Did Images Ever End a War?

Deafening Western silence over the images of the daily horrors of Israel's genocide that fill our phones prompts comparisons with an iconic Vietnam image - but, but, but...

Picture as shown in VN Express

Can the public revulsion generated by the mass dissemination of a particularly grotesque photograph of a war’s effects play a role in helping end that war? An example under consideration in recent weeks -- because of the 50^th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam – was the “Napalm Girl” photograph credited to Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut. The frame shows a Vietnamese child, Kim Phuc, running towards the camera, naked and in agony from the scalding of her skin by the napalm that had been dropped by the U.S. proxy South Vietnamese army on her village, Trang Bang. And writing in Zeteo, Jehad Abusalim spells it out, asking why images of burning children mattered in Vietnam but are ignored in Gaza.

That’s a well-deserved indictment of Western elites and their publics’ willingness to continue enabling the holocaust Israel has unleashed on Gaza. The moral decrepitude and dishonesty of those who mumble “Never Again” in reference to the Nazi Holocaust but are unmoved by the Zionist genocide — is plain to see. But Abusalim’s claim that the Napalm Girl photo “forced people, especially in the United States, to confront the human cost of their government’s actions in Vietnam” and that “it became a catalyst, a turning point, a symbol of a war that had lost its moral justification” is open to question.

That photograph was taken in June 1972, and was published on the front pages of print newspapers around the world, providing, as Abusalim notes, an excoriating visual confirmation of the horrors the U.S. war had wrought on Vietnam’s civilian population. But it may be a misconception (albeit a popular one) that once the folks at home saw the horrors perpetrated in its name, their revulsion forced an end to the slaughter. It’s far more plausible that the political consequences of its reliance on conscripting its own citizens to bleed and die in an imperial war of choice, rather than the shaming of American consciences, that forced the U.S. to admit defeat in Vietnam. Indeed, ending the war began years before the publication of “Napalm Girl”.

The 1968 Tet Offensive had made clear that U.S. officials promising their public an imminent victory were lying through their teeth. Although the Paris Peace Accords were finally signed in January 1973, the U.S. had in fact begun formal negotiations over a withdrawal in May of 1968, and began steadily drawing down its troop strength in Vietnam the following year. By the time “Napalm Girl” was photographed; there were only 24,000 U.S. troops left in Vietnam — from a high of 536,000 in 1968. So, the decision to withdraw from Vietnam had been taken years earlier by U.S. leaders mindful of the inevitability of defeat, and under the pressure of a public horrified by the losses it was expected to suffer to sustain the war.

The Pentagon Papers and subsequent books and accounts tell us that the U.S. decision-makers had been aware by the mid 1960s that the war was unwinnable, yet they kept on pouring more and more of their own troops into the meat grinder, and slaughtering more than a million Vietnamese. Were their minds changed by the public impact of any widely published photographs?

Perhaps. But I’d suggest that by far the most influential photographs carried in U.S. media in this respect were the images that became commonplace from 1968, of dead and wounded American soldiers, faces filled with pain, despair and confusion. And, in particular, the June 1969 Life Magazine series titled “Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam, One Week’s Toll” – which showed portraits of 242 young Americans killed in a single week of waging war on Vietnam.

LIFE had been one of the most influential and popular U.S. print outlets at the time (with a print run of 8.5 million), and the visceral impact of the high school-yearbook-style photographs of just one week’s U.S. body count made clear to millions of American households the blood price they were paying to sustain the neocolonial folly of “South Vietnam”.

The key factor forcing the U.S. to change course in the face of the intractable resistance of Vietnamese people, may have been that, unusually for an empire, the U.S. had relied on conscripting its own citizens to fight its expeditionary wars. Consider, by comparison, that most of the expeditionary foot-soldiers for deployment on distant frontlines by the Roman, Ottoman and British Empires had been mustered from among the colonial subject people rather than the domestic citizenry.

The draft, as it was called, left the U.S. uniquely vulnerable to hostility from within the conscript population and its community. Even among those who went to Vietnam, the problem of discipline and low morale is highlighted by the incidence of “fragging” – soldiers turning their weapons on their own officers. Between 1969 and 1971, there were 730 such incidents reported. Draft evasion was endemic, at least a half million young men failed to report for duty, and the public burning of draft cards became a common countercultural practice.

So, conscription meant that the U.S. needed not only on the passive consent of the public for waging war on Vietnam that had been generated by early media coverage; it relied on the active participation of young Americans showing up to kill or be killed. And that may have given an outsize influence to media coverage, particularly of the what waging the war meant to young Americans and their families. It’s no surprise that the U.S. military ended the draft in July of 1973, and began to rely exclusively on professional enlisted ranks to fight its foreign wars.

Media Monopoly

It was a lot easier to manufacture consent when the information consumed by the vast majority of the U.S. public was produced by the (ideologically identical) nightly news shows on just three TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), and by a handful of (ideologically indistinguishable) big-city print dailies and weekly news magazines.

Indeed, the entire U.S. national imaginary of the Cold War era, the narrative of “leader of the free world” facing down a communist menace, imbued with a moral obligation to fight wars of choice on every continent etc. relied heavily on this monopoly of information. TV sets began to arrive in every American household in the early 1950s, grounding the national conversation in the soothing fantasies of an inescapably entertainment-based medium (as Neal Postman so archly pointed out).

If most American adults were getting their news and information from such a narrow range of institutions, it was possible to detect the manufacture of some degree of a national consensus.

Today, of course, it would be likely that Kim Phuc, the girl at the center of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, might have recorded a live video of the experience on her own cell phone – or that those around her might have done so. The gruesome images thus recorded would have then been visible to hundreds of millions of cellphone users around the world within seconds — Nick Ut’s film had to be developed and printed in AP’s Saigon darkroom, then transmitted to subscriber papers via AP’s news wires (it appeared on the front page of the New York Times a day after the incident).

So, yes, the anarchic daily mass production and distribution of images today, when every one who carries a smart phone is a witness-photographer and a publisher, evades many of the political gatekeeping functions of traditional media.

Many war crimes by U.S. troops in Vietnam went undocumented because there were only a handful of photographers covering the combat; today’s technology allows us intimate witness to the full horror of Israel’s daily savagery, documented both by victim and (weirdly) perpetrator. Consider what our visual memory of the Nakba would look like if the residents of Deir Yassin or Tantura or Ramle, or the Zionist militiamen who massacred them, had been able to document the horrors on phones and share them on social media.

But given that most of us have seen dozens of images every bit as horrific as “Napalm Girl” coming from Gaza almost daily over the past 20 months, why do those images appear to have so little impact on stopping the genocide?

One thing to consider is how, even back when TV news and a handful of newspapers commanded as much attention as they did back in the early ‘70s, there was another dimension of which the great Jon Berger had warned us: In his peerless “Ways of Seeing”, he observed that the appearance of horrific news photographs alongside banal advertising images served to trivialize the meaning of those images, sanitizing any function they might have as calls to action by absorbing them into the daily visual bombardment that, by design, reduced the citizen to a passive consumer.

Neal Postman had warned of the same thing in his magisterial critique of a U.S. public and political discourse grounded in the entertainment medium of television.

Berger was writing in 1972; Postman in 1984. The mind boggles when considering what they’d have made of the era of Tik-Tok and Instagram.

It’s worth asking what impact is felt by the fact that the daily tranche of images of Israel’s genocidal terror appear on our feeds punctuated by ads, makeup tutorials, party pics, food pics, cat pics and more? The difference from Berger’s day is that they’re no longer on static print pages arriving at 24-hour intervals; they’re a constant deluge arriving in our feeds by the tens of thousands throughout every 24-hour period. As Huxley warned, the relentless barrage of banality within which any information of consequences arrives may be enough to neutralize its significance.

But that’s not all.

If “Napalm Girl” or “Saigon Execution” managed to make the front page of the major daily newspapers, they had at least -- albeit briefly -- held the floor in the imagined community that was Cold War America. The public square, back then, was constituted as we noted above by three networks, and a handful of print media outlets. Those images were likely to have been seen by a majority, or significant plurality of citizens. Today, that’s highly improbable, simply because there is no longer any kind of single, mass media-based American public square.

It's curious how the fracturing of that imagined public square coincided with the end of the Cold War. First, it was the onset of cable TV, which allowed viewers who happened to be on their couches at 7pm in front of a television the choice of avoiding the nightly news altogether and tune into wrestling if they prefer. (Seems most did.) It also allowed for the sort of rabid rightwing infotainment and trolling that had been the stuff only of AM radio until the 1990s to find a place on the TV spectrum in the form of FOX News – which by 2002 had eclipsed CNN and the three network news shows. The Internet further fractured the old town square, offering more diverse sources of news and information that steadily eclipsed most of the print outlets. And then, social media… well, we know how that goes.

As Belén Fernández recently wrote concerning “Napalm Girl” and the impact, or lack of it, of the images pouring out of Gaza every day, “in the current era of social media, in which both still images and videos are reduced to rapid-fire visuals for momentary consumption, the desensitizing effect on the public cannot be understated – even when we’re talking about nine-year-old children with both of their arms blown off.”

Could it be that the scale of Israel’s savagery and its monstrous impact on Palestinian bodies has desensitized publics? Those paying attention have literally seen hundreds of “Napalm Girl”-type images, rendered in even more intimate video formats; is the lack of clear impact of those images simply a case of the familiarity and frequency of those images actually normalizing them? Or are we now in a historical moment when the technology via which all of humanity learns what it knows has fractured any possibility of a single public square enabling any shared narrative?

Even then, we can’t give up sharing those images and demanding accountability, and acting in whatever way we can to create consequences for Israel and its enablers for their criminality. We can’t afford to normalize a world where a Western-enabled genocide is treated with a shrug, or with silence, indifference or obfuscatory invocation of something Western establishments call “nuance” when it comes to violence against colonized bodies. The power of images, ultimately, is the extent to which they spur the viewer to action.