Two very quick observations here.
1. Did you notice that no media outlet used the word “murder” to describe what happened?
2. The media never mentioned the victims names.
– All of the attention was focused on the soldier and nobody reported on the victims. This was pointed out by Common Dreams – No One Asked Their Names
Not much shocks me anymore about war. War is brutality no matter how many ways leaders try to justify the cause. War is not civil.
The public is grappling to try and understand how someone from “the good side” could commit such murders. It as if the old scabs from Abu Ghraib have suddenly been torn off.
The murders do not surprise me though. This is the reality of what happens when you send a group of human beings to go kill another group. War’s brutality cannot be masked by flags, anthems or pretty uniforms. Eventually many people die, deserving or not. War does not follow rules as rules are just ideas and these ideas are quickly warped in the mind of a soldier who has seen so much death, so much cruelty.
What does surprise me however is how an entire population, the entire audience of news, magazines and every venue of mass media never asked the questions.
Who were these people who were murdered?
What were their names?
What were their lives like?
I think an event like this proves how separated we are from one another.
I have an urge to go into the use of words and how the word “Murder” was forbidden to be used in this case, for the American readership. That is a word only used when America’s enemies kill people.
Yet, I don’t want to write about this. In fact, I want to forget about war and forget about killing and forget about the bad things that go on everyday in the world.
I am going to go have a cup of tea.
5.30.21 UPDATE
Trump pardoned a lot of Blackwater killers but I was VERY SURPRISED to learn he didn’t pardon Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. I would have assumed Trump being Trump and Republicans being Republicans he would have pardoned the murderer.
Thank goodness another name was absent from the list, a man whose heinous actions endure like bloodstains in South Sound military lore: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
https://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article248676890.html
