The Atlantic has a
great set of photographs from Kobani, showing what happens to a town after four months of fighting.
An "improvised armored vehicle" of the Kurdish forces. I saved this picture to show to my sons, who like most young Americans delight in imagining how they would fight against zombies or mutant bandits in a post apocalypse world.
I note a conspicuous lack of corpses. Isn't it interesting what the Atlantic chooses to show or not show their readers?
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much that sort of unwitting editorialization contributes to the love of zombies and apocalypse that young Americans seem to share? In my view, too many Americans are too blind to the realities of war and death. War is something that happens "over there" and "somewhere else", to "other people" who were probably Nazis or mutants or zombies or somehow-less-than-human anyways. Shooting someone is just "Bang! You're dead!" without all the sucking gunshot wounds, the twitching and moaning and shrieking, the agonizing minutes of bleeding out and weeping and begging in fear and desperation and horror.
Of course it's not to say that every over the top action film or shooting based video game should instead be a perfectly realistic violence simulator - that'd be absurd. But I do at least wish that in addition to all the unrealistic media depictions of violence we have, we also had a few spot on ones. It's perfectly fine to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger blow away a hundred bad guys bloodlessly in an action fantasy piece, just so long as you also gain a separate understanding of the truth of things elsewhere. And in my opinion, the News Media really ought to be one of those places where we see the reality of war.