Eyes Averted 0

At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, MIT professor John Tirman wonders why dead civilians in far-away places with strange sounding names become nonentities in American wars. He identifies several factors, which I have extracted below.

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims?

• A large role is played by what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls our “frontier myth”–by which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer
• The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture’s derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put foreigners at risk of violence.
• More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When our “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain it away as an aberration.

Follow the link for background on his reasoning and a fuller explanation of each one.