This is why the state doesn't want pictures of US wounded or dead circulating in public. The media mostly obey. Did you ever notice that? You are being shown only what the government wants you to see. The state does not want you to see dead soldiers or suffering families of those shot and killed.
Instead the state wants you to believe that the Iraq War is about patriotism, 9/11, national pride, the campaign to make you safer, the administering of justice, manhood and courage, and all the rest of the coverups for what war really is: murder and destruction paid for by you and me and made legal solely because it is the state and not someone else doing it...
But from the government's point of view, it is running the war, and it should control what people know about it to the same extent it controls everything else about the war. As a result, after 4,000 dead soldiers, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, millions of wounded on all sides, there are only a handful of bloody pictures to be found anywhere.
Amazing isn't it, just how effective the state can actually be when it cares intensely about something? And why does it care so much?...
... the state is most especially interested in continuing to foster the myth that these kids are dying for their country, and there are no more important people to convince of that than the parents of the dead.
But actually, only the most naïve could possibly believe that this is what the rules are wholly about. They want to protect the rest of us from reality. The Vietnam War lost massive support at home when the military loosened up on photojournalism. The handful of pictures we have from World War II all date from a period after FDR too bowed to public pressure.
At one level, it is pathetic that we need pictures to underscore what war is all about. But since the ancient world, the masses at large have proven susceptible to believing every myth about the grandeur and glory of war. We imagine that we as a people are going abroad to bring justice, truth, and liberty to some unenlightened and threatening foreign tribe. This has been the constant theme since the ancient world.
Then we see the pictures. It turns out that the unenlightened tribe is a collection of individuals pretty much like us. They are made of flesh and blood, have families, worship God, and struggle with pretty much the same issues that all people everywhere have always struggled with. There is no great glory in killing them, nor in being killed by them.
But the state says that sometimes war is necessary. If our masters really believe that, why hide its costs? Let us see precisely what we are getting into here. If it is justified, let us see why and how, and let us observe what we are giving up in exchange for the just war.
The truth is that the state must hide not only its wars but all of its activities. It hides its inflation. It hides the effects of its taxation and its protectionism. It fears anyone who draws the cause-and-effect connection between its activities and their deleterious consequences for the rest of us. It is the most destructive force in our world. Because that truth is so momentous, the state does everything possible to hide the smallest drop of blood.
The state wants us to all go on with our lives, believing it, loving it, and seeing only the pictures it wants us to see.
The Seen, the Unseen, and the Hidden Costs of Statism - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. - Mises Institute
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