War Without Edit

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.” – J. Krishnamurti
I am utterly haunted by the image of the remains of the suicide bomber, I cannot get it out of my mind. Were I in the reality of that image, I would also be experiencing the smells of death, the perspiration of fear and desperation, the metallic sting of blood, the cloying stench of burnt flesh.
That a young man would destroy, not only his own body, but the bodies and lives of strangers, is the most overwhelming, tragic, … I’m sorry, I cannot find the words. Let me try again.
When I viewed the image of the bomber, my mind could not accept what my eyes relayed. It was as if I were trying to find sanity in an image that only Hieronymus Bosch could interpret. And his words would be simple: “Welcome to Hell.“

I had the dubious inspiration to check the website some 15 minutes after lunch. I guess curiosity and a dumb sense that I’m strong enough to withstand the attrocities of some war wiped out the reason.
Soon afterwards, I was contemplating the illusion of my flesh and bones, empty of will and direction, within a growing rage that kept building, until I had to check myself.
Could have been me, my sister, my parents. Could have been your entire family, had you been born there. Yours, no matter where and who you are.

Do not click on any of the second poster’s links. BAD NEWS. It is bubble gum porn, you can’t get if off your shoe.
How sad that in the midst of a serious conversation, an interloper appears with this sick stuff.

I avoided going here when I read your warning, then someone else told me to check them. Like radu I went there after lunch. Too much. No words. The suicide bomber seemed more like a painting to my eyes. Perhaps my eyes were trying to protect my mind. The more people see this the better.

Asta ~
“That a young man would destroy, not only his own body, but the bodies and lives of strangers, is the most overwhelming, tragic …”
I’ve begun to worry that suicide bombing may not be restricted to Muslims in the future. Maybe it’s my choice of summer reading material, maybe it’s the growing hatred in our own country, or maybe it’s that tragedy befell my family recently.
A young woman drove her car at 70 mph into my brother-in-law’s car this summer. She killed him and his two friends. She escaped with just a minor ankle injury. At the scene she told police she wanted to end it all and was trying to kill herself.
It took awhile for us to wrap our minds around that fact. That a young, attractive, white 23 year old American woman not only wanted to kill herself but clearly wanted to take others with her. (She ran through two or three traffic lights in order to gather up enough speed for a horrific crash. Plenty of time to rethink her actions, plenty of time to ease the foot off the gas pedal.)
It made national news and the commentary was predictable. How “stupid, selfish, tragic, bring on the death penalty, yada, yada, yada.”
But I had just finished reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral in which the main character obsesses as to how he could produce a daughter — a child to whom he had given every advantage — who would become a terrorist and end up killing others. (Coincidentally, I saw a PBS show on Patti Hearst at the same time … interesting.)
Now this woman who killed my brother-in-law was not making a political statement. But I’ve been thinking about the common thread that ties suicide/murderers together — the desire to take other lives in the act of committing one’s own destruction.
Is this merely one incident, an aberration? Or is it a tiny glimpse into the future of American youth? With as violent as our society has grown, is it hard to imagine that scores of young people might be unable to respect the value of human life, leaving them prone to committing outrageous acts in the future?
As I make my way through Terror in the Name of God by Jessica Stern, it’s hard not to wonder about a possible future of homegrown terrorism brought about by humiliation, despair, anger, religious indoctrination, you-name-it.
On the other hand, maybe I’m the crazy talker.

I scrolled to the photo of the suicide bomber and screamed in horror. I’m at home, so I was less inhibitied, I suppose. I turned my head away, then looked again, then turned my entire body away and covered by eyes for…awhile.
I’ve occasionally looked up pictures on the Web of the violence in Iraq, as well as the shots of daily life. Some have been horrific, some have made me intensely angry at the waste of lives, the cruelty of maiming people. I often think of Riverbend, the Baghdad woman blogger, and wonder what this horrific war will do to her and her family. Then I feel so terribly guilty–was there more to be done to stop BushCo?
Once I commented somewhere that decades, a century or more from now, readers of histories will not know that X percent of the American people were against this war; it will simply say America invaded Iraq at the beginning of the 21st Century and, probably depending on which nation or culture is pre-eminent, will tell some of the story that suits its own master narrative. It won’t matter that so many of us said don’t do this thing–we were Americans, the invaders.
Should we see some of these photos in our newspapers? Yes, absolutely, some of them. Thank goodness Salon gave warning.
I appreciate the comments others have written.

Asta says it all in the first posting. However, here I go:
Pictorial violence is curiously a daily fact of life in American cinema productions. Death is normal there (whereas human beauty, as shown in the body, is abhorred). However, one never actually sees scenes such as shown in these photographs. Sure, we get explosions and gunshots and so on, but as I recall, the resulting “deaths” are always very clean. Does this sanitised version of the effects of violence reinforce society’s acceptance of violence as a legitimate way of resolving conflict? Or would the showing of more realistic but graphic images actually render us more imune to them, and therefore even more accepting violence?
I’m not a shrink, but I suspect that the latter would actually be more true. Is it a coincidence that Iraqi rebels, intent on murdering hostages, generally cut their throats? After all, cutting the throats of animals is the consecrated way of killing – or sacrificing -them.
So, let’s work against the glorification of violence. Yes, I am naive; yes, I am utopian; let’s just say that I don’t expect to be able to change much but that we must all try.
(and no, I did not click on the link to the porn sites… that is NOT celebrating the beauty of humankind!).

I’m sorry to hear about your brother-in-law… that must have been horrible.
But suicide bombing has never been restricted to Muslims. Look at the Tamil Tigers, for just one example.

Okay, I have not been able to get the bomber out of my mind. The picture shows us how effectively the bombs are being crafted or designed. The bomber didn’t blow up, he blew out – for maximum impact upon other people. From that one photo we can see those guys are more advanced than the MSM portrays them as being.

I didn’t sleep well last night. My thoughts were about Kerstin and her family, I wondered how they were coping with their loss, how they found a way to make sense of it all. I thought about Riverbend who hasn’t posted since around July 15, and I thought about the families in Iraq who had lost loved ones in the endless stream of senseless events they must face everyday.
I did find comfort this morning in the words of Martin and Jawbone and Mugatea and I am grateful that I can come here and listen to the voices of sane people.

If we would see pictures like this coming from Iraq every day, I have the feeling more people would feel as repelled and nauseated by this conflict as I was from looking at those horrifying images.
I’d like to think that, anyway. I also have the feeling many people would make villains of the publications that used those images. They would say those pictures “work against the troops” or are “insensitive” and “obscene.”
I felt terror, nausea, and outrage from looking at those photos. If everybody felt that way about war, perhaps we would spend more time helping people than destroying them. But we are sheltered from the rain of carnage. It’s always more difficult to see the truth after keeping your eyes closed for so long.

The bomber’s collage of body parts doesn’t bother me so much. I’ve seen worse in paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in a museum. It’s so far from any normal depiction of the human body that it no longer triggers revulsion in me.
What bothers me is the last two pictures and the accompanying story. A man lies dying in the street, critically wounded during an inexplicable and horrendous retaliation by U.S. forces. The light in his eyes has not yet gone out. In the next picture, it has. It’s somewhat disturbing to see dead bodies, but here we are watching somebody die from the comfort of our keyboards.
So many ugly questions bubble up from this simple two-image sequence. Why did our helicopter fire a rocket into a crowd of civilians? Was anyone ever held accountable for this little atrocity? Did the western media even rate this story as newsworthy? And ultimately, how many new insurgents were minted on that afternoon?

The volume of Americans either unwilling or unconcerned to view actual images of the carnage and madness permeating Iraq tells the whole story of why BushCo has striven so hard to restrict images of the war from reaching the American hinterland. People everywhere, no matter their political affiliation, would be horrified to see what the administration has unleased on Iraqis. This war is an abomination, as it is a manufactured conflict of choice; there is nothing noble or just about it. I long for the day when your government is held accountable for this unholy mess, although tens of thousands more may die before that day dawns. Disgusting, tragic and unncessary.

Disclaimers like the one displayed at the beginning of this post are unnecessary. Are we so sanitized and detatched from the world that we must be warned to see images of real war? That we must be given a *choice* to view, or ignore reality? It’s this same attitude that has caused MSM to steer so clear of sharing these important, truthful pictures.
I don’t intend to compare BAGnewsnotes with MSM–this site does a great job of digging into the carefully selected images of the MSM and finding truth. The images of the Iraq war require no digging–they are truth, and reality, and interpretation is useless. They stand on their own without metaphors and compositional baggage. We need no warning to see the truth.
Thanks for providing a link to these photographs, and maintaining such an important site.

The Unseen Gulf War

Has anyone an idea why Riverbend hasn’t posted since 15 July? Her silence is unsettling.