Raw War Footage

Read a very interesting article "The Pleasure Of Flinching" by Nicholas Sautin in Guernica Magazine's online site.

Ostensibly a review of Argentine Mauro Andrizzi's documentary "Iraqi Short Films" which is an unending diet of war and soldier R&R footage from Iraq. All culled off the internet and none of it shot by the film-maker himself. The footage is bloody, unmitigated shots of death and dying. War porn. Combat snuff.

To my mind such images raise an unsolved dialectic of questions, both pro and con.

Firstly, I would far rather these images existed than the surgical strike videos the army fed us from the Desert Storm Campaigns. Here at least you can see what death actually entails, rather than what amount to little more than video game sequences offered up by the military. These images redress the balance of those who would want to sanitise war.

Or do they? While I favour any global citizen being able to post their own eye witness report on a warzone, to get around the editorial control of TV stations and newspaper proprietors and the restrictions placed on journalists embedded with military units "no operational details for security purposes", one has to also ask the question of whether the citizen eye witness is any more reliable? By this I don't mean that they may lack any grounding in editing. More that how do you know you're not being fed a line, that the footage isn't in fact raw and unedited, but crafted for propaganda purposes? By either side in the conflict.

Which begs the question who is watching these videos at home on their computer. On one side it is pretty clear. Those prosecuting the resistance in Iraq or Afghanistan view images of 'glorious' operations such as IED explosions, and atrocity images of their own dead and dying brothers and sisters in villages and at weddings, as recruiting tools pure and simple. Your Faith needs You, the modern day recruitment poster child of death. To me this ties in with the psychology of those fighting the war against the 'invaders'. This is war and snuff porn and it works on the psychology of disaffected youth, who feel stakeless and unfulfilled in the modern world. Who feel the weight of the history of humiliation and servitude of their people on the global map. Who have no outlet for their male fantasies of strength, honour and dignity in a conventional way. But here they can connect to being warriors somehow. The equivalent Oriental Grand Tour, kill an infidel in every one of Iraq's holy cities... This is what it means to be male in the 21st century for this cohort of young men. This is the fuel of their fantasy life and is not too hard a task to attach some basic propellant of ideology to it. Death porn is pitched just right, to young men who feel they have nothing to lose in a no win society anyway. Death is the everyday currency of exchange. Tit for tat. Escalation. Revenge and reparation. It's how you can behead a human being live on YouTube...

But what of the non-combatants tuning in? Notionally those non-Muslims who watch death and torture porn? I am on less sure footing here as I neither know how many are return customers rather than once only purveyors and also why war footage porn appeals to them where say sexual torture porn does or doesn't. Presumably there is this constituency I alluded to above, those who opt to get their 'news' from these unofficial and alternative sources, but again I raise the question of how they know they're not being hoodwinked? I can recognise a video that's looping the same explosion over and over, but these are the most basic of examples. There are bound to be some far more sophisticated and lovingly crafted. Is the viewer at home really able to penetrate such artifice? At what point does a reasonably regular diet of such images inure and desensitise the viewer? To reach the same point of dehumanisation as the Jihadi watching the same images in order to stoke his fire and gird his loins? I guess I'm saying, what is the point of watching endless videos of death and carnage, if you're not a combatant? Or at least what is the endpoint? Will it make you march harder on a demonstration? Write with more frothingly outraged vocabulary in that letter to your MP? Are you maintaining some sort of spreadsheet collating the bodycount there in your study?

So there are few definitive conclusions to be drawn. We need alternative sources of data from warzones, but can we trust them any more than official versions? Their logic is crystal clear as far as combatants go, but what exactly are non-combatants deriving from repeated trips to the YouTube well? Maybe we should start inquiring as to what hunger for such images tells us about the psyches of both direct combatants and non-combatants and then maybe, just maybe, we the people will figure out how we come to get into such entanglements of war in the first place; why young men pick up rocket propelled grenade launchers and why the soldiers who go in after them are led by men with no understanding of what's involved.

It's the new Catch-22. You have to watch suffering endlessly in order to bring about an end to the suffering. Don't think this one's gonna fly though somehow. Do you?