Creator and Lead Writer of the TV Series Scandal has, by the plot of her story, raised questions as to if only American lives matter to Americans, as her storylines continuously play down the death of non-Americans while going into an all-season mourning whenever an American is dead or presumed dead.
The November 2 episode “Adventures in Babysitting” was about how the first female American President handled the aftermath of a military coup in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Bashran. While the President, Mellie Grant, planned to stand by the Bashranian President who was in the US during the Coup and who she seems to have fallen for, Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) murders Rashad and his teenage niece, Yasmeen, “for the good of the country”…America.
Yet Olivia is presented as the good girl who protects America by killing a teenage Muslim Arab girl and a political ally of the US for a greater political goal. Before being murdered, the show made a desperate attempt to portray Yasmeen as a lesbian who found “life” and love in America by dating a girl. It also tried all it could to portray the imaginary Arab nation of Bashran as another shithole where no one is free.
In the 6th episode of the series, Olivia’s murder of the innocent man and his teenage niece was discovered and challenged by her associate, Quine Parker, and among other things, her defense was that Yasmeen was “not family”. At the end of the episode Quine is kidnapped and in the following episodes she is thought to be dead and viewers have to go through lengthy episodes of grieving and background instrumentals in honour and mourning of Quine. Even Olivia who murdered a 16 years old Yasmeen without flinching almost could not survive the pains. Finally, a human been was thought to be dead.
Shonda Rhimes removes any doubt of her bais when she wrote another series of hers ‘How to get away with Murder’ into a twist where another Muslim Pakistani character confesses he is gay and ends up with a bullet in his head, raising the question of if whenever Miss. Rhimes thinks of Muslims and Arabs it can’t be for some other reasons aside ending up dead, in comma, sacrificed for the greater good and being gay a while before that.
America’s invasion of Iraq has often been tagged a war launched by the ruling class but polls by Gullop show that as far back as 1992, 55% of Americans wanted America to send troops back to the Persian Gulf to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Despite claims that the support of majority of Americans for the invasion of Iraq was due to government lies and propaganda, 52% of Americans supported the invasion before the September 11 attacks. This number rose to 59% close to the invasion. In 2003, the year of the invasion, about 89% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq “with or without evidence of Weapons of Mass destruction”. The war later claimed the lives of half million Iraqis and has destabilized the region till this day.
8 out of 10 Americans also support the invasion of Afghanistan, a war that has claimed 111,000 out of the 34 million people in Afghanistan.
Many say Americans need to do more to prove to the world that violence against others is not something the population welcomes. While former President Obama smiled at the world and showed everyone his lovely family, he, by his own records, ordered a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted at Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen compared to 57 strikes under Bush.
