The universality of war propagandaA soldier with the Russian army in Afghanistan recounts what they believed about their mission
By Glenn Greenwald
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It is hard to kill people without demonizing them. In 1988, my unit accidentally hit an Afghan wedding party. My friend, whose mortar shells had killed innocent people, was shocked when he learned of it. Some soldiers, however, were indifferent. "That village supports the resistance, anyway," they said. Like NATO now, we didn't count "their" casualties. As another friend, Alexander, would later write : "We thought that all of them - old and young - were insurgents." Alexander, to save his unit, had called in artillery that destroyed a village from which the mujahedeen were attacking.
People of the villages hit by our air strikes became hostile and turned to the resistance. More attacks by insurgents led to more Soviet strikes. After 10 years of such a tragic cycle, more than a million Afghans were dead and millions more had fled their devastated country. Also, ignored by many,
a powerful religious force of militant Islamic movements grew under the pressure of foreign aggression. In 1989, during negotiations between my regiment and the most radical militants from the area, a mujahed told my friend : "We’ll take our revenge to your country." And they did. The backlash spilled out and hit not only the former Soviet Union and Afghans themselves in the 1990s, but also America on 9/11.
The vicious cycle I witnessed in the 1980s - violence causing violence - is still continuing.http://www.vigile.net/We-re-still-dying-in-Afghanistanhttp://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/10/28/propaganda/index.html...............
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi:
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"