Great read here. Warning graphic.

[cgw]

Suspect we'll be seeing more censored photos during the course of the WWI centennial. It's nothing new.

 

[The_Traveler]

It's going on right now in Gaza. IDF and Hamas are waging a PR war, both using very sophisticated means. Israel's is probably smoother. But Hamas has the advantage of lots of visual imagery that a media source will jump at. To be specific, I can sit through a briefing by IDF intel officers about rocket trajectories indicating that they're coming from specific sites or neighborhoods that are then being targeted. Or I can go take pictures of bloody parents holding kids. I'm not trying to argue one side or the other, only that in a visual medium, images trump.

Images, like smells, hit us somewhere down below the intellectual level, where we react in a visceral sense.

I mentioned somewhere before that the first dead bodies I saw had been floating in a lukewarm ocean for a week before they were recovered. The sight and the smell were so awful that it was 3 hours before I could go into the autopsy suite. I would go up the elevator, get to the floor and then turn and walk downstairs immediately. The only way I was able to persist in being in the room was to keep my head tilted back a bit so I really couldn't see the bodies until, millimeter by millimeter, I forced myself to look.

Seeing the twisted remains of what we know was once a person is destructive to our own sense of immortality; it's the total opposite of how we feel when seeing a baby with all those small, unblemished working parts. When we see a baby or child killed, we react without thinking.
In war and politics (which is war by another means) thinking is always the most important thing to do.