The machine on the Israeli neurosurgery ward that kept the 18-year-old boy with shrapnel in his brain alive made a constant, low-pitched hissing sound.
My friend sent me a video of a post-bombing scene in Gaza. It was degrees above shocking, but provided a necessary corrective toy perception of war and its aftermath. We are, in the main, removed from the reality. For my part, all non-graphic reporting has allowed me to keep the horror as an abstraction. You're right, the images can't be unseen, but like mass shootings. If not seen at least once, their reality is less than vague. The powers that be do not want us to see the suffering and get closer to the pain. Because when we do we cry, Stop!
Thanks Richard for your thoughtful comment. I agree, in war and terrorism there's a fine balance between exposure to the horrors as abstraction through non-graphic reporting, with only a short step to becoming overwhelmed by graphic images. Of course many people do very well psychologically with ostrich behaviour.
It makes me sad to think you are also suffering form your experience. As a person with chronic PTSD from WWll, I can surely relate and my heart continues to go out to all the victims all over the world of brutal bombings, beheadings and other atrocities.
It strikes me that perhaps the people (here in Mexico, the cartels who are "dehumanized," may also suffer from having been brutalized to the degree, like many doctors under constant stress, that they may also be lacking in empathy for that very reason. How, for example, can a man feed live victims to tigers not only to intimidate his rivals, but for kicks?
Of course, I talk as a person who does not beleive in good and evil, but rather in traumatized and not traumatized, though perhaps, and you will know this better than I, some come into the world with severe bran aberrations perhaps caused by fetal alcoholism or other brain trauma while still in the womb.
Thanks for the article, Peter, You alwasy make me think and I can't help but be in awe of the immense variety of experiences you have had all over the world which only add to your humanity.
Thank you for your comment, Manuela. The traumas of suffering so often beget permanently traumatized souls, still more violence, and still more suffering.
Thank you for bringing up this other underside of war, Peter. I am thinking about the "shell-shocked" soldiers from WWI, who were accused of faking their behaviour to get leave from the front. Nowadays we would call them traumatized. And, hard as it is for you, and all of us, to shake the images of violence and sadism from this war, and others, I can only imagine the effects for those who didn't read or see them, second or third hand, but experienced the moment.
Peter, I feel for you as we watch these terrible scenes unfold on the news day after day. It occurs to me that, if journalists had reported sights in such detail in previous international wars, we would have seen whole cities being bombed almost out of existence eg. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Why should Israel be so severely criticized for doing the same thing that Britain, the U.S., and Germany have done in WW2? Hamas has to be wiped out just as Nazis had to be. No Arab states have stepped up to take Gazan refugees, probably because of the poverty, hatred, and PTSD that Gazans would bring into their midst. There appears to be no answer. Please turn off most of the news and deep breathe.🙏
Thank you for this Peter. On both sides of this war will be inter-generational trauma. No one wins.
My friend sent me a video of a post-bombing scene in Gaza. It was degrees above shocking, but provided a necessary corrective toy perception of war and its aftermath. We are, in the main, removed from the reality. For my part, all non-graphic reporting has allowed me to keep the horror as an abstraction. You're right, the images can't be unseen, but like mass shootings. If not seen at least once, their reality is less than vague. The powers that be do not want us to see the suffering and get closer to the pain. Because when we do we cry, Stop!
Thanks Richard for your thoughtful comment. I agree, in war and terrorism there's a fine balance between exposure to the horrors as abstraction through non-graphic reporting, with only a short step to becoming overwhelmed by graphic images. Of course many people do very well psychologically with ostrich behaviour.
It makes me sad to think you are also suffering form your experience. As a person with chronic PTSD from WWll, I can surely relate and my heart continues to go out to all the victims all over the world of brutal bombings, beheadings and other atrocities.
It strikes me that perhaps the people (here in Mexico, the cartels who are "dehumanized," may also suffer from having been brutalized to the degree, like many doctors under constant stress, that they may also be lacking in empathy for that very reason. How, for example, can a man feed live victims to tigers not only to intimidate his rivals, but for kicks?
Of course, I talk as a person who does not beleive in good and evil, but rather in traumatized and not traumatized, though perhaps, and you will know this better than I, some come into the world with severe bran aberrations perhaps caused by fetal alcoholism or other brain trauma while still in the womb.
Thanks for the article, Peter, You alwasy make me think and I can't help but be in awe of the immense variety of experiences you have had all over the world which only add to your humanity.
Thank you for your comment, Manuela. The traumas of suffering so often beget permanently traumatized souls, still more violence, and still more suffering.
Thank you for bringing up this other underside of war, Peter. I am thinking about the "shell-shocked" soldiers from WWI, who were accused of faking their behaviour to get leave from the front. Nowadays we would call them traumatized. And, hard as it is for you, and all of us, to shake the images of violence and sadism from this war, and others, I can only imagine the effects for those who didn't read or see them, second or third hand, but experienced the moment.
Peter, I feel for you as we watch these terrible scenes unfold on the news day after day. It occurs to me that, if journalists had reported sights in such detail in previous international wars, we would have seen whole cities being bombed almost out of existence eg. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Why should Israel be so severely criticized for doing the same thing that Britain, the U.S., and Germany have done in WW2? Hamas has to be wiped out just as Nazis had to be. No Arab states have stepped up to take Gazan refugees, probably because of the poverty, hatred, and PTSD that Gazans would bring into their midst. There appears to be no answer. Please turn off most of the news and deep breathe.🙏