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The photographs are us
On the visual evidence of what was not supposed to be: Muhammad cartoons, American torturers and how the West ends up publishing what it wants and excluding what it doesn’t
By Diego Costa
Perhaps indecency isn’t measurable, but it isn’t very hard to know that one of these images is fiction, the others are not.
Dozens of people have died, thousands have protested, hundreds have been arrested, churches have been burned and an Italian minister has resigned — over a cartoon.
I am not going to get into the moral judgment of whether the very existence of the caricatures is justifiable, simply because we have heard a lot about them, but few have actually seen them.
Most of us completely ignore what prompted their publication, the nature of the drawings and what kind of commentary they aimed to make.
And whether the aftermath has been an extreme overreaction, a symptom for the combustive zeitgeist or the only way certain voices seem to be heard, the dichotomy of “Me Westerner, You terrorist” doesn’t help matters.
And it speaks of our Manicheist tendency to bisect all human beings into two categories whenever we feel threatened.
Perhaps we are so glib to the real reasons that nourish our ideologies that we cannot accept any dubious bewilderment. I am this and this alone. And by vilifying an “other” whose reasons for being we hear a lot about (superficially), but we absolutely ignore, we seem to convince ourselves of the ultimate Samaritan effects of our self-interests.
It is quite convenient to, in a knee-jerk reaction, look at the situation triggered by the cartoons the way we look at most events involving people “unlike us”: ethnocentrically. Different cultures have different social tool boxes — different histories, different social capital, different limitations, different shielding mechanisms, different weapons, different currencies.
We cannot expect from the ones “on the other side” the kind of articulation we recognize as justifiable just because it is the only language we are familiar with and have been trained to comprehend.
To dismiss the strong Muslim reaction as ignorant barbarism is to resort to the easiest kind of defense mechanism.
This is not to say that killing someone is ever justifiable because “it’s their culture.” But who are we to call “the other” barbaric? Who are we to claim “blinding extremist, bloody dogmatism” about “them” when we resort to the same mechanisms each time it is in our interest?
It may be just that we resort to lethal resolutions with such finesse in America, with such sanitized excuses and financially sound rhetoric that it sounds like it’s war when it actually fits all requirements for inexcusable barbarism, too.
While most American publications have been shying away from actually printing the cartoons, we are able to conclude that there is a huge abyss between taunting and commenting.
So you can just Google the images and perhaps see for yourself what these drawings look like.
But since this would make the experience out of context (we don’t know what kind of paper ran these, what articles may have surrounded the piece, the history of these publications), we might as well shift off to more tangible kinds of images: photographs.
In one of her last pieces of writing, Susan Sontag wrote a fascinating piece on the Abu Ghraib photos to the New York Time Magazine when they first surfaced.
In it she unabashedly, and somewhat nauseatingly, concluded that whether we hooded those prisoners or not, we are just as responsible as those who actually did.
And while the Muhammad cartoons are hand-drawn images that attempt to convey “we don’t know what,” the Abu Ghraib photographs (which we so insistently deem improper to publicize) are very real.
They aren’t one artist’s perspective on politics and religion. They aren’t a piece of napkin with a blurred illustration of bomb-looking turbans. They aren’t fabrications of the imagination. The torturing images are as devoid of creativity as a photograph can be.
The photographs are us. And perhaps because the photographs are so us, we refuse to stare at them, to put them on the cover of magazines and to demand a clear explanation and accountability.
The Abu Ghraib photos, more of which resurfaced last week, may deserve more rage-filled reaction — instead of a complacent, cowardly and blinding nationalism that tries to dismiss them as mere glitches — than a Danish sketch. They reveal themselves as a symptom for what kind of history we have been choosing to write as a nation, what kind of immorality we have allowed to take power.
How can we expect to claim freedom of the press to publish Muhammad cartoons and yet prohibit the publishing of American soldiers’ caskets or American soldiers’ sadistic torture of Iraqis?
By not showing the cartoons we may be missing on someone’s unfortunate ingenuity, but by not showing the American-sponsored torturing and ghost prisoners abroad, we are withholding a human rights scandal.
Which one is more disrespectful of Muslims: a Danish artist sketching his take on the Islam within current zeitgeist or a battalion of soldiers making Muslims masturbate and eat feces against their will?
Perhaps indecency isn’t measurable, but it isn’t very hard to know that one of these images is fiction, the others are not.
Perhaps Muslims have the right not to want people to depict Muhammad, and perhaps non-Muslims have the right to still do it. But no one with the smallest sense of ethics would think twice about the unacceptability of what American soldiers’ cowardly terrorizing of their Muslim prisoners reveals.
This kind of non-fictitious outrage can too easily disintegrate in the fog of war before receiving proper assessment, unless we are allowed to stare at them — every single one of them — and see them for what they are.
Let's print and pay more attention to real pictures as opposed to hand-drawn ones. Let's be offended, yes, but by American arrogance that puts itself divinely above all law.
Let’s question the perverse use of photos by American soldiers surrounded by Iraqi children uploaded onto their hotornot.com profiles so they can get dates. Let’s protest the dexterous justification of the most absurd of all violence against privacy.
Let’s pay more attention to the fact that we, as Americans, may actually be getting increasingly closer to a barbaric marriage between church and state. The very kind of juxtaposition that we seem to eager to exterminate abroad.
Let's get outraged and scream and not accept a carte blanche of decency in the name of freedom. Let's choose all the old truisms of peace and love: words over weapons; dialogue over war, universal sensibility over megalomaniac American self-interest.
Let’s quit slapping a “liberal” label onto everything that isn’t happy with being quiet, and dead.
For more Abu Ghraib photos go to Salon.com, which also provides interesting explanatory captions.
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