Mainstream news and social media cannot get enough photos of imperial invaders posing for photographs with small children in Afghanistan.
Mass media narrative managers and military agencies alike have been spamming these images everywhere, as quickly and enthusiastically as possible.
That's right. Invade a nation, kill hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, stay for decades, accomplish nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy, drop everything and leave, then have your armed goon squad take PR photos with local infants so everyone thinks your military is awesome.
Ooh everyone look at this picture of a sweet kindly US stormtrooper cuddling one of the Afghan infants his coworkers happen to have not murdered yet.
The UN found that at least 26,025 children were killed or maimed in the fighting in Afghanistan just between the years 2005 and 2019.
And what exactly is going on in this video here? Why is he bottle feeding those kids like koalas after an Australian bushfire? Those are people. If they've been out there for two days you've had time to get water bottles. Hand the people water bottles.
Also how crazy is it that they spent trillions of dollars supposedly "nation building" in Afghanistan and basic water and plumbing needs are still an issue. It's like, hey, stop doing photo ops with babies and go dig some wells or something.
Just imagine if all this media firepower had gone into criticizing all the lies and devastation that went into creating this mess in the first place.
Not everyone is impressed by these photos.
Not impressed at all.
I mean I get it. The military and the mass media are two arms of the same empire, and creating a positive image for the imperial war machine is essential to its continued operation. If people began awakening to just how horrific the US-centralized empire's mass murder operations really are, they would lose trust in the giant propaganda engine which manipulates the way they think, act and vote. You can't stop the killing, since killing is the glue which holds the unipolar world order in place, so you have your grunts take pictures with the babies of the nations you invaded instead.
It's just gross is all. Really, really gross.
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It had to be said, thank you! Only thing missing to show how the US really feels about kids in disobedient nations is the clip of Madeleine Albright saying 500,000 Iraqi kids dead due to genocidal US sanctions was “worth it”.
My first reaction -- knowing what I know about the United States and its military -- is how incredibly cynical and ham-fisted this all is, just like the war.
Then I realized for those who think Chris Todd is a real reporter and the name Glenn Greenwald is unknown, the propaganda doesn't really need to be any better than this.
And that realization is depressing as hell.