Internet Project: Re-Humanizing People in War-Torn Countries

There is a rule in big media: Don’t show regular people doing normal things in countries that your country is at war with (or might soon be at war with). So you will rarely see in the US media images of Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, etc, just buying things at the market. Children playing. Normal street scenes that wouldn’t be out of place – except for the visible local cultural differences – anywhere in the world.

So that is what I would like to see. If there are any people living in or visiting these countries reading this, please flood youtube and your blogs with videos and photos of normal life. Lets get these images out as an antidote to the pernicious pro-war propaganda (which now works in more subtle ways than before, sinning as much by omission as by what it clearly says).

Anti-war people have shown enough blood & guts, cadavers and dismembered bodies. It’s time to try something else. I believe that people will be more empathic to images of people in situations they can related to rather than in the alien (for them) world of war.

For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend Antiwar.com and Antiwar Radio.

Photo: Children in Iraq.