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« Deciding to go to war is like signing a death warrant for thousands of people. When we stop showing the dead, we stop understanding what we’ re signing.»
There was a time before
On June 8, 1972, a young Associated Press photographer, Nick Ut, took a photograph of a nineyear-old girl running naked down a road in Vietnam, her back burned by napalm. The photo went around the world. It changed history. American public opinion, which was still wavering, swung definitively against the war. Congress voted to halt the bombing of Cambodia. Kim Phuc, the little girl, is still alive today— and remembers it all. That is what a true image can do. That is what journalism that does not look away can do. But since then, something has broken. Since the Gulf War in 1991, Western armies have invented the system of“ embedded journalists”— the famous embedded reporters. Integrated into military units, fed, housed, and protected by them, these journalists see the war from inside a tank. They report what they are allowed to report. The rest— the ravaged villages, the overflowing hospitals, the mass graves— remains out of frame.
Did you know? During the Iraq War( 2003 – 2011), the U. S. government banned all photography of the coffins of repatriated American soldiers. The ban, officially“ out of respect for the families,” was lifted in 2009— after six years of war and 4,400 American deaths. Iraqi deaths, estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians depending on the source, have never been officially tallied.
Flashmag! Edition 173 Juin 2026
War is becoming a video game Tune in to any major news broadcast during an armed conflict. You’ ll see: 3D maps with animated arrows. Military experts in suits talking about“ lines of defense” and“ axes of advance.” Footage from drones filming explosions from the sky— clean, silent, almost aesthetic. And phrases that recur like refrains:“ surgical strike,”“ collateral damage,”“ neutralization of targets.”“ Collateral damage.” Three words to avoid saying: children dead under the rubble.
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