[Andrew Fletcher]

A friend of mine recently told me that one of our classmates has peculiar hobby. He downloads videos of U.S. soldiers killing Iraqis and watches them for fun. Apparently there are several websites that offer such videos, allegedly filmed by soldiers themselves and uploaded to an independent website.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the films. For all I know, they are nothing more than home movies with low-budget special effects sold to stupid college kids. Still, the fact that this guy downloads this stuff for enjoyment is really scary.

This guy is the type of person who would be outraged by Iraqi college students watching movies of American soldiers being killed. He clearly has some kind of mental block that allows to him to apply different standards to Iraqis than to people who happen to have been born in the United States.

I guess my question is: what is to stop this logic from allowing people to accept the mass murder of people who live in the United States? Couldn’t someone simply “other” an ethnic group (like Jews, for example) and kill them for entertainment?

There is something very scary about certain streams of philosophy and standards that run through U.S. culture.