Negation Aspiration vol. 147

"Consider the newsreels of concentration camps at the end of World War II, which left no doubt that the Nazi project had been genocide. 
"Later, Nick Ut’s widely disseminated 1972 war photos of 9-year-old Kim Phuc ('Napalm Girl') running from her destroyed village in Vietnam — naked, burned, desperate — displeased President Nixon, who tried to claim they were 'fixed.' They weren’t, and the photos helped pierce public denial and build opposition to the Vietnam War." 
 "When the voiceover in one Turkish version, which doesn’t show the shooting itself, explains that the gunman in the video pushes memes celebrating the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s, the video cuts not to internet screenshots of the meme, but to photojournalism from the Bosnian Serbs’ ethnic cleansing campaign of Bosnian Muslims." 
 "In the New Zealand case, the perpetrator’s manifesto laid bare his extremist beliefs. But the gory video is what demonstrates the consequences of that ideology. "When white supremacy is thought to live only in words, it becomes abstract, mutable, even deniable. The very real extensions of that ideology are easy to ignore. 
 "It’s in this context that the importance of excruciating documentary films like Alain Resnais’ 1956 'Night and Fog,' a 32-minute film about the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust, becomes apparent. The French government periodically re-airs 'Night and Fog' as a public service: to remind people of the horrors of war. Even some American high schools in the ’80s used to show it to make the devastation wrought by racists with weapons indelible in the hippocampus.... 
 "In 'Night and Fog,' as the camera pans over images of the empty concentration camps, an unseen narrator asks: 'Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?'"

Do people really need to be protected from the New Zealand shooter’s footage?

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

MAR 16, 2019 | 3:15 AM