Ideology and Rapture
by tristero
A wonderful insight from John F. Burns, recapping his long career as a foreign correspondent for the NY Times:
In my case, poking from the very top of my traveler’s backpack is something you might expect of a reporter who spent long years in what were then some of the nastiest places in the world, each of them fraudulently dressed up, in their enveloping propaganda, as something entirely different, and benign. What those years bred in me, more than anything else, was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.
Agreed, and Burns gives a great example of North Korea's lunatic ideology in his article. But:
...I, like other reporters, undoubtedly failed on occasions when my passions, and the passions of those around me, ran at their highest.
Those moments, I fear, might have to include for me the hours after American troops overran Baghdad in April 2003. At the time, I witnessed and shared the wild public rapture at Saddam Hussein’s fall, which gave way almost overnight to grim forebodings about the murderous sectarian chaos that was to ensue, and which continues, with a redoubled vengeance, in Tikrit, Mosul, Ramadi and dozens of other Iraqi cities and towns where the Islamic State has held sway.
Burns apparently still fails to recognize that his "rapture" was precisely the intended effect of Bush's "fraudulently dressed up... enveloping propaganda."
Maybe he thinks propaganda is created to simply make the creepy "benign," not proactively induce euphoria Or maybe he thinks that others do propaganda - South Africa, the Soviet Union, North Korea - but not "us," or at least "we" don't take it to the same mad extremes. Wrong and wrong.
Since Burns had his rapture in April of 2003, hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered, maimed, and tortured by Americans, their proxies, and their enemies. And tragically, given the intractable virulence of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their
equally intractable ideological counterparts in the US, it is likely that the havoc directly traceable to Bush and Cheney's war efforts have just started.
So, a modest proposal:
DearAll Foreign Correspondents:
No raptures, please. Ever. If you feel a rapture coming on, take three deep breaths and double-down on your skepticism.
Love,
tristero
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