Gruesome Be-heading

Johnny Versace

Originally posted by SheroN
It's a war situation, what are people expecting? to make friends?

Exactly.

America invaded Iraq. America destroyed Iraq.

What do they expect?

mr_angry

Originally posted by Johnny Versace
I think you misunderstood. Maybe read again before ranting?

Nope. I got what you meant (and it was a good point). But your choice of analogy? Dubious.

Sleipnir

Originally posted by Jak
With all 'due' respect. Go **** yourself.

Hearing about something is not the same as witnessing it, and if I choose not to shy away from something and want to see what emotions it will evoke and how my opinions will change as a result then I will.

There was no 'gawping' or 'cheap thrill' involved. If anything just pity and shock at the true barbarity of the crime. We live in a media driven world for better or for worse, get over it and keep your ****ing moral objections to yourself.

JAK.

Pity? How magnanimous of you.
I'm sure his parents would be delighted to hear that some moron in Ireland watched their son die and had his pity

You chose not to shy away from it?
Aren't you just fantastic? You're a warrior in this "media driven world" facing up to the evil of man and staring it in the face.
Or are you a spotty teenager who watched it and said
"wow did ya see dat?!?!?!"

The latter I would think.

Originally posted by Ixoy
If I decide to watch it later, it's out of a lesson to myself on how brutal man can be to man, and a forced break from our, often coseted, world view.

You need to watch the video to know how brutal man can be to man?
I know they cut his head off with a knife, I don't need to see it to know that it happened.

Wacker

Johnny, I will adress your point.

If I pay money for child porn, or even if i find it for free, I am helping the industry carry on and to continue, either by paying for it or by becoming part of a demo-graphic who may some day pay for it. I am totally consenting to kids being forced to perform oral sex on adults, as we pay for this to happen. I am a definite part of the system; I am the customer.
If I am part of this system, I deserve punishment.

Myself, and the others who watched that clip ddid not watch it with the hope that more people will be decapitated so we can watch those clips too.
I really hope no one ever gets decapitated again. Really, I do. However, I feel I can better make sense of my feelings on an issue once i have seen it. Also, I don't think decapitations will increase becuase people like me watch clips like this.

So basically, the difference is this. Watching child porn is illegal not because you are witnessing a crime, but because you are making yourself a part of the crime.

Watching this clip did not make me a part of the crime at all, in my opinion.

Johnny Versace

Originally posted by mr_angry
Nope. I got what you meant (and it was a good point). But your choice of analogy? Dubious.

OK, nicer response

My analogy may be dodgyish, but I think it is fair. They are both extreme acts.

Johnny Versace

Wacker:

Fair point, but...

If there were websites where people paid to see movies with decapitations etc., should viewing this movie be illegal?

I'm sure with a bit of googling I could find a few examples...

Wacker

You chose not to shy away from it?
Aren't you just fantastic? You're a warrior in this "media driven world" facing up to the evil of man and staring it in the face.
Or are you a spotty teenager who watched it and said
"wow did ya see dat?!?!?!"
The latter I would think.

Sleipnir, I know that wasn't directed at me, but would you please stop being so condescending?

Wacker

I think such websites should be illegal if it could be proven that people were being kidnapped and subsquently decapitated in order to supply footage for such sites.
This clip was nothing like that. We both know that, without needing to see the clip.

Johnny Versace

Originally posted by Wacker
I think such websites should be illegal if it could be proven that people were being kidnapped and subsquently decapitated in order to supply footage for such sites.
This clip was nothing like that. We both know that, without needing to see the clip.

Sure.

I never really thought of the "child porn industry" as a money maker, I always saw it as a bunch of disturbed ****ers molesting children.

So I see your point.

adonis

up to his old tricks again.

I believe as people who read/look at this we are also part of the chain. i.e we consume.
This may not be translated in monetary value, but we definitely consume.

i think its all part of de-sensitisation, and i wouldnt be surprised at all if that video was released by the american media on purpose.

"war, what is it good for? aboslutely nothing"

ixoy

Originally posted by Sleipnir
Pity? How magnanimous of you.
I'm sure his parents would be delighted to hear that some moron in Ireland watched their son die and had his pity

I'll ask again, since you seemed to shy away from the actual questions the first time. Should we have shown footage of 9/11 in which people died (and, when there were people falling from windows, seen to die)? Should we have shown the recent assassination of the Chechynan premier on TV? They're all images of death that may - horror of horrors - invoke symapthy and pity in people (what vile emotions those are).

Dr. Dre

It's simple really.
If you want to watch it, then watch it.
If you don't, then don't - and don't judge the people who do, you're not in a position to.

Mighty_Mouse

I think child porn is horrid, but there is a big difference between sucking someone off and killing someone.

:eek: and they unbanned you! Yippee for a boards where everyone has something constructive to add to a debate!

adonis

is that from twin peaks?

tinofapples

I was gonna call these guys animals or their act barbaric but think now it would be an insult to an animal .

How a human can do this is beyond me .

ChipZilla

Hmm, some US army PR drone was on Euronews last night saying how despicable and deplorable it was that these guys executed their prisoner. Hello! Somebody get Jeb Bush on the phone. Dubya's own brother's dispatched quite a few people to the next world - albeit not is such an extreme manner. Anyways, anyone who goes working in Iraq these days, civilian "contractor" or not, is taking his/her life in their hands and shouldn't be surprised that they might come to a bloody end. It's not Eurodisney y'know.

Johnny Versace

Originally posted by Mighty_Mouse
:eek: and they unbanned you! Yippee for a boards where everyone has something constructive to add to a debate!

You completely missed the point (as usual.)

Maybe read the responses after my post?

ixoy

Originally posted by adonis
is that from twin peaks?

Yup.... Love the show and anxiously waiting the second season on DVD.

Anyways, anyone who goes working in Iraq these days, civilian "contractor" or not, is taking his/her life in their hands and shouldn't be surprised that they might come to a bloody end. It's not Eurodisney y'know.

Of course it's not but the implication is that they're somehow more deserving of their fate by virtue of the fact they go there. Contractor or not, nobody deserves this vile act perpetrated upon them. I disagree with the U.S. presence in the country, but I disagree a hell of a lot more with barbaric acts like this.

Wacker

Chipzilla, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't be more than happy to find out that all the guys standing up in that clip met a gruesome, agonizing death.
However, such a death should not be meeted out in the name of righteousness by a supposedly benevolent army, of course...

Xterminator

Anyway, for me it put in perspective the difference between what the Americans have been caught doing, and what the Iraqi insurgents, (previously the administration!) are willing to do.

It brough back to my mind the burned bodies of the contracters being dragged through the streets and beaten, and the screams of the american as they hack his head off.

Soliders are not police. They are not trained or suitable for maintaing order, because they are required to be able to take life, and this desensitises them to violence. But at least america has a conscience.

But the whole idea of human rights etc is alien to the type of animal who used to run iraq. They can poison, murder and starve others without any concience.

This is what gets me. If the west performs torture its terrible, but we can live with it, but if an Arab group does the same its somehow worse.

The difference between these torture incidents is that we have seen this video. If you had seen a video of the American use of torture would you be so quick to call the Arab worse?

Dead is dead. And Torture is Torture. Neither this video or anything that the Arabs have done to date, condones the Coalition use of Torture in Iraq. And Vice Versa.

As for Soldiers not being police, every army has a police force attached to it. Many of these MP's have serves in the State police services either prior to becoming Soldiers, or when they're not on active duty with the army.

Neither side has shown all that much conscience in the operation of their war in Iraq.

adonis

Of course it's not but the implication is that they're somehow more deserving of their fate by virtue of the fact they go there. Contractor or not, nobody deserves this vile act perpetrated upon them. I disagree with the U.S. presence in the country, but I disagree a hell of a lot more with barbaric acts like this

I dont think anybody agrees with people being beheaded.

But i am not as blind so as not to see that their is certainly a reason for this revenge style of killing.
I know i would feel a little hard done by if i had watched my country invaded, raped of its resources and then sold overseas to the highest bidders. To add to this thousands of their innocent countrymen were killed in pursuit of this business plan.

So if you are booking a holiday, id strike Iraq from the list. Which is a shame, i hear its a beautiful place. A Friends father used to work their for the UN.

Sleipnir

Originally posted by Wacker
Sleipnir, I know that wasn't directed at me, but would you please stop being so condescending?

Sorry, but when someone tells me "go **** yourself" I think a condescending response is fair enough.
Weird that someone telling me to "go ****" myself would annoy me I know........

Wacker

Did any of you guys read the Kevin Myers column from about a week ago?

In it, he said that were he the editor in charge of the ABC programme that first released the pictures of the Iraqi torture victims, he would not have released them, as it would lead to reprisals. Such as this, one might argue.

How would you guys stand on this issue? Everyone seems to agree that this decapitation clip is far worse than the torture pictures we have seen. Were you the editor, would you repress the pictures, believeing that such pictures would only make the situation worse?

I'll start by saying that I would release the pictures anyway. I would imagine that the hard-liners in Iraq already knew what was going on anyway.

swiss

Lads keep the flaming down. I've already had to edit a few posts. Remember that ad hominem attacks are not tolerated here.

As for the video itself - well I didn't watch it but that's because I'm in work at the moment. I would watch it were I at home. Why? Because it serves as a chilling reminder of how brutal some people can be. Some people also disliked that someone linked to the video. Xterminator did not link to the video, he linked to the site where the video was hosted. I've been to that site a few times before and as well as hosting such videos it contains interesting articles and information.

What I will watch with some interest is whether Americans will look to this as some sort of justification for the abuses suffered by the Iraqi prisoners by the hands of their American captors. I will also be wary of any action that will be taken by the Americans as a result of this brutality.

uberwolf

Without having seen the clip, will this not backfire in terms of the public opinion backlash which I had the impression was beginning to turn against the war in America itself, acts like this are self defeating even in the context of war/eye-foreye, etc. The battle for hearts and minds that Bush et al were so desperate to win in Iraq was being lost in America. Will this slow/stop/reverse this?

egan007

It's a war
Electrocuting pow's i no less a crime than beheading somebody.

People need to realise that babies, children and women get their guts blown all over the place, loose limbs, get raped on a daily basis.
If people seen this on tv rather than a military truck driving down the road they might realise what war really is.

Hairy Homer

I haven't watched this. I don't think I have the stomach for it. It's enough to know the poor guy was put to death in a horrible fashion by some savage.

On the wider issue of the morality of killing people, I think there is a movement to condition people, especially in the West to reacquaint themselves with the reality of one person killing another. We are being brought back to the psychology of the gruesome public execution from which we have largely shielded ourselves over the past 150 years.

Part of this is because of the spread of technology which makes it possible for anyone around the world to view something taken with a cheap handycam in an Iraqi slum.

Want to see a man having his head sawed off? Click here.

Want to see a woman forced to have sex with a dog? Click here.

Horrifyingly, we know I'm not making the first one up and shamefully, I can tell you that I'm not making the second one up either. (I didn't know what exactly it was going to be when I clicked on it but I wasn't exactly expecting a church service)

Another reason, though, is because of the huge amount of research into psychology that has gone on in the past hundred years which is aimed at harnessing the power of the human mind to focussed motivated behaviour. Anyone who has done a management course will probably have come across Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs or Herzberg's Dual Structure theory.

These and others aim to understand what motivates people to engage in behaviour so that managers, of whatever type of organisation, can arm themselves with the information they need to encourage people to act in a certain way.

There is of course no harm in business managers effectively employing techniques that will cause people voluntarily to work harder for mutual benefit. But armies, which have arguably been among the pioneers of the study of psychology, have been very keen to get to the bottom of what causes one man to do away with another.

There was a fascinating program shown last Saturday night (late) on Channel Four (I think) It was called The Truth about Killing and went into studies that the US Army had made about their soldiers' behaviour in the second world war. It found, for example, that only 2 per cent of their soldiers had actually wilfully killed another human being in combat. This excludes guys who engaged in activity that almost certainly resulted in human death, put who did it from afar, like artillery guys or soldiers who fired blind at an enemy far away.

And of that 2 per cent, half of them were psycopaths anyway.

Part two of the program, due to be shown next Saturday, will show how the Americans have managed to grow the percentage of soldiers who will wilfully kill another person from 2 to 97 per cent over the past 50 years.

Now THAT should be compulsory viewing for everybody concerned about the world we live in.

Wacker

Sleipnir, it was Jak who said that to you. By all means, reply to him or her in whatever manner you wish!
But don't insult everyone else who watched the clip in the process of answering one person's point.

Guys, watch the video, and decide for yourselves. Its not that gruesome.

It was an execution, more so than a Torture.

oscarBravo

If I was a muslim, I'd be even more deeply sickened than I already am - not only at the act of barbarity itself, but also at the constant chanting of "Allahu akbar" as it was perpetrated.