Google Soft Censorship
Google ad policies define this article as NOT acceptable, so Google refuses to show Google ads on this page. We depend upon advertising revenues to survive.
Since Google refuses to show ads on this content, we're asking you to override Google's decision and help us survive by
1) donating to OpEd News
or 2) becoming a Paid Member of OpEd News.
(Know that if we had sufficient income, we wouldn't use Google ads at all.)
You know the image. A girl, naked, scream, arms spread, a look of horror on her face. It has been indelibly burned into the minds of billions of people throughout the world. That girl survived and now lives in Canada. She's written an Op-Ed expressing her thoughts on showing photographs of the victims of mass killings in the US and wars, suggesting that they are very similar.
It's not that often that NYTimes op-eds give me chills or touch my heart, but Kim Phuc Phan Thi, that littler girl, 50 years later, pushed those buttons for me several times in her guest essay, It's Been 50 Years. I Am Not 'Napalm Girl' Anymore.
Introducing her article in an NYTImes email, Peter Catapano, NYTimes, Senior Staff Opinion Editor, writes,
"I have a confession to make.Lately, I've been ignoring my news alerts. I've turned off push notifications. When breaking news emails arrive in my inbox, I leave them there to languish, unopened. Or I at least pause before clicking, and think, Do I really want to see this now? Do I really want to know?
Almost everyone I know is grappling with questions like these. We must bear witness, but how much? The carnage of Ukraine. Months of it. Then the Buffalo-Uvalde-Tulsa onslaught, a whiplash sequence of incomprehensible violence. And so I proceed with caution. There are some things, once seen, that we cannot forget.
This week 50 years ago, readers of newspapers all over the world were faced with an image they may have wished to never see " a photograph taken on June 8, 1972, by an Associated Press photographer in the South Vietnamese village of Trangbang.
You know this image. A group of soldiers and children are fleeing the scene of an errant napalm attack that had seconds before engulfed them in flame. A 9-year-old girl is at the center. She is naked, having torn off her burning clothes, screaming in pain, her arms spread wide as she runs.
In time, this photograph would become inscribed into the memories of generations, an enduring emblem of the horror and depravity of war and the suffering of its youngest victims. In her book "On Photography," the critic Susan Sontag wrote that this photograph "probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities."
If there's anyone who would know whether showing the horrific images of victims of violence is the right thing, she is.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
2
