Warning: I'm about to get very political in this entry. Since this is mostly a non-political blog, I'm always a little hesitant about posting strong political content. I would hate to alienate (or attract) readers based on the expression of any strongly held but controversial political views I may hold. The following extended post contains material strongly critical of US foreign policy in Iraq as well as certain aspects of American culture. Feel free to skip today's entry if you find such opinions distasteful.******************************************************************************
I've been looking at the recently-released photos of the tortured Iraqi prisoners with their American tormentors. The topic has been written about extensively in many other blogs. The most thorough one information-wise that I know of is this one. I usually steer clear of politics in this blog, especially on issues that are so highly publicized, but I feel the need to make a couple of points.
First, what I find most disturbing about the pictures is the public reaction of horror and disbelief. The photos are certainly disturbing, but how could people be so naïve as to be surprised by this? Time and time again, we see that whenever there is a huge public outcry about anything, it is only when people are either immediately affected or when they are exposed by the media to very graphic and disturbing images. This is what happened on Nine Eleven. Thousands of New Yorkers saw the destruction firsthand and are reminded every day of what happened by the gap in their skyline. Thousands of Americans lost someone close to them or knew someone who did. The media bombarded the public with the images for days, including pictures of people jumping to their deaths to escape the flames. And everyone lived in fear and uncertainty about when and how a future terrorist attack might come.
In contrast to Nine Eleven, the death toll to innocent Iraqi civilians, brought on by the various bombings over the years, receives almost no media attention and certainly no graphic images. Untold thousands have been killed. This is an uncontested fact. About ten thousand were killed in 2003 alone. That's more than twice the number of casualties in the Nine Eleven World Trade Center attacks, with which Iraq had nothing to do. I can certainly understand that images are capable of evoking much stronger emotions than a small block of text in a newspaper which reduces it all to numbers. But we have to think for ourselves and remember what those numbers really mean. Otherwise the powers that be will always have a tremendous capacity for manipulating us, without even needing to lie.
Imagine the types of images we might have seen if the bombing of Iraq had received the same coverage as the World Trade Center attack: a mother screaming in anguish as she cradles the pieces of her dead baby; children standing by helplessy as their father, pinned by a large piece of fallen debris, slowly bleeds to death in front of them; a little boy runs home from school after an attack to find the house in ruins and his entire family dead; a little girl finds herself suddenly buried alive all alone and gradually suffocates to death over a period of several hours. Doubtless those and similar horrors have been played out thousands of times in Iraq over the course of the past several years. How can it be otherwise when thousands of innocent civilians were killed in aerial bombardments?
The scary thing is that we know this to be true. Those deaths are a fact. The US government is doing this in our name. Yet most people simply do not grasp what it really means without seeing the images themselves. Now everyone is outraged by our treatment of the Iraqi prisoners. But I'll bet that if the pictures had not been released to the public, and the torture had merely been described, this would not be seen as such a big deal. Apparently, facts alone are not enough for us. I find this disturbing.
My second reaction to the torture pictures was that they looked somewhat familiar to me. A few months back I blogged about a book called Without Sanctuary. It is a photodocumentary of lynchings in the US in the first half of the twentieth century. Apparently the image we have of lynchings taking place late at night in the woods perpetrated by a small group hoodlums is wrong. They took place in the daytime out in the open and were attended by entire towns, including children. They were occasions of celebration. And just as with the American torturers in Iraq, people wanted pictures as souvenirs. Professional photographers were brought in to photograph the hangings, and the images were sold the next day as postcards to the people in attendance. The book is a compilation of those postcard images, many of which show the faces of people in the crowds. If you have the stomach for it, there is a well done flash presentation of the images. The Iraqi torture photos reminded me very much of them and made me wonder if perhaps such behavior may be direct American cultural descendant of the old lynchings. After all, even the Nazis didn't make a public spectacle of the gas chambers.
