[Reader-list] From the European Social Forum

[ananya vajpeyi]

The Work of Images in Wartime:

On the last day of the 3rd European Social Forum, held in London from 
October 15 to 17, 2004, there was an anti-war demonstration, in which 
20-25,000 people marched from Russell Square to Trafalgar Square 
protesting the American occupation of Iraq and Britain's support to the 
US.

At the concluding Trafalgar Square meeting / concert, there was a large 
screen set up beside the stage, constantly showing images to go along 
with the music. All these images were carefully selected to get their 
message across without any cognitive delay. There were pictures of 
political leaders, pretzels, Ronald Mc Donald, hamburgers, bombs 
dropping out of fighter planes, caricatures of Bush and Blair, guns, 
tanks, Disney-Paris, American troops in the Middle East, Arundhati Roy 
in the Narmada Valley, anti-WTO protesters in Seattle, South American 
farmers, Guantanamo Bay, Donald Rumsfeld, riot police, etc. etc., i.e., 
contemporary images, taken from war, dissent movements, world politics 
and American pop culture in general, especially aspects of it that 
Europeans tend to dislike.

So far, so good.

What I found appalling and abhorrent was that the Abu Ghraib pictures 
were also up there.

It is not clear to me why it's alright to put photographs of torture in 
loops and play them like music videos at a concert in the open air with 
thousands of viewers, even if it is a gathering of protest. It's not 
like anyone had a choice -- you couldn't turn the images off, because 
it wasn't your private television you were watching. You were forced to 
behold these atrocious sights, huge, lit up, unfolding in the historic 
heart of London. There were children in the crowd, as many people had 
brought their kids along, the demonstration being held on a Sunday 
afternoon.

Displaying the human rights violations and crimes against humanity of 
Abu Ghraib in a public setting without giving viewers a discretionary 
option -- to me this seems like a gross misuse of the media. It is an 
assault on the viewer and also disrespectful to the victims whose 
misery is turned into a global spectacle. War crimes must have 
witnesses for there to be justice, but an anti-war demonstration is not 
a space for acts of witnessing that have any standing or use in a court 
of law. As participants in the demonstration, we were all forcibly 
turned into spectators equally of the cruelty of the perpetrators and 
the suffering of their victims, the debasement of the American soldiers 
at Abu Ghraib and the humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners. If my act of 
witnessing cannot serve a legal purpose or a political purpose or even 
a moral purpose, I do not want to be arm-twisted into this kind of 
spectatorship. Images of torture are not entertaining, not instructive, 
not informative, and not valid instruments of propaganda that purports 
to be non-violent in its methods, its medium and its message.

Perhaps resorting to such explicit images of violence is an index of 
the frustration, even impotence, that many in dissenting sections of 
European society feel when confronted with the power of the current 
American administration and its allies. By descending to the level of 
splicing in Abu Ghraib footage, those protesting American -- and in 
this case British and Israeli -- occupation and domination in Iraq and 
Palestine appear to be no less desperate than the terrorists who make 
videos as they behead their hostages and then want these to be aired on 
television channels across the world. But even if it is the case that 
all players have been pushed to the wall by an intransigent world power 
like the United States, such extreme tactics have to be condemned, no 
matter which side employs them and which side we would like to support 
in these terrible conflicts.

Some years ago in India, I came to know and like Daniel and Mariane 
Pearl. Danny's horrendous execution at the hands of kidnappers and its 
recording on film were not just traumatic and tragic events for his 
family, friends and colleagues: the whole civilized world was in shock. 
Today decapitation videos are par for the course. What is more 
egregious -- that innocents are butchered at all? That their murder is 
filmed? That such films are broadcast? That such broadcasts become 
routine and lose any meaning whatsoever?

This perversion of the media in the very last hours of the European 
Social Forum left a bitter taste in my mouth. No one can deny that the 
world is radically mediatized. Media will service any ideology without 
much discernment. But there must be limits and rules to the 
mediatization of war. Recall Guy Debord: "[Life in the era of 
spectacular technology] no longer projects into the sky but shelters 
within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. (...). The 
spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which 
ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The 
spectacle is the guardian of sleep." (The Society of the Spectacle, 
1:20-21). Making a spectacle out of the monstrous acts in Abu Ghraib is 
an entailment of political slumber that also perpetuates that slumber. 
It is important for people to continue to build solidarity campaigns in 
a time of extreme, possibly terminal, cynicism. I have discovered 
anecdotally that hardly anyone, even those who are on the left in an 
organized or unorganized fashion, believes in the efficacy of protest, 
or in the capacity of popular movements to actually effect political 
change. Be it east and west, activists, artists and intellectuals are 
tired of raising their voices in a vacuum. It's very telling that not 
only do thinking people find it difficult to experience "political 
euphoria", they have little or no faith in democratic dissent, 
especially when it is expressed through non-violent means (-- which 
doesn't necessarily mean they believe in violent resistance).

At the ESF there were lots of young people -- mostly students, from the 
looks of it -- but there were also lots of older folks, in their 50s 
and 60s, people who might have been active in left movements in their 
youth. In other words, there were people who came because they had no 
political experience and wanted a taste of it, and there were others 
who probably recalled a time of greater political engagement and came 
in order to relive that time. It was heartening to see both types in 
action and at work.

Ananya Vajpeyi, Ph.D.
Writer in Residence
Waag Society for Old and New Media
De Waag, Nieuwmarkt #4
1012 CR Amsterdam NL