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May 15, 2004
A still from the video of the decapitation of Nick Berg, an American civilian in Iraq, purportedly carried out by Al Qaeda:
More pictures of the beheading here and here. The video can be found here though not at work. More extensive links to the video can be found here.
What puzzles me is that Nick Berg is wearing an orange jump suit. Is that not standard US prison wear at Guantanamo Bay?
What does that signify? I have no idea.
How are people trying to make sense of this beheading. John Quiggin's comments are here.
Catherine Lumby tries to make sense of the "horrific images from Abu Ghraib, the United States-run military prison where Iraqi prisoners were tortured and humiliated by their Western captors" by going back to Goya's Disasters of War, where Goya set down the unspeakable cruelty and suffering that attended the 19th-century Spanish uprising against Napoleon I's occupation of Spain.
Lumby refers Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" to make sense of the shock:
"The truly shocking thing about these images is that ordinary people took them with the apparent intention of showing them around, perhaps even emailing them on to friends or family.They are, in some primal sense, a bizarre inversion of all those smiling partygoers and contented couples who populate billboards advertising the joys of having a camera in your mobile phone."
The significant point is that perpetrators of the prison torture were normal people, ordinary human beings. Lumby adds that:
"...we would all do well to remember that these images show ordinary people behaving under the extraordinary pressures of war. They are images of what men and women can do. And, in this sense, they are images which implicate us all. That, after all, is the urgent truth of Goya's etchings: human beings are capable of terrible things; there's nothing metaphysical about evil."
Suprisingly, Lumby makes no mention of the images of the video depicting the decapitation of Nick Berg:
When we do, we make contact with the practice of sacrifice, human sacrifice. Ritualized human sacrifice as with the Aztecs or the Catholic Church (witches). So it is tied up with the sacred. I appreciate that to modern sensibilities the immense level of human sacrifice in both of those societies seems an abomination. But we can have a disturbing and confronting conception of the sacred: the sacred realm as a realm of danger: of eroticism, sacrifice excess.
Bataille enable us to understand this conception of sacrifice as he associates the sacred with excess: that which in some sense exceeds the rational social, political and economic structures constructed to contain excess. The sacred is to be found in the violent, transgressive, excessive, cruel domain, that has to be socially repressed or controlled. One way of control was designed by the Aztecs. Those captured in war by the Aztecs were sacrificed in place of the individuals of their particular culture. An immense symbolic tie was created between the victim of the sacrifice and those for whom the victim was a substitute.
Update
There is more on Bataille and sacrifice over at philosophical conversations.
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It won't be there for very long, but this picture of an Iraqi prisoner freed from Abu Ghraib wears a similar (same?) orange jumpsuit.