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    Re: Casualty Figures (long), Dead Elephant in the Room? Archived Message

    Posted by RaskolnikovX on August 13, 2023, 11:46 am, in reply to "Casualty Figures (long), Dead Elephant in the Room?"

    The U.S. used to make a big deal of the flag-draped coffins and tearful hero widows but sometime during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars they decided that this stuff couldn't be shown any more and stopped people from taking photgraphs of the planes laden with coffins coming home.

    This combined with the "We don't count bodies" attitude from the start of those wars probably dates the start of the heavy censorship of those figures (even though the "don't count bodies" thing was directed at the locals they were killing left, right and centre).

    No idea about the Russians but then they haven't been involved in anywhere near the number of conflicts that the U.S. has. They were cagey about them during the Afghanistan war and also the two Chechen wars (particularly the first one where they underplayed their pretty large casualty numbers).

    Ukraine seems to have been a black hole for facts since it started.

    This is from "War Made Invisible" by Norman Solomon:

    For officeholders in Washington and laptop warriors in the press corps, over time, enthusiasm for ongoing U.S. wars generally seems inversely proportional to the number of American casualties. Flag-draped coffins arriving on conveyor belts at military bases in the United States have been bad optics. “On the eve of the Iraq invasion” in early 2003, the Washington Post reported, the Pentagon ordered bases to adopt a policy of “making the arrival ceremonies off limits.” Tightening enforcement of restrictions that had been issued a dozen years earlier, at the time of the Gulf War, the George W. Bush administration “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”7 The ban stayed in effect until 2009, when it was removed by the incoming Obama administration.8

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