How Much is an Afghan Life Worth to Americans? Apparently Not Much
Even before the death of the Once and Future King of Pop, the United States politicians, press, think tanks, filmmakers and “experts” all tagged the war in Afghanistan as a threat to United States national security, and not about securing and restoring a nation of 32 million people to functioning civil society after thirty years of war.
If anything, the responsibility for this lack of interest in the lives of Afghans by the American public is at the hands of all of these so called experts, politicians, policy-makers, think tanks, filmmakers, and the media. If they change their rhetoric then so too will the American people with their mindsets in regards to the lives of the Afghan people:
The Value of a Life
As it happens, however, the past matters — and keep this in mind (it’s what the wedding-party-obliteration record tells us): To Americans, an Afghan life isn‘t worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.
Back in the Vietnam era, General William Westmoreland, interviewed by movie director Peter Davis for his Oscar-winning film Hearts and Minds, famously said: “The Oriental doesn‘t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
In those years, there were many in the U.S., including Davis, who insisted very publicly that a Vietnamese life had the same value as an American one. In the years of the Afghan War, Americans — our media and, by its relative silence, the public as well — turned Westmoreland‘s statement into a way of life as well as a way of war. As one perk of that way of life, most Americans have been able to pretend that our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with us — and Michael Jackson’s death, everything.
“To Americans, an Afghan life isn‘t worth a red cent, not when the chips are down.” Tom Engelhardt [Twitter]