{"id":28105,"date":"2013-04-22T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=28105"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:53:13","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:53:13","slug":"the-orwellian-warfare-state-of-carnage-and-doublethink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/04\/the-orwellian-warfare-state-of-carnage-and-doublethink\/","title":{"rendered":"The Orwellian Warfare State of Carnage and Doublethink"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"orwell3\"<\/a>After the bombings that killed and maimed\u00a0so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country\u2019s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion \u2014 and reflexive \u201cdoublethink,\u201d which George Orwell described as willingness \u201cto forget any fact that has become inconvenient.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

In sync with media outlets across the country, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0put a chilling headline on Wednesday\u2019s front page: \u201cBoston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say.\u201d The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, \u201crigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87\/B warheads were in the category of \u201ccombined effects munitions\u201d when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting.<\/p>\n

One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market. \u201cThe bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbia\u2019s third-largest city with shrapnel,\u201d a dispatch in the\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle\u00a0reported on May 8, 1999.<\/p>\n

And: \u201cIn a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pointing out that cluster bombs \u201cexplode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius,\u201d BBC correspondent John Simpson wrote in the\u00a0Sunday Telegraph: \u201cUsed against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Savage did not preclude usage. As a matter of fact, to Commander in Chief Bill Clinton and the prevailing military minds in Washington, savage was bound up in the positive attributes of cluster bombs. Each one could send up to 60,000 pieces of jagged steel shrapnel into what the weapon\u2019s maker described as \u201csoft targets.\u201d<\/p>\n

An unusually diligent reporter, Paul Watson of the\u00a0Los Angeles Times,\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0from Pristina, Yugoslavia: \u201cDuring five weeks of airstrikes, witnesses here say, NATO warplanes have dropped cluster bombs that scatter smaller munitions over wide areas. In military jargon, the smaller munitions are bomblets. Dr. Rade Grbic, a surgeon and director of Pristina\u2019s main hospital, sees proof every day that the almost benign term bomblet masks a tragic impact. Grbic, who saved the lives of two ethnic Albanian boys wounded while other boys played with a cluster bomb found Saturday, said he had never done so many amputations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0LA Times\u00a0article quoted Dr. Grbic: \u201cI have been an orthopedist for 15 years now, working in a crisis region where we often have injuries, but neither I nor my colleagues have ever seen such horrific wounds as those caused by cluster bombs.\u201d He added: \u201cThey are wounds that lead to disabilities to a great extent. The limbs are so crushed that the only remaining option is amputation. It\u2019s awful, awful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The newspaper account went on: \u201cPristina\u2019s hospital alone has treated 300 to 400 people wounded by cluster bombs since NATO\u2019s air war began March 24, Grbic said. Roughly half of those victims were civilians, he said. Because that number doesn\u2019t include those killed by cluster bombs and doesn\u2019t account for those wounded in other regions of Yugoslavia, the casualty toll probably is much higher, he said. \u2018Most people are victims of the time-activated cluster bombs that explode some time after they fall,\u2019 he said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, during invasions and initial periods of occupation, the U.S. military dropped cluster bombs in Afghanistan and fired cluster munitions in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Today, the U.S. State Department remains opposed to outlawing those weapons, declaring on its official website: \u201cCluster munitions have demonstrated military utility. Their elimination from U.S. stockpiles would put the lives of its soldiers and those of its coalition partners at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

The State Department\u00a0position statement<\/a>\u00a0adds: \u201cMoreover, cluster munitions can often result in\u00a0much less collateral damage\u00a0than unitary weapons, such as a larger bomb or larger artillery shell would cause, if used for the same mission.\u201d Perhaps the bomber(s) who stuffed nails and ball bearings into pressure cookers for use in Boston had a similarly twisted rationale.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t expect explorations of such matters from the USA\u2019s daily papers or commercial networks \u2014 or from the likes of NPR\u2019s \u201cMorning Edition\u201d and \u201cAll Things Considered,\u201d or the PBS \u201cNewsHour.\u201d When the subject is killing and maiming, such news outlets take as a given the presumptive moral high ground of the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

In his novel\u00a01984, Orwell wrote about the conditioned reflex of \u201cstopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought . . . and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The doublethink \u2014 continually reinforced by mass media \u2014 remains within an irony-free zone that would amount to mere self-satire if not so damaging to intellectual and moral coherence.<\/p>\n

Every news report about the children killed and injured at the finish line in Boston, every account of the horrific loss of limbs, makes me think of a little girl named Guljumma. She was seven years old when I met her at an Afghan refugee camp one day in the summer of 2009.<\/p>\n

At the time, I\u00a0wrote<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cGuljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan\u2019s Helmand Valley. At\u00a0about 5 a.m., bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, where several hundred families were living in squalid conditions, the U.S. government was providing no help. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when it bombed them.<\/p>\n

War thrives on abstractions, but Guljumma was no abstraction. She was no more or less of an abstraction than the children whose lives have been forever wrecked by the bombing at the Boston finish line.<\/p>\n

But the same U.S. news media that are conveying the preciousness of children so terribly harmed in Boston are scarcely interested in children like Guljumma.<\/p>\n

I thought of her again when seeing news reports and a chilling\u00a0photo<\/a>\u00a0on April 7, soon after 11 children in eastern Afghanistan were even more unlucky than she was. Those children died from a U.S.\/NATO air strike. For mainline American journalists, it wasn\u2019t much of a story; for American officials, it was no big deal.<\/p>\n

\u201cCircus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip,\u201d Orwell observed, \u201cbut the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon<\/i> is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include \u201cWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.\u201d He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 globalresearch.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country\u2019s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion \u2014 and reflexive \u201cdoublethink,\u201d which George Orwell described as willingness \u201cto forget any fact that has become inconvenient.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,65,62,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-media","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}