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No, Carole Cadwalladr, THIS is what war looks like…

Carole Cadwalladr has been applying her fingertips to her keyboard again. This is usually bad news for anybody offended by giant leaps of logic or insufferable smugness, but it’s also usually inane enough you can just ignore it.

Not in this case. The overall standard of Western Journalism has fallen, and it was never mountainously high to begin with, but this tweet is SO offensive, so hubristic and vain and insulting that it merits special attention. It deserves to be called out. Loudly, and often.

I was going to embed it, not post a screencap, but there’s the tiniest chance she’ll have an uncharacteristic moment of sanity and delete. This way her disgusting words can never be erased.

No – Carole – Facebook profile pictures are NOT “what war looks like now”, and sitting behind a keyboard in the home counties, giggling about Russian bots whilst Wimbledon is muted on the TV behind you, doesn’t make you a fucking soldier.

How DARE you write that? Do you have no sense of hubris? Of respect?

It is the most disgusting sentence I have ever read. Words cannot express the smallness of the mind and the gargantuan scale of the ego that shat those words into the world, fully expecting them to be taken seriously.

THIS is what war looks like today…

The following pictures are graphic and unpleasant, but so is war, and some people need a reality check

This is a Palestinian child, burned with White Phosphorous during the Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2014.

This is a Yemeni rebel fighter, standing in the rubble of his country. Our government sold Saudi Arabia the bombs they used to turn these buildings to dust.

This is Libya, once the most developed and richest country in Africa. Now a gutted shell, home to slavers and warlords. NATO did this to control Libyan oil, amongst other things.

This is Mosul, an ancient city in the cradle of civilisation, reduced to rubble in the name of America’s laughable “war on terror”.

This is a father and daughter, fleeing the ISIS occupied areas of Iraq. We train, fund and arm ISIS to act as our proxy army in Syria.

A mother and 1 month old baby, killed when Ukrainian fascist militias shelled Gorlovka in 2014. We arm these Nazi militias, and have actively disrupted and discouraged any peace process in the region.

American soldiers torturing Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib after the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The bodies of nine men allegedly killed in a U.S. drone strike on Dec. 12, 2013 are lined up prior to burial near the town of Radda, Yemen. Over 90% of those killed by drones are innocent bystanders.

Vietnamese civilians flee their burning village, carrying their dying children in their arms, after the USAF dropped napalm on them.

This is what war looks like today….the same as it has done for hundreds of years.

War looks like burnt down buildings, scorched rubble, ashes, fire and chaos.

War looks like blood stains, and spattered brains and burns right down to the bone.

War looks like tears leaving clean trails through masks of sweat-stuck grime and muck, as wives and husbands and mothers and sons and sisters and brothers and friends feel a loss too deep and visceral to ever be put into words.

War looks like poor people screaming and dying and bleeding, hundreds of miles away, whilst the Western arms companies make a fortune selling expensive toys you can only use once.

War is what the rich to do the third world, while the complacent chattering classes of pompous privileged prigs pat themselves on the back because they separate their recycling and voted for Remain.

War is what modern journalists – self-regard where their consciences should be – preach to the masses. Cheering on the destruction and sending other people’s children to die for a cause they barely believe in themselves, but which will definitely net them a good book deal when the dust settles. Reducing a once proud profession to nothing but a series of insane propagandists and disingenuous whores

Journalists are just a symptom, of course, a sign that the power structures of the Western world – and those ensnared within them – are so divorced from reality that they are putting us all in danger. If their insane, insulting, inflammatory rhetoric is allowed to go unchecked they could blindly lead us all into a war – a real war – that would make the above photographs look like a day at the beach.

Write about that, Carole, if you can. You won’t win the Orwell Prize but you might save your soul.

EDITORS NOTE: One of the photographs in this piece was mistakenly attributed to a drone strike in Pakistan, when it is in fact a drone strike in Yemen. The mistake has been corrected, and we apologise for making it.

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