What "brutal, inhumane, and barbaric" looks like
I knew it wouldn't take long for the complete Nick Berg decapitation video to mirror its way around the world. I found it quite easily, less than eighteen hours after it was released, though it took me some time after I downloaded it to steel myself to finally watch it. I wasn't looking forward to watching the insurgents' grisly exclamation point to their meaningless manifesto, but I knew I had to do it.

Not to realize some sick vicarious thrill, nor to reinforce any political or social statement I might wish to make here or elsewhere about the war, our politicians, our justifications. Or to merely say yeah, I saw it, as if it were some new box office attraction.

For one thing, I feel it's important for people to either become or remain aware that we, as human beings, are capable of this kind of crap. For another, I see it as almost a duty to honor the life of this man by witnessing how it ended. For all the adjectives that can be employed to describe this action, it is instructive to see what those words mean in a visceral sense, and in real time.

People who have been using those same adjectives to describe the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners of war, which I also condemn, especially need this definition of terms. Forcing people against their will to pose for compromising photographs is disgusting, rude, humiliating, undisciplined. Cutting a man's head off (inefficiently, at that) is barbaric, inhumane, abhorrent, incomprehensible. 1:48:37 PM    comment []trackback []