The Beheading Video

Having just watched the beheading video courtesy of Jon’s bandwidth, I’m sympathetic to a commenter on that post who nearly vomited upon viewing. I just about lost it myself, and I’m not generally squeamish.

The video is quite possibly the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. Jon suggested that people watch it “to make you remember what our country is fighting for.” I can’t honestly say that I was moved to patriotism. Rather, watching the video made me hate the murderers who filmed it, but that hate is not generalized to their countrymen so as to justify slaughter by our military none too distant in moral conduct from this despicable act. Like any act of true violence I’ve witnessed, this film leaves me abhorring violence in total.

I can’t see in this video what we’re fighting for, nor what they’re fighting for. I can’t hear the American dream dying in the lacerated throat of Nicholas Berg, just as he can’t comprehend the jihadist tract read to him before his death. All I can hear is that he can’t cease screaming even as his vocal chords are cut because in that last brief world of pain it is only instinct, not politics and values, that consumes. All I see is brutal, tragic, animalistic death.

Acts like this are removed from the context of politics through sheer horror.

I believe in the effectiveness of limited, well-planned military operations for accomplishing specific tactical goals, distinct from all-out war. I don’t believe in war, because like the “holy” war that led to this abhorrent killing, war is potentially limitless in the violence, hate, anguish, and sorrow it breeds. This man should not have died a horrific death only to perpetuate such evil.

That’s what I felt, instantly, other than sickened to my core.