Using dead kids for propaganda purposes?

[Wildcard Ky]

This article was pointed out to me earlier today. If true, it makes a shocking revelation.

By all appearances, it looks like a group of people in Lebanon are carrying around the corpses of children for photo ops.

Just when you think humanity can't sink any lower.....................


EU referendum

 

[Zeb_Carter]

This article was pointed out to me earlier today. If true, it makes a shocking revelation.

By all appearances, it looks like a group of people in Lebanon are carrying around the corpses of children for photo ops.

Just when you think humanity can't sink any lower.....................


EU referendum

I saw this yesterday and even though it's a blog it does have the ring of truth to it. The author does provide links to various stories supporting the alegations.

 

[Weird Harold]

...even though it's a blog it does have the ring of truth to it.

Even if it wasn't true when it was posted, the idea is out there and will make too much sense to those who would most like to make Isreal look bad not to be used.

Just when you think humanity can't sink any lower.....................

Sadly, This is far from being as low as I think humanity can sink. Coming from a region where fanatics routinely use schools and hospitals as ammo dumps and don't care who is killed whent hey blow themselves up in a shopping center or bus, it's almost pacifistic and humane.

 

[MagicaPractica]

I've heard a couple people talking on the news of late using dead children as part of their rhetoric and it made me sick. It was so blatantly propaganda and not actual concern. And it was done by different sides.

 

[cantdog]

This is one of the best prayers I ever read. King Lear, raging on the heath, stumbles upon a place of shelter:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what the wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

 

[shereads]

It's awful to use dead kids. It's even worse to be responsible for making them that way.

 

[minsue]

It's awful to use dead kids. It's even worse to be responsible for making them that way.

Indeed.

 

[NoJo]

This article was pointed out to me earlier today. If true, it makes a shocking revelation.

By all appearances, it looks like a group of people in Lebanon are carrying around the corpses of children for photo ops.

Just when you think humanity can't sink any lower.....................


EU referendum

A slightly insane ultra-rightwing poster posted that link to the GB a few days ago. I read the article and thought it was intriguing. Since then, a number of people, who knew the poster's ideology better than me, have commented on that thread that the article's website is on the lunatic fringe of the right-wing too, and the article could quite possibly be a skank.

 

[Liar]

How about using dead kids for less propaganda-ish purposes? Here's a true story from a city hit by the -05 Kashmin earthquake, that was told to me by a Red Cross (or Red Cresent, as it were) worker.

She arrived in a heavily hit small town up in the mountains with a supply shipment, to discover something weird. This was weeks after the big shudder, and cleaning out the rubble and carruing away battered corpses was already underway. Everywhere except on the town's main street, which looked especially dramatic.

Shattered windows were not boarded up there, crumbled buildings were not taken down and cleaned out. There were military and townsfolk working frenetically to get the place live-able for the winter, but not along the most busy street. It was even there, to a square along the road, that dug-out corpses were taken and pretty much laid on display.

One of the reasons was for identification. People could come by, and say "yep, that's my uncle, his name is so and so". But why there and not somewhere more secluded? And why start restoration and cleaning up everywhere else but there? Because along that road was where outsiders passed by. Especially foreign journalists, who all snapped shots of the gruesome scene of death and destruction. The right "money shot" might reach a big western newsaper, and get the private donations to relief efforts in the region rolling, they reesoned.

And it did. Some of the more graphic pictures in western and east asia of the quake aftermath my friend recognised as being from that town.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

A slightly insane ultra-rightwing poster posted that link to the GB a few days ago. I read the article and thought it was intriguing. Since then, a number of people, who knew the poster's ideology better than me, have commented on that thread that the article's website is on the lunatic fringe of the right-wing too, and the article could quite possibly be a skank.

I considered that possibility when I made the post. That's why I made sure to put in caveats like "If True". I don't know anything about the originating website, or the author, but it is definitely intriguing. He makes a very strong case for his point.

 

[shereads]

I considered that possibility when I made the post. That's why I made sure to put in caveats like "If True". I don't know anything about the originating website, or the author, but it is definitely intriguing. He makes a very strong case for his point.

We've all witnessed propoganda that exploits the dead. Not as ghoulish as this example, but no less manipulative or disrespectful, were the political commercials that used footage of firemen carrying their dead priest out of the World Trade Center ruins - as if one side had a greater stake in the tragedy than the opposition. I found it sickening, but like most people, my reaction to the use of the 9/11 dead for political propoganda didn't hold a candle to what I felt about the event that killed them.

I view this story about the exploitation of dead children in the same light: if the story is true, and even if it's worse than described, it matters little compared to the fact of their deaths. I don't know about you, but if it was my kid and I had a choice, I'd say give me another hour with my child alive and well - and in exchange for that precious, final fragment of life and love and innocence, you can do whatever you want with the body later on. Drag it through the streets. Turn it into Soylent Green. I'll hate you for exploiting his death, but not a fraction as much as I'll hate whoever killed him.

A random thought: Writing off the deaths of innocents as collateral damage is sort of the opposite of exploitation, isn't it? Instead of exploiting death for a political purpose, we ignore death for a political purpose. Instead of fueling emotions with the use of brutal images, we keep an emotional distance by prohibiting the media from showing flag-draped coffins coming home, or turning the TV off when CNN shows bodies in the rubble. Either way, reality is twisted to play with people's minds. Either way, the dead are beyond caring.