Wonder Boy and I have both recently been subscribed to Rolling Stone, which means we get two issues every week and we have no idea why. It’s not a magazine I’m terribly interested but a recent issue caught my eye, mainly because Rihanna is on the cover wearing an outfit I wore just last week.
So I was flipping through the Rihanna issue and came across this story The Kill Team, which highlights acts of murder occuring by American solders against civilians in Afghanistan. The artice is pretty horrible and while these types of things might occur in every war, they shouldn’t and it’s an awful representation of Americans.
But that’s not the part that gave me pause. In this article, it is explained the soldiers are taking pictures of their kill and sharing the pictures much like you would baseball cards. Disturbing right? Then Rolling Stone published the pictures to show just how awful they are. The New Yorker also did this when the Abu Ghraib torture stories broke. Seeing pictures of tortured people … dead people … it’s shocking. But Rolling Stone went one step further. They published an image of an Afghani man’s head being held up by an American soldier. Just the head.
And here’s the thing – the fact that anyone took this picture is heinous. But to publish the picture? It’s exploiting the awful act. And I sat there, slack-jawed looking at it and thinking, “Would they have published the picture if the head was from an American?”
I don‘t think so.
Comments are closed.