Snuff movies on YouTube: the death of Gaddafi and other video nasties – Telegraph Blogs
|
Quote:
|
What a revolting smorgasbord of snuff movies we had to choose from over the past week. Footage of a child being crushed to death. A high-speed cycle crash and near-decapitation. The murder of a dazed 69-year-old man. You can watch them while eating your cornflakes.
Ignore the fact that the last, the death of Gaddafi, was deserved. Barbarity was still the result. The sort of barbarity that we mock our medieval ancestors for. Yet there it is: death, murder and suffering open to all at one scroll and click. And, judging by the prominence of the clips on sites around the world, we were lapping it up as much as any 14th-century peasant.
YouTube has been increasingly deluged with this grisly fare – Saudi beheadings, Somali stonings, Iranian hangings – as the Middle East and Third World and their brutalised societies move online. It marks a dramatic shift in the levels of detailed real-life violence that we in the West are being exposed to. Yet it has gone by with amazingly little comment. No one has stopped to ask whether there is really any need to see the actual stoning of an adulterer in order to rally political opposition to stonings. No one has sought to impose adult filters. No one has even started to wonder how all this might be affecting us psychologically or morally.
The subject is not without its sensitivities. Those who have in the past had the most interest in understanding how images affect our brains have also usually been the ones who have most wanted to censor and control these images. And we are naturally wary of even attempting to explore whether there might be a need for some form of censorship in these matters, such has been the historic abuse.
But this fear of censorship has prevented the serious discussion of a serious subject and has allowed the chummy world of academia to cling to its politically-motivated hypocrisies. Thus, they contend that the presence of violence in societies – the witnessing of it, the living with it – perpetuates its spread, while its simulacra in the cinema or now on YouTube (real or not) remains harmless. Commercial billboards and ad breaks are pernicious and brainwashing, yet slasher films and YouTube snuff clips are entertaining and instructive.
Either images, films and advertising have an effect on our brains (and considering most things we encounter are believed to make an impression on our psychology, it would be odd for this lot not to), or they don't. And if they do, the sudden transformation of YouTube into a modern day version of Tower Bridge's traitors' gate is more than a little worrying and more than a little in need of objective investigation.
|
I'm not quoting this because it manages to be categorically incorrect several times in almost every paragraph, but because it's an example of my favourite thing: victim culture.
Seriously, the guy's main argument is a triumph of paranoia. If I were running the mental health services I'd be looking into getting him checked out for schizophrenia.
Even if most of the individual statements are incorrect, his basic idea is that "someone should censor violent videos for the good of society". What proportion of the population actually disagrees with that? Well, me and 4chan, and one or two others. I guess you'd probably get at least 90% support for the proposition. And yet he's somehow managed to convince himself that he's a lone voice in the wilderness, everyone else having been brainwashed into drooling indifference by the Sinister Cabal Of Academics That Secretly Runs The World (were this appearing in a left-wing paper it would be a Sinister Cabal Of Bankers, on Fox it would be a Sinister Cabal Of Washington Liberal Elitists etc. etc.). It's not enough to simply support a policy, you have to support it as an oppressed minority, fighting against the overwhelming opposition of terrifying forces in high places, effortlessly controlling the deluded masses, even if you have to invent the whole kit and caboodle.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Linear Mode
