I’ve seen some terrible images of war, thankfully just online or on the television. I don’t seek them out, but if I come across one, I force myself to watch or look at the image or video. Except for the audio from the Uvalde kids. I can’t listen to that. I know I’ll be in serious trouble if I do.
I saw one on Wednesday. It was of the massacre in Israel by Hamas. I had to leave for work so I had to really hold myself tight while viewing it and for the rest of the day at work. Since then, I’ve had a couple of crying jags when some of the images surface back up in my brain.
It’s been suggested that maybe I shouldn’t watch these things if they upset me so much, but I feel almost a duty to view them. I’ve been told that’s a crazy opinion.
So what about you guys? I didn’t post this in the pit, I’m not asking for images of war in this thread please. I just want to talk about how you feel about seeing them.
The images of war involving children just piss me off to no end. Being stuck in the middle of fights between two sides that they didn’t ask for. If they had their way they’d be playing kids games with kids on the other side. Instead they’re getting brainwashed by adults telling them all the reasons why our side is good and their side is evil.
You’d like to have hope for the future with a new generation that would break the cycle but the images just make me think they are just raising another round of jaded individuals.
What benefit are you doing for yourself or anyone else by viewing these images? What value is this imagined ‘duty’ providing?
In a globally interconnected modern world in which you can be exposed to abusers and horrors suffered by people you will never meet and over which you can effect no change or prevention, the traumatizing by forcing yourself to view these images is really nothing more than masochism. It harms you, serves no one else, and likely puts stress on your relationships with people who you actually interact with. Which is not to say you shouldn’t be concerned about these abuses and do what you can to work against them, whether that is pushing elected representatives for action, donating to a legitimate aid charity, et cetera, especially if these can have an effect. But being emotionally, intimately involved to a point that it impacts your own well-being to no effective change in outcome is just a harm with no upside.
I’ll note that images alone, while powerful, lack context and can give a false impression that doesn’t capture of the totality of an issue. I’m not going to introduce a tangent discussion about this issue except to say that it is all part of a much larger problem of generational ethnic conflict that would have to be addressed to ever hope to come to a peaceable resolution. Looking at and getting upset about images without making any substantive change isn’t achieving anything useful. And frankly, this kind of conflict is going to become increasingly common as the system of global trade and security contracts and climate stress fostered simmering resentments into open hostilities over resource conflicts.
The people that might benefit by having some of this revolting imagery thrust upon them aren’t seeking it out. Instead they’re fomenting the kinds of situations that cause this all over the world.
Take concrete action to work for change or wash your hands of it. But submitting to emotional self-abuse in some misguided notion that your own suffering changes or ennobles anything is silly.
Nobody who has been through actual combat as a participant thinks they were much improved by the experience. It’s not a feature of organized humanity to be proud of. You practicing the emotional harms without any of the practical benefits (I term I used very, very loosely and advisedly) is pointless.
Except it doesn’t. Photographic evidence of the horrors perpetrated in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War didn’t stop the United States from engaging in another completely baseless invasion of Iraq with only token resistance by both legislators who approved a resolution for action or the populace in general. Very few people think war is good in principle but when it comes to emotional reasons for waging conflict (or not intervening in ethnic and political violence between nations) the fact that innocent non-combatants will be harmed in disproportionate quantity falls below the noise floor in the decision process. Witness Ukraine; we’ve spent the last of almost two years witnessing Russian attacks directed at schools, hospitals, civilian housing, and crucial infrastructure for civil health—all inarguably war crimes—and yet additional materiel aid and funding being held up because of political issues regardless of the impact this will have on Ukrainian efforts to defend its territory and protect the non-ethnic Russian population which has been targeted by Russian forces for abuse, execution, and removal to Russia for indefinite imprisonment or ‘resettlement’.
The voting populace of a powerful democracy with the capability to intervene in conflicts should be informed about conflicts worldwide (and frankly, the US population is very poorly informed about anything outside of the Continental United States), but visceral images are powerful but can be misleading without full context, and the trauma that people who respond with strong emotion may actually skew their opinions away from a rational assessment. I don’t see that it is anyone’s ‘duty’ to expose themselves to images of brutality and the consequences of warfare if it isn’t going to result in any substantial abatement of conflict or violence. And again, I think we’re going to see a lot more of this in coming years with essentially no way to impact the conflicts and environmental changes that are the causes. It’s unfair, but so is life, and I would counsel someone who really wants to have an impact to marshal their empathy into causes where they can do genuine good, particularly local ones where they can be assured that their efforts and donations are applied in a productive manner.
Yeah, the people who need to see the videos to tampen down their war lust won’t watch them, or they’ll enjoy them. The people who are very disturbed by them don’t really need to see them.
I’ve seen a few, because I’m interested in the technology and because I want to understand the effects of certain weapons and tactics. But I don’t like seeing people die, and I have no illusions about how awful war is.
Well, the news at least covers domestic events, so to the extent that people follow news they know something, although that ‘something’ is becoming increasingly skewed by ‘news’ delivered through selective social media. When it comes to foreign developments, however, the US news sources present relatively little and from a pretty much unified and siloed viewpoint that is muted in any criticism of the American government, and frankly most people aren’t really clamoring to know more.
Maybe I don’t have the imagination to truly identify with war images but I’ve never been freaked out or saddened or nauseated by them. I once saw a photo online from WW2 of a guy who had been literally sawed in half by heavy machine gun fire, and all I thought was “what a mess”.
Nonsense. Opposition to the war in Vietnam was largely driven by those very images. And we had a longer span of peace afterward than ever before in our history. The Pentagon didn’t make that mistake again in Iraq.
I don’t force myself to watch to the point of breaking down, and to that point I think the OP may be taking it too far. But I do think as the voters in a democracy - the sole UN member to vote against a ceasefire in Gaza - we have a responsibility to face the horrors our policies create. How else can we vote intelligently?
And if it hurts you to look at what the bombs your country sold have done, then maybe you need to let your Congresscritters know that you don’t approve.
I do agree on that point; it is only useful if it spurs you to action. Just sitting around in a paroxysm of grief does nothing for the children of Gaza and Ukraine. If you aren’t insisting upon a Government dedicated to statesmanship and diplomacy over violence, then you are just torturing yourself without purpose.
OP, I hate to be the one to tell you, but you might be a Quaker. Read up a little and see what you think.
Having spent my adolescent years watching slasher flicks, I have to say, the mere sight of carnage on visual media has little to no effect on me. I think my reactions might be different if I were to view such mayhem in real life.
Yes, yes, I get fleeting thoughts about how horrible the event is, but feeling anything upsetting, no.
Sure, the photojournalism (and in particular the image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, a.k.a. “The Burning Girl”) turned the American public against American involvement in Southeast Asia (although it took almost three years and the largest heavy bombing campaign since WWII for the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and its covert campaigns elsewhere). But that long span of (mostly) peace was more on account of the degradation of US military capability post-Vietnam and the détente that ended proxy wars (for the most part) until the 1979 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan (fomented by US support for insurgency) and the Nicaraguan Revolution. The United States didn’t engage in large scale direct combat except for occasionally knocking back a tiny Caribbean nation or engaging in peacekeeping efforts until the 1991 Invasion of Iraq (which was limited in scope, and coverage by ‘embedded’ media showed little of the impact upon Iraqi citizens or the Kurdish rebels who were initially encouraged to rise up against Saddam and then abandoned when it was no longer convenient to support them), and then in the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (almost unanimous vote with only Barbara Lee dissenting) and Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (296 Yea, 133 Nay, 3 abstaining) with only a token public resistance despite the scope and scale of destruction that both invasions were almost certain to have.
It is shocking that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—one of the architects of the Vietnam war, and at least proximately if not primarily responsible for many of the decisions during the Johnson Administration which resulted in widening the war, the use of chemical defoliants, and downplaying the scope of US involvement—was one of the few former officials of that era to publicly declaim US invasion of Iraq. There was very little opposition and virtually no discussion of what US military invasion would do to the people of Iraq, or what the consequences would be to the region for creating a power vacuum that the US was unable to establish a stable leadership to fill. Even today, there is little discussion about the hundred of thousands (and by some estimates, upward of a million) excess deaths resulting from that invasion or the millions of refugees produced by the war. There was certainly no reflection upon the horrors of the Indochina/Vietnam wars on the Vietnamese and what that, and while modern US military doctrine is to take all reasonable measures to avoid harming non-combatants, just the destabilization of the invasion put millions of people at risk; all for a manufactured premise with no basis in fact.
It would be great if memory of war would cause the US public and their elected representatives to pause and reflect on how much death and destruction is justified in pursuit of even a noble goal like killing the leadership of Al-Qaeda but it didn’t. In the fear, rage, and anger that followed the 11 September 2001 attacks there was only an almost unanimous consensus to go to war with whomever the executive leadership could blame with no consideration for consequences. We learned nothing from Vietnam, and in twenty-five years we won’t recall any lessons about the Invasion of Iraq except that we should have killed more radical Muslims and maybe started in on Iran.
To me, it all depends on whose dead people I’m seeing. I’m very much a side-biased person.
I don’t like seeing any Ukrainians, Americans, civilians etc. getting hurt, but I am totally comfortable with Russian-vatnik entrails, 4th-degree burns and viscera.
By and large, the soldiers doing the dying aren’t the ones making the decisions that lead to them, or the other side, dying.
One hell of a lot of Americans have fought as ordinary soldiers in ill-conceived and illegal wars. If they are admirable for so doing, so are ordinary Russian soldiers doing the same right now in an equally illegal war.
Reddit has some war photos and video. Dead bodies in the distance don’t bother me. It does make pause for moment and think about lives cut short. What could they have done if they survived the war? The families they never had.
Thankfully I haven’t seen any graphic up close material. I would stop a video quickly if that was in it. I don’t think its allowed on Reddit.
You should see these pictures, because you are who is paying for and funding this. Sad to say but the war between Russia and Ukraine would have been over long ago except for the billions and billions of dollars, your tax dollars, that we continue to send to prop up Ukraine in this war. Ukraine will eventually lose and end up ceding land to Russia. You think all the money is going the war effort? Really? It is lining the pockets of new oligarchs that wouldn’t exist except for the billions, and billions, you are sending.
Everyone should be required to see the pictures. You did this, no one else, you. Israel?, same story, different area.
How about a nice land war in Asia? Coming soon to a theater near you.
