War porn and First Amendment rights
Andi's World reports that "war porn" is all over Youtube.com. Citing the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:The wildly popular video-sharing Web site YouTube.com has dozens of videos purporting to show individual American soldiers being killed in Iraq, in what amounts to snuff films, overlaid with music and insurgent slogans.
Some of the videos, including ones of American soldiers purportedly being picked off by snipers or being blown up by improvised explosive devices, have been viewed tens of thousands of times each in the past few months. Some are posted in YouTube's "news and blogs" category, but others are listed under "entertainment" and even "comedy."
One shows what appears to be three U.S. soldiers in desert fatigues questioning Iraqi men in a street or alley as young boys mingle around. Suddenly, one soldier slumps to the ground, felled by a single bullet, as the children scatter. In another, a U.S. soldier is standing through the top hatch of a Humvee, then slumps over as the sniper strikes.
There are also "violent videos that claim to show U.S. soldiers killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan." The appearance on Youtube of jihadist propaganda video,
... shows that insurgent propaganda -- including genuine footage -- already available on more obscure Web sites has seeped in the mainstream of American popular culture, said Eben Kaplan, assistant editor of CFR.org, the Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank headquartered in New York.
As disgusting as war porn is, fairness impels me to point out that US troops have been making personal videos in Iraq from the beginning. I have seen several examples, via military officers I know well. Some video scenes are extremely graphic and show, unblinkingly, extremely violent combat sequences. One such sequence that I can't seem to forget is of a fairly close-up scene wounded jihadist in Fallujah attempting to climb to his knees and aim his weapon. He's cut down by a burst of machine gun fire to his head.
Whether any of the troops post that kind of video to Youtube I have no idea. Possibly the videos of American troops killing Iraqis or Afghanis the article says are on Youtube were posted by private soldiers. (The volume of videos posted to the site boggles - 65,000 per day.) But our troops are posting other in-theater video for certain, including combat footage. For example, the video below is of a foot-infantry firefight in Afghanistan. The enemy is never seen and there's no blood, but the action is intense. (Warning: some "soldier" language.)
On the whole, the advent of internet citizens' media has been more than positive, but not an unalloyed good. There is a line between a video such as this one and those that show the graphic scenes the Star-Bulletin describes. Which videos are clearly on one side or the other are easy to identify. But others aren't so clearly identified.
A man told me this week in conversation that "it's time to set some limits on the First Amendment." I disagreed and think that we already have too many limits (cough, McCain-Feingold, cough). I have written before that, "The only good answer to free speech with which you don't agree is more free speech. "
Yet (to move off the topic of videos) there are justifiable limits to First Amendment rights of speech. The famous USSC opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes - in which he referred to falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater - is actually germane to a point made yesterday by Harvard Prof. Harvey Mansfield. Holmes, reports Wikipedia, was writing on whether Congress could forbid the distribution of fliers opposing the draft during World War I. The USSC said yes:The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
The case's legal point was later reversed in another case by the Supreme Court of 1969, which held the test was different than what Holmes said it was. Now Prof. Mansfield has written,
The preaching of radical Islam is in fact "a clear and present danger," and we need to suppress it. This sort of speech is not just blowing off steam or keeping us honest or puncturing our complacency. Here is a new task to occupy the anxious minds of civil libertarians in universities: how to distinguish truly dangerous speech and how to defeat it?
I think that such "preaching" falls under the category of inciting insurrection, which has never been protected speech since Washington's day. But the good professor is right: we have to recognize that there is such a thing as speech that is dangerous to the republic before we can take prophylactic measures at all, and there are an awful lot of elites in America who won't confront that fundamental task.
Crossposted at DonaldSensing.com
When our guys appeared in silhouette against the sunset (or sunrise) on the ridgeline, I actually yelled at them to get down. Great footage.
In my opinion, this is not an issue that ought to bring into consideration any abridgement of free speech.
Does anyone remember the video "don't bring a rifle to a tank fight"? A lot of people laughed at that. They had no sympathy for the jihadi with the rifle. (Nor did I.)
Other people must find it just as funny to see our guys getting killed.
Some people like the speeches of Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, others prefer Adolph Hitler, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Some people who've watched decapitation videos were struck with pity for the victims, others are eager to identify with and perhaps imitate the jihadis. The same thing might be more or less obscene - or actually glorious and holy - depending on the reason you're watching it.
It's a matter of taste, and which side you're on.
Oh, and good clip. Go our guys!
But the reason I was happy to see the clip was it was our guys (American guys, still our side), and doing good. It really is just a question of which side you're on.
I've only watched the first quarter of the vid and so far I have to nod approvingly at the trigger discipline of this team. No way for me to tell if it's aimed fire, but I'd be willing to bet that it mostly is.
To ring a change on the old John Lennon line, ambushes are what happens {sic}while you're busy making other plans...
Great video. Congratulations to the troops who lived through it.
If you say Bush is an evil monkey-nazi, that's fine. But if you say we should take up ars, then you need to go to jail.
Inciting violence in antithetical to democracy. Your opinion can be as onery and repugnant as you wish, but you cannot advocate violence against your fellow citizens.
I should point out that the soldiers in the video are Canadian.
I don't support or approve of posting any war porn, no matter who the subjects are. But, re. David Blue's comment (#2), I have never heard the choice between fascism and freedom so casually dismissed as a "matter of taste." You need to get your moral compass recalibrated, sir, because you are badly off course.
I think Dave Blue was being sarcastic.
On the free speech issue, I think the WWI decision was wrong. Speach in opposition to the draft is a danger to government policy, which in turn was potentially a danger to the men implimenting it. Its an indirect danger to people.
OTOH, there are people preaching and legitimizing violence against Americans or Jews or homosexuals. But the 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio said the government couldn't prosecute the Klan for advocating terrorism in general, unless it was inciting to "imminent lawless action."
I don't see that ruling changing, but the way the U.S. defeated the original Klan was through the law of conspiracy -- a body of law rejected in France and other civil law countires, as well as by international law according to many experts and by at least four members on the U.S. Supreme Court. That tool is in imminent danger of being lost.
#6 from Donald Sensing: "I should point out that the soldiers in the video are Canadian."
Oh, thanks for that - and silly me for not noticing. OK, I amend what I said before:
But the reason I was happy to see the clip was it was our guys (Canadian guys, still our side), and doing good. It really is just a question of which side you're on.
#6 from Donald Sensing: "I don't support or approve of posting any war porn, no matter who the subjects are. But, re. David Blue's comment (#2), I have never heard the choice between fascism and freedom so casually dismissed as a "matter of taste.""
Give me the whole sentence, please. I said it was "a matter of taste, and which side you're on."
#6 from Donald Sensing: "You need to get your moral compass recalibrated, sir, because you are badly off course."
(grin) I won't object to that. It's kind of a professional obligation for a reverend to think that you know how other people's moral compasses ought to be calibrated.
Given that I'm coming at moral questions from a pagan point of view, if you didn't think there was something wrong with my moral compass, one or both of us would have had to be doing a bad job of following our own lights.
I do not mean to dismiss the difference between "freedom and fascism", though I appreciate that from your point of view that's what I did do regardless of my intentions. I don't think that the contestants in this fight are "freedom and fascism," rather I think they are Western civilization and Islam. So if I was casually dismissing the difference between two things, those would be the two things.
I do, set particular moral judgments in the context that authorises them, the religion or ideology or whatever.
Was Mohammed Atta good? He was an ideal Muslim, and I think his final day expresses the moral essence of the spirit of Allah. So, well done, Mohammed! (Atta, or (pbuh) version.) Possibly he was not so good from a Christian or a Wiccan or a Buddhist point of view.
I don't take the extra step of assuming that every moral system is of equal value, or that all religions are equally true or whatever. I have systematic and I think fairly well considered (if alas homespun) reasons for thinking that some cultural systems are more valid than some others.
But I don't think that this is the sort of thing that should be rendered into law in the form of a system of censorship.
If something is so dangerous that from a prudential point of view you should prohibit anything that might be an expression of its moral viewpoint, then perhaps you should be trying to get rid of it rather than slapping a bandage over the eyes of anyone who might see that point of view.
#7 from PD Shaw: "I think Dave Blue was being sarcastic."
Sort of.
When I said this comes down to taste and what side you're on, I meant it.
I didn't say all tastes are equal.
Or that the sides are morally equal.
The desecration of the bodies of the four contractors at Fallujah (which I think could count as "war porn") might be a beautifully authentic expression of Islam. That does not imply that I think Islam is authentically beautiful.
If I say something like this: "shaming our dead is consistent in spirit with humiliating the infidel, and humiliating the infidel is divinely mandated according to Islam," that does not come with a silent rider "and that's all right."
So, David, when you say well done to Muhammad Atta, are you being approving or not? If not, you are going to need to change your rhetorical habits or resign yourself to being misunderstood by the large majority of people to whom "well done" means moral approval.
#10 from Craig: "So, David, when you say well done to Muhammad Atta, are you being approving or not? If not, you are going to need to change your rhetorical habits or resign yourself to being misunderstood by the large majority of people to whom "well done" means moral approval."
I sincerely respect the great job some people do of being what their religion or culture or ideology invited them to be, while disapproving of the system.
I think there are systems that are bad and have to go, while at the same time I am not at all in tune with hatred of the "boil them in pig skins school."
I've (repeatedly) given the picture of playing against a chess program, with a guy sitting opposite you at the board making the moves he sees on the screen. (Or with a "paper program" like Islam, reading off instructions from the Koran, the main schools of Muslim jurisprudence and so on.)
If we could end Communism or Islam by sending every bloody fanatic a friendly puppy, I would say to Hades with punishment and just deserts, lets do it. (It wouldn't work. Saudi Arabia has banned puppies.)
That doesn't seem excessively ambivalent or ambiguous to me, but evidently to some people it is. And the point of speaking is to communicate.
Your advice is probably good, Craig. At least I'll give it serious consideration.
David Blue,
Some readers have read many of your prior comments, and interpret your remarks here in that light. Other readers have only this thread to go on. Presumably, effective communication would mean that the two groups give more-or-less the same meanings to your words. That didn't seem to be happening here.
#12 from AMac: "David Blue,
Some readers have read many of your prior comments, and interpret your remarks here in that light. Other readers have only this thread to go on. Presumably, effective communication would mean that the two groups give more-or-less the same meanings to your words. That didn't seem to be happening here."
Yup.
And in this thread at least, I've decided to apply the first rule of holes. (When you are in one, stop digging.)
Ohmigod, these studs are awesome. Glad they're on our side. Whew.
mj: I can lend you some kneepads...