A_Wanderer said:
Isn't it, to advocate war is to be advocating the killing of innocent people.
Ah, but in the spirit of postmodernism, are they really "people" if you never have to see them? Would all the pro-war "armchair generals" be so fervently in favor of the war if they were forced to humanize the conflict?
"War," to those of us not in Iraq, is nothing but a simulacrum. In the most literal sense, we support--or condemn--the war based on what we are selectively told and what we are selectively permitted to see on television.
But, for the record, "dehumanization" is not solely an American phenomenon. With Arab television, the roles are just switched. With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, American television will tell you the name and sometimes a picture of the Israelis killed. The Palestinians are merely given a number--i.e., "20 killed in retaliation" or something. The opposite is true for the Arab world. Killed Palestinians are given a human name and face, whereas Israeli fatalities are merely a number.
When the Bush Administration, rather naively, complained about Al-Jazeera's media bias, they neglected to realize that American media was guilty of the same, if opposite, bias. News, for better or for worse, tells stories just as much as Hollywood. It just happens to be very entertaining to frame everything in a "good versus evil" doomsday scenario. Life, of course, is not that simple.
Melon