This chap who had his head cut off.
Now I am horrified at the though of anyone having bits chopped off, rightly, wrongly, or in the course of medical procedure...and while I have a big fat bag of opinions on this happening, most of which are related to disgust and sadness, I won't go into them. Because everyone else's reactions are so much more intriguing.
Last week I bought a couple of DVDs from Amazon - two of the Blackadder series. Last night the constant threat of beheading, and Baldrick's 'hobby' as executioner seemed, in that context, amusing...as well as the jokes surrounding the public executions...getting nautical memorabilia into the gift shop for Sir Francis Drake's execution..that sort of thing. I was laughing.
We used to go in for public burnings, hangings and beheadings in this country, but they went private (as in behind closed doors, not floated on the stock market) a very long time ago.
But I didn't expect this drought to lead to boyishly enthusiastic and ghoulish expressions on faces of people crowding round computers to watch the video.
Even though it is enormously saddening, there will always be people who see violence as necessary to their own ends, but it is sickening to me to see those circling, anticipating expressions.
Is that curiosity natural even if it is over something sick and disgusting?
If we still had public executions and stuff people wouldn't be that curious.
So you're telling me that you think if they had hauled up the killers of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman for a public hanging, that there wouldn't have been a crowd?
Morbid curiosity.
There'd be a huge crowd, no doubt. Interesting, or perplexing and sad, that people have the same curiosity when it involves the killing of an innocent person.
I think that a lot of the public execution factor would still be there - especially with today's media, but yes - I think it would be predominantly morbid curiosity...which is kinda my point.
OK...I'm still working on, "boyishly enthusiastic and ghoulish expressions on faces of people crowding round computers to watch the video"....I'm almost speechless and that's not so easy to accomplish. I guess we really DO get the world we deserve.
I don't know you, but I'm so glad somebody finally wrote about the poor boy who got his head cut off. In both my real and online world, I've been carefully avoiding discussing it with everyone except my newswoman friend, and I thought I was about to explode from the stifled sadness and disgust.
Stuart, I'm saying we we had public executions all the time, there would be less of a crowd.
Yeah, because people will eventually find mass murder more socially acceptable.
Wait a minute guys...the point is that at one time we did have public executions, and they were usually attended as though the event were a party of some kind. We stopped doing that for a number of reasons but not the least of which is that we started to value human life a bit more. I think poverty shows us that it's not so easy to value someone elses life when your fighting for your own...war shows us that as well which is why it's not uncommong for horrific events to happen during war. Unfortunately that doesn't actually explain why the safe comfy folks in the office around the computer screen are no longer able to value human life.
I came across a link to download it and thought about it then decided against.
Mostly for the reasons you described - it's ghoulish.
It doesn't change my views on this war, or my views on either side. It certainly doesn't justify torture on the American side or somehow make it more acceptable.
In war people die horrifically. Those people who were in favour of war should have realised that. The Pentagon sold the idea of a clean, "smart" war with high tech weapons and minimal civillians deaths.
There is no such thing. War de-humanises people.
I want nothing to do with what is being perpetrated "in my name". Likewise I don't want to see for myself such horrific images.
Horrible, horrible. I heard about it but it just never crossed my mind actually to *see* it. Why would you do that?
It doesn't change my mind about the war, either, and I was, and am, pro it. And I *did* think about the fact that in war people die horrifically - as, I would hope, did anyone who was in favour.
The point is that you have at some point to make some judgement - and there are good arguments on both sides - about whether you can accept that people you don't know and of whom you'll never see a picture will die horribly *out of war* or whether you want to see something done about it - and run the risk of raising the profile of that area and seeing photos and the horrible effects. I still, on balance, think "something should be done", though it's not an easy decision. But in an imperfect world with some disgusting imperfect people, sometimes that involves fighting, as waiting/debating/talking may not work.
This wasn't a discussion about whether anyone was pro- or anti-war. Merely that human morbid curiosity goes beyond all patina of civilisation and compassion regardless of history.
Which I find disappointing.
Now here's a thought - who needs public executions when we've got Hollywood? Has anyone ever thought that even though what we see on the TV isn't real, somehow our brains build up an association with those events, drawing a dark and murky line between fantsy and reality. The more we see fantasy killings, shootings and executions at the cinemea, the more curious our brains become to see something closer to the reality, harsher. Because its on TV, there is still that dark murky divide. No one can really decide whether it is real or not. I think if you had to put all the people that watched the video in the actual room, where the actual event took place, many would probably decline and those that didn't woud discover the reality of seeing someone brutally murder is very far from the film industry fantasy. But why it's on TV, there is still that question - did it really happen? Was it real or staged? And of course, every time you start the video, Mr Berg doesn't mraculously come back to life in the real world, yet in our minds there is confusion over his status. It saddens me to note that to all of us who didn't know him, he is simply a character, another face on TV that we are unable to distinguish between fact or fiction. Eastenders anyone...?
I too find the level of morbid curiosity among my fellow humans both disappointing and not a little sickening. Whether one is pro or anti (yes) war is utterly redundant in this case (and it's a little too late for that one anyway folks). Why one would anticipate the sight of a total stranger being horrifically murdered begs many pertinent questions about us as a whole.