Government lying

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Government lying

In most conflicts, whether they are conflicts within a home between husband and wife or conflicts between nations, there are two sides. Usually the opponents in the conflict do not see things in an honest, fair, cool, impartial way. It is an emotional thing and they see themselves as the “good guy” and the fellow on the other side as the “bad guy”. They try to defend themselves and their conduct as good and portray their opponent as evil. It is not surprising that when a nation is at war the government of the country is very interested that its citizenry see it as the good guy and the other country as the bad guy. It is important in a war to have the support of your citizenry. So it is not surprising that in a war a government will lie, mislead, and deceive. It is just part of human nature for people to lie, trick, deceive, and suppress facts if it is important to their interests. Countries indoctrinate school children to be patriotic. Governments want their citizenry to support their country right or wrong. Because of all this it is not at all surprising that a government will try to manipulate news during wartime. They want all of the news reaching their citizenry to show them in a good light and the enemy in a bad light. They want themselves to look good and the enemy to look bad. They have their narrative and don’t want any narratives that contradict their narrative. They don’t want to be questioned or challenged. They don’t want any unfavorable or unpleasant facts to get to news reporters. They try to manipulate news and view anyone presenting any inconvenient truths opposed to their ‘truth’ as enemies. They lie, invent facts, and suppress what they don’t want people to know. They have their propaganda specialists who mold the news to their interests.

In the months preceding the Iraq war back in 2003 my intuition was telling me that our new president George Bush, Jr. was looking very hard for excuses for going to war with Iraq. It was just the feeling I had. I suspected fabrication. I believed that he hated Saddam Hussein and wanted to “get him” and that desire to get Saddam was behind the whole thing. And that, by itself, is not a good reason for going to war. Then our government started contending that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t know if it were true or not but had doubts. (As it turned out he didn’t have any.) On hindsight I would say that my intuition about it all was correct. Very quickly after we had gotten into the war it became obvious that we had really gotten ourselves into a terrible mess. We had made a terrible mistake in doing what we had done. We had opened up a bucket of worms. The deep hatreds between the Muslim sects (Sunni, Shia, etc.) started revealing themselves and everyone was slaughtering everyone. What a mess it was! And there had been those who had warned against the war.

A huge number of innocent civilians were killed in the Iraq war. It was a gigantic tragedy that brought long term consequences. It would have much better if we had left Saddam Hussein alone. Much better for everyone. The same is true with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. What we did there was a gigantic mistake. It would have been much better to have left Muammar Gaddafi alone. Libya is a mess now.

A huge number of innocent civilians were killed in the Iraq War. That was a fact that was pretty much kept hidden to us. Authorities never want people to know the bad side of their actions. I am a person who believes in truth above all else. And the idea of innocent people in large numbers being slaughtered is very disturbing. I have just seen the following excellent video that I highly recommend:

YouTube The war you don’t see: Why propaganda hides the true face of war.

It is all about lying, falsehoods and deception on the part of governments in connection with wars. In the case of war you just can’t trust your government or the news you will hear from news outlets. People deceive, lie, manipulate truth.

I have often said that we live in a world of lie. Spiritual lie. Political lie. Economic lie. I often chafe against the Liberal Left with all of their false narratives and foolishness. However, it is easy to be deceived if there are no sources speaking the truth and all one hears is lies.

The above video states that civilian deaths accounted for 10% of deaths in World War I, 50% of deaths in World War II, 70% of deaths in the Vietnamese War, and up to 90% of deaths in the Iraq War. Think about that. All of those civilian deaths are collateral damage. We are now at a figure of 90% collateral damage. What is behind all of these ever increasing percentages of civilian deaths. I would say it has to do with the advance of science and technology. War has become so automated and our weapons have become so powerful and terrible that killing has become just so easy, so mechanical. Now an operator can safely sit behind a computer console somewhere in America, fly a drone in Afghanistan, locate a target, bring the cross hairs on the target and fire. The method is precise to within inches. Killing has become so sanitized. It is all like playing some video game. People who love video games would probably love it. You made your kill and for each kill you also killed nine other innocent people. They may often be women and five or six year old children. It all ends with lots and lots of children without mothers or fathers. Think about that. All of the great agony and human suffering that comes of it. Do the news agencies report any of this? No. No one ever hears about it or learns of it. The government definitely doesn’t want its population to know what is going on. That is the ugly side of what they are doing. In their view and in the view of the military it is just part of the collateral damage of war and unavoidable. And the people at the consoles are just people doing jobs that have been assigned to them much as the guards in Nazi extermination camps were just people doing a job. Maybe they enjoy their job and maybe they don’t. And it is really hard to do the job assigned to you without killing a lot of innocent people. But it is all done remotely so you don’t really feel it much. It is just images on a computer screen.

All of this is what civilized man has come to. Do you think that people who do these things are guilty of crime? How about the governments that are behind it? It is very easy for the head of some government to declare war on some country. Is he responsible for the deaths of all of the innocent people he kills? How does it compare with the murders committed by some hit man of some Mexican drug gang?

We can now ask a different question. If one adopts an antiwar attitude how does one handle tough aggressive warlike people with inclinations toward violence. Remember history with its violent Vikings and Huns and Mongols. There are calloused bullies in this world. How do you handle them? Does pacifism work?

It seems to me that if you go into some foreign country and kill nine good guys for every bad guy that you kill that is not acceptable at all. I think that is a bit shocking. If we were doing that in Afghanistan I don’t blame the people for hating us and wanting us out of their country. I know that their one time president Hamid Karzai complained that we were killing too many innocent people. We were killing too many women and children. I think that is a completely valid reason for wanting us out of their country. I would feel the same. Why is this happening? Why were we killing so many innocent people? The cause is the “at a distance” methods of killing that we are using. Dropping bombs from airplanes, firing missiles, and firing from drones are “at a distance” methods. These are the methods that kill so many innocent people. If you engage the enemy one on one with rifles you probably don’t kill many innocent people. But the advantage of the “at a distance” methods is that you can kill without endangering yourself. It is natural to prefer a method of fighting that involves little or no danger to oneself. In the case of Afghanistan many of the people of Afghanistan probably felt that between us and the Taliban, the Taliban was the lesser of two evils. If we killed great numbers of innocent people in Afghanistan we did a great wrong there. We should expect to be hated. And in doing that great wrong we spent gigantic amounts of money. If in Vietnam we killed huge numbers of innocent people we did a great wrong there too. It is no wonder we lost the war. The Vietnam war went on for many years and cost enormous amounts of money. The same was true with the Afghan war. We do seem to squander enormous amounts of money on ill-advised adventures. Where should one put the blame for this?