via rollingstone.com
I was telling my students at CUNY about this video this week and was reminded that it ties into this concept I've been thinking about a lot concerning the convergence between video communication and ethics. Was inspired by the April 6th Youth Movement in Cairo (see April 1, 2011) and how they harnessed the power of social networking by showing video of Cairo's security police and their practice of torturing its citizens. By showing video online, and essentially broadcasting bad behavior, they turned it's youth into a powerful force. A few weeks later, I was disgusted by this story from Rolling Stone about a group of American soldiers, The Kill Team, who edited a little music video of killing Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, and honestly, couldn't even watch all of the video as it was so grotesque. Reminded me of watching Full Metal Jacket by Stanley Kubrick, a fabulous anti-war film in that it shows the madness that soldiers must come face to face with in handling the emotional atrocities of partaking in hand to hand combat with the enemy. There is a scene in Full Metal Jacket where a soldier invites a photographer to take a picture of him with his "bro", a dead Viet-Cong who was sitting next to him with his hat pulled down over his eyes. The moment when he pulls that hat away and we see the deathly pallor of this man, a human, sitting next to this guy, who is red and ruddy in the cheek, is sickening as we can see that all of their human-ness is sucked out of them while in war. There is no way to think about your fellow-man, when you have to kill him or be killed upon the battle field. The only people that matter are your buddies, who help keep you alive.
Wow, what an amazing scene from a fictional film, but something that looks like reality. My class this week was focused on War On Film. We looked at scenes from films like Born on the 4th of July and Full Metal Jacket, and then looked at documentary films like Restrepo and Frontline TV documentaries and ended with this sickening footage that the Kill Team came up with. I didn't show them the footage broadcast on Rolling Stone's site, but just spoke about it. It's a crazy mixed up world out there, especially in war, but hopefully, people can see the ethical conundrum in using video for "sport". It hurts our mission when people use it in this way. Video's power is undeniable, but the Kill Team's behavior is untenable.
No comments:
Post a Comment