13 February 2015

Debunking as it should be done


The poster above was presented by a (probably well-meaning) Facebook customer. Follows a great response to this clumsy propaganda attempt by David Sigeti. Enjoy.


This poster is every bit as deceptive as anything the Bush Administration did to convince people to support the occupation of Iraq, and I say this as someone who opposed the second Iraq War and was disgusted by the deception used to justify starting it.

In the first place, the claim of 2.5 million dead in "wars justified by 9/11" (presumably the Afghanistan and Iraq wars) is exaggerated by at least a factor of five or six. 400,000 is probably a high estimate and 500,000 must be very high. Talk about a lack of proportion.

Secondly, the great majority of those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were innocent Muslim civilians murdered by Islamists who were either our adversaries in the war (Al Qaeda in Iraq and allied groups in their attempt to reimpose Sunni Arab supremacy on the Kurds and Shiite Arabs in Iraq, or the Taliban in their attempt to reimpose a regime of lunatic medieval tyranny and murder in Afghanistan) or were practicing massive reprisals against the former groups, reprisals that we were trying very hard to stop (the Shiite Islamist terrorist groups that were allied with, supplied by, and largely controlled by Iran). Blaming the US for the crimes against humanity committed either by its adversaries or by terrorist groups that the US was trying very hard to suppress is absolute moral cretinism.

Finally, there is the fact that no one would dream of applying a similar argument to almost any other war. Take the US in the second world war, for example. The Japanese killed less than 2000, overwhelmingly combatants, in their attack on Pearl Harbor. The number of Japanese we subsequently killed in the war must have been in the high hundreds of thousands at least, and the number of Germans was probably in the low millions. In addition, the Japanese and Germans killed several hundred thousand Americans, mostly combatants, as well as countless civilians from Allied countries in reprisals connected with our attacks and in fighting our forces. Does this mean that we were wrong to go to war in response to Pearl Harbor?

It is amazing how much mendacity and twisted reasoning you can fit into three sentences and a fragment thereof.

10 comments:

Dick Stanley said...

The only deception involved in the Bush invasion of Iraq was by Michael Moore and his cronies in the Democrat party. Liars everyone.

Dick Stanley said...

Consecrated ground? By long believer usage, like the Western Wall, or some priests sprinkling holy water?

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Hm... well, I wouldn't go that far. There was some monkey business with Iraq at the time, but of course the relevant part of the media made a production of it that was way beyond what it really deserved.

Dick Stanley said...

Wormtongue and the Lizard Queen aren't really public servants. They just play them on TV while raking in the graft and setting up new situations (calling government programs) for more stealing for themselves and their cronies.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Well, them are pols, what do you expect?

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Probably the latter, but since I promised not to read the book, I'll never know.

peterthehungarian said...

Don't forget the Crusaders and the bombing of Dresden...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2952971/BBC-s-insult-hero-pilots-Veterans-rage-Dresden-coverage-attacks-Britain-worse-Nazis-ignores-RAF-s-sacrifice.html

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Who can forget?

Sennacherib said...

Is this a link? If so I can't get it to work. What book are you referring to?

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Oh, sorry - usually I don't provide links to books like these. The blurb might really spoil any good book undeservedly, so there is no need to set a poor author back by such link.