Death tolls

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golly
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Death tolls

Post by golly »

War causes a terrible crime against humanity besides the many evils that occur during it: the emotional impact of the aftermath and the stories that suppress truth.

How we remember is very important, and I wonder about death tolls where the details have been exaggerated by emotional turbulence.

War is often measured in terms of death "tolls" of specific populations and this is one of the reasons that we say that we excuse war or "go to war" (as if it were a place to arrive that is separate from human beings). We say that death tolls of specific types of people are the kinds that justify war in an order from most heart-wrenching to diminishing levels of importance and care:

1. Babies
2. Children
3. Pregnant Women and Mothers
4. Women
5. Old Women
6. Old Men
7. Disabled men
8. Men

In that scale there are also some kind of crimes against particular sympathetic characters such as "good people" and "innocent lives". I don't write any of this coldly, and I can see the incredible importance and the missing nuance of these words. For our mourning and our loss over the millennia of people harming people and coming to blows, the news of all kinds has in our memory and documents resorted to pathetic words that don't carry the weight of the occurrences of war. It could be that they can't.

In the 9/11 narratives coming from American and British media, you often saw traits like "smiling laughing faces" or "angelic" personhoods with "infectious laughter" and other traits that we like in people. So there are particular qualities that we might say can be used in propaganda narratives to drive people to violence on purpose.

If we understand how our emotions can be used to evoke a powerlessness against a population that is offered a violent means out of their sense of powerlessness, then we can understand why insidiously used words can be called "war propaganda" instead of just news or neutral information.

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