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Witnessing the horrific on the Internet

by Brendan Christopher Cathcart

A few weeks after a video appeared on the Internet in 2002 that showed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl being beheaded in Pakistan, a co-worker of mine said, “I really thought I wanted to see it, but after I did, I wish I hadn’t.” His response was word-for-word identical to another I heard from a friend who, while filming for a skateboarding video, witnessed a radius bone break and come right through the skin of another guy’s arm. Designed by nature to be hermetically sealed to keep our lives safely inside, the sudden rupture and violent tearing open of a human body was more uncomfortable for both of them to witness than they assumed it would be.

Ambulance attendants, police officers, soldiers, doctors, pathologists and morticians regularly see the results of broken bodies. To avoid breaking down emotionally and psychologically, they have to develop professional calluses so as to be able to continue with the daily work. Other than what gets shown on the evening news, the average person going about his day does not very often come into direct contact with scenes of severe injury or violent death.

The United States Department of Veteran Affairs website posts a fact sheet for the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on the effects of witnessing community violence, defining community violence as, “a complex term that has been used to describe a wide range of events including riots, sniper attacks, gang-wars, drive-by shootings, workplace assaults, terrorist attacks, torture, bombings, war, ethnic cleansing, and widespread sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.”

According to the fact sheet, kids tend to display disorganized, agitated behaviour, become withdrawn, fearful, aggressive, and suffer from nightmares of monsters, separation anxiety and regressive social development. Adolescents may also have trouble with nightmares and intrusive thoughts: they experience depression, anger, distrust, fear, alienation and betrayal, all of which can lead to acting out, risk-taking and substance abuse. Adults can experience many of the same symptoms as both children and adolescents, with the added struggles of negotiating “(1) how to build trust again (which includes looking at issues of power, empowerment, and victimization); (2) how to find meaning in life apart from the desire for revenge; (3) how to find realistic ways to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their homes and community from danger; and (4) how to deal with feelings of guilt, shame, powerlessness, and doubt.”

Regardless of age, experiencing any one of the special forms of trauma listed under the heading “community violence” can knock a person’s emotional feet out from underneath them. As the Internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous in modern technologically developed societies as a means of communication, entertainment, dissemination of information and social networking, every single form of violence listed on the fact sheet has been made readily available for public (private?) viewing. For anybody with a few minutes of extra time and curiosity that won’t be observed or censured by anyone, it’s easier to find a video of an actual beheading than it is to file a tax return.

On one site, Theync.com, there is a video of a 12-year-old Pakistani boy wearing camouflage combat clothing, a white bandana with Arabic writing on it, and holding a long knife. Surrounded by men dressed just like him, as well as by other villagers that are there to watch, he looks straight at the camera and speaks a message that I can’t understand. Emotionally sung recorded music starts playing. Then the man laying at his feet gets held down tightly by other, older men, and the boy bends down to do his job. As he starts cutting through the man’s neck, the spectators all begin shouting riotously, “Allahu Akbar!” It takes a good three minutes of work to get through the vertebrae and fully detach the man’s head. This particular video has already been viewed 205,362 times.

Other videos on the site, as well as on similar sites like Extremefuse.com, Nothingtoxic.com and Rotten.com, include instances of rape, swarmings, firing squad executions, necrophilia, messy vehicular deaths, and just about any other unpleasant thing imaginable. Amazingly most of these videos, particularly the ones that first warn “EXTREMELY GRAPHIC,” have been viewed between approximately 15,000 and 200,000 times. Nobody is being forced to watch, but considering the numbers of people that do, it seems important that we should ask the question: “why do so many people want to watch this stuff?”

Unfortunately, the jury is still out on the answer to that question, though there are many ideas about it, which come as varied as the people who watch the videos. Whether it’s intellectual interest, morbid curiosity, vicarious excitement, inner compulsion to know what’s going on in the world, or meditation upon the moment of death, it seems that, throughout history, people have always wanted to see.

“In Kaunas, Lithuania, where Einsatzkommando 3 operated, the Jews were clubbed to death with crowbars, before cheering crowds, mothers holding up their children to see the fun, and German soldiers clustered round like spectators at a football match. At the end, while the streets ran with blood, the chief murderer stood on the pile of corpses as a triumphant hero and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.” Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote this in his foreword to Ernst Klee’s The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, which is a collection of letters, diaries, confessions and reflections, all of which are an attempt to give access to the private thoughts of both murderers and spectators of murder. The overwhelming sense that I get from reading the individual accounts — of what happened and why people did what they did — is that I don’t understand what happened and why people did what they did.

Reading about death, seeing it firsthand or watching it later through a video, will not necessarily get a person closer to an understanding of what it is they’re becoming witness to. Likewise, asking why people are willing to watch murder is roughly equivalent to asking why people commit murder in the first place. Not that the two activities are equivalent, but that the reasons for both seem to be hidden in an unquantifiable recess of human nature. So what exactly is the point of intentionally becoming witness to horrible events? Trevor-Roper makes a compelling suggestion:“This is a horrible book to read, and yet one that should be read — not in order to revive old enmities (after all, it has been compiled by Germans and published in Germany), but in order that we do not forget the most somber lesson of the Second World War: the fragility of civilization, and the ease and speed with which, in certain circumstances, barbarism can break through that thin crust and even, if backed by power and sanctified by doctrine, be accepted as the norm.”

Violent death, as Trevor-Roper asserts, is nothing new to human history. Until recently, in most Eastern and Western nations alike, executions had almost always been a matter of public spectacle. Anthropologist Nancy Schepper-Hughes points out in her essay “Bodies, Death and Silence,” that although today in North America open violence appears to have largely disappeared — save for that related to gangs, drugs, theft, sports, road rage and infidelity — it has actually just become such a routinized and integral part of our very foundation for peaceable living that we don’t even notice it.

“The military is not an educational, charitable, or social welfare institution; violence is intrinsic to its nature and logic,” writes Schepper-Hughes. She also points out a much more profound example of tacitly accepted and nationally validated violence, which is couched in the terminologies of science and the rhetoric of national security. “Nuclear scientists,” she says, “have created a soothing and normalizing discourse with which to discuss our government’s capacity for blowing up populations of bodies to smithereens.” Canada has no nuclear missiles of its own but is still under NATO’s nuclear umbrella and as such could have nuclear missiles used in its defence if threatened nationally.

The thin crust of civilization that Trevor-Roper talks about, under which is hidden the boundless possibilities of barbarism, is what David A. Adler, a Holocaust survivor, acknowledges with anxiety in his essay “Tell them I was there. I’m real. It happened.” Adler remembers a man named Al Feurerstein just arriving in the United States in 1946 and having a friend say to him, “Don’t worry. We have a constitution. It can never happen again.” Having just experienced a nation crumble under his feet to reveal a mass grave, Feurerstein responded, “Germany was a democracy. It had a constitution, too.”

Violence is wound inextricably through the fabric of all human history; its intensity rising and falling in both expected and unexpected times and places. The obsessively repeated maxim — those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them — sounds like cliché out of almost anybody’s mouth because it reflects an ideal that sounds profound but doesn’t seem to have much purchase on the way that things actually work in the world. Every nation with a history book knows that there have been wars in the past over politics, religion, resources, race and power that destroyed people, empires and civilizations, and that these were devastatingly bad experiences for those involved. Yet war and violence continues today for almost all the same reasons.

Maybe people don’t understand what it is they’re hearing about or seeing on the news. This might the case because of the fact that when violence is discussed publicly it’s usually coming from the mouth of someone being paid to talk about it, so the representation of violence gets embedded into stories that are actually about other things, like the failure of compassion in individuals or about the results of oppressive political systems and religious intolerance. Maybe what’s missing is just the experience of witnessing the thing itself, death, the finality of which ends all individual compassion, political ambition and religious dominance.

In the same essay that expresses anxiety about the tenuous stability of political systems, Adler makes the claim that, “average citizens in countries not overrun by Germany may have had only a vague knowledge of what was happening. But in April 1945, when photographs of the victims filled newspapers and magazines and were shown on newsreels, the world truly understood the horrors of the Holocaust.”

So what’s better? To see or not to see? The vast majority of violent death videos found on the Internet are totally devoid of context or are in languages other than English; the sole purpose seems to be to show the singular, excruciating moment.

Is there something valuable to be gained by watching these videos? Should people even have unregulated access to such images in the first place? I posed these questions to Adam Muller, an associate professor of English at the University of Manitoba and research fellow with the Centre for Defense and Security Studies specializing in representations of war and genocide.

Manitoban: Why are so many people watching these videos of violent deaths on the Internet?

Adam Muller: Often when these images are talked about its some kind of schadenfreude that’s appealed to that explains how it is that people become fascinated by them. Why do people watch stuff like this? Schadenfreude, the idea that through watching other people harmed you come to be feel better about yourself, that your happiness in some perverse psychological way, depends on other people’s misery.

M: Because you’re not experiencing that kind of suffering?

AM: Yeah, and because you’re not, lucky you, isn’t that great? That’s often given as an explanation. But I don’t think that’s right; I don’t think that’s what’s going on with these images. Bear in mind there were other precursors to this, particularly and notoriously a film called Faces of Death that was actually banned in Canada. I saw a bootleg copy in the ’80s that was brought into the country by British soldiers stationed at the base near Medicine Hat where I grew up. To watch that the first time was horrific, watching scenes of suicide and animal death, it was very unpleasant and weird. Seems pretty banal compared to what you can see right now.

M: Is there something wrong with watching these videos?

AM: I think in a lot of ways the kinds of technologies we’re in bed with right now have severely contracted the space formerly denoted by the term “the private.” Whereas, in the 18th century, the establishment of some kind of distance between the public and the private was vital to the creation of a political subjectivity on the one hand because you needed people to feel like there was some part of their life [or] world that they had a unique and particular claim to that didn’t belong to anybody else, that had a kind of value to them that they felt obliged to represent politically. You needed privacy for that. Additionally, the idea of the individual gets announced in the 18th century and defended philosophically and politically, that kind of individualism revolves around a conception of privacy, because what is the individual but in a sense an organism private unto himself? Vital.

These technologies are amenable to an insertion in spaces that would formally have been considered off-limits, thereby contracting the space of the private. Now, death is really an intimate and mysterious moment. Our own deaths are a source of anxiety and mystery to us because there’s a sense in which we both experience them and don’t experience them. We undergo them, but it’s not clear that we experience them, as experience has a cognitive dimension to it. We have to process what we see and feel to have experiences. And we don’t get to witness the deaths of others very often. You may see an accident on the street, or you may know a relative. Death for me is the last horizon of mysterious privacy. A singular moment.

What we see is an intrusion of this technology into one of the last remaining spaces denoted as private. And what makes us deep down uncomfortable about these representations, in addition to the fact that it’s hard to watch, is the sense that it’s not right to be watching. I think our sense of it not being right to watch has to do with our vestigial sense we have of the moral necessity of our own privacy. We need that space still. If we don’t have that space, amongst other things we’ll be obliged to confront our own mortality, and we don’t like that.

M: What’s the difference between watching Hotel Rwanda and a beheading video?

AM: [Hotel Rwanda] is a film, a fiction film. The edits are smooth, the angles are conducive to a maximum awareness, the performances are to some degree mannered. I might fear for a character, but my fearing for a character is radically different than sort of fear from the fear I would have for an individual who is real in the world. It wasn’t non-fictional in the sense of a documentary. There were many codes of performance, conventions of dress and accent and so forth that drew attention to the fact that Hotel Rwanda wasn’t real.

M: What then is the purpose of representing genocide in the film?

AM: We see atrocity occurring in the film; the film isn’t about those atrocities per se. The film is about two things: it’s about the failure of Western powers to do what they needed to do to prevent those atrocities; and secondly it’s about the courage of a single man, separated from, divorced from, any higher authority, who on the strength of his own character protected and saved hundreds of lives. It’s difficult to say that a film of somebody committing suicide on the Internet is about anything other than that particular moment. In other words, it serves no other rhetorical purpose, whereas I think there is a deeper and morally worthwhile purpose served by something like Hotel Rwanda.

M: What about the Taliban video of the 12-year-old beheading another man?

AM: What’s being served by some decontextualized death on the Internet? From the Taliban’s perspective, maybe there’s a purpose, but in terms of my own engagement, I can be nothing but appalled by it. It means nothing to me because it’s just a spectacle. We should know that they were killed, and in a sense somebody has to witness this for us, but without the relevant contextual information, without being prepped and located — remember, in a fiction film there’s point of view, narration, text on the screen that tell you when and where something’s happening, you’re always positioned — the watching of them becomes a matter of prurient interest; a vile, invasive spectatorial attempt to negotiate the inner reaches of another’s privacy.

M: Because viewers have a total and complete inability to understand the direct experience of extreme and violent death, is it damaging to witness it?

AM: It might be, but people’s psychologies are different, it might be thrilling. As limited events, they defy description. The language in art that’s typically attached to these events is of the sublime. The language of the sublime is all about evoking the mysteriousness of the thing being described. The kind of verité style of these images is all about trying to make it so that we understand them as fundamentally non-mysterious. The extent to which you’ll be damaged by witnessing these events will amount to an idiosyncratic response, private to you, to this demystification.

M: You said that these videos are decontextualized, but in fact they are typically situated in the middle of the screen, surrounded by images of pornography, other forms of gruesome death and advertising. What is this frame?

AM: It seems to me on the one hand, it creates an implicit equivalence between those forms of representation and the representation of death. There’s also this other sense in which the crass, two-dimensional juxtaposition in this rectangular field that is your computer screen suggests that it’s really no different in kind from all that other stuff. And what I’m suggesting is actually that’s true. That as it’s being presented to us it’s precisely part of the demystificatory project that has rendered so much else that we took to be specifically unique to us, private to us, and rendered that banal.

M: Is it more real to see something in person than on a computer?

AM: Let’s say somebody we can’t get to on the other side of the river hangs themselves, right in front of your eyes. You’re left at some level contending with the idea that maybe there was something you could have done. When you witness this thing on the computer screen, you’re focalized through someone else’s eyes. And you can always displace some of the responsibility for seeing onto someone else, because it’s their perspective that’s capturing your perspective and that makes you at once removed from the thing itself. For some people, that’ll matter hugely, and that’ll make it possible for them to feel nothing when looking at those images on the screen. For other people it’s going to be an insignificant difference because we’re all human beings. That someone could have seen that individual in that way and had the presence of mind to film it, would be horrific enough, and devastating.

My worry about the death thing — given death as a limit case, as one of the last mysterious phenomena we still have and given the deep psychological uneasiness we have about it — that if it goes, then what finally is our claim to privacy going to consist in? What’s left to protect?

M: There seems to be varying degrees of removal between experiencing the thing in front of your eyes, watching a video of it, or watching a fictional representation of it. Copy of a copy of a copy, but aren’t they all still about the same thing?

AM: The funny thing is that it’s the thing in itself that we really care about. The representations we care about in different ways. The stuff that gives us the thrill and makes deep moral demands on us is the original representation. Of course when we’re dealing with the stuff on the Internet, precisely because what we’ve taken is something historically and contextually located within an individual and then made it available to multiple contexts of presentation, we actually end up putting huge distance between us and the thing itself. And to the extent that we do that, we have less obligation to act, less obligation to respect, less awareness of where to draw the line between the public and the private and so on and so forth. I think this ends up being a really messy and dangerous phenomenon.

M: At the university, you teach people about genocide. What’s the difference between what you teach and what can be found on the Internet?

AM: I’m witnessing, but reflecting on the mechanism of the witnessing itself.

M: Can’t witnessing without reflecting be considered a valuable experience?

AM: It’s valuable but it’s naive. It leaves you open for exploitation by all kinds of agencies and institutions that have a vested interest in shaping memory . . . without that level of critical reflection, I think the image is little more than a kind of porn.

M: Some countries, including Pakistan, Iran, Morocco, Brazil, China, Myanmar, Syria and Thailand, have chosen to regulate and block certain aspects of the Internet that they believe to be dangerous for their respective countries. Since the Internet is a publicly shared space, should it be regulated so that people in general don’t have free access to disturbing images?

AM: Different cultures draw the line between the public and the private in very different places. What might be considered acceptable or unacceptable is going to be a very different order of thing. Although I’m not a deep cultural relativist, obviously you have to in some sense acknowledge that other cultures do things differently in ways that aren’t necessarily better or worse than the ways we do them. So again, I think the imperative is to analyze where the line is drawn and not assume that we have historically or notionally drawn it in the right place.