I wish we had a broader platform because every person following these atrocities with half a conscience could rip to shreds the casual propaganda being spouted by large, mainstream outlets.
Listening to BBC's Global News Podcast and in the intro they just said: "Israeli fighter jets hit another 200 Hamas targets on Wednesday and parts of Gaza have been reduced to rubble"
THIS IS AN INSIDIOUS AS FUCK LIE. As if Israel isn't bombing the shit out of neighborhoods, hospitals, etc (even when they have the GPS coordinates of these civilian centers and the sophistication with targeted strikes to CLEARLY AVOID THEM). And they fail to at all accurately characterize the parts of Gaza reduces to rubble (implying that it's just Hamas strongholds). Holy fuck this disinformation. And this is all amidst Israeli politicians unabashedly stating that Palestinians are animals and they are going to make the 1948 Nakba look tame in comparison to their response. Absolutely evil shit.
It is so blatant and infuriating and an intrinsically essential part of maintaining Western support of Israel's genocidal policies towards the Palestinian people. There are no words for how fucking furious this type of coverage makes me.
I would not subject myself to it but I feel a responsibility to understand why so many people in the US, Europe, etc have such a miserably warped understanding of the situation; know thy enemy type of shit, but omg is this hurting my goddamn brain and soul
There's a line in Michael Herr's "dispatches" about how every Vietnamese person killed by the Americans was assumed (by the Americans) to be a member of the Viet Cong. It goes something like "by the time the statistics had reached command, a dead old woman had become a nameless, ageless, genderless insurgent."
This is how first world nations fight asymmetric wars. The propaganda exists at every level, throughout the entire system.
@passenger This made it into Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which Herr co-wrote.
Ah, this scene.
It's been a while since I read Dispatches but I remember the line as being differently framed: not about a brutal murderous machinegunner but about the cold process of paperwork, about how "extraneous" information is stripped away as statistics proceed through layers of hierarchy. However, both are very powerful and very relevant, for all that they're different.
@passenger You remember correctly, but since the writer is the same - as you say, it depicts how the message from the top percolated to the rank & file
@cyrilpedia
I did not know that, that's really interesting, thank you!