War
NON-RANT Section:
I wrote about him a couple times here on the Habitat. CBFTW was one of the more notable “soldier blogs,” chronicling the experiences of one American soldier in Iraq. His blog resulted in several high profile articles, and has now resulted in his writing a book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell, which you can pre-order on Amazon.com.
RANT:
Sadly, I discovered Colby’s book in a depressing and circuitous journey from Metafilter to an appalling amateur pornography website where soldiers are being offered free memberships by uploading photos of dead and dismembered Iraqis and Afghanis. A vocal detractor of the “war porn” site mentioned Colby (CBFTW)’s website as an example of a real soldier. I won’t share the URL to the location where the soldiers’ “war porn” is being shared in exchange for porn. I could have lived a full life without having seen any of the few images I did see. The website owner says he’s providing a service by allowing soldiers to give “an unedited look at the war from their point of view.” {Link NSFW=Not Safe For Work} And I’m sure he feels he’s helping morale, but I think we’ve seen enough evidence that further-sexualizing war is a really bad idea (Abu Ghraib).
Soldiers are conditioned to celebrate anything that hurts their enemy, I understand that. But if those corpses were of American service people, American civilian contractors, or our allies, these “war porn” posting soldiers would be tackling and detaining those who dared to photograph “their” dead… much less share it on a website in exchange for access to porn. And our U.S. military and the federal government? They would have had that website shut down a long time ago as a hate site, if not a site that was outright “supporting terrorists”.
And before someone cries that the photos are educational and actually serve as a useful anti-war message, you need to read the captions and discussions surrounding the images. It’s hardly a simple visual documentary of war…. {sigh}
