What's become of us? Where are we going?

We have lived through a year of live-streamed genocide, which is still going strong. How could it be?

There was another school massacre. This time in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza last Thursday. They reported 18 killed. One video of a dead man was particularly gut-wrenching. They could only recover his body from chest up: two arms (both damaged; one severed at the elbow, the other with some missing fingers), back of the head, and hollowed out, unrecognisable face. They put him in a white sheet and folded the sheet from all sides to be taken away. The disbelief on the faces and in the words of those around this unnatural occurrence was apparent. They still didn’t lose sight of the big picture, however, as one of the bystanders, probably a relative of the dead man, kept proclaiming: hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil (Sufficient for us is Allah, and [He is] the best disposer of affairs.)

I would be lying if I said that that is the most gruesome death I have seen in Gaza since the Palestinian genocide began on October 7. I have seen several videos and photos like that one. The same bombing produced this photo of a girl with just some part of her hair and face intact. The rest seemingly evaporated.

It is said that the advent of photography had a profound impact on the way wars were seen by the civilian populations. Photographs from the American Civil War — which was the first widely photographed war — brought the horrors of armed conflict to civilians, who until then were distant from the bloody realities of wars unless they lived in close proximity to a battlefield. Otherwise, they only heard stories from the returning soldiers. Photography changed it all. It captured the fighting in all its gory, grisly details for the general public who were affected by the visual representation of the bloody spectacle.

In one American history class I sat through, the instructor told us that the Civil War pictures made the war real for the ordinary Americans who otherwise mostly saw it in terms of wins and losses for the Confederacy or the Union, distant from the battlefield. They could now see the painful details of the bloody battles and would be profoundly impacted by them.

A New York Times article from October 20, 1862, discussing an exhibition by the most famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady reaches the same conclusion about the impact of visual representation of the war, and says that photographing the war dead was akin to bringing “the bodies at our doors,” essentially blurring the line between merely imagining the events of the war and experiencing them:

The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of way; conversation would be less lively, and the general air of pedestrians more subdued. As it is, the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. The roll we read is being called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling lips are answering to it. Shadowy fingers point from the page to a field where even imagination is loth to follow. Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. It is a thunderbolt that will crash into some brain — a dull, dead, remorseless weight that will full upon some heart, straining it to breaking. There is nothing very terrible to us, however, in in the list, though our sensations might be different if the newspaper carrier left the names on the battle-field and the bodies at our doors instead.

It goes on to say how Brady brought the war in people’s lives:

Mr. BRADY has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.

One can deduce from the NYT’s reporting from over a century and a half ago a conspicuous belief that the advent of a technology, which relayed the brutality of warfare would, at the very least, make people squirm at the thought of an armed conflict.

It did nothing to stem the bloodletting, however. The two great wars that slaughtered a combined upwards of a hundred million men would occur in the 20th century — a century riddled with bloody conflict with ever more sophisticated machinery summoned to devour and incinerate human flesh in all kinds of grotesque ways that would put the most brutal mediaeval killing devices to shame.

Worse, instead of the public recoiling at the horror of the latest mass killing machinery deployed to devour millions of men in their name, they often give their backing to these industrial-scale slaughter campaigns. The advent of photography, later, videography, and, in the case of Gaza, live-streaming, be damned.

How did we get here? Propaganda is an obvious culprit. The narrative-shaping war pigs who hog all the time on supposedly “news” platforms have certainly played a part in making a thing as hideous as war cool. When talking heads — (read: lackeys of the weapons manufacturers) — on “news programmes” blather about the latest in weapons technology they talk about the features of these killing machines, never their impact on the helpless victims in, say, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Palestine. They don’t talk about how they reduce houses to rubble and incinerate, decapitate, disembowel, and vapourise the children, the mothers, the fathers, and the grandparents who dwell in those houses. They talk about these deadly weapons as if they are objects of sublime beauty, as if to look at them is to draw joy from them. “You know, Fareed Zakaria, if that guy could have sex with this cruise missile attack, I think he would do it,” Jeremy Scahill once remarked about one war monger who seemingly orgasmed at the sight of an American cruise missile scorching Syria back in 2017. Scahill’s comment, although explicitly named the despicable ghoul Zakaria, covered every one of Zakaria’s ilk — and there are thousands of them.

The so-called entertainment industries — which are essentially the hip propaganda arm of the military industrial complex — take a similar approach to the “news” industry when it comes to making bloodshed cool. “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons,” sang Leonard Cohen, who didn’t even attempt to hide the brazen warmongering in his lyrics. “I think it means exactly what it says,” said Cohen. “It is a terrorist song. I think it’s a response to terrorism. There’s something about terrorism that I’ve always admired. The fact that there are no alibis or no compromises. That position is always very attractive.” Cohen, who went from barrack to barrack singing for the IDF thugs during the so-called Yom Kippur war of 1973, would certainly know plenty about terrorism. During his terrorism apology tour of 1973, Cohen also made it blatantly clear the source of his sympathies for terrorism: “A Jew remains a Jew. Now it’s war and there’s no need for explanations. My name is Cohen, no?”

Then there are the politicians who promise “jobs” to their electorates. They never explicitly tell their job-seeking potential voters that the bread they will earn while working for the Northrup Grummans and the Raytheons in their very own state will produce machines that will scorch whole farmlands and incinerate entire families at their breakfast tables halfway around the world all thanks to their handiwork at the promised, newly minted jobs.

All of this is to say that the advent of technology that enabled the capture of a brutal reality accompanied with it the hope that it would lead to a reduction in bloodshed. However, that technical advancement has been counterbalanced by rapid advances in consent manufacturing via overt and covert propaganda.

And this propaganda has reached such a fever pitch that live footage of a man reduced to just half his body with severed arms and a hollowed out face doesn’t so much as elicit an outrage loud enough to put a stop to this carnage. Not just the footage of that one man, but thousands like him who have been tortured, humiliated, beheaded, executed, and desecrated in massacres that have been ruthlessly executed every other hour by the genocidal Israelis and their genocidal Western allies for nearly a year now.

The latest in weapons tech still flows unhindered to the butchers in Israel. No laws, no appeals to morality or reason, no humanitarian bodies, and certainly no protests have made an iota of a difference to the fate of the Palestinians, who are enduring an enemy hellbent on their extermination at all costs.

The technology that was to bring the war dead to our doorways to make it unpalatable to us has advanced enough to stream it live in front of our eyes 24/7, from all possible angles, complete with sounds so clear that we do not miss the screams of a man in the last throes of death, a mother’s wail at the sight of her dead sons, or a father’s anguish as he caresses the one foot, the only salvaged part of his dead daughter.

Yet, not a needle has moved to bring it all to an end. Our supposed helplessness in stopping this slaughter indicts us all, no matter how far removed from the action we think we are. It is our moral failure, for it is the collective accumulation of our inactions over the years and decades that have removed us so far from our own humanity that we remain indifferent to injustice, that we don’t do everything within our means to stop it in all its forms. This helplessness is also an indoctrination and it won’t be going away if we keep staring into screens looking for the instant gratification instead of working to regain our ever-dimming humanity (if there’s still anything left of it).

Years of mindless consumption of garbage through all of our sensory organs have had the effect of making us less human. For every monstrosity that mildly discomforts us (if it at all does), there is always the option of scrolling down to see something uplifting. Take your dose of dopamine, forget what you just witnessed. It doesn’t concern you anyway. Until you realise that you are sleepwalking to your turn at the slaughterhouse. You are barely alive anyway. It will all be over soon.

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