Body part porn and war, part 2

This is a continued reflection on the latter portion of what I posted here yesterday.
First, I’ll just paste in here a lightly edited version of the bit that was buried down at the bottom of y’day’s post:
…going to the link that Mark from Ireland gave to the sex-porn-plus-violence website was very interesting. Warning to anyone who wants to go there: definitely not for the faint of heart.
That link is to a page there titled: Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – Gory; Moderators: chris, LordDefile, awwwwcrap22, Jonny2K, Jannemans14. It was a directory of other files you could go to. I clicked first on this one.
It started out with 19 photos of sort of “after-incident” reports. No captions or explanation of any of ’em. They each had dates which seemed to be in June and July of 2004. Some of the images were extremely disturbing: the head inside and outside the bowl; many burned bodies and body parts, etc.
As I said, no captions. But between each image and the next were what looked like links to other, explicitly described sex-porno (as opposed to pure-physical-violence porno) pages, also on the NTFU website. The juxtaposition is shocking/ sobering/ intriguing?? It tells us something profound about the inherently violent nature of sex-porno, I think…
But here’s one really interesting thing about that page w/ the 19 ghastly photos and the links to sex-porno photos: Below all that there was a discussion board, with most contribs dated late October 2004. The discussions were almost purely political and very intelligent, most of them not rhapsodizing about the violence or the war. Indeed, many of the people there seemed to be expressing a fairly strong anti-war stance. Like this one, from page moderator “Jonny2K”:

Yep. Sure was a good idea to send thousands of peacetime part-timers over to get involved with this shit. I’m thrilled that I’ll have to be (tax)paying for veterans’ psychiatric benefits for the rest of my life so that our current Cowboy-in-Chief can outdo his Daddy.

That one generated a lengthy subsequent discussion.
Then there was this exchange between JonnyK and his fellow moderator LordDefile:

Jonny2K wrote:
Wow. All I meant was, “If these pics are so unsettling, think of how appalling it must be to be dealing with this shit irl.” (Admittedly, politicized a bit.)
There’s no question Iraq and the rest of the world are better off without Saddam Hussein and his psycho offspring. However, even George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld admit that, as it turns out, there was no pre-war connection between S.H., Iraq, and Al-Qaida. (Although there certainly is now!)
On the thinnest of evidence, the U.S. has gotten involved (with minimal international support) in an unbelievably complicated post-war quagmire. I don’t think there’s anybody in the world (let alone running for President) who has a plan that will get the U.S out of Iraq, put a popularly elected government in place, and end the terrorist insurgency any time soon. I fully expect this to be an issue in the 2008 campaign.
The Viet Nam experience was not a history lesson to me. I was fortunate enough to be able to avoid being there — but I was around to absorb the coverage of that war (which was much more comprehensively covered than this one) and its impact on the American people and American politics. The similarities between the conflicts are terribly disheartening.
LordDefile commented:
That’s cool, and I can see your point, no doubt. However, I HATE to see whiny fuckin reservists who are like “Oh shit, I can’t go to war”, when they knew DAMN well going into it that it was a distinct possibility.
Jonny2K responded:
In general, I agree with you. Theoretically, they knew the risks they were accepting when they signed up. Whether they knew then what they know now isn’t really a factor in whether or not they’ve got to do what they signed up to do.
But I try to be understanding when I look at them and realize that they truly didn’t have any idea what might be asked of them. I wouldn’t trade places, would you?

Elsewhere on the page discussion contributor Sestos wrote:

I would post some pic’s from during the war, makes those look tame. However, up till now we have kept most of our pictures inhouse. Saddly those photos are more common then rare. Not sure currently, but the worst detail you can have is cleaning up dead bodies days after they are killed so that the outside of the FOB [Forward Operating Base] does not have limbs and eyes all around it.

The following is my little subsequent reflection, today:
Note that Sestos there says “sadly”, and talks about cleaning up the dead bodies as “the worst detail you can have”. That man is not glorifying violence. I have a feeling some of the people who take those ghastly photos may be doing so as a way to “frame” the terrible experience they were having there, or to help them distance themselves from it.
Okay, perhaps that doesn’t explain why they choose to hand the photos around and share them later… But anyway, I am sure there would be hundreds of really interesting psychological studies people could do of what is happening to those men and women– some of them very young– who suddenly find that the “job” they signed up for includes not only killing other men and women, sometimes at very close range, but also cleaning up the debris afterwards… “so that the outside of the FOB does not have limbs and eyes all around it.”
No wonder Jonny2K had commented, “I’m thrilled that I’ll have to be (tax)paying for veterans’ psychiatric benefits for the rest of my life so that our current Cowboy-in-Chief can outdo his Daddy.” (Clear irony alert there, global readers: There is NO way that sentence could be read without understanding that Jonny’s use of the term “thrilled” there was completely ironic.)
I’ll just add in here one of my ongoing pet critiques of US warfighting, which is that society and the military in general engage in long and v. expensive training, marked by numerous parades, rituals, and other rites of passage, that are designed to turn an ordinary civilian person into a highly trained killer. But then when they exit the military, what kind of ‘de-programing the violence’ training do we give these people, and what kinds of deep, community-wide rituals that could mark their reintegration back into normal civilian life?
Almost none at all. That’s why I think my work on the re-civilianizing rituals in Mozambique, and what I’ve learned about such rituals elsewhere, including Uganda, seems so important.
… Anyway, there’s lots more that’s interesting in that NTFU website there. Maybe some JWN readers with stronger stomachs or more time could check out more of it. All comments on this phenomenon are very welcome, whether you’ve been to the site or not.
As for me, I’m still trying to catch up with the idea of having extremely serious conversations about the ethics of war on a porn website…