Israel and Palestine, irreconcilable Montagues and Capulets of world geopolitics for seventy years, have filled the digital cosmos with untold horrors, from the Hamas attack on Israeli soil to the merciless bombings on the civilian population in Gaza. With this visual emergency of violence, an old debate has returned about the legitimacy of explicitness, a dilemma that once concerned only this profession but that today concerns every citizen with the power to repost, disseminate and viralize a video.
This weekend, some journalists like the young Israel Merino asked social media users to moderate the use of mournful images, arguing, with good judgment, that we were all aware of the genocide that is taking place in the Gaza Strip without any need. of seeing a dismembered baby. The dilemma is much more slippery than it seems. The above signatory denounced that The Silence of the Lambs, by Jonathan Demme, contained a deceitful moral trick, since it sought the public’s identification with the monster, but the monster hardly behaved as such on screen. In this sense, much more honest was its sequel Hannibal, by Ridley Scott based on a script by David Mamet, in which the fascination with the beast remained intact despite the repeated explicitness of each of its crimes. “If you want to love him, do it after watching him eat the brain of a living cop,” Scott seemed to tell us.
In that moral order, it would be said that candor promotes a more genuine awareness. And if we contemplate the ethical evolution of Western societies, it is impossible not to appreciate how the presence of the media and real-time images of the atrocities of war were composing an unknown anti-war commitment: the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the first distant conflagration. that mobilized Western populations against a war thousands of kilometers 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 era of communications.
And yet, last week you could read on these pages the devastating psychiatric effects that Facebook moderators suffer from their exposure to the terrifying. It is difficult to see any progress in consciousness there. With the Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo, the debate showed another of its profiles: choosing the image of the police officer shot on the ground was also giving the atrocious its desired propaganda. The Western print 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 effect to the coercion of violence on the front page. The question is still in the air, annoying and inaccessible like your skin itching from the inside.
