It’s depressing to see dead bodies lying on the ground, but there’s something haunting about seeing someone hold a dead body upright in anguish like that
From an absolutist point of view, with a lack of revolution, consciousness, or even interest from the country to affect anything materially, the answer would be suicide.
I don’t see that as a solution though. It may help in the slightest because you no longer pay taxes and contribute to a genocidal society, but then the enemy also faces one less threat against its existence which is greater than some dollars lost. The enemy doesn’t deserve to relax. The wretched of the earth also loses a voice within a hostile nation who can speak for them if they’re murdered by said nation.
The immediate goal is to not become a passive dissident, going through the motions of life shaking your head, but also not let the powerlessness consume you. We have seen so some of the largest protests since 2020, and like 2020, most material things have not changed because the American psyche refuses to resist genocide proportionally. This is not something you can change on your own.
The next steps? I don’t know. Being consciously angry is not enough. At the end of the day, it doesn’t stop genocide and patting one’s back for it is insulting. I hate that fascists spew the “good times make weak men” shit because ultimately it’s true. What else do you call it? The liberals will have vague “solidarity,” but then those who are strong enough to speak up are slandered and murdered, and those who are strong enough to kill and die for a better future are demonized.
I can certainly see that and you might not be wrong.
But I also know that photo journalism can be an incredibly powerful medium. Maybe the award itself is BS but we can still recognize the power of that image.
That might be the intention of some of them. But photos have a powwrful emotional impact. It was the photo of a drowned boy that (temporarily) got Europe to accept thousands of refugees.
How many iconic photos of injustice has the world seen since the war on terror? What has changed? Slideshows of genocide and rape during the Vietnam war horrified people, but it turns out it was only the loud minority. The rest of the US thought it was too harsh to imprison war criminals. And that loud minority? Most of them are defending and supporting subsequent genocides, including the current genocide.
The west has social dementia. It’s why they become so confused and shocked and outraged when the rest of the world remembers the west’s evil imposed on them.
I truly hope something can stop this nightmare even if another one happens shortly down the line. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that as a collective, westerners do not deserve to be “horrified” by images like these. For them, these pictures absolve them of the evil and misery they support because mere acknowledgement of the existence of suffering is the same thing as “resistance.” There was a moment when I thought the allies forcing the German populace to look at the concentration camps and handle the corpses was sufficient to deprogram fascism. But I’ve changed my perspective after reading a post here about how Hitler was Europe’s Jesus. Likewise, massacred Vietnamese were liberals’ Jesus, and now they may do everything their hearts desire.
The implication is that there are much more heartbreaking and gruesome scenes that don't make it out of Palestine because Israeli snipers treat "PRESS" printed on vests like a bullseye.
I have seen them. It’s important to know what’s really happening but I have days I wish I could just lobotomize myself and not remember anything about what’s happened to people in Gaza.