Edward S Herman's landmark essay, The Banality of Evil, has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable... It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."

Normalizing colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners... No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American...

Fallujah, The Us Elections And 9/11