Israel and Palestine, irreconcilable Montagu and Capulets of global geopolitics for seventy years, have filled the digital cosmos with untold horrors, from the attack by Hamas on Israeli territory to the merciless bombing of the civilian population in Gaza. With this visual emergency of violence, an old debate about the legitimacy of being too explicit has returned, a dilemma that once only concerned this profession but which today concerns every citizen with the power to repost, spread and viralize a video.
This weekend, some journalists like young Israel Merino asked social media users to moderate the use of mournful images, claiming, with good judgment, that we were all aware of the genocide that is brewing in the Gaza Strip without needing to see a dismembered baby. The disjunctive is much more slippery than it seems. The underwriter complained that Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs contained a tricky moral ploy, as it sought audience identification with the monster, but he barely behaved as such on screen. In this sense, the sequel Hannibal, by Ridley Scott based on a script by David Mamet, was much more honest, in which the fascination with the beast remained intact despite repeatedly making each of the crimes explicit. "If you want to love him, do it after you see how he eats the brains of a live policeman", Scott seemed to tell us.
In this moral order, one would say that frankness prompts a more genuine awareness. And if we contemplate the ethical evolution of Western societies, it is impossible not to appreciate how the presence of media and real-time images of the atrocities of the war came to form an unknown anti-war commitment: the invasion of Iraq from 2003 was the first distant conflagration that mobilized Western populations against a war thousands of miles away and even before the first shot was fired. It may seem like an anecdote, but there is no precedent in human history and it is difficult not to attribute it to the abundance of images of distant conflicts that democratic societies have been consuming in the age of communications.
And yet, last week you could read on these pages the devastating psychiatric effects that Facebook moderators suffer from exposure to horrific images. It is difficult to see any progress of consciousness in it. With the Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo, the debate showed another profile: to choose the image of the policeman shot on the ground was also to give the atrocious fact the desired propaganda. The Western written media lost that day a unique opportunity to commit to freedom of expression against horror, reproducing the caricature of Muhammad as the object of revenge instead of giving way to the coercion of violence on the front page. The question remains in the air, annoying and inaccessible as if your skin itches inside.
