Content warning: This article mentions graphic and violent imagery.
This year has seen images of slaughter in Gaza amass, and, yet, the public’s interest thereof has seemingly only waned. And not for a lack of published material. It seems that in spite of the deaths of over 41,000 Palestinian people; in spite of the mounting Lebanese civilian casualties; in spite of the numerous crimes against humanity that the Israeli state has committed, photographic documentation has done little to inculpate the American government and citizens at large. Depictions of senseless slaughter, to which our eyes should otherwise gravitate toward and of which should warrant political action, have been cast to the social wayside as byproducts of a region that, in American eyes, only knows death and strife.
And yet those same eyes once saw slaughter for slaughter, recognized annihilation for annihilation and perhaps even helped to mitigate the conditions under which those photos were produced. The Civil Rights movement and the anti-war activism of the ’60s and ’70s were defined and strengthened by the very images that captured the social conditions they sought to curtail. It seemed as if a single still could mobilize a generation of Americans to significant cultural and political reform.
Images of murder have not changed. I hesitate to believe writ large that Americans’ eyes have changed either. My questions are only these: Why does photographic evidence of mass murder seemingly hold little weight in the sphere of public concern? And why do I still hear the cries of outright indignation towards those who show our own American hand in the proliferation of violence in Palestine, particularly here at Tufts?
Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “The Terror of War” is pictured.
Encapsulating the terror of the Vietnam War in a single image would be a violent reduction. However, I think no image can better broach the nature of American involvement in Vietnam than the above. Moments before the photo was taken on June 8, 1972, a South Vietnamese attack aircraft had mistaken the civilians and the nearby South Vietnamese soldiers as enemies, resulting not only in numerous dead civilians but in the immediate combustion of the clothes of Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the pictured girl, with third-degree burns all over her body.
Rather than lingering on the sheer dread present, I underscore this image because of its composition: napalm smoke in the background, South Vietnamese soldiers in the mid-ground and the victims of war in the foreground. The causal continuity from the deployment of napalm to its horrifying consequences is first captured in a still whose subjects appear as if in eternal flight from their premature, unwarranted deaths. But the soldiers’ presence cannot be discounted, for it is their position between the children and the napalm that changes this photo from mere evidence of brutality to a condemnation of its perpetrators in its own right.
The image is at once both a lament for the loss of life and a denunciation of the guilty parties responsible. Perpetrators and victims are preserved in sinister tandem, the indifferent countenances of the troops making the children’s wail even more audible. Judgment is imparted through simple positioning, and the seamless flow between American napalm and the American uniforms that the South Vietnamese soldiers are wearing leaves the accusation clear: American dollars did this. Thus, the image transforms into a sort of ad hoc court, one whose overwhelming verdict shall condemn the guns and napalm sent by the American government and the military-industrial complex that left over 2 million civilians dead by 1975.
The photographer, Nick Ut, received a Pulitzer Prize for his work after it was printed on the front page of The New York Times’ “The World” section. As the first widely televised American conflict, the Vietnam War ended due to a dramatic shift in public opinion thanks in large part to widely publicized and acclaimed war photography like Ut’s — thanks to photos that showed the extent of a personal, tangible, easily recognizable American complicity in industrialized violence unseen since World War II. The superfluous presence of American regalia, fatigues, arms and troops was envisioned and felt, not merely recounted. The American public’s hands were soaked with blood they could not wash off.
It is not at all difficult to find images of genocidal crimes in Gaza; there is no dearth of photographically documented slaughter against the Palestinian people. Above all, the sheer amount of photographic evidence should elicit the same reaction in all of us: Genocide is taking place. Why, then, do these images founder in a sea of American political inaction? Why does American politics allow for platforms, be it Trump’s or Harris’, that only promise the systematic reproduction of these images?
As with the Vietnam War, a single image cannot be raised to a point of descriptive privilege. Nonetheless, an image of a man burning alive published in the New York Times Oct. 20 offers a thematic relevance that is undeniable. On Oct. 14, the Israel Defense Forces firebombed the al-Aqsa Hospital, killing five and wounding 65 people.
Israel’s response? According to the IDF’s Telegram channel, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions.” “Precise munitions” immolated at least five people lying in bed in an otherwise targeted strike that killed only civilians. The parallels to Ut’s photograph could not be stronger. The burning man’s outstretched hand, IV still attached, echoes Kim Phúc’s own skin, sloughing off her arms.
Two bodies, disfigured by war, stretch their limbs out in search of any air that has not yet stoked the flames of their inferno — an inferno that will broil their flesh and char their bones to the point of unrecognition, more human fuel for our machines of war. Ut brought Kim Phúc to a nearby hospital immediately after he took his photo; a hospital not unlike the one this Palestinian university student, 19-year-old Shaaban Al-Dalou, was carbonized in.
What is left of a human whose body is reduced to ashes and dust? A name? This photo shall live on as evidence for a trial whose culprits cannot be seen, conveniently out of frame as they fly 30,000 feet overhead. The power of Ut’s photograph consists in its judicial staging; the nature of modern warfare, however, has foreclosed almost every eventuality that the perpetrators and victims of war crimes ever be caught together in the same frame. We are left with the burning corpses of military intervention, but seldom do we see the emblematic symbols of its perpetrators and their financial backing. And our government is all the more thankful for it.
The shift of military exports from American camouflage and M16 rifles to drones and guided bombs has conversely precluded their photographic documentation. Armament, of which every trace of its American provenance is destroyed immediately upon impact, now constitutes much of American military support to Israel. In stark contrast to the Vietnam War, the American public is photographically deprived of any distinctly ‘American’ vestiges of murder. Seldom will contemporary images of Palestinian genocide ever confront the Israeli military and American government with their crimes. We only see murder, rubble and corpses, a far cry from the judicial juxtaposition of earlier war photography.
Sure, President Joe Biden can announce his commitment to making sure that “Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond” as loud as he wants, but words and numbers cannot hope to encompass or describe the terror that our own dollars have funded, allowing us to wash our hands of Palestinian blood. Only a medium beyond language can render that blood indelible — a medium whose political power suffers under the nature of modern warfare.
Before us — the students of Tufts and American citizens — stands an impossible task. We must marry the images of murder with their hidden murderers and awaken our own responsibility from our collective unconsciousness. To look over the genocide, while still somehow holding it in the foreground, and see our own American flag that looms overhead, that is what I ask of you. It might require our own submergence into a frightening imagination, but it is only through our imaginative capabilities that we can see what has been hidden from us. There used to be images that changed the course of nations, of histories. Let us create new ones that do the same.
