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Have any of y'all seen that photo from the late 60s of an ARVN officer executing a Vietnamese man in Hanoi? The shutter fell while the executed man was just recoiling to the right as the bullet passing from ear to ear. Not a pretty picture, but it summarizes the nature of war, external of rationales of right and wrong.
To agree with plaid banshee , in my mind this photograph deserves to win the award precisely because, like that Hanoi photo, it captures a hideous moment in perfect clarity, precisely the sort of thing that sitting in our homes we'd like to deny ever happened anywhere. In fact, the sort of thing that most people DO sit at home and deny ever happened, along with a parade of other ugly moments in history, microcosmic and macrocosmic, which we'd prefer to just gloss over - the Shoah, Kolyma, Guatamala, the Belgian Congo, etc.,etc. I'd say the photo holds the important function of creating a record of atrocity - no one who sees this photo can feign ignorance of this phenomena, claim that they too were carried away and thus blameless for their actions. It creates social memory and crystalizes the disgust and horror that would otherwise be eroded over time by rationalization, rose-tinting, and conscious twisting of the event's record.
I'd actually say that making the world a better place necessarily involves uncovering, displaying, the potential ugliness of human nature as a collective - recognizing it so that an communal antibody can be made. This picture raises the question "What made this situation acceptable to all of those participant-aggressors, after the victim began to insist on them stopping?" and now it's our task to start trying to address that pathology.
(With a satellite-mounted Emasculation-Laser and Vasectomy Cannon.)
M. Utopia: Not fair. The photo shows a moment in time and space. You have no idea what occurred before, after, or even around. You're projecting, and it shows in your linguistic-semantic twisting of the concept "the act of observation affects the observed event," a principle that works well on the electron-level and also on the participant-observer level of anthropology/psychology, but can't really be applied effectively here, since it is not the act of observation that is affecting anything, but rather your interpretation of other possible activities that would be "better" in a moral sense.
On a more grunt level, as an ex-bouncer, let me point out from experience that getting through a crowd like that is virtually impossible, especially when it's a drunk and rowdily cheerful crowd. You have a clot of people in the center who are the actors, and everyone else - the moving wall between you and the thing you need to intervene in - considers themselves bystanders and thus "innocent" [evil fucking lazy assholes...but that is another story, as Kipling would say]...so when you start pushing through the exterior of the crowd, they feel put upon and tyrannized, and respond accordingly with nastiness and resistance, if not violence. [I hate human beings, especially males, in large groups.] My experience in clubs, concerts and bars, at a few soccer riots and other sundry group melees, with maybe three hundreed to five hundred bodies, was bad enough...I'd never go near a Mardi Gras crowd. |
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