A Brief History of War Imagery

It’s agonizing learning of the barbarism perpetrated on innocent Jews and Palestinians. As a regular news binger, it’s an all-day every-day loop I can’t escape. I hope, however, the constant repetition will reach people not paying attention by osmosis, through social media, or even CNN playing in a doctor’s office waiting room.

I make myself consume as many updates as I can mentally tolerate because I believe that ignorance is apathy and that is complicity. We must be aware of events in Israel so the knowledge can change us—on a cellular level—how we think of and treat “others.” Without news content and credible social media we can’t change our thinking. But sometimes it is just more than I can bear. As a mother to a toddler, any mention of violence to babies and children elicits an immediate, “Alexa, turn the hell off.” What is the purpose of sharing the torture, in explicit detail, on websites, Instagram feeds, news interviews?

Indexing on one specific demographic is called localizing news, it connects you to a story that’s far away and seemingly unrelated to your life. Take Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old white woman who was murdered in Wyoming. It was national news for weeks tracking a massive search. But when Native non-women go missing, which is often, we don’t learn of it in the national theater because the national interest is absent. Thus, the news is “localized” to white audiences.

The trauma is obviously worse for anyone on the ground than here in the US watching TV, but that doesn’t mean these images and descriptions aren’t traumatic to consumers. The bloody images of bodies or a humiliated grandmother covered and paraded around a village is forever imprinted in my memory, and already has been for Jews for centuries.

I mentioned the dilemma to a (Jewish) friend who is a therapist, and she said, “Oh god it’s getting really horrible how much detail they are sharing. It’s psychological warfare truly.”

Her comment raises a prescient point. Not since the mid-20th century have we seen such gratuitous, highly graphic violence towards an othered population. “The postcards and photographs, depicting gruesome images of the bodies of Black men, women and children who had been tied to trees, mutilated, tortured, shot and burned alive by white mobs, were often distributed as souvenirs and saved as mementos in family albums and stored away in attics for safekeeping.”¹

Just like enslaved Africans and their descendants who have been oppressed, tortured and murdered for hundreds of years, Jews have been a target of hatred since they were blamed for the execution of Christ, some two thousand years ago. Antisemitism is a significant part Jewish history and culture, the most notable to generations alive today, being the Nazi Holocaust. Just like the celebration of assault towards Black bodies persists, so too, does the glorification of violence towards Jews.

In a 2014 article in The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett wrote, “On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name… The image, and its anonymous subject, might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices.”² Perhaps the “editorial choices” intended to prevent American sympathy to Arabs.

Until WWII, photos of dead GIs were never published in American journalism. When Americans at home became complacent with the ongoing war, a photo of three dead American soldiers was printed in Time Magazine in September 1943. The American soldiers who died in the Pacific Battle of Buna-Gona brought the war home to Americans who had never seen such somber images of their own men.

Even in 2010, the big scandal of the time was a photo of an army soldier proudly crouching next to an Afghani corpse, “The Trophy Shot,” the man humiliated, then killed. For certain, it is lewd, but it is not nearly as depraved as what we are seeing out of Israel today.

Even when Russia invaded Ukraine, we heard that civilians were being killed in hospitals, that surrogate babies couldn’t go home to their families, families were divided, people were without electricity and heat, men were dying. We saw photos of men in camos and combat boots looking serious and hardened, smoking cigarettes outside in the depth of freezing grayness, a demolished apartment building in the background, concrete rubble. Yes, there are people buried below it, but we are still looking for them, invisible.

A few months in, the war in Ukraine became a footnote, and now that we are going on year two, coverage of the war is sparse. Maybe it’s because we never saw the full picture of the uprooted lives of Ukrainians. Should we have? Is it too late to start? How will there be enough room on the airwaves to granularly illustrate the conditions billions of humans live under?

A young teen post 9/11, I remember listening to the news in the car with my dad, typically NPR. They used sanitized words like: atrocities, violence, innocent civilians, war, refugees. None of these words are humanizing. Words like babies, toddlers, women, men, soldiers, mothers, fathers, are more humanizing.

Does it humanize these victims when the media describes a decapitated baby, or a woman raped next to the corpse of her husband? Are those more humanizing descriptions because they reveal the terrifying experiences these innocent victims are face? To my eye, it dehumanizes these victims to animals, prey oblivious to signs a predator would pounce. But the images indeed evoke a sadness so profound that in the faces of the Jews, I see myself, my husband, my mother… and the unspeakable.

In localizing the plight of Israelis, it brings the war home, like the soldiers in 1943. It shows white people that other white people are, again, targets of Arabs, resulting in a rise of Islamophobia and antisemitism here at home.

In yesterday’s speech, Biden addressed American Jews and Arabs saying, “We must without equivocation denounce antisemitism. We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia. And to all of you hurting, I want you to know I see you, you belong. And I want to say this to you, you’re all American.”

Since the US media has censored the worst war photos coming out of the Middle East for decades, until now, I can only speculate it is nothing more than another exercise in violence voyeurism. The world, including Americans, are fascinated with brutality perpetrated on Jewish bodies. Just like the lynching photos and postcards of the Jim Crow era, the world is reveling in the never-ending feed of pain and suffering of Jews. It is psychological warfare, truly.

Here lie three Americans.

What shall we say of them? Shall we say that this is a noble sight? Shall we say that this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country?

Or shall we say that this is too horrible to look at?

Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?

Those are not the reasons.

The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .

The reason we print it now is that, last week, President Roosevelt and [Director of the Office of War Information] Elmer Davis and the War Department decided that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.

And so here it is. This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns.

Life Magazine editorial (excerpt) September 20, 1943

Photo: George Strock, Time/Life Images

1. https://wordinblack.com/2022/01/the-horrors-of-lynching-photographs-and-postcards/

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/