Update: February 4, 2018
This piece published about four years ago appears to have inspired visitors with the “P” word, which had been used as below to describe direct awful conveyance in photographs and videos of conflict-related atrocities. This is the second time the editor has had to revise a post to deflect traffic more genuinely interest in other matters — the first involved a “Live Leak” photo of children strung from rafters — no question about that — allegedly in a Burmese hut. This one has had an image of a woman buried in hard earth up to her chin and being given a spoonful of water. It was used by CAMERA, an organization dedicated to accurate reporting on the middle east conflict, and may have originated in film rather than some shared village atrocity, and it too appears to have drawn puerile curiosity — so I have removed it from this post and from the BackChannels archive in the interest of building and sustaining a community genuinely interested in political science and political psychology.
As search engines appear not to have developed judgment about true content, the editor has changed both the title and address of the post to fend of the results of misrepresentation.
War porn. Islamic government porn. (Very surreal listening to “Somebody to Love” by the Jefferson Airplane while typing this). I / we may be at a crossroads as regards the value of complaint, which is what we have all been doing with the mud slinging or witness depending on the conflict or natural disaster and our personal relationship with each related event or policy.
When I set out in 2006/7 to read foreign newspapers in English translation (because one Everyman with Broadband could suddenly do that with ease), I had no idea it would lead to this (add videos for beatings, beheading, bombing, chemical weapons attacks, hangings (in Burma, of children, no less), helicopter gunship combat, firing squads, mass graves, refugee camps.
I started in Somalia, which struck me first and foremost as an environmental disaster (I even sent a note to Greenpeace about getting that littoral cleaned up).
Why Somalia first?
Chance.
Nothing else.
Now I have that Back-Channels blog and it appears a sea of the world’s desperate — disenfranchised, impoverished, voiceless (almost) — are about to discover it, and as editor I am wondering if it’s possible to traverse the distance from “Isn’t that awful?!” to “I / we can do something about this.”
The world’s bad habits are stubborn . . . ask any diplomat about South Sudan this week . . . or the Central African Republic . . . or Syria.
* * *
This desktop scribe cannot authenticate photos (yet) and, of course, a lot of misdirecting imagery comes out of the “special interest” presses, not least the ones oriented to ethnicity or religion. One begs those also in the field to have integrity about material poured into news.
Beyond that, let’s find some answers for obscenities like stoning, the Iranian “justice” system, and Evin Prison (methods and operations): such as those need to be consigned to yesterday, long ago, and far away.
May the world sail on into improved global camaraderie.
For those new to this blog, and there are many today, “FTAC” stands for “From the Awesome Conversation” which in turn refers to the “chatyping” I and others have been doing on Facebook for some time.
Awful confession: with this “FTAC” method and section, I quote myself, essentially sharing thought prompted by the politics-oriented talk with which I’ve been involved within the social network. To keep the process simple, I leave out the other half of the conversation, so I’m not copy-and-pasting other than my own thought.
🙂
As my own “style book” rule, I double-indent quoted material, my own and excerpts from other locations.
Unimaginable — but who has to imagine now? — cruelty. To my surprise, the late Peter Matthiessen, among the sturdiest of old literary hands, turned out a pretty good Holocaust novel in _In Paradise_. He walks through from today and into the cattle car and gas chamber of yesterday with both reassuring empathy and a chilling and ineffable distance as regards the complete heartbreak bound up with the apprehension of events and their unpredictability.
JR’s comment — “It makes a victim so helpless and debased… that even seeing it is physically difficult!” — suits, and no doubt the purpose of the malignant narcissism and sadism underlying the creation and maintaining of the barbarism is to dishearten, deaden, and enslave witness, a process if still near Nazism is signal, leads on to cataclysmic mass murder and, given how the better, more sane world responds, national mass suicide by way of war. “Diplomacy” fails: those 20th Century German engines did not stop until completely bankrupted and broken.
* * *
Also, and back to integrity in reporting, this, I believe, is the story related to the rape victim:
Note that she is facing the gallows, that good old English method reserved for murderers (once upon a time), so the illustrating picture may be interpreted as agitprop (by way of CAMERA’s Facebook page) certain to get a reaction.
* * *
Of course, the real story is worse than the one suggested!
* * *
There is so much of horror and suffering in the world — where does one focus?
# # #
BackChannels 
Pingback: FTAC – Conflict, Graphic Images, Social Sharing – A Comment | BackChannels