A few weeks ago, in Tikrit, the insurgent group ISIS lined up more than a hundred Shiite soldiers and shot them dead, dispatching them in several groups. Like so many atrocities these days, the mass executions were duly filmed, boasted about, and broadcast across the world by the killers themselves. Indeed, ISIS claimed to have executed no fewer than seventeen hundred men in such a fashion. Every few days since then, it has posted new pictures and short videos: usually, they show several men at a time, made to kneel on some patch of waste ground, being terrorized by men in black hoods before they are shot in the back of the head.
For anyone who follows current events compulsively, the news has become a bulletin of cruelties too awful to contemplate. A video I saw recently showed seven or eight victims and as many victimizers engaging in a scrambled choreography: the jihadists line their victims up, make them kneel, berate them, hit them, and push them over, then haul them upright again for the final shot to the head. You look into the victims’ faces: some have already given up, while one or two beg, supplicate, appeal to the humanity of the men with the guns. It’s strange how, seconds away from certain death, some people try to avoid the pain of a slap or kick to the head. And why, one wonders, do the victimizers bother with such petty degradations, knowing that they are about to send bullets into the captives’ brains? Most disturbing is the sadism that’s evident in these videos. In one, a young man shoots his victim in the head and then empties his pistol into the dead man’s body as it crumples to the ground; when he is done, he gives it a little goat-like kick and whinnies with laughter.
In the old order, such things were hidden away by perpetrators who were aware that it would be politically unwise to publicize their culpability. After Stalin ordered a mass murder in the Katyn forest—killing some eight thousand Polish officers and thousands of other members of the country’s élite—the Soviet establishment denied it for decades, blaming the Germans instead. The Nazis denied many of their worst atrocities even as they precisely documented them. Saddam Hussein’s gas-poisoning of Kurdish men, women, and children in Halabja, in 1988, was a killing with a clear political purpose—spreading terror among Kurds—but, taking a page from Stalin’s book, he blamed the Iranians. Saddam was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, but he always denied what he had done—even at the end, when he was on trial. Why give your enemies ammunition to use against you?
There are notable exceptions. In 1980, the Liberian coup leader Samuel Doe invited the world press to watch his soldiers execute a slew of government ministers as they stood tied to stakes on a beach near the capital. (Ten years later came Doe’s own videotaped mutilation and murder at the hands of a rebel officer.) But, for most of the past century, that was the rule, because it made sense. The killers’ cold practicality led them to try to keep their deeds from the broader public. When Argentina’s Dirty War was in full swing, in the late seventies and early eighties, the junta hid its soldiers’ torture and execution of thousands of leftist opponents, deriding claims that it was murdering people as “subversive propaganda.” As for the so-called “disappeared,” the Argentine generals liked to scoff—they were probably off fighting in the hills, alongside other “terrorists.”
Taking credit for political assassinations became fashionable late in the Cold War, particularly among urban guerrillas like the E.T.A., the Provisional I.R.A., the Red Brigades, and various Palestinian factions. They represented a new mercilessness, both in their use of political violence and in their manipulation of the media to spread terror. Things have evolved further since then, and a turning point came in 2002, with the recording of Daniel Pearl’s murder—a globalized snuff film. As the jihadist phenomenon spread following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a new generation of extremists, incarnated by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, delighted in broadcasting its cruelties.
In the years since then, there have been many more horrors, inflicted by copycat newcomers such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Shabab in Somalia and in Kenya, and the latest crops of jihadists in Iraq and Syria. Their modi operandi have, in turn, inspired others around the world. Videotaped decapitations are now banalities, daily fare for the Zetas drug gang in Mexico, while people on the streets of the Central African Republic are filmed as they are hacked by machetes, disembowelled, and burned alive. The pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine have filmed themselves conducting executions, too.
There is no doubt that mobile technology and the Internet are driving much of this new performance terrorism. This week, my Twitter feed included images allegedly showing an ISIS member, his face covered in a black cloth, taking a sledgehammer to an ancient artifact from Nineveh, a relic of one of the oldest civilizations on earth. Just as in the execution videos, one senses, from his posing, that he is doing it not despite the camera but, rather, because of it.
This is the “Saw III” generation, making its own real-life revenge porn, and it has to stop—because we are all diminished by it, and because, once it begins, this kind of copycatting has no end. In the nineteen-eighties, when a previous generation of would-be jihadists in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere would say, “We love death as others love life,” one could tell oneself that it was mostly braggadocio. Now the evidence on video shows us that it’s real.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
