Viewing Photographs of Hell On Earth

June 6, 2006

N,

Had some time to kill and had to return some books to the B Township Public Library, so browsed a bit and ended up in the photography section. While a book on photographing architecture and another Paris In the Fifties both interested me, a newer book entitled Shooting Under Fire The World of the War Photographer by Peter Howe captured my attention with its color pictures and the stories behind the pictures and captions. I sat down and turned the pages slowly as my mind grasped the utter horror this man has seen since his days photographing our guys in Vietnam. I kept remembering my comment once to you how invigorating it would feel to be a war correspondent in the middle of everything, being like Hemingway and putting into compelling words the sights and sounds of all that was happening around oneself as the seer and the journalist. I also remembered well something you wrote me early last summer, as I viewed the pictures of dead civilians and children blown to bits while playing in the snow in Bosnia in the 90s , (paraphrasing your words) "In short, I am a pacifist, and would rather have a bomb drop on my head than have to drop one on someone else's. Fear is death."

In more than one photograph Howe has captured the look in a person's eye as he is about to be executed, or is dying from his wounds. It started to turn my insides in that all he has photographed has happened with the explicit knowledge of the world over, the wars and massacres in Africa, Afghanistan between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, the Lebanese in the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the last thirty years. Nicaragua looks pretty awful with dead people in the streets and and missionary nuns lying on a dirt road with their clothes askew. It is all as if the holocaust never saw the light of day and the world's conflicts and wars are reenactment scenes from the worst and bloodiest history of mankind.

Everyday when I say the one prayer I repeat everyday since September 11th, I ask that some how we (all human beings) are blessed with an awakening to show good will towards every man, woman and child that we come across that day. Sometimes I look for proof that the universe might have heard me and perhaps there will not have been a car bombing, or an attack or a suicide bombing anywhere in the world for even 12 hours, but it never happens. I'm sick at heart here wondering if people would be better off dead, rather than be bound by fear of those who threaten them, who overpower them with bombs and bullets, slicing and dicing the life from them and their loved ones. Yet those who surrender and don't defend themselves are dead in the end anyway. Do people not wonder why the Jews did not fight and overpower the soldiers in the Death Camps whom they outnumbered.

I think we free thinkers think life as precious and we can't imagine death as being a choice. How can we watch what happens and not do anything about it. Do we leave like the UN did when a car bomb exploded at the UN mission in Baghdad and watch the slaughter from afar like we did during the Yugoslavia ethnic cleansing that went on for three years!

What I wonder too is whether in our life time we will see everlasting peace among all men a world without politics and greed and despair and desperation. Howe writes in his book how he was photographing the Afghans and the Taliban fighting "both twenty-first and seventeenth-century warfare," wearing the same type of clothing that their ancestors wore, some even still carrying swords, but also using shoulder propelled grenades, walkie talkies and portable satellite phones! Twenty-one centuries and we are no better civilized than the Romans were fighting the Gauls.