My Take | Gruesome images of war may serve a pacifist cause
- If mainstream news media would show graphic photos of what modern weapons do to the human body, most people would be revolted and demand peace, such as with the war in Ukraine
I love a good horror flick as much as the next person. But somehow, the most disturbing images that have stayed in my head all these years are all from history books. Perhaps that just shows human history is a lot more horrible than anything Hollywood directors can come up with.
But historians may be excused for using graphic language descriptions to drive home their message. We hacks are not the only sensationalists in the literary field. If you are easily grossed out, there is a graphic alert here and please skip the next few paragraphs. The problem with the following three stories is that once you have read them, you can’t unread them.
The first one is from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. During the Holodomor, or the famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, a group of orphans attacked the weakest one among them, and ate him alive. But the boy was so weak and deranged that he started chewing his own flesh and drinking the blood.
The next one is from University of Hong Kong historian Frank Dikötter, whose latest book on post-Mao China I reviewed here yesterday. I didn’t get far with his previous Mao’s Great Famine, since by that time I had already read Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, the pioneering history by Jasper Becker, who was Beijing bureau chief for this newspaper, and Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, by mainland Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng.
But I got far enough to read about a boy who was caught stealing food and, as punishment, sadistic cadres made his father bury him alive. A few days later, the father literally died from the horror. I sometimes wonder, the weak soul that I am, whether I would have buried my own child alive in such a situation just to survive a few extra days?
There is at least greater historical distance with my last sample. It is the execution of the regicide Damiens for his attempted assassination of King Louis XV. It involved quartering, slicing and disembowelment, all related in loving details, in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. Was Foucault just being sensationalist, or was there a moral to the story?