No Rest For The Dead
Footage of US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghans has gone viral; the White House has condemned the actions displaying in the video, which shows four US Marines desecrating the bodies of Afghan men, lifelessly sprawled out on the ground – there are no apparent weapons belonging to the deceased men in plain sight yet due to the ‘good soldier’ vs. ‘bad foreigner’ narrative propagated by the mainstream media, in which US armed forces are always portrayed as being the good soldiers, the story-line is that the Afghans being urinated on were “Taliban.”
Despite this assumption, the barbarity is evident for all those who wish to see – for those who are willing to remove their nationalist blinders.
Phil Stewart, of Reuters, writes the following for the Chicago Tribune:
“…the Americans shown in the Marine video appeared to have wanted a record of themselves desecrating the corpses of the men they had just killed.
Cracking jokes, like “have a great day, buddy,” as they urinate on the dead, they are aware the video is being taken. Near the end of the clip, one of the Americans seeks to confirm that the video caught everything.
“Yup,” a colleague answered, apparently a Marine from the same North Carolina-based unit. That casual exchange, and others, are part of what make the images so disturbing.”
Instead of outright condemnation by everyone who has seen the footage there are a number of men and women who have made use of their position in the mainstream media to further the myth of American exceptionalism; that the United States, a city on a hill, is above the law.
CNN’s political analyst and contributor Dana Loesch, during her conservative talk-show “The Dana Show“, praised American marines for urinating on the dead Afghans; she gave the marines in question “one million cool points” and even went as far as to say that she would “drop trou” and “do it too.”
Ross Caputi writes the following, for the Guardian:
“The video of US marines urinating on Afghan corpses does not shock me. Though their behavior is disgusting and unacceptable, I find the public’s reaction to this video far more troubling. People are not outraged that there are dead Afghans; they are outraged at the manner in which the dead are treated. This is indicative of our culture’s tolerance for war and war crimes – as long as they are done in a gentlemanly fashion.
During the second siege of Fallujah, blatant war crimes were committed, yet the corporate media reported them with indifference. The siege itself was a war crime, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross Summary of International Law, because indiscriminate tactics were used, constant care was nottaken to protect the civilian population, proper distinction between civilians and combatants was not made, medical personnel and medical units were notprotected, indiscriminate weapons were used, and recent research about the current health crisis in Fallujah suggests that poisonous weapons may have been used as well.”
This premise rings true, especially since rare are the voices calling for accountability, inquisition or reflection as to why those men were killed – the actions displayed on film are instead brushed off as being a result of war.
Caputi expresses, profoundly, that “…many of us choose not to see these war crimes, even though they are right in front of our faces. Only when a shocking YouTube video comes along, do we choose to look. And even then, what we see is the urinating, not the dead bodies.”
