I found a very interesting and sobering article by John Tirman asking why Americans ignore the numerous civilian deaths that we bring about in our wars. He calls it "colossal carnage." It's an old article, from 2012. But, it cites numbers of fatalities going all the way back to Vietnam.
"The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers."
What makes this so interesting is where it got published: the Washington Post. It's considered the second biggest and second most influential mainstream newspaper in the U.S. after the New York Times. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon and richest man in the world.
But, let's continue with the article, and remember these figures go only until 2012.
"The wars in Korea and Indochina were extremely deadly. While estimates of Korean War deaths are mainly guesswork, the three-year conflict is widely believed to have taken 3 million lives, about half of them civilians. The sizable civilian toll was partly due to the fact that the country’s population is among the world’s densest and the war’s front lines were often moving."
"The war in Vietnam and the spillover conflicts in Laos and Cambodia were even more lethal. These numbers are also hard to pin down, although by several scholarly estimates, Vietnamese military and civilian deaths ranged from 1.5 million to 3.8 million, with the U.S.-led campaign in Cambodia resulting in 600,000 to 800,000 deaths, and Laotian war mortality estimated at about 1 million."
Despite the fact that contemporary weapons are vastly more precise, Iraq war casualties, which are also hard to quantify, have reached several hundred thousand. In mid-2006, two household surveys — the most scientific means of calculating — found 400,000 to 650,000 deaths, and there has been a lot of killing since then."
And remember: that war was based on lies. We, the U.S., crossed an ocean to start that war. We bombarded and invaded them. So, when young Iraqi soldiers fought back, they were just doing their duty, trying to defend their country. So, our killing them was just as wrong as our killing civilians- in my view. They did not deserve to die.
"The lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is also shown by these civilians’ absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries. The entertainment industry portrays these wars rarely and almost always with a focus on Americans."
Well, that is certainly true today because Hollywood has turned gung-ho about war. American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, and other 21st century movies have glorified U.S.wars, and these wars have been atrocities. We started them. We were the aggressor.
Americans have been oblivious to the carnage caused by our government and military. "On Iraq, when an Associated Press survey asked Americans in early 2007 how many Iraqis had died in the war, the average of all answers was 9,890, when the actual number was probably well into the hundreds of thousands."
And remember, that was written in 2012, and this is 2019. Johns Hopkins researchers place the death toll in Iraq at over one million people.
"Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls “the frontier myth” — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America’s sturdiest national narratives."
"When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as theIndians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplanwrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, “The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenclature may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.”
I shall remind you that Professor John Quigley, in Ruses for War, maintains that the aggressor in the Korean War was South Korea, and he presents 100 pages of argument and evidence for it. And you know damn well, that the government of South Korea, which was our puppet government, only did it because we told them to, because we put them up to it.
The author of this article, John Tirman, is a research scientist at MIT, and he is the author of a book called: The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars. I just ordered it.
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