Warmonger Propaganda in the New York Times

Flipping through the New York Times today, I came across a nice, little, fluff bit exploiting the recent NASA disaster. A beautiful, full-page, color photo of a shadowed Moon over Earth initially catches your eye. Centered above the moon in white text is a quote from our intrepid leader George W. Bush, reading “The crew of the Shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home.” What a warm and squishy statementÖsurely our space-walking heroes went straight to heaven after being horribly cooked alive. Even the Jew got in; after all he was serving our great and holy nation. God loves America, everyone knows that, and blesses our every endeavor.

At the bottom of this complacent commercial for divine patriotic duty, four logos appear, the sponsors. Among them are the United Space Alliance, Boeing, Alliant Tech Systems, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin is the largest developer of war technology, producing a great majority of the bombs our great nation will be dropping on the Iraqi people, serving to make huge profit from the war. Before US military forces will actually move into Iraq, the Navy and Air force are planning something they affectionately call “A-Day.” Short for Air Strike Day, 300 to 400 bombs will rain down upon Iraq (more bombs dropped than the entire original Desert Storm war), effectively crippling electrical and water infrastructures, as well as massacring millions of innocent civilians. One day of holocaust is not enough though, for the next day 400 more bombs will further decimate the civilian population.

As quoted in the Village Voice, this two-day barrage “concentrates on the psychological destruction of the enemies’ will to fight, rather than on the physical destruction of the military forces.” This makes a bleeding arse-load of sense. Massacre most of the civilians, half of which are children, and the people with guns will just sit there and say “My entire famfily has just been vaporized “I’m so sad I’ll just surrender.”

On the contrary, any person with an ounce of humanity that finds the smoking corpse of his or her own child will only be further fuelled by hatred. With nothing left to live for and blinding rage instilled, the Iraqi military will fight to the bitter end. No doubt we’ll crush them anyways, but we have to question our motives for this modern-day death campaign. El Presidente and Lockheed Martin don’t want us to question. If we didn’t decimate Iraq, Lockheed Martin would never sell all those bombs, and the Oil Men who stole the Whitehouse in 2000 would never get their greedy white hands on the Iraqi black gold.

The peddlers of this conflict want to keep us in the dark. They want to profit, with the public doubtless this war was the right move. Forget the millions of civilians that will perish in those two days of death-showers. Forget the thousands more that will fall to our ground forces, or the many innocents that will die, in time, from starvation and disease. This is enterprise, the great cornerstone of the American dream at work. People just need to buy into the battle. They realize this, the warmongers, uh, I mean businessmen. They place these advertisements, celebrating the American spirit and God, playing on people’s faith. The unacceptable truth is people look on this advertisement and are numbed to the grim reality that the blood will be on our hands, on our dollars. While our nation mourns the loss of seven, we must remember the millions of powerless victims that could die under Bush’s big red button. Hitler would be proud.