Melville Cooke

The United States media, a highly localised organisation of reporters, talking heads and superb technology which has inescapable global reach, was at it again with the casualty figures from Iraq on Saturday.

The headlines trumpeted that 25 soldiers had been killed, the highest one-day death toll among U.S. troops since January 26, 2005, almost exactly two years earlier. Of course, the figure sticks with us; what does not is that of that number nearly half were killed in a helicopter crash, the cause of which was not known at the time of the reports.

The United States military lives up to the maxim that there are lies, damn lies and statistics by inflating its casualty figures in the public imagination, counting every single soldier who dies in Iraq as a casualty.

Even the previous highest single day casualty figure was not as a result of actual combat, as in the 2005 incident 31 U.S. troops were killed in a helicopter crash. But whether it is a crash or a heart attack, a car crash or a stroke, as a U.S. soldier dies in Iraq they are added to the stockpile of prefabricated heroes by a cynical U.S. administration and media in which Iraqi civilian casualties simply do not count.

Lies and misinformation

The current situation, in which lies weapons of mass destruction are the foundation upon which an illegal occupation lies, causes me to question, more than ever, what has been passed down to us as the history of contact and conflict between the Europeans and the darker races of the world. Because if lies and misinformation can be so casually passed off in this Information Age, what actually happened in the times when there were a few persons writing down what actually happened - and those few almost invariably among the aggressors?

The objective of the U.S. military's (forget coalition) body count and the media presenting the faces of the dead is to put a human face on the military machine, to encourage empathy and, by extension, if not support for the occupation at least not an adamant opposition to it.

And despite my opposition to the U.S. actions, I am not immune to the premeditated efforts to create empathy.

Another policeman murdered

We woke up yesterday morning to the news that yet another policeman had been murdered, this one at a taxi stand in Montego Bay, St. James. By now we are accustomed to the reaction when a policeman dies; the authorities trot out outrage, the police are enraged and somewhat despondent, the general population tends towards surprise followed by a marked lack of outrage, with even some indifference.

Which is sad, because the police are very much casualties of war. They have joined a constabulary force created as a buffer between the haves and have-nots in the aftermath of the 1865 Morant Bay uprising, just to make a living. As such, they operate in a culture in which they are allowed to get away with abuses committed against the have-nots, yet it is this class that they often come from and live among and hence are vulnerable to.

And it is hard to feel only sympathy when hard on the heels of the murders of police officers comes serious allegations of abuse. So with the horrendous murders of policemen since the start of the year comes the killing of 71-year-old Edward Morgan, along with 43-year-old Patrick Austin in Glengoffe, St. Catherine, on Tuesday, January 18.

It is not the same police officers who are involved in the so-called questionable shootings who are being killed. But, like the U.S. in Iraq, an American is an American, and in Jamaica a policeman is a policeman.

They are both potential casualties of a conflict that they did not start themselves; they both are doing an often deadly job, some with more enthusiasm than others, being labelled for the actions of others.

And it is they whom we pour our emotions on, for good or bad or indifference.