Killing You For Your Own Good, To Save You

I recently had the chance to sit down and watch the critically acclaimed “War Made Easy.” In short, it is a devasting critique of the Fourth Estate, its lack of independence and objectivity — and how it has been compromised and utilized as the mouthpiece of the political class.

The editing is superb, as it simultaneously blends the rhetoric both pundit and politician used in selling not just the recent invasion of Iraq, but all of the invasions over the past 40 years.

Throughout the film, author Norman Solomon (who penned the original book by the same name) masterfully illustrates the giddy, collectivistic mindset that embodies the perpetrators of these crimes. And certainly exemplifies Robert E. Lee’s somber dictum: It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.

Your brain on war

While George Orwell examined the perversities surrounding a policy of “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” and Murray Rothbard eloquently demonstrated the same fallacy, by invading the world, Solomon builds and expands upon the corpus.

Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bremmer, O’Reilly; the entire neoconservative fraternity is captured in the heat of the moment and exposed for the charlatans they are (Mencken would certainly approve). How can one forget the morbidly poetic “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”?

While it poignantly ends with Martin Luther King’s then-controversial “A Time to Break Silence” it arguably adds legs to a memorably germane theory.

A few choice quotes from the documentary:

- Don’t just think of yourself, America can’t just be selfish. It makes bombing other people ultimately seem like an act of kindness, of altruism.

- If my motives are pure then the fact that I’m killing people may not be too upsetting as a matter of fact, it may indicate that I’m killing people for very good reasons.

- Actually war becomes perpetual when it becomes a rationale for peace.

- They became in a sense part of the invading apparatus. You didn’t have embedded reporters with people being bombed, you only had embedded reporters with the bombers. And it was through the eyes of the invaders that so much of the reporting was done.

- It sees the eyes of the Americans, through the eyes of the occupiers rather than those who are bearing the brunt of the war in human terms.