Interview with Robert Fisk

[bemildred]

Recs please?

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“So because of this – and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating – it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat – when in fact, it’s about death, and the infliction of massive pain.

“I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating them.

“If you saw what I saw you’d never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again. But of course, the politicians – our leaders – are very happy that these pictures are not shown, because they make war more attractive, less painful.”

Do the British public never get to see this more realistic picture of war? “If an Iraqi soldier is obliging enough to die by the side of the road in a romantic pose, and you can get him against the skyline without any boiled flesh – ‘the price of war: an Iraqi soldier lies dead,’ you know the sort of caption by now – you can do that.”

http://www.ukwatch.net/article/interview_with_robert_fisk

[leftchick]

1. gladly

<snip>

“There are several things. First of all, there’s the inability of many journalists from the US to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation – hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost.

“Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it’s about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it’s about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.

“Then you have this business where TV won’t show what we see, for reasons of so-called ‘bad taste.’ I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Al Jazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, ‘there’s no point feeding us this, we can’t show this.’

“The first excuse was, ‘people will be having their tea, so we can’t put it on,’ then it was, ‘this is sort of pornography, we don’t show this.’ And it ended up – it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff – the last thing was, ‘we have to show respect for the dead.’ So we don’t show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for them.

K&R!

[madrchsod]

2. war will never be televised again

we will never see the us troops racing to kuwait to get to out of the country before the iraqi`s blow the bridges and ied the roads....

[mikita]

3. K & R

Thanks for posting... He's a treasure.