Here’s a great post by a guest blogger on Stop Conflict. He first brings up the doctoring of photographs from the Madrid train bombing to describe the sanitization of images applied to a Western audience. There’s also this:
I’ll finish on recalling the exact moment I lost faith in Barack Obama, because it encapsulates what I’m rambling on about in this piece. Obama said in his inauguration speech that “We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense”. Now, I have always believed that you have to be humble in the face of experience, that when you are confronted with an event that challenges your worldview, that perhaps even criticises your attitudes and beliefs, you should not try to remain the person you were before, to deny the event, but instead to commit to it, reflect upon it and ask questions.
When we are confronted with some little opening in the media’s narrative of how the world functions, as in the case above and the limb of some unfortunate passenger, we must not turn away from it. We cannot deny we saw it, and we should not avoid asking the questions that such an image raises.
When Obama writes that “We will not apologize for our way of life” he presupposes that we in fact understand the costs involved in our way of life. I would argue that we do not, that in fact we work hard, as a society, to avoid being confronted with the consequences of our “way of life”. We in fact should always be ready to apologise for our way of life when it is shown to bring misery to others, and we should never simply run to its defence without first thinking about what it is we are committing ourselves to.