in anger upon a civilian population used the possession and intent to use weapons of mass destruction as a pretense for war. In the early days of the invasion of Iraq, Hussein was vilified as being a spendthrift playboy and his “pleasure mansions” were decried on the news. This same judgement was absent when mentioning that the US President, who threw himself a $US40 million dollar re-inaugural party was, days afterwards, asking Congress for an additional $US80 billion on top of the $US250 billion already spent waging a highly questionable war. Hussein’s violation of human rights are decried by the world’s second gravest violaters of human rights on the planet, and we have even committed some of our most aggregious offenses in the very prison (Abu Ghraib) where we objected to these practices (on paper). We have declared that we must “fight terrorism”, and in order to do so we have employed the technique of spreading terror both at home and abroad (that is, if a “terrorist” is someone who uses fear in a calculated attempt to achieve their aims, in which case the most recent US election was a terrorist bonanza). We can call ourselves “liberators” as much as we want and it does not change the fact that, to our victims, we are the greatest oppressors of all.

    I will articulate the inescapable conclusion to which a person who examines the facts without an angry mindset must inevitably reach. We are the “evildoers” and we are the terrorists. Our commitment to the principles of “freedom” (the very idea that a genuine democracy can be imposed upon people from without is a logical paradox!) is merely an ad miseriacordian rationale for our monstrous behaviours. The tacit message you attribute to an “angry mindset” rankles you because it points to a truth that no amount of misdirection and blame-shifting can justify.

    I am not a Republican nor am I a Democrat. I have no agenda except to re-evaluate the priorities of a people who have devalued human lives to the point that a four year old girl’s suffering is reduced in their minds to “collateral damage” or propaganda. To paraphrase Ivan Karamazov, if the price of freedom is the suffering of the innocents, that price is too high.

43. Lextlionis Says:
    January 30th, 2005 at 3:59 pm

    Mono: as I have said before…. if an individual wishes to wage war, itshould be done the right way… honorable combat in the arena… were our leaders forced to face the harsh realities of personal combat, they would be much more reluctant to wade in…

44. Monolycus Says:
    January 31st, 2005 at 1:47 pm

    Of course there is no ethical problem if two bedbugs want to kill one another with knives for their mutual satisfaction. There is only a minimum of ethical difficulty if the bloodthirsty want to fight and die on behalf of the bedbugs, even if they are brainwashed to believe they are doing something noble in the enterprise. What is ethically unacceptable and outrageous is that the innocents must suffer for the bedbugs… and even more outrageous are the bloodthirsty who DO NOT fight and die for the bedbugs, but endorse the suffering of the innocents with their excuses and rationales.

45. Lextlionis Says:
    January 31st, 2005 at 3:09 pm

    A good point… I find it odd how those children of senators that are enlisted… never find their way to the battle front… While I find the warmongers abhorent, I will say that if they were steadfast and not hypocritical about it, then their behavior would be something I disagree with. BUT the hypocrisy indicates an acute awareness of their actions… and that is unforgivable…