Video: Kevin Sites on lessons learned as a war correspondent
Apr 26th, 2010 | By Admin | Category: NewsKevin Sites discusses the lessons he learned as a war correspondent for major TV networks and Yahoo News. Sites believes American media and society as a whole focus on only the most narrow part of war – combat – while ignoring collateral damage that affects civilians for generations.
Great points. One quibble. At the 1:00 minute point, Kevin lists the longterm impacts of war on society–the deaths and injuries of civilian populations, civil destruction, unexploded ordinance, sexual violence, and the loss of heads of households.
While Kevin emphasizes these as the long-term, generational costs of war, to my mind these are actually in the category of immediate and physical. They’re easily recorded and observed, materialistic impacts.
The more subtle thing, harder to grasp is the consequences on the structure of society, particularly its concentration of power, concentration of wealth, often in the hands of opaque individuals, firms and classes of society. And it is these people who actually orchestrated the wars, for gains of various sorts. Got capitalism?