Junk for Code

Sontag: the Abu Ghraib prison photos#1

Susan Sontag on the images from the American run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Another photograph here:

Sontag says:

"So, then, the real issue is not the photographs but what the photographs reveal to have happened to "suspects" in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken - with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives."

Sontag goes onto say:

"If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs - collected in a book entitled Without Sanctuary - of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib."

She says that:

"...the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun."

America, Sontag says, has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are, increasingly, seen as good entertainment, fun.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 24, 2004 11:08 PM | TrackBack