Post by addisona on Jun 4, 2022 7:55:03 GMT
War as terrorism
ANYONE who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers GI Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as ‘collateral damage.’
We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? In that era when the only foreign conflict most of us knew about was the 1991 US tromping of Iraq, mainly an air-power war from the American point of view, we certainly didn’t think about what we would now call war crimes. It might have been cause for a therapy referral if one of us had taken a GI Joe and pretended to shoot a child, whether armed with a suicide bomb or not.
Having lived through more than a century and a half of relative peace in our homeland while fighting endless conflicts abroad, only in the past 20 years of America’s post-9/11 war on terror, waged by US troops in dozens of countries around the world, have some of our children begun to grapple with what it means to kill civilians.
War in a Trumpian (dis)information age
AS A Navy spouse of more than 10 years and a therapist who specializes in treating military families and those fleeing foreign wars, I believe that the post-9/11 wars have finally begun to come home in a variety of ways, including how we think about violence. Conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond have reached US shores in all sorts of strange, if often indirect manners, starting with the surplus small arms and tactical equipment (some of it previously used in distant battle zones) that the Pentagon has passed on to local law enforcement departments nationwide in ever increasing quantities.
Our wars have also come home through the ‘anti-terror’ grants of the department of homeland security, itself a war-on-terror creation, that have funded local law-enforcement purchases of armoured vehicles and other gear. Such weaponizing programs have helped embolden police officers to see themselves as warriors and citizens like George Floyd as enemy combatants, which helps explain the increased use of force during police encounters in these years.
www.newagebd.net/article/172307/war-as-terror-ism
(Take out the - between terror and ism)
ANYONE who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers GI Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as ‘collateral damage.’
We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? In that era when the only foreign conflict most of us knew about was the 1991 US tromping of Iraq, mainly an air-power war from the American point of view, we certainly didn’t think about what we would now call war crimes. It might have been cause for a therapy referral if one of us had taken a GI Joe and pretended to shoot a child, whether armed with a suicide bomb or not.
Having lived through more than a century and a half of relative peace in our homeland while fighting endless conflicts abroad, only in the past 20 years of America’s post-9/11 war on terror, waged by US troops in dozens of countries around the world, have some of our children begun to grapple with what it means to kill civilians.
War in a Trumpian (dis)information age
AS A Navy spouse of more than 10 years and a therapist who specializes in treating military families and those fleeing foreign wars, I believe that the post-9/11 wars have finally begun to come home in a variety of ways, including how we think about violence. Conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond have reached US shores in all sorts of strange, if often indirect manners, starting with the surplus small arms and tactical equipment (some of it previously used in distant battle zones) that the Pentagon has passed on to local law enforcement departments nationwide in ever increasing quantities.
Our wars have also come home through the ‘anti-terror’ grants of the department of homeland security, itself a war-on-terror creation, that have funded local law-enforcement purchases of armoured vehicles and other gear. Such weaponizing programs have helped embolden police officers to see themselves as warriors and citizens like George Floyd as enemy combatants, which helps explain the increased use of force during police encounters in these years.
www.newagebd.net/article/172307/war-as-terror-ism
(Take out the - between terror and ism)