Horrific pictures of dead bodies wont stop wars

People who believe that showing violent images from conflict zones will deter killing
are mistaken

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Paul Mason
The Guardian, Sunday 23 November 2014 19.59 GMT
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The
photojournalist Martin Adler, who was murdered in Mogadishu in 2006:
It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the
combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not
the mutilated faces. Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images
Nearly four months on from the Gaza conflict, the image I remember
most is this: we are in the crowded triage room at Al-Shifa hospital,
whose tiles are echoing with wails and screams. A group of men is
staring at a pile of curtains, blankets and towels on the floor. Then
somebody uncovers whats beneath.
If you watched TV reports that night you would have seen the blurred
bodies of six children. My cameraman took a shot of blood being
mopped off the floor to signify what we could not show.
But on Twitter they dont blur things out. If you follow the Syrian conflict,
you will see horrific pictures of dead children and their grieving relatives

several times a week. If youre following the Islamic State story on social
media, you will see crucifixions, executions, beheadings often posted
by people trying to convince us that IS are bad and should be blown to
smithereens themselves.
We are besieged now by images of the dead in conflict, usually
published by people who believe it will either deter killing, expose the
perpetrators or illustrate wars futility and brutality.
It is an old illusion and we can trace it back to a precise moment in
history. In 1924, the German anti-war activist Ernst Friedrich published a
shocking book called War Against War!.
Friedrich had been jailed during the war for sabotaging production in an
arms factory, and was a wild leftwinger. By the early 1920s, he had
assembled a comprehensive collection of photographs showing the
reality of the first world war. Probably the most offputting are those of
facial mutilations endured by surviving soldiers.
But there is also documentary evidence of the brutalities of war: the
hanging of a priest by a triumphant German soldier; a starved Armenian
child, captioned by the words of a German politician who had claimed
that every mercy shown to lower races is a crime against our mission.
Often Friedrich himself indulged in crude propaganda: a picture of
Papa posing proudly in his uniform on recruitment, juxtaposed with his
shattered body three weeks later, with the comment not included in the
family album.
Though hounded by censors and lawsuits, Friedrichs book went into 10
editions before the Nazis banned it. The international anti-war museum
he had opened in a terrace house in Berlin was closed by Hitlers
stormtroopers in 1933 and turned into a torture chamber.
Friedrichs work represented a breakthrough. Before then, imagery of
war had been subject to absolute censorship during conflict and diluted
for the sake of taste and decency by the media during peacetime.
So War Against War! republished in facsimile this year in the UK by
theBertrand Russell Peace Foundation poses a relevant question: why
is it that showing people gruesome photographs of war injuries does not
deter war? In a conflict such as Israel-Palestine, people on both sides
feel compelled to fight. Other conflicts are wars of choice. Professional
soldiers know what they are signing up to. One day spent on a trauma
first aid course, even with fake blood spurting out of rubber prosthetic
wounds, is enough to illustrate what it is going to be like.

The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I
think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90
years since Friedrichs book came out, weve developed coping
strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.
Faced with horrific injuries, we develop prosthetic technologies and
plastic surgery. Faced with lethal weaponry we develop Kevlar or
drones and stand-off weapons to keep our own soldiers safer. We
professionalise armies and improve survival rates for the wounded.
Plus theres international law. Today, no day of conflict passes without
somebody accusing someone of breaking the Geneva Conventions. The
implication is that war conducted according to the rules is regrettable but
all right. Instead of the language of the jingoist, which Friedrich ridiculed,
we have the language of the technocrat: collateral damage, civilian
deaths to be regretted.
Finally, while the first world war was begun in ignorance about the
horrors of war, by the mid-century, belligerents had learned how to use
images of atrocity to fire people up to fight.
But why do we then report war? Last week, I attended the Rory Peck
awards, where my Gazan producer Khaled Abu Ghali won the Martin
Adler prize for the work he did for Channel 4 News. The room was full of
people who risk their lives to get pictures of horrific injury, cruelty and
death, and the executives who send them there.
Theres a growing frustration in this milieu not just that journalists are
being targeted, but that a disbelieving public has come to see all graphic
imagery of war as potentially fake, manipulated or propagandist.
Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his
camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human
situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of
conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces.
Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the
horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most
exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare
represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom.
This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless,
fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing
absurdity is more important than showing injury.
I have no doubt the men clustered around the childrens bodies in AlShifa thought the war they were fighting was just. But the collective sigh
when they saw the injuries convinced me they had seen through any
illusions as to the conflicts glory.

Pictures of war should not only show us what bodies look like. They
should educate us about the absurdities, the accidents and pointless
killing.
Paul Mason is economics editor at Channel 4 News. Follow
him@paulmasonnews