How Massacres Become the Norm?
Dahr Jamail writes from Iraq about what he has encountered as an independent journalist:
Having stood with soldiers anticipating that each moving car would turn into a bomb and each passerby into a suicide bomber, I have tasted the stress and fear these soldiers live with on a daily basis. When one of their fellow soldiers is killed by a roadside bomb, the need for revenge may be directed at anything. And repeated often enough, the process gets socialized.
It’s about this attitude brought on by the normalization of the abnormal under “atrocity-producing situations” that Dr. Lifton speaks. Unless of course we consider Mattis and others like him to be rare sociopaths who are able to participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional harm.
And it is this attitude that is responsible for the incessant replication of wanton slaughter and madness in Iraq today.
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MASSACRES OF CIVILIANS AND FULL-SPECTRUM WAR
The massive broadcasting of the massacres of innocent Iraqi civilians–”worse than Abu Ghraib”–and of the ensuing cover-up, will threaten the will to win the Iraq War like nothing else before, because TV diffusion of violent images has the power to neutralize the legitimacy of the US government and its Army.
The military post-Cold War doctrine, post-MAD, is called ‘full-spectrum force’. And Bush’s wars are so closely linked to the functioning of the mass-media that TV must be considered part of the ‘full-spectrum’ of military force. On the far end of the spectrum of force is full-scale warfare, including massive invasion and the tactical use of WMDs.
In the middle of the new power spectrum are policing and peace-keeping operations.
At the opposite end from full-scale invasion is permanent surveillance.
Now my question is: Since TV is part of the full-spectrum force, how will the Military use it to neutralize the disastrous effect of the massacres’ images?
Do you remember the way the American people were drawn into an ill-justified war on Iraq only by the effect of the way mass media work in the US?
9/11 was also a televised event; as was the presidential campaigns that brought Bush to power; as was his famous Cathedral speech of Sept 14, where he declared ‘war’ on terrorism.
After the Cold War, the explicit aim of the US government mentioned in documents on foreign and military policy is ‘domination.’
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