RootsAction.org and Just Foreign Policy have launched a campaign targeting NBC’s new program, “Stars Earn Stripes,” a reality show co-hosted by retired U.S. General Wesley Clark and co-starring Todd Palin, which the network is advertising during the Olympics.
DAVID SWANSON, david at davidswanson.org StarsEarnStripes.org
David Swanson is a campaigner for RootsAction.org. He said today: “NBC is marketing its new show during the Olympics as the next big sport, featuring former Olympic athletes, but the sport is war, with — so they tell us — real bullets, real explosives, and real danger. If NBC is really risking blowing off the head or arm or leg of Sarah Palin’s husband and the other stars, then we’ve regressed to ancient Rome. Bread and circuses are now Big Macs and NBC war-o-tainment shows. I suspect and hope that in fact NBC is not putting these people at risk and nobody is going to die on Stars Earn Stripes. And I am certain that the 95 percent of casualties in U.S. wars who rarely get mentioned on any NBC program, namely the non-Americans, will not be featured. We will not see children and grandparents blown to pieces. We will not see cluster bombs picked up as toys. We may see doors kicked in, but not the screaming terrified families behind them. NBC is sanitizing and normalizing war as a sport. Gone is any concept of war as an emergency, any notion of war time as separate from peace time. We are into permanent war, and war for its own sake.”
ROBERT NAIMAN, naiman at justforeignpolicy.org, JustForeignPolicy.org
Policy director of Just Foreign Policy, Naiman said today: “It’s breathtakingly bizarre that NBC is promoting a ‘reality TV series’ glamorizing war at a time when 87,000 American soldiers are fighting in a real war in Afghanistan that lost the support of the majority of Americans a long time ago. If NBC wants to show Americans what war is really like, they should take their TV cameras to a military hospital, and ask the people they meet there what they think about keeping tens of thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan indefinitely, or what they think of the plans of some people in Washington to start a new war with Iran.”