hypocrisy and lies

[winterbadger]

Contrast this BBC news article: Pentagon fury at war dead photos

with this

UK MOD website on Operation Telic casualties

including this photo

Apparently US casualties are a shame that needs to be hidden, instead of honoured warriors returning home after making the supreme sacrifice.

Comments

[ladyjillian.livejournal.com]

York is full of war memorials--for different wars, and for different people who'd participated in them (eg a memorial to York's railway workers who died in the Boer War). It's not like these kinds of memorials are unheard of in America--but here people continue to leave flowers and wreaths on them centuries later. And people remember--I told a story in a past LJ about how a charming old woman took me into a nearby church to see the memorial to the soldiers of the school that her father and uncles had attended. Corollary to the idea that the past is truly present here is that soldiers of past and current wars are present in people's minds and honored as a matter of course. Whatever I may think of the morality or appropriateness of wars or war in general, I have to admire the cultural solidarity and acknowledgement of one person's sacrifice to duty demonstrated in this photo.

[winterbadger]

One of the things Chris and I did in our last trip to Scotland was to visit all the regimental museums and monuments to the Highland regiments that we could, with a special focus on the Black Watch. The regiments have, at least in the past, always made a point of maintaining community connections, both in their "home" areas (where they recruited or where their depots were located) and wherever they travelled around the world. One of the interesting and wholly positive parts of one museum we visited (I think it was the Black Watch's in Perth) was the room that was mostly displays of all the certificates from towns and cities that have given the regiment the Freedom of the City, acknowledging the benefits that having the officers and men of the regiment stationed there had brought to the social and culutral life of the city.

Also very moving was the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle, a lasting and moving tribute to Scotland's casualties in the First World War and after. It's visited by thousands of people every year. The lists of names and tributes to all the regiments and services made me think of the (much smaller) lists in my college's chapel. I wonder if anyone even looks at them any more.

[kathygnome.livejournal.com]

One of the news outlets printed one of the photos. It was tasteful and patriotic.

I smell a guilty conscience on behalf of a few cabinet secretaries.

[silent-ic-river.livejournal.com]

As much as it boggles my brain, there is popular support for the war, currently. Once the photos of our war dead begin being published the tide will likely turn. Bush and the current administration cannot afford that, it will cost them the election. That's why people like us, the 'educated elite' are being slammed as reactionary liberals with no moral fiber.
The armed forces aren't hiding the coffins in shame, they are hiding them in fear. The push for reinstating the draft will never get any farther once the photos of the dead are published (at least I hope so). And to be clear, I agree that hiding our fallen is shameful.

[winterbadger]

I'm amused that the current bill (at least the one I'm aware of) for reinstating the draft (with no exemptions for college or CO status) was introduced by Charles Rangel and another fairly liberal legislator, with the intent of pointing up the fact that we're at war and men and women are dying, but our leaders, despite talking up their "war president" status and so on, are not askign the coutnry as a whole to take this seriously. The *nation* is not being asked to make sacrifices (they're even trying to delay asking for the funds--needed to pay troops who are being held over--until after the election). This is one of the few ways in which I think the war *is* like Vietnam (an analogy that doesn't always bear up in other ways): the president is trying to do it on the cheap, without mobilizing the nation and making it a national committment. Tax cuts, business as usual, no pictures of caskets. I doubt that he is doing what LBJ forced himself to do, and sign every letter going to relatives of those killed.