Just watched a tv documentary about the Le Mans crash of 1955. They featured the footage of the car scything into the crowd very heavily: Starting with the still of the mercedes crashing into the back of the Healey and flying into the air and then the view from the pits as the debris cut people down. Again and again. And then in slow motion. Again and again.
It was pretty distressing.
And afterwards I realised that we almost never see footage like this anymore. Something like Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road isn't shown anymore. We show a Duisburg, or a Hillsborough but the one off tragedyt ? We look away.
We have our sanitised "Shock and Awe" footage, but broadcasters prefer not to show us the aftermath, the mistakes. We hear about the wedding parties slain, but we never see them.
And I'm not sure this is a good thing. Too much concentration on the bangs, too little on the misery leaves us unable to see war in the round. the EU came out of a profound shock at the end of WWII that, as we surveyed our smashed cities, that we must never wage war on each other again. Okay, this meant that we transferred our aggressions onto darker skinned people safely a long way away and we didn't have to look at their terror except on the 6 o'clock news. But we started the idea that war isn't politics by other mean, it's something we can no longer afford.
But we need to have our noses rubbed in our own shit now and again to remember that life isn't a video game, that we can't just play again when the city is rubble and the DU & white phosphorus has been dropped.
shocking and horrible tho' it is. Maybe we need to see the blood in car crashes, bomb blasts, wars now and again. To remind ourselves that we shouldn't be doing this. keep to the Fen Causeway
Sanitised war coverage on TV reflects our ambivalence to conflict - Times Online
There is, as Bill Rammell correctly points out, an extraordinary disconnection between the British people and the warriors sent to fight on our behalf. True, the 24-hour news media constantly pump information from the battlefront into our homes, but often that news is sanitised: it seldom shows the reality of modern war -- the periods of boredom punctuated by moments of pure horror and fear. The US ban on showing footage or photographs of soldiers returning in body bags is part of a wider feeling, shared in this country, that the public should not be exposed to such upsetting images. This may reflect a gentler and more humane society, but it also says much about our profound ambivalence about the real nature of war.
There is, as Bill Rammell correctly points out, an extraordinary disconnection between the British people and the warriors sent to fight on our behalf. True, the 24-hour news media constantly pump information from the battlefront into our homes, but often that news is sanitised: it seldom shows the reality of modern war -- the periods of boredom punctuated by moments of pure horror and fear.
The US ban on showing footage or photographs of soldiers returning in body bags is part of a wider feeling, shared in this country, that the public should not be exposed to such upsetting images. This may reflect a gentler and more humane society, but it also says much about our profound ambivalence about the real nature of war.
It doesn't show the heroism of the troops coping with things we wouldn't like to? Well it dosn't show the civilians caught up in carnage, the Bodies damaged where people are playing big boys games or the sheer pointlessness of much of the acxtivity involved in War. The public shouldnt be exposed to upsetting images? Well yes they should, We're back to the old with rights come responsibilities. If you want to vote for a bunch of maniacs, then you have a duty to face up to the consequences of your actions. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Our glorious Leaders have taken a page from the Romans. The difference is people are killed, maimed, and mutilated "virtually" for the amusement of the audience, not actually.
