MASS MEDIA OPENLY BEHIND PENTAGON WAR PROPAGANDA

By Juan Montoya
I am sure that this will piss off some of my fellow veterans.
But that is a price I'm willing to pay to have my say. After all, it was our service which gives us the freedom to express out opinion.

Who hasn't felt warm and fuzzy when a little girl, or boy, is surprised when their dad or mom – attired in their service uniform or green fatigues – suddenly comes in the door and surprises them? The emotion is real and you get a nice feeling of the mother and child reunion caught on camera and disseminated all over the world.

But have you ever thought that perhaps that same reunion won't happen in Iraq, Afghanistan or another part of the world where U.S. soldiers are waging war? Is the father or mother a pilot who has dropped bombs on Syrian or Iraqi cities and can't be very discriminate about who gets killed in the bombing?

Ted White used to say that long distance war is very clean and neat. You can't feel what you can't see.

How many Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, Yemeni, Sudanese, or Syrian kids will not see their father coming in from the side doors to hug them and kiss them because they're dead, perhaps though the action of some of those same U.S. soldiers who are caught on camera surprising their kids?

We even go as far as to glorify a sniper who sat hidden and camouflaged and adds another notch to his "kills" from half a mile away. The target doesn't even see who killed him. Our generation can take pride in the fact that through protests in the streets and demonstrations we stopped a war that was decimating our youth in Vietnam. And to a degree, we stopped the U.S.-sponsored war in Central America.

This new generation thinks that a war can be waged as you would play a video game. No one gets hurt in the games and you can add "lives" in case you lose. You don't bleed. In fact, this new generation seems to want to start wars, not avoid them.

Pablo Neruda writes about the resistance in Nicaragua when the U.S.-backed the Somosa family dictatorship in the past. As a result of the civil war that erupted against our "friends"," thousands of Nicaraguans, Salvadorean, Cubans, Chileans, etc., died fighting against the dictators that we helped to prop up to do our bidding.

I hadn't seen this level of propaganda being swallowed hook, line and sinker to support the Pentagon's war-making plans in a long time. We have been engaged in continuous war for the past decade or more and no one – except for the families and survivors of our veterans – seems to be aware of this.

War is the failure of diplomacy and statemanship. Now we are about to put the head of Exxon in charge of our nation's foreign policy. The future does not bode well.

This is not a healthy thing for a country. This is the stuff of empires. Let's not glorify death. Just as the Pentagon can wage war, it can also avoid it.