War, Violence, and the Nation

War, Violence, and the Nation III

This is another update on my blog about the topic of "war, violence, and the nation," where I have been collecting media materials that discuss neglected aspects of war and violence. I discuss in my blog how the media represents acts of war and violence and how these representations affect American culture and the nation. In my previous update, I discussed three different entries on the topic and in this paper I am going to discuss additional four media materials that I have collected for my blog.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8383084962209910782#

This is a link to a documentary that talks about the relationship between the government and the media in propagating war. The title is War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. It is narrated by actor Sean Penn and features media critic Norman Solomon. The documentary discusses how for the last fifty years American Presidents have been deceiving the nation when it came to declaring wars and how the media helped the Presidents to sell their war stories. Solomon gives numerous evidences showing how the Presidents lied to the nation. For example, the documentary airs a tape where President Nixon tells his Secretary of State that he wants to bomb Vietnam with a nuclear strike and that he does not care about hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. A day after saying this to his aids, President Nixon told the American people publicly that all he wanted in Vietnam was peace. The documentary shows how civilian casualty of wars waged by the United States have been concealed from the American people, how foreign dangers have been exaggerated, and how the media uncritically served the government leaders in these events. I decided to include this documentary because it is one of the most important ones for my blog. Since my main purpose is to explain the readers the effects of war, War Made Easy is a must entry to my blog.

2. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/29/national/main4762268.shtml

This material is an article talking about the increasing level of suicide rates among members of the U.S. Army. It is a credible article because the statistical information is provided by officials in the Defense Department. The article mentions that if 64 Army members took their lives in 2004, their number increased to 102 in 2006, 115 in 2007, and 128 in 2008 -- the year 2008 being the highest in the last three decades. The article points out that the increasing levels of psychological stress because of being involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been causing greater levels of suicide rates. "Officials have said repeatedly that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," the article says. This is another aspect of war people often neglect. The Defense Department regularly updates information on the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq wars but these statistics do not include those soldiers who took their lives because of participating in these wars and suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I try to collect materials that are often neglected in the media and by the public. Therefore, I thought that the inclusion of this entry into my blog is very important.

3. http://aacap.org/page.ww?name=Understanding+Violent+Behavior+in+Children+and+Adolescents&section=Facts+for+Families

This article discusses another extremely important topic that is not duly addressed. It talks about violent behavior in children and adolescents. Children and adolescents are more susceptible to influence from parents, peers, media, and others. So, if major problems in the society that encourage violence are not addressed, children are more likely to be influenced and become violent. This article addresses why children and adolescents may become violent, what factors influence them, what are the signs, and what preventive measures work in society's attempts to end violence among children and adolescents. In our society today, many parents have become irresponsible, not only allowing their children to immerse themselves in violent video games and movies but also causing a lot of violent behavior among their children by having unhealthy marriages, abusing their children, and becoming alcohol and drug addicts. This problem needs to be addressed, and therefore I found it important to include into my blog.

4. http://www.parentingbookmark.com/pages/NCP03.htm

The last material I decided to include into my blog is an article by a professor of education who talks about the connection of toys to violence. This article points out that we often look at violence in media, TV, the Internet as causes of violence among Americans but we rarely look at toys that nurture culture of violence in children. Especially, the article says that while many films and TV programs are rated PG-13, heroes in these same films and programs are marketed as toys to our children. "Often, toys linked to these movies are also linked to other media such as TV, video games, and comic books," the author of the article says. "This cross-feeding starts with toys for the youngest children and begins the cycle of children's involvement with entertainment violence." The toys-violence connection is something I did not think about before finding this article. I am sure many people ignore this aspect of violence in our society. Therefore, I decided to include this in my blog.

As I have discussed in this paper, I am looking at a variety of issues in our society that lead to violence and wars. In this paper, I discussed media materials that talk about the role of the government in spinning us to wars, the increasing level of Army member suicides as a neglected aspect of wars, and how culture of violence may be nurtured at our early ages as well as preventive measures to decrease the level of violence in our society. These are important additions to what I have been collecting in the past.