Having just read a book which referenced the appallingly inhumane actions enacted on innocent civilians during WW2, I can’t help being angered by the pathetically self-indulgent mindset of the woke generally – and in particular the behaviour of two high-profile people who recently moved from the U.K. to the USA to “escape their trauma”.
My long departed grandmother would have said that “some people just need a good kick up the backside” ….
I’ll second that – the current buzz phrase is ‘mental health’ and if notice is taken of the woke brigade, the whole country is in need of the men in white coats, many of them simply suffering from the ‘stress’ of a critical comment on social media – so get out of the cesspit!! Being sad or depressed at life’s curve balls is not a mental health issue, it is what your grandmother and the rest of my generation would call ‘life’, however it does detract from those who do suffer from genuine mental illness for whom there is limited provision. I am inclined to think though that at least one of the two people you refer to, if not both, does have – a deeply flawed narcissistic personality disorder, any suffering is not by them but inflicted on those around them.
Surely the word they would have used, to lapse into the vernacular, was arse?
Stainy
3 years ago
There are people that go to the most awful, violent and cruel incidents everyday. They see the very worst in people. Then they get up the next day and do it all again. However, they rarely write articles and books about their own suffering. They are called Police Officers.
Perhaps you haven’t met the ones retired early with PTSD or who take 6 months off with ‘ stress ‘ .
In Greater Manchester the average officer takes 19 days off on the sick each year.
That’s just short of a month .
Yes, today’s police are, for the most part, a deeply immoral bunch of chancers. And they are endlessly criminal. Every day there is a new story about one of them getting done for drunk driving, thieving, some kind of sexual offence or whatever.
I can assure you that evil does exist and it is near you. Much of it most people are thankfully unaware of. I also know that if it comes and touches you that you will call the police. No one else will or can stop it. However, I really hope you have no need to call.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Academics and the vast majority of journalists are deeply traumatised by the knowledge that millions of people voted for Brexit and Trump, so I daren’t think what these video might do to them.
This is the best comment ever! – Looks like we escaped Europe or rather the EU just in time and their alternative to Trump is starting to look rancid – The new strange mesmerising Wokezone suffocating our culture could be the decadence that comes after a few generations with no perceived threat to their way of life so that many really believe our freedom is our human right that could never be taken away even by CCP genocide etc?
Last edited 3 years ago by Lindsay Gatward
Alex Hunter
3 years ago
Really insightful article, thank you.
I am interested in changing language which I find fascinating. ‘Trauma’ and ‘mental health’ come into this – for example nowadays everybody seems to be suffering with their mental health, scratch the surface and they are actually feeling a bit sad.
I suppose in a similar way, there are degree of ‘trauma’. Despite Covid, the odd terror attack and so on, we live in incredibly un-traumatic times in the West. Therefore anything outside the norm must be ‘traumatic’ when others would consider such levels of ‘bad stuff’ being almost commonplace. I am put in mind of footage we see of children playing in warzones, they are living through traumatic times and yet still able to play.
Today some commentators suggest that kids who’ve been stuck in lockdown are going to have mental ill-health into adulthood. In some cases, for example where domestic abuse is present, that’s understandable, in others not so much.
David Morley
3 years ago
Thanks for this article.
I’d never made the connection between the cult of “sensibility” and the over egged moral sensibility we now see being paraded by the rich and privileged.
And of course it is, and was, the rich and privileged. While they might feel pity for the poor, at the same time they considered them insensate brutes, inferior in feeling.
This was brilliantly parodied by Nietzsche who, going from memory, compares all the suffering of animals subjected to vivisection to one bad night of an hysterical blue-stocking.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
even though for the past two years I’ve been doing a Leverhulme-funded study on how different audiences respond to jihadi execution videos. And what is to be learned from this study? Maybe the apologists need to be strapped into chairs and forced to watch these videos. Maybe, just maybe, it will move them past the reflexive need to justify what they see by blaming the West, as if radical Islam would bother no one if we simply left it alone. I’m sure it has an effect. In a previous life, I was a reporter, back that was still a real profession. Gallows humor was common; it was a sort of coping mechanism for some of the horribleness that comes with the news. Same happens with the military; it’s a small wonder that the ongoing deployments have left so many damaged souls. You can’t see friends or innocents blown apart and not be affected. I’m not sure the study is going to reveal much that is not already known.
Jos Haynes
3 years ago
No one forces these people to watch anything. There are many other research subjects to pursue in academia (most of them a complete waste of time). They must be a particularly sadistic lot to choose to relive the last tortured moments of the victims.
David George
3 years ago
There’s another angle to this in a very good essay up on Quillette, it delves into the need to confront the uncomfortable realities of existence and what happens when we don’t: “For Our Own Good, We All Need a Glimpse of the Evil Queen”
Excerpt: Equally importantly, she had a reference point for her fears: from that point onward (and I am by no means claiming complete success in her treatment) she had something truly awe inspiring—something truly serious and horrifying and graphic and real—to compare with the other, almost inevitably lesser, horrors of life. Were the mundane miseries of existence as challenging as the experience she had put herself through voluntarily? Was the butcher shop more frightening than human death, in all its reality, at such close proximity? Had she not demonstrated to herself that she could encounter the worst that Terrible Nature could throw at her and face it courageously? And that was to her a paradoxical and ineradicable source of comfort.
Daniel Björkman
3 years ago
Hah. Yeah. That’s the impression I’m getting more and more from articles and public statements of all sorts – that it’s more and more a competition of being the most strongly affected, of being the most outraged or the most deeply saddened. Or, in more positive cases, the most joyfully exuberant. (sometimes I feel reluctant to admit to finding kittens cute, since I feel like a chorus of people will start trying to scream “D’AWWWWWWW!!!!” at the top of their voices. Look, I think they’re cute, but I don’t know that I think they’re that cute, okay?)
This is an unhappy thing for an autistic person, whose feelings are never quite the socially mandated ones, and who anyway has spent his life trying to learn to keep things in perspective and not freak out at the slightest provocation.
Daniel, ultimately it is just attention seeking behaviour, all of it. See me, hear me! I am the most horrified, the most traumatised, the most damaged, or the happiest, the jolliest, the most exuberant.
All these academics and journalists, media people and “celebrities” are just competing for the status of being the most of something, whatever it may be, and the attention this brings.
Immature children, the lot of them.
Dave M
3 years ago
“You don’t get a book contract by saying I went to these horrible places and was fine. Nobody’s going to read that.”
PJ O’Rourke would beg to differ. Pick up Holidays in Hell and see a book that disproves that particular rule.
Terrific book. Laughed when he speculated that most small wars (some guerrilla warfare in banana republics, for instance) are instigated by boredom amongst rival villages/villagers.
Agree, hard to think it would ver be published today.
Last edited 3 years ago by Daisy D
Matt B
3 years ago
There is little to match routine practices of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Many reporters covered this, and some who were not killed switched to careers directly countering such brutality.
Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
No, don’t believe it. There are those who empathize and those who virtually do not, and if you agree that sentence is true, then there are those who empathize at one end of the bell curve, and those at the other.
Then there is deadening, which is having sensitivity burned out of you by pain. And there is desensitizing, which is just exposure till it loses its novelty and just becomes what is.
Then there is innocence, and there is experience, at exposure to suffering of others, and the more formed you are when your innocence is broken means it is likely much more traumatic. There is also acquired enhanced empathy where you see so much suffering you begin to fully realize the depth of it, and so become totally oppressed by the horror of life.
I have seen a great deal of suffering, and have become weighted down by it all as I realize it is just nature and so see the life of creatures and the unfortunate as just horrors of misery, and it is a very dark feeling when I allow myself to reflect on it all, so I avoid thinking of it.
One thing I have never been able to understand is the genera of entertainment which is ‘HORROR’. I just cannot understand it on any level – that some find it fun to watch actors simulating horror? I do not get it, but it would seem, by looking through those sick streaming services Prime and Netflix, that most love it, it being hugely popular.
No, this writer just does not get it at all. he is like a tone deaf person writing about Esoteric Jazz, which few can understand, but some can, as we are all built and formed by life experiences differently.
I fear you may be making the authors point for him.
Colin Colquhoun
3 years ago
I’ve been through a fairly serious trauma, requiring a great deal of treatment. The thing is it was really the making of me. I feel like a person hasn’t really lived unless they’ve experienced something serious, although I must be careful not to wish bad things for others. You might die or be permanently damaged by “traumatic events”.
But the truth is that there are huge benefits when you recover from trauma – assuming you do – in terms of personal development. People are living beings, and most living beings experience danger, terror and the knowledge they will either make it or they won’t. Maybe we need that to orient ourselves confidently in life. Anyway I think it’s helpful.
Maybe that’s why people seek it vicariously?
I don’t think you can be easily traumatised by doing academic work or watching TV, but it’s possible. It depends. I hear facebook moderators see some pretty terrible things. I wouldn’t want to tell them they’re being pathetic and I wouldn’t want that job.
I hear facebook moderators see some pretty terrible things. I wouldn’t want to tell them they’re being pathetic and I wouldn’t want that job. Of course. How could you tell your mother you played piano in a Facebook office?
I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying it’s such a worthless job they pretend to be piano players? I think that it might be a tough job because they have to go through a lot of pretty vile pictures and comments all day or else lose their job. I do think that’s probably very tiring, although not the same as being the people in the pictures. But maybe not, I don’t actually know.
Alison Houston
3 years ago
Yes, but you’re making this about you, a bit too, in order to prove your own superiority, though I agree with your point.
On the other hand when you read Boris Johnson’s account of standing by the crater in Iraq which was once Saddam Hussein’s favourite restaurant, in which he expresses his excitement that it is possible for western soldiers to blow people to kingdom come from hundreds of miles away, without any real remorse or imagination, given to the suffering of those innocent bystanders killed by that act, we know that the sort of ‘man of feeling’ you describe, however over the top in his pretended sentimentality, is a much less dangerous specimen than the psychopath in power.
Is Boris Johnson a psychopath?
Maybe he is merely lacking in imagination and somewhat lacking in empathy, unable to see beyond certain superficial states. This lack of empathy in certain scenarios is not necessarily the sign of a psychopath or a sociopath.
Possibly he is just rather self centered, self obsessed, but this seems to be the norm nowadays.
He is uncaring, abandoning his various wives and girlfriends, insisting on abortions, leaving his children. He pretends to be all kinds of things ,because he cannot reveal his authentic, cold, empty self.
Nick Johns
3 years ago
The tendency to patholgise ordinary , albeit strong and sometimes distasteful, human reactions also serves to diminish the far more immediate and genuine potential suffering of those who experience the originating events first hand. Believe me, there is little equivalence, for example, in viewing a physical trauma online, and coming into physical contact with it. Blue light services staff deal with the ‘all senses’ impact of sometimes grotesque incidents, without the luxury of shutting the laptop. Even this is one step removed from the trauma of the victims.
There used to be a useful recognition in the emergency services that not everyone could deal with the more visceral aspects of the job; this did not make them bad or inadequate, merely professionally unsuitable. These individuals were, largely for their own benefit, (although others were also helped), to leave. In recent times, this practice has fallen into disuse, to the detriment of boh the service and the individual.
It ill behoves those who often subsequently seek opportunities to display their suffering, that has arisen from a reasonably forseeable aspect of their chosen professions, to proclaim their victimhood, especially for profitable compensation.
The same applies to those whe choose to engage in study of atrocities, at a safe remove.
Last edited 3 years ago by Nick Johns
Daisy D
3 years ago
A particular sort of blow to one’s soul can occur when viewing another person’s trauma if one is helpless to intervene. This is true whether one is seeing the trauma in person or as recorded on screen.
It’s important to identify the motivation for viewing people’s torture and death. Members of ISIS, or perverts who make child porn videos for other perverts, don’t share the same motivations of academics viewing ISIS propaganda or of police detectives viewing endless images of tortured children w/the purpose of bringing evil-doers to justice.
I think that any academic viewing ISIS videos who truly shares the motivation of the good guys viewing child porn – to bear witness and helpfully intervene on behalf of the victims, to take part in an endeavor to apprehend and help vanquish the bad guys – will have the benefit of enough spiritual (and therefore psychological ) strength to stay the difficult course; it’s actual helplessness (whether in the primary victim or in the helpless witness) that deeply traumatizes.
Last edited 3 years ago by Daisy D
Wonder Walker
3 years ago
What a stunning article, saying a lot of things that are no longer said, with emotional restraint and simple honesty.
In particular, thanks for referencing superb historical examples of these same attitudes which helps put them in perspective. Great insights into a difficult and important subject.
Why watch a single one? I have managed to avoid them all.
peter lucey
3 years ago
Interesting article. Iris Chang is noted as a historian of atrocity (Rape of Nanking) who took her own life: but its possible she had other issues.
astarelbali
3 years ago
Funny how you never see academicians in the field clean up after these events that traumatize them so.
Perhaps there are some who do, they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Those that can,do.
Those that can not write about it.
Gordon Black
3 years ago
Use of the word ‘enemy‘ is a powerful brainwashing.
Every bullet, shell, mortar, grenade, rocket, missile, torpedo and bomb is designed and described by the maker to neutralise the ‘enemy‘. The years of training, practise and exercises in the use of these projectiles are directed against the ‘enemy’. Not just the antagonists but every aspect of the other side’s infrastructure and property carries the adjective ‘enemy …‘
When shootie gunnies turns real, now, you are not firing at people but at the ‘enemy‘: when walking through the battlefield, the piles of mutilated bits are not people but the ‘enemy‘.
Academics, journalists or I suppose anyone who has not had the ‘enemy‘ indoctrination could be mentally disturbed by such images.
Dougie Undersub
3 years ago
An excellent essay. Yes, there’s nothing new under the sun, including virtue signalling.
Having just read a book which referenced the appallingly inhumane actions enacted on innocent civilians during WW2, I can’t help being angered by the pathetically self-indulgent mindset of the woke generally – and in particular the behaviour of two high-profile people who recently moved from the U.K. to the USA to “escape their trauma”.
My long departed grandmother would have said that “some people just need a good kick up the backside” ….
I’ll second that – the current buzz phrase is ‘mental health’ and if notice is taken of the woke brigade, the whole country is in need of the men in white coats, many of them simply suffering from the ‘stress’ of a critical comment on social media – so get out of the cesspit!! Being sad or depressed at life’s curve balls is not a mental health issue, it is what your grandmother and the rest of my generation would call ‘life’, however it does detract from those who do suffer from genuine mental illness for whom there is limited provision. I am inclined to think though that at least one of the two people you refer to, if not both, does have – a deeply flawed narcissistic personality disorder, any suffering is not by them but inflicted on those around them.
Surely the word they would have used, to lapse into the vernacular, was arse?
There are people that go to the most awful, violent and cruel incidents everyday. They see the very worst in people. Then they get up the next day and do it all again. However, they rarely write articles and books about their own suffering. They are called Police Officers.
Absolutely second this, and have no patience with those who would demonise them.
Perhaps you haven’t met the ones retired early with PTSD or who take 6 months off with ‘ stress ‘ .
In Greater Manchester the average officer takes 19 days off on the sick each year.
That’s just short of a month .
Yes, today’s police are, for the most part, a deeply immoral bunch of chancers. And they are endlessly criminal. Every day there is a new story about one of them getting done for drunk driving, thieving, some kind of sexual offence or whatever.
I can assure you that evil does exist and it is near you. Much of it most people are thankfully unaware of. I also know that if it comes and touches you that you will call the police. No one else will or can stop it. However, I really hope you have no need to call.
Academics and the vast majority of journalists are deeply traumatised by the knowledge that millions of people voted for Brexit and Trump, so I daren’t think what these video might do to them.
This is the best comment ever! – Looks like we escaped Europe or rather the EU just in time and their alternative to Trump is starting to look rancid – The new strange mesmerising Wokezone suffocating our culture could be the decadence that comes after a few generations with no perceived threat to their way of life so that many really believe our freedom is our human right that could never be taken away even by CCP genocide etc?
Really insightful article, thank you.
I am interested in changing language which I find fascinating. ‘Trauma’ and ‘mental health’ come into this – for example nowadays everybody seems to be suffering with their mental health, scratch the surface and they are actually feeling a bit sad.
I suppose in a similar way, there are degree of ‘trauma’. Despite Covid, the odd terror attack and so on, we live in incredibly un-traumatic times in the West. Therefore anything outside the norm must be ‘traumatic’ when others would consider such levels of ‘bad stuff’ being almost commonplace. I am put in mind of footage we see of children playing in warzones, they are living through traumatic times and yet still able to play.
Today some commentators suggest that kids who’ve been stuck in lockdown are going to have mental ill-health into adulthood. In some cases, for example where domestic abuse is present, that’s understandable, in others not so much.
Thanks for this article.
I’d never made the connection between the cult of “sensibility” and the over egged moral sensibility we now see being paraded by the rich and privileged.
And of course it is, and was, the rich and privileged. While they might feel pity for the poor, at the same time they considered them insensate brutes, inferior in feeling.
This was brilliantly parodied by Nietzsche who, going from memory, compares all the suffering of animals subjected to vivisection to one bad night of an hysterical blue-stocking.
even though for the past two years I’ve been doing a Leverhulme-funded study on how different audiences respond to jihadi execution videos.
And what is to be learned from this study? Maybe the apologists need to be strapped into chairs and forced to watch these videos. Maybe, just maybe, it will move them past the reflexive need to justify what they see by blaming the West, as if radical Islam would bother no one if we simply left it alone.
I’m sure it has an effect. In a previous life, I was a reporter, back that was still a real profession. Gallows humor was common; it was a sort of coping mechanism for some of the horribleness that comes with the news. Same happens with the military; it’s a small wonder that the ongoing deployments have left so many damaged souls. You can’t see friends or innocents blown apart and not be affected. I’m not sure the study is going to reveal much that is not already known.
No one forces these people to watch anything. There are many other research subjects to pursue in academia (most of them a complete waste of time). They must be a particularly sadistic lot to choose to relive the last tortured moments of the victims.
There’s another angle to this in a very good essay up on Quillette, it delves into the need to confront the uncomfortable realities of existence and what happens when we don’t: “For Our Own Good, We All Need a Glimpse of the Evil Queen”
Excerpt: Equally importantly, she had a reference point for her fears: from that point onward (and I am by no means claiming complete success in her treatment) she had something truly awe inspiring—something truly serious and horrifying and graphic and real—to compare with the other, almost inevitably lesser, horrors of life. Were the mundane miseries of existence as challenging as the experience she had put herself through voluntarily? Was the butcher shop more frightening than human death, in all its reality, at such close proximity? Had she not demonstrated to herself that she could encounter the worst that Terrible Nature could throw at her and face it courageously? And that was to her a paradoxical and ineradicable source of comfort.
Hah. Yeah. That’s the impression I’m getting more and more from articles and public statements of all sorts – that it’s more and more a competition of being the most strongly affected, of being the most outraged or the most deeply saddened. Or, in more positive cases, the most joyfully exuberant. (sometimes I feel reluctant to admit to finding kittens cute, since I feel like a chorus of people will start trying to scream “D’AWWWWWWW!!!!” at the top of their voices. Look, I think they’re cute, but I don’t know that I think they’re that cute, okay?)
This is an unhappy thing for an autistic person, whose feelings are never quite the socially mandated ones, and who anyway has spent his life trying to learn to keep things in perspective and not freak out at the slightest provocation.
the Olympics of the oppressed; everyone competing to see who is the tallest midget.
Daniel, ultimately it is just attention seeking behaviour, all of it.
See me, hear me! I am the most horrified, the most traumatised, the most damaged, or the happiest, the jolliest, the most exuberant.
All these academics and journalists, media people and “celebrities” are just competing for the status of being the most of something, whatever it may be, and the attention this brings.
Immature children, the lot of them.
PJ O’Rourke would beg to differ. Pick up Holidays in Hell and see a book that disproves that particular rule.
Whether it would find a publisher today…
Terrific book. Laughed when he speculated that most small wars (some guerrilla warfare in banana republics, for instance) are instigated by boredom amongst rival villages/villagers.
Agree, hard to think it would ver be published today.
There is little to match routine practices of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Many reporters covered this, and some who were not killed switched to careers directly countering such brutality.
No, don’t believe it. There are those who empathize and those who virtually do not, and if you agree that sentence is true, then there are those who empathize at one end of the bell curve, and those at the other.
Then there is deadening, which is having sensitivity burned out of you by pain. And there is desensitizing, which is just exposure till it loses its novelty and just becomes what is.
Then there is innocence, and there is experience, at exposure to suffering of others, and the more formed you are when your innocence is broken means it is likely much more traumatic. There is also acquired enhanced empathy where you see so much suffering you begin to fully realize the depth of it, and so become totally oppressed by the horror of life.
I have seen a great deal of suffering, and have become weighted down by it all as I realize it is just nature and so see the life of creatures and the unfortunate as just horrors of misery, and it is a very dark feeling when I allow myself to reflect on it all, so I avoid thinking of it.
One thing I have never been able to understand is the genera of entertainment which is ‘HORROR’. I just cannot understand it on any level – that some find it fun to watch actors simulating horror? I do not get it, but it would seem, by looking through those sick streaming services Prime and Netflix, that most love it, it being hugely popular.
No, this writer just does not get it at all. he is like a tone deaf person writing about Esoteric Jazz, which few can understand, but some can, as we are all built and formed by life experiences differently.
I fear you may be making the authors point for him.
I’ve been through a fairly serious trauma, requiring a great deal of treatment. The thing is it was really the making of me. I feel like a person hasn’t really lived unless they’ve experienced something serious, although I must be careful not to wish bad things for others. You might die or be permanently damaged by “traumatic events”.
But the truth is that there are huge benefits when you recover from trauma – assuming you do – in terms of personal development. People are living beings, and most living beings experience danger, terror and the knowledge they will either make it or they won’t. Maybe we need that to orient ourselves confidently in life. Anyway I think it’s helpful.
Maybe that’s why people seek it vicariously?
I don’t think you can be easily traumatised by doing academic work or watching TV, but it’s possible. It depends. I hear facebook moderators see some pretty terrible things. I wouldn’t want to tell them they’re being pathetic and I wouldn’t want that job.
I hear facebook moderators see some pretty terrible things. I wouldn’t want to tell them they’re being pathetic and I wouldn’t want that job.
Of course. How could you tell your mother you played piano in a Facebook office?
I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying it’s such a worthless job they pretend to be piano players? I think that it might be a tough job because they have to go through a lot of pretty vile pictures and comments all day or else lose their job. I do think that’s probably very tiring, although not the same as being the people in the pictures. But maybe not, I don’t actually know.
Yes, but you’re making this about you, a bit too, in order to prove your own superiority, though I agree with your point.
On the other hand when you read Boris Johnson’s account of standing by the crater in Iraq which was once Saddam Hussein’s favourite restaurant, in which he expresses his excitement that it is possible for western soldiers to blow people to kingdom come from hundreds of miles away, without any real remorse or imagination, given to the suffering of those innocent bystanders killed by that act, we know that the sort of ‘man of feeling’ you describe, however over the top in his pretended sentimentality, is a much less dangerous specimen than the psychopath in power.
Is Boris Johnson a psychopath?
Maybe he is merely lacking in imagination and somewhat lacking in empathy, unable to see beyond certain superficial states. This lack of empathy in certain scenarios is not necessarily the sign of a psychopath or a sociopath.
Possibly he is just rather self centered, self obsessed, but this seems to be the norm nowadays.
He is uncaring, abandoning his various wives and girlfriends, insisting on abortions, leaving his children. He pretends to be all kinds of things ,because he cannot reveal his authentic, cold, empty self.
The tendency to patholgise ordinary , albeit strong and sometimes distasteful, human reactions also serves to diminish the far more immediate and genuine potential suffering of those who experience the originating events first hand. Believe me, there is little equivalence, for example, in viewing a physical trauma online, and coming into physical contact with it. Blue light services staff deal with the ‘all senses’ impact of sometimes grotesque incidents, without the luxury of shutting the laptop. Even this is one step removed from the trauma of the victims.
There used to be a useful recognition in the emergency services that not everyone could deal with the more visceral aspects of the job; this did not make them bad or inadequate, merely professionally unsuitable. These individuals were, largely for their own benefit, (although others were also helped), to leave. In recent times, this practice has fallen into disuse, to the detriment of boh the service and the individual.
It ill behoves those who often subsequently seek opportunities to display their suffering, that has arisen from a reasonably forseeable aspect of their chosen professions, to proclaim their victimhood, especially for profitable compensation.
The same applies to those whe choose to engage in study of atrocities, at a safe remove.
A particular sort of blow to one’s soul can occur when viewing another person’s trauma if one is helpless to intervene. This is true whether one is seeing the trauma in person or as recorded on screen.
It’s important to identify the motivation for viewing people’s torture and death. Members of ISIS, or perverts who make child porn videos for other perverts, don’t share the same motivations of academics viewing ISIS propaganda or of police detectives viewing endless images of tortured children w/the purpose of bringing evil-doers to justice.
I think that any academic viewing ISIS videos who truly shares the motivation of the good guys viewing child porn – to bear witness and helpfully intervene on behalf of the victims, to take part in an endeavor to apprehend and help vanquish the bad guys – will have the benefit of enough spiritual (and therefore psychological ) strength to stay the difficult course; it’s actual helplessness (whether in the primary victim or in the helpless witness) that deeply traumatizes.
What a stunning article, saying a lot of things that are no longer said, with emotional restraint and simple honesty.
In particular, thanks for referencing superb historical examples of these same attitudes which helps put them in perspective. Great insights into a difficult and important subject.
Why watch any more than a single atrocity video.?
Why watch a single one? I have managed to avoid them all.
Interesting article. Iris Chang is noted as a historian of atrocity (Rape of Nanking) who took her own life: but its possible she had other issues.
Funny how you never see academicians in the field clean up after these events that traumatize them so.
Perhaps there are some who do, they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Those that can,do.
Those that can not write about it.
Use of the word ‘enemy‘ is a powerful brainwashing.
Every bullet, shell, mortar, grenade, rocket, missile, torpedo and bomb is designed and described by the maker to neutralise the ‘enemy‘. The years of training, practise and exercises in the use of these projectiles are directed against the ‘enemy’. Not just the antagonists but every aspect of the other side’s infrastructure and property carries the adjective ‘enemy …‘
When shootie gunnies turns real, now, you are not firing at people but at the ‘enemy‘: when walking through the battlefield, the piles of mutilated bits are not people but the ‘enemy‘.
Academics, journalists or I suppose anyone who has not had the ‘enemy‘ indoctrination could be mentally disturbed by such images.
An excellent essay. Yes, there’s nothing new under the sun, including virtue signalling.