S11 - a diatribe

[thorfinn]

Let's start with some URLs, in vague order of seriousness:

• The Onion - Bush Won't Stop Asking


• The Onion - 9/11 Anniversary Infograph


• Flem Comics


• USA Today - Why Does Everybody Hate Us?


• September Hearts - Afghani Blood


• Los Angeles New Times - Enough Already!


• Afghani People in the Crosshairs


• Washington Post - War Without Evidence


• Washington Post - The Long and the Short of It


• People's Daily - US-British Warplanes Bomb Civil Airport in Northern Iraq


• AZ Central - US Jets Again Attack Iraqi Air Defenses

Now, if you can't be bothered reading all of the above... Let me summarise.

So, 3000 people died in New York on this day last year. US Civilians, for the most part. Due to a well executed attack from a known and declared enemy of the US. Today, there are several thousand "accidentally" dead Afghani civilians, due directly to US military action in Afghanistan. Fucking get over it already. There are much worse tragedies in the world, that go unmarked, uncelebrated, and unremembered, and not a small number are perpetrated as a direct result of US action.

Last week, depending on your source, US and British warplanes bombed the crap out of either a "civilian airport" or an "air defense" installation. So what if it's the latter, you say? Well, it's Iraqi fucking airspace those warplanes are violating there. Last I checked, there's no declared war. "Just 'cos we feel like it" is not a valid reason to go bombing someone else's country.

Get over it. September 11, 2001 was a small minor disaster. The whole world does not have to go into mourning. Fuck off, America.

Comments

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

I found this last year, when talking to a bunch of people on IRC a bit after 11th September. There were a few USians involved in the conversations, me (an Australian living in Canada), a couple of other Australians, a couple of Canadians, one person from India, and a bunch of assorted Europeans.

Someone (non-USian) said something like "Well, the US don't exactly make themselves popular with the world. It's not all that surprising that people don't like them." The USians said "You're wrong, the world loves us." The non-USians said "Uh, I assure you that is not the case." This went round and round for quite a while, with the USians simply refusing to believe that the whole world doesn't love, admire and respect them.

I can hardly conceive of what kind of propaganda it must take to convince millions of people that they are so lily-white-perfect that anyone who kills a bunch of their people must necessarily be "insane" rather than, say, pissed off with the US's imperialist bullshit. There seemed to be a total failure to see cause and effect. It was bizarre.

K.

[thorfinn]

*nodnod* The US Government, as a body, is extremely good at Orwellian 1984 Newspeak. Very very very good. Scarily so. It's very difficult to look at prepared Official Statements and actually process them in a context outside their own - and that's the true key to implementing Newspeak.

It's all about implicit assumptions... In a literature sense, the Text of a Newspeak message is carefully constructed to generate a particular Context... and that Context is the actual message that slips under the radar.

As Art, it's impressive to look at, but as Propaganda, it's Damn Scary™.