A Picture Says More Than a 1000 Words.
http://life.lege.net/picturesays/
Fri, 26 Aug 2005 12:40:56 -0500
One of my Latter-day Saint friends sent me the below pictures with the subject line "Pictures say a thousand words".
Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:49:47 +0200 (MEST)
I replied with the CNN snippet at the end and the words: "Exactly. View brief attached CNN footage."
Now view brief "CNN footage" !
(CLICK ABOVE)
The blind leading the blind?
The Latter-day Saints are led by a "prophet" who have expressed his personal support for this war. And the support for the war among the LDS have been far greater than among the general US population, at least 70% in Utah. Hence "The blind leading the blind?" above. In the LDS Church I see the morally blind leading the morally blind -- indeed, I see the LDS Church making many of it's followers unable to take an independent moral stand. Too late and too few of the Latter-day Saints are now finally waking up, but most Latter-day Saints are still in denial -- like the sending of the above images illustrate -- and like their "prophet", Gordon B. Hinckley, when he expressed his personal support for the Iraq war in order to defend home and country (those were of course propaganda lies by the war hawks) in front of the whole Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was of course quite the diplomat about it, but most of the Latter-day Saints understood him to support the Iraq war, and this perception has never been corrected. Whereas when another LDS leader was interpreted to criticize the war, this was very soon corrected by the LDS Church.
The "follow the leader" message pounded at the Latter-day Saints in combination with moral blindness in "the leaders" makes Latter-day Saints especially vulnerable to moral blindness. As stated, to pass around imagery like the above is of course a denial-reaction. It's like suggesting that a serial killer is a great guy because he is passing out candy-bars to the neighborhood kids between kills. And as you can see in the brief "CNN footage" above, there is no shame in the killing, but pride. It feels good to kill, what a rush! ("... that was awesome, let's do it again!") The clean-cut all-American young guy gives killing the wounded a friendly face.
[The above] Updated August 27, 2005
October 20, 2005: After publishing the above I felt to add the following poster in the same spirit as the images:
1940. Theo Matjeko. "Abandoned people-groups, trust the German Soldier!"
I'd also like to add that I understand that most U.S. servicemen went to Iraq with a genuine desire to do good, but that the system prevents them.
With the words of the [U.S.] American journalist Dahr Jamail in his October 18, 2005 "Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches" (``"Elections" and other Deceptions in Iraq''): ``As usual, it isn't only the Iraqis who are suffering from the illegal occupation of their country. A National Guard soldier who has been in Iraq for nearly a year writes me, "I needn't tell you...how messed up everything over here is. Regardless of the intentions of most soldiers to do a good job and do what's right, the organizational structure of our presence here makes it very difficult. The nature of the conflict--in terms of the insurgency, the attitude of our leadership, and the demands placed on soldiers because of numbers and resources-requires aggression where compassion and understanding are necessary. And this is against a background of profiteering by KBR and other contractors who are quite honestly raiding the American Treasury in the name of "providing services." I was opposed to this war from the start; what I've seen has deepened that opposition into anger, anger over the exploitation of both American soldiers and third-country nationals for vain and venal reasons."''
War is a crime, and the criminals are those who started the war. And those are not the Iraqi nor the U.S. people, but quite frankly the U.S. media and the U.S. leaders, hand-in-hand. In the name of democracy. Which of course is how every single U.S. war since ``the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called "engineering of consent"'', was started. ``During World War I, he was an integral part--along with Walter Lippmann--of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda machine that advertised and sold the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy. The market strategies for all future wars would be based on the CPI model.'' (Back cover text of Ig Publishing's September 15, 2004 reprint of Edward Bernays 1928 "Propaganda".)
War is hell. Which is why the International [Nuremberg Tribunal in the 1945-1946] Court declared: ``To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.'' A crime where the criminals are in the media and in the White House.
Updated October 20, 2005