Anthony Freda
Why is it that the mainstream media will only show us dead babies whose murders they can blame on regimes that the US wants to bomb, invade or overthrow?
The US has been killing kids all over the world for 14 years.
There are numerous, alternative places online you can easily find this gruesome evidence of US war crimes, yet they never seem to make it to mainstream channels.
Have you seen one picture of these innocent victims in the corporate press?
Have you seen one image of the tens of thousands of kids killed as a result of the US invasion of Iraq promoted by the controlled cable tv news?
Have you seen one photo of the kids killed by US aggression in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, or Somalia appear in a war justifying, mainstream newspaper?
I doubt it.
In 1972, a shocking photo of a girl who was a victim of a napalm bombing raid on Trang Bang, Vietnam appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
The Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of Kim Phuc by AP photographer Nick Ut proved to be very effective in exposing the true horror and immorality of the Vietnam War, and helped turn public sentiment
against US aggression in the country. Would such a picture make it’s way to this powerful platform in today’s landscape of state and corporate sponsored media?
I doubt it. ( Remember, The New York Times helped promote the lies that took us to war in Iraq.)
Publishing such emotionally charged, shocking images can be used to help end a war, but much more frequently, they are used to demonize an enemy and provide pretexts for a new war on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.
We never see the results of US inflicted carnage, because a major function of the war-promoting media is to remove all guilt and moral responsibility for our country’s actions and affix
blame and evil elsewhere.
The excuse for putting these visual documents of war into memory holes often is that the images are
‘too provocative’, yet the same media outlets enthusiastically put clips of bad guys chopping off heads into heavy rotation.
The response to images like the dead Syrian boy on the beach shows that there Is a real human instinct for universal compassion.
As difficult as they are to look at, we need to face them head on.
Not to desensitize us to the horrors of war, but to confront our own complicity in them.