Photos & Bombs

You gotta figure the advent of photography and video recording means that we’re less likely to go to war in the future because we have better institutional memory of the horrors of war now than we did before the daguerreotype was announced in 1839 and recording technologies are always getting better. I'm not talking about using technology like the Satellite Sentinel Project does to alert the international body politic about materializing atrocities in real time, I'm talking about countering the unfortunate parts of human nature that are inclined those armed conflict in the first place.

We mouth slogans like “Je me souviens”/“Never forget” on Remembrance/Veteran's/Memorial Day and we pretend that poems like Flander's Fields properly encapsulate the deplorable consequences of battle, but poetic lines about "the crosses row on row" are no substitute for actually confronting images of corpses torn apart by shrapnel, gutted by bayonets, and brutalized by gases. Video can be even more disturbingly effective in this regard.

Until there was a way for the real horror of war to be conveyed intergenerationally it was always going to be hard to make people who weren’t alive for the last great war understand the depth of anti-war sentiment. See WW1. There hadn’t been a major war in a European theatre since the Battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic wars in 1815 so when the alliance system brought about mass conflict the citizens of Europe were in the streets ecstatic about the return of cavalry charges and nationalistic glory, not at home bracing themselves for an onslaught of awfulness.* In other words, photo and video might be the best antidote we have for the bleaching effect of military nostalgia.

Maybe I’m just describing Vietnam Syndrome and why it’s a good thing. But there was no Vietnam Syndrome after the revulsion of the first world war so even if photographic evidence can help prevent war, it is still only one of a host of factors.

*: There was the Crimean war in the middle of the 19^th century but, as you might have guessed, that was in Crimea.