The Insanity Of War
Written 21 March 2008
I feel sick. Not like the 24-hour flu sick, or even the ‘I have to write 6 entries for my blog by next week’ sick.
This is the type of sick you feel when you get so angry you could scream, or the nasty feeling in the pit of your stomach when you know something is terribly wrong and you just want it to go away.
Now I guess that I should give a little warning. Do not click on the link above if you are easily disturbed by raw war footage, and I would also not recommend it for those who have family or friends serving in the military.
For those of you who didn’t click the link, I will give a little background. In our last class, Professor Rozema passed out a handout that talked about the freedom that soldiers have while blogging, and the relevance the Internet has to the war in Iraq. In that article, it briefly mentioned this website, and it says that it takes a daily assessment on attacks on allied forces and it encourages others to follow in the path of Holy War, or Jihad.
Being the curious scoundrel that I am, I decided that I wanted to check it out, see what it was. I expected it to be a website that looked like it was made in a high school computer class with a couple of creepy pictures and perhaps a video or two of people shooting some rockets. Man was I wrong…
The first thing that caught my eye was the running ticker on the top of the page. It took me a minute to figure out what it was saying, because it sort of reminded me of the stock market scroll on the bottom of MSNBC. The ticker was counting off the latest American casualties, and the latest bombings of hummers and other assorted military vehicles. There were advertisements for someone called the “Baghdad Sniper”, who apparently ‘never misses’, and entire sections dedicated to military operations and filmed military operations. They have media releases, political statements, and even a “Contact Us” option.
So by now, I am outraged. How could they do this????? How could they show American men and women who try so damn hard just to do their job getting shot, blown up, and burned to death? And to top it off, they celebrate it, and post it on the Internet for everyone to see….
I pause, and quickly flip open a new tab and go to Youtube.
My anger turns to disgust as I witness American soldiers videotape themselves killing Iraqi insurgents who are wounded. American allied soldiers, who represent freedom for all and international peace and unity. The same America who gets pissed off when a video of Iraqi’s burning a dead American soldiers body surfaces on the Internet.
I know I am most likely not supposed to be writing about this, I should be analyzing literature and how it relates to war today, but this is too important to me to let pass by. I don’t want to say we are bringing this upon ourselves, because two wrongs don’t make a right, but what kind of an example are we setting for the Iraqi people? Can’t they get the Internet too? It isn’t called the WORLDWIDE WEB for nothing…
I think maybe we need to take a look in the mirror before we start policing the web for bad things that others do to us. It is an utter shame to see what a state the human race has sunk to, if we exchange videos via web of one person killing another, especially when they are helpless and wounded.
If you need further convincing, just click on the links below. I can’t write about this anymore…..it’s too much….
April 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I just saw the video clip and one of the soldiers says
“hell yeah, it feels good. It makes you want to do it again.?
See this is the type of of statement that I do not understand. Soldiers were brought into the field for a reason. They were brought because of some idiotic individual thought it was a good time to be in a position of leadership. So they pops his agenda out and starts making plans so that the people of the United States can feel good about it because revenge is a good feeling. So the soldiers go over there and fight the battle for them. Now they have forgotten that this war has no real enemy. There is a real enemy but really most of the people that they killed are actually good people. They too are fighting for some idiotic individual with an agenda.
So when I hear lines such as I feel good when I kill an Iraqi, it makes me disgusted that they do not think about who they are shooting. It’s like they are in a paint ball game where one shot and the other person goes out and you have scored a point for the team. This is real stuff. When a person is shot, they do not out of the game and then go back again for another game. They are out of the game permenantly. Sometimes, I just hope these soldiers who are over know realize that they are hurting citizens too and not just “liberating” them.