{there's concise words to describe the multiple events that are collapsed into the one horrific moment, but I don't know them. it only happens once, and what it is that's happening that one time is a lot of things. but for most people in America, especially younger ones, what these images will bring is not the horror of war so much as the horror of death itself. it's important to remember that pictures of carnage, of, for instance, the Galveston flood where, as plep reminds us, 8,000 people died, were and are equally horrific, when they exist. the intentionality of war, if there can be said to be such a thing once the fighting begins, is what makes these images more searing, that they are the results of an act of human will, rather than an 'act of God'.
pictures of screaming children are nightmarish for anyone with any human emotional receptivity, but children scream and are terrified at more than just the damage and danger of war. it's important to remember that.
and images of events like the great plagues that swept europe of so many, all those centuries ago, those must be imagined, none remain. now we have the technological means to record so much, and so much of that will seem new, because it is new to most of those who see it. but it isn't really, it isn't happening for the first time. and if any good can come from viewing pictures like these it's that clearly seeing what's there, even at second and third hand, confronting what's there directly and with an honest heart takes away the power of the moment, that shock at first recognition. too many people respond to pictures like these by rejecting the death they show so undeniably. and we live in a culture, in a state of infantilized helplessness within that culture, where death is denied. once that power has been overcome, once the shock is no longer paralyzing, the question of war can be answered. otherwise it's an argument against death itself, an argument only children make.
obviously for the fantasy-bound, for those whose idea of war is like a television program, these pictures show their armchair viciousness for what it is, the reaction of a movie audience to a film-maker's tricks.
as 'art', as testament, the images themselves convey the body's fragility, and life's. and in some, those of the maimed and still living, the ability of the self to continue through horror, to be, to exist on the other side of horror, to go on.}
This Is War
Memory Hole via plep
