Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

16 April 2013

DOUBLE STANDARDS

Three people, including a child, were murdered and more than 150 people injured yesterday 15 April 2013 in a cluster bomb attack at the end of a peaceful marathon run in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

The perpetrator (s) of the attack and the reasons for it remain unknown.

However, the slaughter of innocent people for whatever end is always unjustifiable. The end never justifies the means.

We therefore condemn the attack without reservation.

America is understandably in mourning.  US President Barak Obama has described the attack as “heinous” and “cowardly”.

We agree.

However, only last week a local woman and 10 kids were killed in their home in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan in an air strike carried out by US-led occupation forces.

At the time, we scoured the media to locate an apology by US President Barack Obama. We found none.

The most we could find was a comment attributed to the occupation forces to the effect that they were aware of “allegations” of civilian casualties in Kunar and were “looking into them”.

In fact, the day the slaughter in Kunar came to light the western press had more to interest it than the killing of local civilians in the east of the country.

That same day US diplomat Anne Smedinghoff  was killed in a suicide bomb in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan. It was this incident, not the killings in Kunar, that attracted the most attention from western media in Afghanistan that day.

In a way, you can understand why.

The butchery of innocent adults and children by western coalition forces in Afghanistan has become so commonplace that it no longer rates even the scanty western media coverage that it might initially have been given.

To grasp why there is a disparity between coverage of civilian  slaughter in countries which the US has invaded and coverage of civilian slaughter in the imperial homeland, you have to grasp one simple easily understood political fact: American lives are worth infinitely more than the lives of other peoples, particularly if the latter speak weird non-English languages, wear turbans or head scarves, and live in two-bit out-of-the-way regions that no one in their right mind would want to set foot in except if they were invading or occupying them.

Think about it.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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