The following, set off by the two lines of asterisks, is from Norman Geras' blog.
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"Nick Berg decapitation video." "Nick Berg Beheading." "Nick Berg and Iraq." "Nick Berg assassination."
Were you one of the people who used these words in an Internet search yesterday?
Lycos, the Internet search engine, reported a huge surge of activity as Web users searched for copies of the horrific video showing the West Chester man being beheaded by his Iraqi captors. ..... None of the reports I'd read about Berg's slaying had prepared me for the brutality that I witnessed. Afterwards, I had to go outside to take a walk to collect myself. ..... "You cannot get that horrid picture out of your mind. You don't even have to see it," [Gail Rosenwald Smith, a Philadelphia-based attorney] said. "It was terrible just listening to the description of it." ..... Elizabeth Carll, an internationally known trauma psychologist who has counseled people impacted by the Persian Gulf Crisis, the World Trade Center attacks and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, thinks it's a bad idea for people to watch the video.
"Don't watch," she said. "The visual image will keep replaying in your mind."
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It is not entirely clear to me whether the passage that begins "None of the reports I had read about Berg's slaying prepared me..." is the voice of Geras or someone he is quoting, although it does appear to be the former. But I found myself asking, whomever it is, "Why did you feel a need to actually see the video? What did you expect to see? How could you have thought that a video of an actual decapitation would be anything but gruesome and horrible far beyond the capacity of any words to describe? What words could possibly capture the look of horror on the face of Berg, or the terrible scream that issued forth from his throat?"
Nor is this the only manifestation of this impulse, which appears to have been given full vent by the pictures from the Iraqi prisons. In a moment of random surfing, I end up on Doug Henwood's LBO-Talk list for the first time in years [that is what following the Pugliese's links will do to you], and what do I see, but an extended discussion of whether or not pictures that purport to represent the gang rape of Iraqi prisoners are genuine.
It seems to me that we have here is pornography in the classic sense of the term, before it came to signify endless reels of boring, repetive sex [in and out, in and out, in and out...]. It is a sense of the prurient at its most extreme, indulged as much in watching a real life snuff video as in "studying" photographs purported to be the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to determine if they are real or not. The Sadeian is as much those who need to see it, as those who enact it on the bodies of helpless others. And we seem to have no shortage of Sadeians.
If the pictures of gang rape are [not] genuine, so what? And now that you have witnessed a most cruel murder in cold blood, so what? What essential knowledge do we need to know about the human depravity of either set of actors that requires us to become a willing, entirely consensual partner to their act, by accepting their invitation to come and watch their crimes on others? For did they not film it, in order that we could join with them in consuming their violence?
Leo Casey