Regarding the pain of others

I'm working through Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others for my term paper. She has some powerful (and debate-worthy) points in it that I wanted to post here to see what others think of them. Also, because I think they build upon the act of "witnessing" while reading texts and case studies of atrocity but also in studying the history, reading the newspapers and staring at the images of conflict, oppression and occupation.

First, a bit of context. Sontag begins her book with the questions raised by Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas which Sontag explains, "...offered the originality...of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inappropriate to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war
is a man's game--that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male" (6).

From this basis, Sontag questions Woolf's belief that merely witnessing atrocity through pictures of it will unite people against it. Sontag asks, "Who are the "we" at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? That "we" would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but--a far larger constituency--those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. The photographs are a means of making "real" (or "more real") matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore" (7).

Sontag also argues that "...photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus" (6).

Can one argue that the machinery of war is indeed male? Is this argument fair, given the integration of women into military service and into suicide bombing and torture?
Do you think pictures do indeed "create the illusion of consensus?" Whose consensus? For whom by whom?

Here is another quote from Sontag. She writes, "To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordinance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. ...Alter the caption, and the children's deaths could be used and reused" (10).

Is identity is indeed "everything" to a militant? I wondered when I read this, well who gets to define whom as "militant?" Where is that line drawn between "militant" and ordinary soldier or patriotic citizen or freedom fighter or any other of numerous labels assigned to those who engage in armed combat? I do like her point though that all photographs depend upon captions for explanation or falsification. Last semester we read Edward Said's After the Last Sky which is a pictorial essay about Palestinians and their exile and survival as political refugees but also as human beings in very inhumane situations. I remember one of the students commented that the lack of captions under the pictures left them wide open for interpretation and manipulation. He said, "How do we know that this wasn't taken somewhere else or staged somehow?" Likewise, a fellow student in a class mentioned how the film "The Battle of Algiers" (and the fact of it being in black and white) impacts how one views the acts of torture, war, and terrorism.
How does such knowledge relate to the images on the screen that we know are manufactured for our consumption, of specific conflicts such as the one between Israel and Palestine but also between the U.S. and Afghanistan and the U.S. and Iraq? I read a headline recently that called Afghanistan "one giant U.S. prison." Torture photos from one prison (Abu Ghraib) came and went but did they stop the machinery of war? Did they stop prisoners from being tortured and dehumanized? What can? What will?

One last quote from Sontag I'd like to post regards violence. She writes (the first sentence paraphrases Simone Weil), "....violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. ...Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. Who could forget the three color pictures by Tyler Hicks that The New York Times ran across the upper half of the first page of its daily section devoted to America's new war, "A Nation Challenged" on November 13, 2001? The triptych depicted the fate of a wounded Taliban soldier in uniform who had been found in a ditch by Northern Alliance soldiers advancing toward Kabul. First panel: being dragged on his back by two of his captors--one has grabbed an arm, the other a leg--along a rocky road. Second panel (the camera is very near): surrounded, gazing up in terror as he is being pulled to his feet. Third panel: at the moment of death, supine with arms outstretched and knees bent, naked and bloodied from the waist down, being finished off by the military mob that has gathered to butcher him. An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry. And the pity and disgust that pictures like Hicks's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown" (13-14).

Sorry that was a long quote but I think a very relevant one. Her question, who could forget those images is especially striking to me given that I can't recall them from all the images I've seen and all the articles I've read. So, if after the crises and blood and horror is removed from our gaze and fades from our minds as "witnesses" to atrocity, what does that mean for those who lived it are living it or are dying from it still?

Also, what does it mean when you read about or view atrocity far removed from it in time, space and context? How do you do this without simply stepping into the world of an Other without ever having to assume what that does to them? For example, many women have traveled into places and cultures in which other women and girls have been subjected to cliteridectomies and have written of behalf of these women and girls to raise global awareness and outrage. What does it mean when you have the power to do something and do not? Or have the privilege to peer into the world of violation and atrocity when you know that you can always leave and others cannot?