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Friday, November 04, 2005

When body counts kill 
Brendan O'Neill rejects the rhetoric of body counts.

These may appear as radical stances: challenging the West over the death and destruction it has wreaked in Iraq and calling for the publication of gruesome photos that would likely have been banned in earlier eras. In truth, the death-obsession of anti-war activists is motivated by cynicism and opportunism, and it represents a gobsmacking abdication of responsibility for coming up with a convincing political argument against the war. In place of a hard debate about new forms of Western intervention and why they're a problem - and debates about whether the West should have the right to interfere in other state's affairs, or whether a people can ever be liberated from without - we get shock-horror snapshots of dead kids and blown-up body parts and weeping mums and dads virtually having nervous breakdowns on the manicured lawns of the White House, in an effort to blackmail us emotionally into being concerned about the war. They hope that gore will make people anti-war, where their own political arguments may have failed to.


The bottom line: "Western handwringing effectively gives a green light to these murderous insurgents."

Read the whole thing.

Jason

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