Media and Conflict: Framing Issues, Making Policy, Shaping Opinions Book

Some books are unpleasant to read, and this is one. It's about war and violent death and deceit carried on at levels of inhumanity almost inconceivable and of course you should make yourself aware of this.

When America goes to war, as it frequently does for extended periods of time, the politicians and generals go into high gear with words like 'patriotism' and phrases like 'supporting our veterans'. But is it either when the reasons behind going to war in the first place are often deceptive and just wrong, as when Bush invaded Iraq with false claims of finding weapons of mass destruction?

Yet such phrases stifle free opinions and speech over and over.

I do think this book is anti-war (or pro-peace) and the author sometimes overstates his case, but overall it's impossible to fault his extensive experience and research into the history and rhetoric that have made and continue to make heinous wars palatable to Americans.

He also makes the point that war is kept at arms length from us even though we see pictures of it over our tv sets. Deaths shown there are as unreal as they are in tv shows; we never feel the anguish of a soldier from some other country who has come as his patriotic duty and killed a child or parent or other loved one right in front of us, then left us to deal with the grief.

"If we really knew war, what war does to minds and bodies, it would be harder to wage."

Therefore, it is often the PR job of the White House to keep that awareness away from the public, with the media's complicity since they very frequently accept the generals' and government's statements as factual. (Even though this has been repeatedly proven not to have been true.)

Our tax money is now being used to support our huge military machine, which is very profitable by the way, at the rate of 1 billion dollars A DAY....and this is in service of an organization whose methods are primarily the destruction of property and people.

This book broke its chapters down by various false aspects of wars waged by America, and in each chapter multiple examples were drawn from Vietnam, Kuwait, Panama, Iraq and so forth. It was a bit difficult to see-saw back and forth like that, but he made his points convincingly.

It's a tough book to read, but it should be.