Michael's Essay - Death On-Screen in the Digital Age
The final tipping point that persuaded Americans that the United States was tangled up in an unwinnable war was the Tet Offensive of 1968....
The final tipping point that persuaded Americans that the United States was tangled up in an unwinnable war was the Tet Offensive of 1968.
In January a combined force of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong guerrillas swarmed into the south, attacking towns, provincial capitals, villages and finally Saigon itself. They even managed to breach the security wall at the American embassy. They were finally routed at a huge human cost. But the lesson hit home: the U.S. could not defeat the North Vietnamese.
Vietnam was called The Living Room War by the critic Michael Arlen. For the very first time, Americans could see what their soldiers and airmen were doing in their name in the battle for freedom, democracy and the preservation of Christian values. Now we can see the horrors of war even more vividly. The videos are ubiquitous. They are graphic. And they seem to be never ending.
It is important that these images exist. They drive home the measure of evil of the masked murderers.
There is something about beheading that is particularly horrifying. It draws us back in our imaginations to the Dark Ages, or the Terror after the French revolution; to a time when death by beheading was public and applauded.
Which is just what the terrorists want.
The videos are the grisliest form of propaganda imaginable and they will have succeeded if we search them out on the web.
I have not watched the Ray Rice video or the beheadings of the two journalists. I do not intend to.
One month after Tet, a young Viet Cong fighter was arrested in Saigon. His hands were tied behind his back. A man named Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of the National Police, paraded the young prisoner before cameras. He took out his revolver, shot the prisoner in the head and walked away. Loan later immigrated to the U.S. where he died in 1998.
That year I was the Washington Correspondent for The Globe and Mail, writing in safety about Vietnam in the National Press Building. The film of that execution disturbed me and lingered in my memory for months. As a police reporter I had seen any number of dead people. But I had never seen anyone actually executed.
We now live in an age where the public execution ritual of Medieval times has returned. We can, should we choose, watch a woman and a child being stoned to death. We can see suicide bombers go about their grisly work in Baghdad or Kabul. And we can watch as masked murderers cut the heads off American reporters. On the domestic front, we can watch as a professional football player beats his wife unconscious and spits on her in an elevator.
All of these events and more are readily available because everybody with a camera is suddenly a photojournalist. And the internet can send images around the world in the blink of an eyelash.
Vietnam was called The Living Room War by the critic Michael Arlen. For the very first time, Americans could see what their soldiers and airmen were doing in their name in the battle for freedom, democracy and the preservation of Christian values. Now we can see the horrors of war even more vividly. The videos are ubiquitous. They are graphic. And they seem to be never ending.
It is important that these images exist. They drive home the measure of evil of the masked murderers.
There is something about beheading that is particularly horrifying. It draws us back in our imaginations to the Dark Ages, or the Terror after the French revolution; to a time when death by beheading was public and applauded.
These grotesque videos create an important ethical issue for journalists. Most editors I know are men and women of high ethical and professional standards. They think about these things carefully before they make any decision.
The beheadings are definitely news. The videos visually add to the horror of the reality. Most mainstream news outlets, including the CBC, refused to show the act itself. But you can still find it on some internet sites.
Which is just what the terrorists want.
The videos are the grisliest form of propaganda imaginable and they will have succeeded if we search them out on the web.
I have not watched the Ray Rice video or the beheadings of the two journalists. I do not intend to.