http://www.unit731media.com/
http://www.terroristmedia.com/nukem/index.php

Two sites I have happened upon to this evening. I must say that I am more distubed by these images on these sites than I have been in a long while. Stayed up way too late looking at them, feeling such great sadness and fear. The beheading videos are particularly troubling and make me wonder just how anything will ever get any better. Once a cause becomes so ingrained in someone that they are willing to do this to someone else it is doubtful that any amount of empirical change will lead them to change their mind. I still don't think that war is the answer. I don't think this is because I have some pacifist tendency ingrained in me. it just seems like a stupid strategy, on par with targeted beheadings in its potential to incite rage. They both stem from the same desire to make power visible.

On the other hand, seeing something like this, a beheading, that is done in someone's basement instead of in the halls of state, with the legitimacy of state power around it, it is horifying. It is like something that could happen a few feet away. The ceremony that it performed beforehand means nothing to me; but it is the attempt to give it this kind of legitimacy that only state ceremony can. But it isn't a state ceremony: herein lies my newly reborn ambivalence, which sits alongside what might be a basically pragmatic pacifism.

If a state were to do this, if an American citizen were brazenly executed on television with the sanction of a state, I would feel little compunction to say that the United States should not retaliate with some sort of force, probably militarily. This, of course, is not a natural response--either the one that the US would take or my internal response to their response--but it is one for which the history of my culture has prepared me. That innocent civilians would probably be killed in this retaliation would be ethically and morally repugnant, but in some strange way justified because they can be named as political subjects of the offending regime. Here, again, I am sort of thinking through the dominant logic which I had lived through for most of my life: it's a hard habit to break. Furthermore in this equation, it obviously doesn't matter if the people who are assumed to be legitimate extensions of the state had any hand in placing that state in control, i.e. it doesn't matter if it is a democracy, which, in this scenario, it most likely would not be. State officials worried about re-election don't often provoke wars by publically assassinating the citizens of other countries (though I guess we have special privileges).

When Individuals do this, however, even if they are theoretically part of a movement, I cannot reason this. Not only is there no sense in going to war with a state, but I cannot fathom what the terms of the discussion should be for justice. To talk about punishment seems paltry--what kind of punishment is suitable? Reform is laughable. Revenge? The easiest step to take, right there with the death penalty. But that just seems to bloody more hands. No, I take that back, the easiest thing to do is to simply ignore it, to make those bad men disappear and head off to my half warm bed, where my wife and dog await me. If I was any more able to talk about this at this point, I would want to explore some of the ways that Foucault might discuss this--or not discuss this. I sound totally stupid here, but I am stymied by what this does to my worldview--not because it makes me suddenly think that GWB is the best thing since sliced bread but that I can't understand why the people I read who claim to care about people wouldn't care about these people as well. My knee jerk 2 am answer is that it's just way too hard. I'm going to go with that for now...