This blog comes without a picture or a public advisory warning, which is a bit unusual after the past week.
Never thought I would find myself sympathising with Colonel Gaddafi but news of the latest videos of the former dictator, now buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in North Africa, being sodomised has tipped the moral compass.
The swirl of ghoulish death-mask images of the late dictator first emerging from his hamster hole have taken an increasingly gruesome turn. Not taking career pathway choice to dictatorship will perhaps be heeded more easily in the future.
Gaddafi, who in life may have murdered thousands, has not yet reached the status of reprieve through such gruesome imagery – his crimes are too notorious; his resolve too bloody and the imagery of his arrogance still too dominant. Eye for an eye et al. But the international online buzz around the videos and pictures of his brutalised and bloody body being dragged out of the hole in my opinion has gone too far.
As the imagery plays out online, the billion plus online audience, a mixture of dispassionate or disinterested observers and the thousands who know first-hand his crimes are treated all the same. The connection with the subject is sensational and impersonal only to the extent that we are all fed the same diet regardless of interest and left to digest, deflect or absorb. At the end of the day, all we have left is our humanity to distinguish us.
The internet provides unprecedented opportunities to live the news, whether through on the scene blogging accounts or more accessibly mobile video shoots. And it creates unprecedented opportunities to do good, some of which I am proud to say I was part of while working as an online journalist, but surely video of a dictator being sodomised is beyond the realms of most but the victim’s morale comprehension? It is mine.
Or have we become so immune to such imagery that we are losing any sense of moral outrage even when it is against what most people would consider to be the moraless?
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