Depicting Fatal Violence: A Double-Edged Sword

Posted on January 3, 2024 By Rachel MacNair

by Ms. Boomer-ang

How can depicting fatal violence and its results discourage and prevent such violence? Are there ways one can ensure that such depictions will generate mourning rather than excitement? That they will turn people off from such violence rather than whet appetites for more?

Following are examples of comparable fatal-violence depictions for contrasting purposes and examples of reactions to such displays that contrast with their intended purpose.

Emmett Till

Emmett Till’s mother in 1955 had people look at his battered body in an open casket, so they could see what had been done to him. But as late as the 1930’s, people sent each other postcards of lynchings to celebrate them (enclosed in envelopes after 1908, when the US Post Office banned postcards “tending to incite murder”). “A typical lynching postcard” displayed the victim “prominently,” while “smiling spectators, including children, posing for the camera to prove their presence,” fill the margins. ¹

In the 1970’s, a newspaper article quoted a young man facing execution as saying he would not mind television showing him being killed, so that people would see what the death penalty really means. But would it really turn viewers against the death penalty? Throughout history, throughout the world, public executions have been happy, exciting attractions.

Pro-life displays show the bloody mutilated bodies of pre-born murdered babies, but there are those who now celebrate “abortion art” to boast of and celebrate abortions (see for example this New York Times article).

The producers of the film The Silent Scream aimed to turn people against abortion. But how does it differ from abortion art meant to celebrate abortion? Nevertheless, some people want to ban showing The Silent Scream to minors, lest it turn them against abortion. But do not some of these same people also not want children to see shoot-’em-up TV shows and movies, lest it develop in them a taste for such violence?

In The Silent Scream, the victim’s open mouth and desperate struggle shows the inhumanity of abortion. But when Aztec parents in the 1400’s agreed to sell a child for sacrifice, their leaders and tradition smugly proclaimed that the desperately struggling child’s bitter tears would generate rain to water the crops.²

A Catholic church in a suburb of New York City had a big billboard sign in front of it telling of the number of abortions in the United States since a certain time or in a certain year, for about a month, in the hope that it would spur people to act against abortion. But in the 1930s, when Japan invaded China, Japanese newspapers reported daily how many Chinese people certain military leaders killed, as if they were points scored by basketball stars. Did they hope it would spur people to act against that slaughter?

Metacomet

Boston’s Holocaust Memorial has six tall pillars which can be seen for a distance, supposedly with assumption that they will cause people to contemplate how bad the Holocaust was and commit themselves to not letting something like that happen again. But only 37 miles away in Plymouth, British colonists displayed the head of indigenous Wampanoag Chief Metacomet (called “King Philip”) on a spike for two decades after a soldier killed him in 1676. Was that towering display meant to remind everybody– settlers and indigenous — to consider the killing of Native Americans and the destruction of their communities a bad thing? To make sure it stopped and never happened again? To assure Native Americans that the world was on their side?³

And as late as 1849, French troops displayed on poles the heads of Algerian resistance from the village of Zatcha, which they “violently crushed” during the conquest of Algeria.⁴ Was that display to remind everybody never to do something like that again? To assure Algerians that the world was on their side?

Sometimes Holocaust commemorations can get praise and brownie points from Jewish leaders while satisfying antisemites. Many emphasize what happened without adding that it was a bad thing.

In hundreds of communities across Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, etc., most of the local non-Jewish adults cheered on, and in many cases actively participated in, killing most of the community’s Jews, on the days in the 1940’s when the German occupiers decided it was that community’s turn. One of these communities was Jedwabne, Poland. When the memorial for the Jews of Jedwabne, Poland, was erected in Jedwabne itself, some locals put up protest signs saying, “WE’RE NOT SORRY!”

Would not it have been more appropriate to put the memorial for Jedwabne’s Jews, and its list of names, in a country where most Jews survived the Holocaust (e.g. the US, Canada, or England)? In Jedwabne itself, would it not have been more appropriate to erect a modest pillar or plaque honoring the minority of local non-Jewish adults who did not participate in the killings? It could include a sentence telling the city and country where the memorial for Jedwabne’s Jews was. Should not this suggestion also apply to other communities with similar episodes in their pasts?

Why are government officials of countries that lost their Jewish populations invited to openings of Holocaust museums? When they give their speech, reciting how many Jews in their country were killed, what is the reaction of their own citizens thousands of miles away watching their speech on TV?

Cannot the same remarks about Holocaust commemorations also apply to some North American commemorations of violence against indigenous Native Americans?

A monument used by both mourners and rejoicers (at different times, of course) makes good business sense, by catering to more than one market. But what does it do for moral sense?

A letter to the editor of the New York Times October 2022 recommends “relentlessly barrag[ing] the Russian public with videos and photographs of the horrific human suffering caused by their tyrant’s” imperial pursuit. “Show them the bodies in the streets and the graves.” ⁵ Russians seeing them would will become aware of these actions that befoul “Russia’s culture and National image.”

However, the suspect in the killing of 10 African-Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo New York on May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron, said he was “drawn to the violence of other mass shooters, particularly the [one] who murdered 51 people” in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, while livestreaming. Mr. Gendron also livestreamed his own attack. ⁶

David Pucino, Deputy Chief council at a Gifford’s council at the Gifford’s Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, pointed out the “contagion” effect, where mass killers draw inspiration from other mass killers.⁷ In fact, in the Virginia Tech mass shooter called the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooters heroic.

More recently, the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance showed a film of videos that Hamas attackers made of them killing Israelis in their October 7, 2023 raid, using their victims’ own cell phones.⁸ The Museum’s objective was to quash “denial” of what happened. Some claimed that those who supported the attacks “denied” the attackers’ brutality. But the attackers sent the videos to their victims’ kith and kin. Doesn’t sound like the attackers wanted denial.

A New York Times article on January 29, 2023 asked: “Do you have a civic duty to watch [the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols] or a moral obligation not to?….Too often the worst abuses of power are . . . shrouded . . . Raw video offers clarity, transparency, and perhaps accountability. . . the unvarnished truth . . . This is the hope: that concerned Americans will become witnesses,…our senses shocked and our consciences awakened by the sight of uniformed officers repeatedly kicking and punching Mr. Nichols . . . [Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis] expressed faith in the power of even the most horrific images to foster empathy and community, faith in the human capacity to experience outrage and compassion when shown such images.”

However, the article added, “a delicate ethical line separates witness . . . from the more passive, less demanding condition of spectatorship. The spectacle of violence has a way of turning even sensitive souls into gawkers and voyeurs. Violence…is a fixture of popular culture . . . For much of human history, public executions have been a form of entertainment. The history of lynchings in the United States is part owikiwikipf history of public spectacle, in which the mutilation and murder of Black men brought out white crowds to stare, cheer, and take photographs. I’m not saying that looking at the video…is equivalent to joining in one of those crowds, but rather that Black suffering…has often been relegated to invisibility or subjected to exploitation . . .

“We don’t automatically recoil from violence. We can just as easily respond with indifference, morbid fascination, or worse.”⁹

Although learning what fatal violence has happened is necessary for knowing what can happen, do not the above examples show that one should be very careful about depictions of it, if one wants to discourage and stop it?

Citations

¹Wikipedia, “Lynching postcards,” last updated June 8, 2022

²Time Life Books, Aztecs: Reign of Blood & Splendor, 1992, p. 107

³www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/king-philips-war

⁴NY Times, October 18, 2020, p. A4

⁵Mark Miller of San Francisco, without his permission. Letter to the NY Times, October 18, 2022

⁶ NY Times, October 19, 2022

⁷Ibid

⁸NY Times, November 9, 2023

⁸NY Times, January 29, 2023

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