WASHINGTON, 3 March 2004 — Surgeons, pathologists, embalmers and even the corner butcher know about the little click, in the brain, that lets them look dispassionately at a living or once-living being and see, instead, just flesh, a thing, or meat. Without this shift in the moral vision, we could not heal the sick, bury the dead or eat a steak. And yet a closely related power of objectification is also the root of cruelty. To see a human being only as an object — an enemy, an occupier or an animal — unlocks the possibility for war, revolution and genocide.
On Thursday, footage of an attack on vehicles occupied by civilian contractors in Fallujah hit the Web sites and television screens of the wider world. An Associated Press cameraman happened upon the scene: First plumes of smoke seen at a distance through a grungy windshield; then shots of an SUV engulfed in orange flames surrounded by a crowd; then charred bodies. A man was beating one corpse with a pole, bending into his labor with his whole body, raising from a crouch until the weapon was high above his head, then slamming it down again. Later, in sharp contrast to the SUV, a compact car with no hubcaps dragged a body behind it. And then something out of Oliver Cromwell’s England: Bodies dangling from the girders of a truss bridge.
To watch these images dispassionately required that click, that willingness to say not he or she but it. It’s just a body. It’s dead. It doesn’t feel anything anymore. And yet the vast majority of Americans have no experience, and want no familiarity, with this turn of the mind’s moral grammar. Squeamishness keeps us from reveling in cruelty, yet it also banishes the hard realities of cruelty from sight. It is our armor and our cop-out.
We’ve pulled up stakes and left war zones before, when images not too much more grotesque than Thursday’s made it to the nightly news. The reality of dead American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia, their bodies mutilated, horrified us — though not so much that we didn’t revisit them through the safe vehicle of entertainment, via Hollywood’s “Black Hawk Down.’’
The difference now, perhaps, is that we’ve grown accustomed to the violence. A year ago, with reporters working under the military’s close scrutiny, there was hot debate about whether images of dead Americans should (no matter how respectfully) be displayed in newspapers. In March, when bombs ripped through Madrid, newspapers printed a photograph with a bloody, severed human femur in the foreground (though many of them cropped or obscured the image). If the lesson of Mogadishu was we can’t be squeamish in war, we’ve come a long way. The total body count in Somalia was 43. In Iraq, it’s at least 590 and counting. There was a convenient political caption to these pictures from Fallujah that emphasized that distance, the lessons of a year’s experience. It is a serviceable caption that should please, depending on the spin, both those who favored this war and those who refused its allure. “There’s nothing new here,’’ we can say, collectively.
Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan was saying just that, in effect, at the White House: Democracy is on track; stay the course; there’s nothing new here. Anyone sick of this war could say much the same. When it comes to the justifications for war, the estimates of its cost, yes, everything is always shifting, but when it comes to violence, death and cruelty, there’s nothing new here.
One could also look back into Iraq’s history and comfortably say that there’s nothing new here. In 1963, when Iraqi President Abdul Karim Qassem was executed, Baathist radicals displayed his body, riddled with bullet holes, on television. A soldier “sauntered around, handling its parts,’’ according to Kanan Makiya, who recounted the episode in the book “Republic of Fear.’’ It was, according to Makiya, nothing particularly new for Iraqis, used to bloody displays, though television had extended its reach.
So we can place this in the Mogadishu file, or the Iraqi history file, both of which suggest precedents and lessons that blunt the power of the imagery, and both of which suggest that this is the kind of thing people unlike us — people who don’t look like “us,’’ people in poor, sandy parts of the world — just happen to do, from time to time.
Yet there’s a dignity owed to the charred corpses in Fallujah that demands we argue with any easy interpretation of these images. Perhaps this is what people unlike us do, from time to time, but it’s also what we do, when motivated by pure, unyielding hatred — from time to time. A foreign commentator, trying to make sense of James Byrd’s mangled body, kicked, beaten and dragged behind a pickup truck in Texas in 1998, might well have called upon his knowledge of lynching and racism and said, well, this is what these people do. It’s in their history, their blood, their nature.
We could look to the haunting precedent of Mogadishu and satisfy ourselves that no good deed goes unpunished. Or that America will always be resented for its magnanimity. Or that it’s time to stop trying to fix the no-hoper nations of the world.
But the dignity owed to the blackened bodies requires not so much an interpretation or moral conclusion as a simple facing of facts. The people who killed those contractors in Fallujah hated them, hated us, hated America so much that the little click of objectification went not through one mind but the many minds of the crowd. This is what hatred looks like. Try to see it without distractions, without the exoticism of the locale, the strange dress, the incomprehensible chants.
This is what it looks like to objectify people. We should know, we’ve done it before, to our own people and to others. We couldn’t have gone to war in the first place if we hadn’t used our powers of abstraction, distancing and objectification, to minimize the human consequences of our still-fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction.