Why We Need to See The Pictures

RUSH: Oh, man. That would really be duty.
CALLER: Yeah. (Laughing.)
RUSH: This program, up to now, has been fun.
CALLER. Oh, no.
RUSH: Now you’re actually wanting me to go to work in order to do this program.
CALLER: You know what? It won’t be fun for me to watch beheadings, either, but it will strengthen my resolve.
RUSH: Well, I understand. Is this movie playing here?
CALLER: Yeah, it’s playing where I am in Asheville.
RUSH: No, I’m talking about where I live. I don’t even know if it’s playing. I know it’s playing in North Carolina. It’s playing in all these little art house theaters in Republican states.
CALLER: Yeah, you could get to it (laughing) if you really tried.
RUSH: (Laughing.) Well, I tell you what. You’ve issued me a challenge. I may try to find a way to see it but I’m not going to pay to.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’m not going to pay to see this. The more important point, though, Karen is — and I’m glad you understand why I say what I say about watching the videotape of 9/11 again and some of these beheadings.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: It’s not for voyeurism. It is for people — you know, we showed, and we still do and we still make movies about, what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. Why? So people never forget it.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: The word “Nazi” today is just as horrendous as it was 40 years ago, and there’s a reason. It’s because people are never allowed to forget what happened there, and we showed those pictures and we showed black-and-white films. We’ve seen actual footage of the carnage there. But we will not see, the media will not show us what Saddam Hussein did to his own people, won’t show us anything but the empty mass graves. But when the U.S. commits atrocities in prison, ah, it’s all we get. We get to see how rotten we are but we don’t get to see how truly deadly and inhuman or enemy is, and I think that because — and this is a key point here, folks. This is a key element to this. Not just the fact that we are conditioned to believing things more so when we see them. It is that unlike World War II, and even Vietnam to a certain extent but let’s focus on World War II, the whole country had to rally around the war effort in order to make it succeed. Sixteen million Americans wore the uniform of one of the service branches during World War II. The people that didn’t wear the uniform went to work in factories to build the machinery and the weaponry and the ammo for the war effort to succeed.

That’s not necessary anymore. We have become so much more prosperous that if you want to tune out, you can. If you want to party all night, you can. If you want to go in the library all night and study, you can. If you want to veg on the couch and watch television all night, you can — and in the process of doing that, you can tune out what this country faces. You can tune out an attack and a threat that’s every bit as dangerous as what we faced in World War II, because it’s worldwide. These terrorist cells are worldwide, but you can tune it out and forget it, and as you tune it out and forget it what’s going to happen? You’re going to think it’s over. You’re going to think it doesn’t exist because it’s not affecting you, and if we don’t see the pictures that spawned all this, if we don’t see the jets hitting the World Trade Center, if we don’t see the carnage at the Pentagon and on the ground at Pennsylvania, and if we don’t see the beheadings, it’s very — and it’s not our fault. It’s just the way our brains work.
Nobody wants to see pain. Nobody wants to see suffering. Nobody wants to see things like that. You tune it out. You pretend it doesn’t exist. You go on you and live your life because the country is so great and so prosper that we can all feed our desire for contentment, happiness, or what have you while others are out risking their lives seeing to it that it doesn’t happen again — and in the midst of all this, we have an entire political party which is engaged in an effort to make sure we lose this war so that they win the White House, and I am not mincing words. They are doing everything they can to see that our effort to win this is defeated, because it’s Bush leading it. That’s why I think these pictures need to continue to be shown, because the party that’s seeking power at the expense of the lives of American soldiers, is not equipped to continue the defense of this country because they don’t believe in it. They don’t believe in the defense of the country. They believe in accommodating those who would harm us.
They don’t believe in defeating them, is what I mean. Not saying they don’t want to defend the country. They don’t want to engage those who would wipe us out, in a battle that would end the lives of those who want to wipe us out. They want to appease. They want to form accommodations. They want to try to form peaceful organizations, where we fly white flags and doves and so forth and king “Kumbaya!” all day long, and that’s not the way of the world, and we’re going to forget the way of the world. This is a world governed by the aggressive use of force. It always has been and it always will be. There will never be a day where this is not a world governed by aggressive use of force. That’s why the as the leading nation of the world the lone superpower and the nation that leads the world in freedom we have to have more force than anybody else, to repel those who aggress against us. We’re not an aggressor nation, but we are going to defend ourselves and our easily and friends when they are transgressed against, and if we’re not equipped to do that we’re not going to be equipped to protect ourselves — and that’s what frightens me about the current batch of leaders in the liberal Democrat Party.
I don’t think they’re willing. I don’t think they think it’s that big a threat. I don’t think that they are really citizens of this country first. They look at themselves as “citizens of the world” more so — and it alarms me. It truly does, and that’s why I say, “Show these pictures.” It’s not about voyeurism, and it’s precisely because there are too many options that population members. People of this country can take to forget it, and to forget that it happened and to pretend that it’s not happening — and if you pretend it’s not happening or you don’t know it’s happening or you’ve forgotten it’s happened, you’re not going to be properly equipped to deal with it as a citizen when the country needs to be defended, which it does now. So that’s just my reasoning on this as to why to show the pictures, and keep them shown. I don’t agree with this business of suppressing it to protect people’s feelings or to hide the gore and the horror. Just the opposite, because until we all know what we’re dealing with we’re not going to have a firm spine. We’re not going to have a firm enough resolve to actually deal with it — and, on top of that, if enough of us end up thinking that it’s us committing all the atrocities in this war, we are cooked. We’re doomed, and there are people trying to make that happen. The New York Times, 50 stories on the Abu Ghraib prison photos. Fifty stories! Think there’s an agenda there?
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