We Love Impunity

Abstract

A few months ago, an English court convicted an officer of the summary execution of a badly wounded captured Taliban fighter. ‘‘There you are,’’ the unidentified officer Marine A declared eloquently as he pulled the trigger. ‘‘Shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.’’ Then he told his fellow combatants: ‘‘Obviously, this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broken the Geneva Convention.’’ Although military regulations do not authorize taking photos of those you murder, a camera on the helmet of another soldier, Marine B, was there to record the scene. The images were subsequently deleted, but not before they had circulated. Kept as a memento on a Marine laptop, they survived. Withholding both the officer’s name and the images, the judge cited the fear of reprisals. But it seems likely that his decision also reflected a deeper ambivalence in relation to the reporting and indeed the depiction of contemporary atrocity. Just a hundred years ago, during and after what we still call the Great War, great efforts were made to mask not just the scale but the nature of mass slaughter. The Hollywood moguls flown to Belsen and Dachau in 1945 suppressed film of the recently opened camps, on the grounds that the images would cause distress, and prove humiliating to survivors. Nowadays, I suspect, most people would like to say that the argument has been resolved in favor of openness. In much the same way we believe that the state has no right to keep what we regard as our secrets, we tell ourselves that anything capable of reproduction can be shown. I’m not sure that this is an entirely convincing argument. It may indeed be futile to wish to display certain things. It might be better to consider what impact on our knowledge of the world is conferred by visceral, empathetic implication in the slaughter of other human beings. At the least we could agree that when it comes to depicting atrocities, some devices are better than others. Such reflections arise from watching the documentary sensation of the year, The Act of Killing. By my own, not quite reliable reckoning, I have been asked to show The Act of Killing on the BBC at least five times. I have some difficulty in responding to its many admirers—not because my responses are hard to explain but because they appear so out of tune with the prevailing chorus of praise. And I have watched the film repeatedly. After someone whose views I respect told me I should see the film on a big screen, I did so. But I found that I was put off not just by being told by the filmmakers that I would find the experience upsetting, but by the ritual odor of selfapprobation I could sense among members of the audience. Yes, there are people who imagine that the proximity of impunity confers some sort of wisdom. I can understand such feelings, but I am not sure I want to share them. So let me now be as upfront as I can be. I dislike both the aesthetic and moral premise of The Act of Killing. Getting killers to script and restage their murders for the benefit of a cinema or television audience seems to me a bad idea for a number of reasons. I find the scenes in the film where the killers are encouraged to retell their murderous exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance. Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will reliably supply a degraded vision of humanity. But sorry, I don’t feel we want to be doing this. It feels wrong, and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. Something not very good is being done. I would feel the same if mass murderers in China were encouraged to re-create their crimes before themselves being knocked off. (Already, they ‘‘confess’’ on television on the way to the needle, abetted by a glamorous daytime TV host.) I would certainly feel the same if I was told that filmmakers had gone to rural Argentina in the 1950s,