The War Prayer and the media

Yesterday I ran a photo of the hidden homecoming of American war dead to accompany Mark Twain's The War Prayer.

No one "wins" in war.

Samuel Clemens knew it back when he was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, and America was invading and decimating the Philippines in the name of God and the White Man's Mission, but in the cause of commerce and militarism.
Today I run a world-famous photo of the face of the victim of our last imperialist adventure. Do we still have an Anti-Imperialist League?
This little Iraqi boy lost both arms when an American bomb hit his home.
He lost his siblings and his pregnant mother to that bomb.
There wasn't enough of him left to crucify.
He was begging the nurses to kill him.

The American press ignored the story, I think they were hot about the Jessica Lynch puppet show at the time. The story and images ran in the press all over the world, but not here.

There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance going on in America.
If you simply understand that the American press is not giving you the story, or is giving you a jingoistic snow job for the purpose of propaganda, you can begin to see through the curtain.
We live in a Potemkin village. Stephen Colbert said it, and was cold-shouldered by the powers that be in the mainstream media. But he was right.

I refused to watch the televised war, and made a point to read media reports from indy media and the foreign press. You can too.

Today, I hear the interviewer on National Propaganda Radio (Rene Montaine?) ask the stupidest question (unless you think, like I do, that she is a poser) of the author of "Afghanistan Inc." Dismissing the corruption of contractors working in that country we destroyed, she said blithely, something like..."but don't you think the Afganis are pleased to have new roads and schools where they didn't have them before?"
Yeah, Rene, I'd bet if you lived for years in terror from chaotic wars, survived the decimation of your country, the loss of loved ones to the violence of war, and the spectre of only more Imperialist American meddling for the future of yourself and your generations to come... I bet you'd be thrilled to have corrupt contractors building you some new schools. Right.

So, Rene is obviously doing her masters' bidding, next time you hear her name, gauge her report accordingly.
Along the same lines, Juan Williams is the big guns for right wing political propaganda, and Andrea Seabrook is the Judith Miller of NPR.
The only good thing about NPR is that with it's pose of neutrality and good taste, it is more listenable that the blatantly right wing corporate media, and can be tolerated when you need to know how the spun stories are coming down.