Bombing The Smurfs
What's the deal with all the media coverage over the Unicef ad featuring an appearance of The Smurfs licensed by the Peyo estate.
People are shocked that using a childrens television icon - especially one with Gen-Y nostalgia value, will be upsetting to children and their parents.
Some thing that since some people didn't like the Smurfs and are glad to see war waged against them, it will minimize and trivialize the message.
Virtually no one seems to be addressing the actual point of the ad: to raise funds to aid in rehabilitating former child soldiers in foreign countries.
Some people gripe that ad ad showing baby Smurf crying in a bombed out village sends an anti-war message.
Pish tosh, tish, and piffle.
People, war supporters, American patriots, are not naive innocents or hypocrites. They are not self-deluded or blinded by rousing John Wayne propaganda. They're not idiots.
American war supporters know full well what a war is. Bombs do not drop from the sky and land only on unoccupied factories in Batman's abandoned warehouse district. When we wage a war on the enemies of our nation in any specific geographical region we know full well that in addition to those who have chosen to defy us, we will also make victims of innocents. Those with no political agenda, men and women, children, mothers and grandparents, the clergy or clerics or voodoo priests of whatever belief system is popular in the land we are devastating.
That is what war is. Every single person who sports a flag decal or casts a ballot in support of a war knows exactly what a war is and has absolutely no moral compunction over taking a claw hammer and smashing in the soft unformed skulls of the newborn children of our enemies like so many baby harp seals cluttering up the Canadian tundra. Hammering a child with a mallet or taking a chain saw to their limbs, and casting a vote or raising your voice in support of war: there is no moral difference, the blood on your hands is the same whether it is literal or figurative.
When a soldier pulls a trigger he accepts the moral responsibility for the demise of his or her target. When a vote is cast or a symbolic gesture is made or a verbal argument is offered in support of a war, that person accepts the responsibility and shoulders the burden of every death resulting from that war just as much as the man who declares it. That is why we do not enter into war lightly, that is why we make a war so hard to declare that only a president with the majority support of the congress and senate and, by extension, the voters, can launch us into a war.
A little cartoon about dancing blue gnomes and falling bombs and red-orange bomb-bursts and puffs of smoke and the smouldering remains of a burned out mushroom hut village don't inform us of anything we don't already know.
People who support war know about the blood and death, devastation and sweet roast pork smell of burning babies. They understand it and they accept it and they wave flags from their antennae in celebration of it and vilify pop singers who criticize it.
And they wonder why they scare me.
People are shocked that using a childrens television icon - especially one with Gen-Y nostalgia value, will be upsetting to children and their parents.
Some thing that since some people didn't like the Smurfs and are glad to see war waged against them, it will minimize and trivialize the message.
Virtually no one seems to be addressing the actual point of the ad: to raise funds to aid in rehabilitating former child soldiers in foreign countries.
Some people gripe that ad ad showing baby Smurf crying in a bombed out village sends an anti-war message.
Pish tosh, tish, and piffle.
People, war supporters, American patriots, are not naive innocents or hypocrites. They are not self-deluded or blinded by rousing John Wayne propaganda. They're not idiots.
American war supporters know full well what a war is. Bombs do not drop from the sky and land only on unoccupied factories in Batman's abandoned warehouse district. When we wage a war on the enemies of our nation in any specific geographical region we know full well that in addition to those who have chosen to defy us, we will also make victims of innocents. Those with no political agenda, men and women, children, mothers and grandparents, the clergy or clerics or voodoo priests of whatever belief system is popular in the land we are devastating.
That is what war is. Every single person who sports a flag decal or casts a ballot in support of a war knows exactly what a war is and has absolutely no moral compunction over taking a claw hammer and smashing in the soft unformed skulls of the newborn children of our enemies like so many baby harp seals cluttering up the Canadian tundra. Hammering a child with a mallet or taking a chain saw to their limbs, and casting a vote or raising your voice in support of war: there is no moral difference, the blood on your hands is the same whether it is literal or figurative.
When a soldier pulls a trigger he accepts the moral responsibility for the demise of his or her target. When a vote is cast or a symbolic gesture is made or a verbal argument is offered in support of a war, that person accepts the responsibility and shoulders the burden of every death resulting from that war just as much as the man who declares it. That is why we do not enter into war lightly, that is why we make a war so hard to declare that only a president with the majority support of the congress and senate and, by extension, the voters, can launch us into a war.
A little cartoon about dancing blue gnomes and falling bombs and red-orange bomb-bursts and puffs of smoke and the smouldering remains of a burned out mushroom hut village don't inform us of anything we don't already know.
People who support war know about the blood and death, devastation and sweet roast pork smell of burning babies. They understand it and they accept it and they wave flags from their antennae in celebration of it and vilify pop singers who criticize it.
And they wonder why they scare me.
posted by Napoleon Park at 12:17 AM
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