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.