The casualties of heathens don’t count
So the median number of dead Iraqis Americans assume is their death total, doesn’t yet exceed 10,000. Why am I not surprised?
In fact, in four years, their death total exceeds our losses in a dozen years of the Vietnam War. People are always humbled seeing 58,000 names on The Wall. But they never show as much compassion for the ‘enemy’. Even though, just as has been the case in both wars, neither country ever sent a single person our way to attack us. What kind of ‘enemy’ is that?
A government mandated enemy.
Hate them, because we say so.
Between 1 and 2 million Vietnamese died. And half of our country blames the antiwar half for not letting them kill even more.
It should be a war crime to make no official count of the casualties on both sides. Instead, keeping that quiet is part of the propaganda campaign. And frankly, most Americans don’t give a damn.
If we’re fighting them, they must be heathens. Sub-humans. Inferiors.
It reflects poorly on any claim to higher moral values. What the study doesn’t measure is whether Americans are less concerned than people in other societies. Is our society simply more violent?
That, I don’t know. I only know that I feel real emotional pain at all the lives wasted by greed, lies, incompetence and indifference. It makes me shun a society I can’t consider civil. It breeds my distrust of those who say they feel pride or numbness.
If there be subhumans, those are the characteristics I’d think define them. In our society and in any society. Both impede the advance of real civilization.
Maybe someday, there’ll be a cure for what afflicts those poor bastards. Then, like grownups, maybe we can figure out something more original than the repetitive failure that is war.
Half of the dead in Iraq are less than 16 years old. If that isn’t failure, I’d hate to hear the real definition.
