@HenryAWallace
The accurate reporting of the war in Vietnam has been repeatedly blamed for America's defeat there.

That sort of thing is no longer allowed as it threatens the MIC ability to reap obscene profits looting our treasury while keeping the unpleasant parts out-of-view.

Win Without War
✔
@WinWithoutWar

Day by day, the casualties grow, largely unnoticed by the American public and our lawmakers. This is why we need to #EndEndlessWar.

Why have death tolls in recent wars been "largely unnoticed " in the US?

During World Wars I and II and the Korean "Police Action," radio, newspapers and magazines apprised the US population of war events several times daily. At some point, I don't know when, newsreels preceded every showing of a film and included news of the war. During the "Vietnam Era," if not sooner, television joined the other mass media in providing news of the war. And, at some point, though I cannot pinpoint it, government decided that war news was not for government. And mass media complied.

In the early stages of the Iraq War, I noticed a loud silence in covering the war daily. As I posted elsewhere on this board, I thought, Surely, on Memorial Day, television news will report on the war, especially deaths of US troops. On the Friday before Memorial Day Monday, I tuned into the open of the Today show and heard a helicopter. However, it was Matt Lauer in the helicopter, reporting on Memorial Day traffic in the New York City area. On a national network, the open on Memorial Day was not war casualties or other hard war news, but a local traffic report for the benefit of New Yorkers using Memorial Day weekend to get out of NYC to a more fun venue!

Nor did media fight a prohibition on photographing flag draped coffins. Although it was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the coffin, the rationale for the prohibition was the sensibilities of the survivors. Really? Were the survivors happy with a government and mass media that was ignoring the dangers and sacrifices of war?

IIRC, there were some televised calls from troops to loved ones in the US, but, of course, the troops were minimizing danger to the US troops, so as to comfort their loved ones. As the war unfolded, I saw calls of that kind and videos of troops surprising their kids at school. The kind of thing that, in the past, may have been described as "schmaltz."

The cumulative absence of day-to-day coverage of wars in which US troops have been involved has been gobsmacking and unprecedented. So much for independent news in the US, at least as to mass media.

@snoopydawg

OT

Was good to see this:

Over 30 days and 300 miles, in temperatures reaching 100 degrees, dozens of ordinary Afghans have walked across some of the most devastated parts of the country to seek an end to the war https://t.co/X36ozba8DQ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 15, 2018

The 'leaders of the free world' came together to celebrate the ending of the war to end all wars while there are countless wars going on. What a fcuking joke! How many people are living in hell right now while those people were eating nice food and being catered to? Gah!

Caitlin nails it again. VETERANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON FUCKING CHARITY.

The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them

The Dead

do not require our silence to be honored
do not require our silence to be remembered.
do not accept our silence as remembrance, as honor.
do not expect our silence to end
the carnage of war
the child starved
the woman raped
the virulence of intolerance
the Earth desecrated
It is the living who require our silence
in a lifetime of fear and complicity

The Dead

do require our courage to defy the powerful and the greedy.
do require our lives to be loud, compassionate, courageous.
do require our anger at the continuance of war in their name.
do require our shock at the maiming of the Earth in their name.
do require our outrage to be honored, to be remembered.
Amen!

Since the war to end all wars

@leveymg While the actual war casualties were small, the damage to China was enormous. I have read where at the time of the first war, China had thee largest economy in the world. By the time of the second war, the Chinese economy had been reduced by 50%.

As empire falls go, we'll be lucky if we have half the grace of the British Empire
and twice the blood on our hands. Given the actual magnitude of genocidal killing that went to build the British Empire, and the relatively peaceful abdication of its once enormous colonial territories, that will be quite an accomplishment.

Britain’s imperial decline and fall can be dated to the end of World War One, and the formal decision to give up the Commonwealth territories to self rule, didn’t come until 1945. The British Empire had, of course, suffered major setbacks previously, principally the loss of its Colonies in North America.

The acquisition of the British Colonies led to enormous loss of life in the areas of English Conquest. Britain was responsible for the deaths of 35 million Indians from 1858 until 1947, according to Shashi Tharoor. Most of those deaths were due to massacres and unnecessary famines brought on by the policies of the British Raj, according to the author. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-deaths-br...

During the earlier period of British Colonial rule in North America, 1670-1776, the Native population in what is now the territorial United States is estimated to have declined from about 2.5 million to 800,000. (Thornton, 1987) The population of imported African slaves in the Colonies amounted to about 500,000 by the time of Independence. (Simmons, 1976) The cost of conquest and building of the 13 British Colonies probably runs in excess of 2 million lives, not including British Colonists and indentured servants.

Historian Paul Kennedy summed it up,

"From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation."

In the post World War Two era of the American Empire, Obermeyer estimated the 5.4 million died worldwide as a result of wars, most fought or supported by the United States. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=5207645&page=1

In the study, Obermeyer’s group compared data on war deaths from eyewitnesses and the media from 13 countries over the past 50 years with peacetime data in the United Nations World Health Surveys, which was collected after the end of the wars.
[ . . . ]
The researchers estimate that 5.4 million people died from 1955 to 2002 as a result of wars in 13 countries. These deaths range from 7,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million in Vietnam.

According to Obermeyer, the estimates are three times higher than those of previous reports. Data from this new study also suggests that 378,000 people worldwide died a violent death in war each year between 1985 and 1994, compared with 137,000 estimated at the time.