Saint Patrick is said to have driven the snakes out of Ireland, (though it's said there never were any). Snakes represent for some a frightening living monster. Dragons without wings.
Monsters represent our worst fears. Facing monsterous images, forces us to feel those fears. But some images of death, like those from the front lines of war, seem too horrible to contemplate.
These have been called "war porn". Porn is acting. The victims of the violence of war are not acting. Why are photographs from war, called Porn?
I was researching something else yesterday when I came across a photographic series from After Downing Street. Org. These were images that have been called "trophy" photographs, taken by soldiers at the front lines of Iraqi. After seeing a few of these I came across the image of a boy lieing in the dirt, in a pool of his own blood and the matter from his head. I looked at the picture for a long time, trying to discern what he might have looked like before he was shot.
I copied the photo to Paint Shop, and tried to reconstruct the boy's face. In the pool he lay in, I saw and defined images of monsters of war.
We know, of course, that the parents of a murdered child will never be free of the horror, that the soldiers who did it will never forget, and that the people those soldiers live with when they come back home will not be unaffected. To properly address claims that some wars are good wars and that the worst deeds of war are performed by "bad apples," we have to have a clear picture of what war is, including the worst of it. If we leave out an understanding of the worst of war, all of our thinking must be distorted.
On Monday it will be four years of the war in Iraq.
Four years of creating dead children, women and men.
Four years of this administration preventing the 'war porn' of soldier's coffins being published.
Four years Of people being wounded and torn.
Four years of spreading a deadly dust over the Middle east that will be killing for years to come.
What are you planning to do on the War's anniversary?
Cross posted at Choice Changes.