By News Desk | 3 Comments | 
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“Killing America’s Kids”:
Fred Reed on War and Journalism
Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, killed at age 21 on Aug. 14, 2009 in Afghanistan
From Fred on Everything, September 27, 2009
The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the web:
Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard’s family is feeling right now, and that Curley’s “lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right—but judgment and common decency.”
I thought a long time before writing about this matter, and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless Secretary, I too was a Marine Lance Corporal of twenty-one years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) thirteenth trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.
. . .
The photo the Pentagon tried to suppress. Fred Reed comments: "It could almost make you turn aginst the war. Some 6,000 American kids have died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Anti-war.com by Joe Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled The War in Afghanistn is Not Worth Another American Life. I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed ninety-five Afghans in another witless air strike. These days, we are the Nazis."
Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping acquiescent ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing military from Vietnam—they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as before—but they learned something more important: Their most dangerous enemy is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the American public can.
Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling somnolent inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.
. . .
Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still…slowly…moving, the dead children, the…never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children. . . . Read the whole article.
News Desk
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It’s too bad that we can’t have an authoritative break-down of the murdered by demography. It appears that the soldiers assigned to front line duty are overwhelmingly white kids from small towns because they possess that combination of physical strength and a honed sense of initiative. The USA services possibly are not completely in tune with the American demography, but with regard to the fighting & dying (not supply, transportation, and administration), our diverse white kids are vastly over-represented among the murdered & maimed.
http://bp0.blogger.com/_L6pDyjqqsvY/R9IHEn-mxHI/AAAAAAAAL5I/cc4nZrBF_Lk/s1600-h/iraq+losses+by+race.JPG
http://www.resistingdefamation.org/PDF/DieInWars.pdf
http://www.resistingdefamation.org/PDF/SacAm.pdf?articleid=10317
The thousands & thousands of young white lives & lineages lost forever in WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, and now Af-Pak should shock us to our core. And that is why conservatism is a disordered category of discourse — its love for wars in Europe & Asia is murdering our future. The end of even a single DNA line resonates throughout the next millennium and beyond.
“The thousands & thousands of young white lives & lineages lost forever in WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, and now Af-Pak should shock us to our core. ”
If memory serves some members of the broad ‘Eugenics movement’ in the 1920s were hard-core pacifists since they didn’t the valuable genetics of soldiers to be wasted in wars.
Logicar Omega is quite right that many eugenicists deplored war on eugenic grounds. The American academic David Starr Jordan, who I believe is the subject of an article in Robert S. Griffin’s book, Living White: Writings on Race, 2000-2005 (2005), was probably the most outspoken of them.
Those who can read French might like to know that the French anthroposociologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge devoted a chapter to the genetic consequences of warfare in his monumental book, Les sélections sociales (1896), which was recently reprinted by Déterna. Vacher de Lapouge was one of the most radical and interesting thinkers on race.
There appears to have been considerable debate about the genetic consequences of warfare in the early twentieth century. Those who are interested in this subject might want to read Paul Crook’s book, Darwinism, War, and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). From what I’ve seen of it (I’ve inspected a copy at an academic library but I haven’t read it), it is an extremely erudite and scholarly book. It is described as follows on the website of Cambridge University Press: