Since one day, a Homo sapiens represented its reality through images, we entered the war of images. Drawings, paintings, daguerreotypes, photographs, videos tell, from the beginning, a desire to fix the present, therefore the temptation to “lie” by exaggerating, improving, obscuring. The propagandistic use of photographs by the Soviet Union, which erased “traitors” to the proletariat through the Moscow trials, worked at full capacity. But the image is also proof. The horrific reality of the concentration camps at the liberation was fortunately filmed – which did not, however, stop the denier.
Since September 11, 2001, this war has taken a singular turn. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ushered in the 21st century with the first visual attack in history. Osama bin Laden could have chosen to schedule the attack at an earlier time, when the skyscrapers were full, hoping for more deaths, more fear and panic. If he chose to carry out the attacks between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., it was to be sure to have the eyes of Americans fixed on the news channels which would not fail to relay live the reality of the terrorist killing. The immediacy of the attack, committed and seen simultaneously and therefore suffered, increases the degree of astonishment and the possibility of chaos. Relayed all over the world, in the West as in the East, the Al-Qaeda attacks provoked horror here, joy there, images then relayed here and there, further widening the abyss between the West and the East, hoping for a war of civilization that would sink the Western world. On September 21, 2001, we entered the modern era of image warfare.
The Nazis did everything to cover up the Holocaust. Documents destroyed, testimonies absent, defensive silences, the Nazi officers did not tell their children about the terrible industrial mechanics which led to the death of six million Jews. It was necessary to destroy all evidence, material and human, it was necessary to save the honor of the filthy beast, not to sully the memory of the Third Reich by allowing its crimes to be discovered. As soon as the final solution was put in place, secrecy had to be preserved. Antony Beevor, in The Second World War, writes of Treblinka: “The essential elements for the smooth running of operations were secrecy and deception. […] In Treblinka, a semblance of a station had been set up on the platform. A station with its ticket offices, luggage storage and restaurant. The arrival of the convoy was greeted by an orchestra; all the performers were impeccably dressed. When rumors began to circulate about Treblinka, the name of the station was changed to Ober-Majdan. Even the Nazis realized the unforgivable horror of their actions.
Videos of death and destruction
Since September 11, 2001, the Islamists have chosen to show the horror of their crimes, to exploit them for propaganda purposes to recruit more jihadists, to spread them through the welcome channel of social networks and to draw soldiers, honor and pride. Beheadings, lynchings, stonings, burnings, hangings, all the abuses of Islamist terrorists were and are duly filmed, edited, set to music and distributed.
Videos of death and destruction, hatred and the purest violence are all trophies and traps for jihadists. Mohammed Merah had equipped himself with a GoPro camera allowing him to film in live its filthy killings, the bloodthirsty terrorists of October 7 enthusiastically filmed their operations of death and sent them instantly to their families, who rejoiced in return at the spectacle of Jewish families massacred, women raped and cut into pieces , babies executed, fathers murdered in front of their children.
The paradox comes from the fact that representation, therefore the image, is prohibited in Sunni Islam – Shiism authorizes it. Proscribed, the image has become taboo to the point of giving rise to visual monsters. As if the prohibition which runs from century to century had taken its revenge in the form of videos which exhibit the worst of humanity in the name of Islam, of the defense of the Islam of its origins. As if Islam lacked and suffered until September 11, 2001 from an absence of narrative, brutally and savagely compensated by the Islamist narrative, since continuous, of the absolute enjoyment of death.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity
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