On my blogroll (down, left-hand menu) is a site called Baghdad Chronicles - it's the diary of a woman surviving in Iraq. She has posted a short item about another site called Under Mars: an online photo album by Western soldiers and military contractors there. Many of the pictures feature incinerated homes and tanks. Some feature bloody human body parts, pulped heads, faces with gouged out eyes - those of Iraqis, not of American or British soldiers. These pictures carry obscene captions such as:
"They blow my eye ball too"
"They put hole in my face mistah"
"Was dis my head"
"ok ok i got it, you a dead iraqi, i love shardes"
"new meaning to giving head" (of a decapitated head)
Bear in mind that many Iraqi people are reading these comments, witnessing an ugliness that I suspect most British and American people would abhor if they knew of this.
In her speech to the nation on Christmas Day, the Queen will express her pride in the British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part I'm sure she is right to be proud. But maybe she should visit Under Mars to learn of other realities.
2 comments:
The oddest thing about UnderMars is that it's run by a very cool (but also, it has to be said, very odd) Canadian called Shannon Larratt, whose other big internet project is BMEzine.com, an online documentation of all kinds of body modification.
Then again, is it too tasteless to say that these soldiers are risking nothing if not sudden and unwelcome body modification?
Post a Comment