A few videos will also be shown during the trial of the twenty terror suspects who shot dead 131 people in Paris on Friday, November 13, 2015. Few and certainly not the most gruesome, the court has decided to exercise restraint. Emmanuel Carrère, the French writer who recorded the process in his breathtaking book V13, watches those videos and finds them gruesome enough: young men who jokingly decapitate people, who drive around laughing in jeeps behind which the bodies of victims are tied – that kind of thing. They are propaganda videos of Islamic State.
Never before, Carrère believes, has propaganda looked like this. When other bad regimes or groups want to make propaganda, they conceal the atrocities they are doing. The Khmer Rouge did not broadcast videos of how prisoners were tortured in the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, the Nazis did not try to recruit party members by showing what happened in Auschwitz – on the contrary, they pretended to the world nothing was wrong.
Hamas also wanted to show the world how lustfully they murdered people, and their supporters cheered for it. “It is sadism, the display of sadism, the permission to be sadistic that [IS] counts to convert,” writes Carrère
Reading that, I thought I understood a little more about the special horror that the atrocities of Hamas and, rather, IS evoke. The lust.
Aren’t there people in Israel who are cheering about the bombings in Gaza? Yes. But the Israeli army does not show propaganda films of Palestinian children being covered by rubble.
And why would this appearance of civilization be so important, I wondered?
Does it make much difference whether one does such things and hides them, or whether they are done openly? Did I think that other executioners don’t enjoy humiliating and torturing their victims? That sadism does not occur further?
No, of course I don’t think so. And perhaps you should say that maintaining the appearance of civilization is purely hypocritical and gives perpetrators and their supporters the opportunity to pretend that they are actually decent people who did not want this either.
It’s certainly hypocritical. But the difference is, and perhaps this is the crucial one, that anyone who propagandizes the most terrible thing a human being can do is claiming: I do not recognize that limit. I don’t recognize that so-called civilization.
We knew that, but now I suddenly understood it very clearly. The next step is then, and Carrère does not avoid this question in his book, to ask on what basis democratic countries, which claim to uphold civilization, allow themselves or their supporters not to adhere to the rules hold. What right ‘we’ have to do that. Whether that injustice can be contrasted with terrorist injustice, or whether one can even be outweighed by the other.
Carrère does not directly answer that staggering question. There may be no answer to this, except the one thing that Carrère certainly suggests: if you no longer even believe in civilization, then anything is possible.
So I just keep believing. A deeply disappointed believer. It couldn’t be any other way, it probably never could have been any other way.