Welcome to Morning Open Thread
This is a daily post with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic for the day's posting. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
This author, who is on Pacific Coast Time, may sometimes show up later than when the post is published. That is a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.
So grab your cuppa, and join in!
The obscuring of the horror of war. Although George Carlin gives us a dead-on example of the American variety, the obscuring of war’s horror is an ancient art. We wrap it in patriotism and resounding but empty phrases like ‘Our Glorious Dead,’ and ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.)
It is especially ironic to use these phrases in an age when the best-trained soldiers can be killed by an aerial bomb dropped from 16,000 feet up in the sky, or a shell launched from 15 to 25 miles away on the ground. Where’s the glory or honor in being blown to bits by an enemy you never see?
The current occupant of the Oval Office, who repeatedly called his opponent “too hawkish” when he was campaigning for office, has radically increased bombing in the Middle East. And worse, many of the dead are civilians.
“2017 was the deadliest year for civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, with as many as 6,000 people killed in strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition, according to the watchdog group Airwars. That is an increase of more than 200 percent over the previous year. It is far more if you add in countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and many others.”
— Margaret Sullivan, www.washingtonpost.com/…
The wimp who wouldn’t stand in the rain at a memorial for the dead soldiers of World War One has no problem raining death on men, women and children in foreign countries — because they’re all terrorists and very bad people, right?