Pictures that reflect the depravity of the internet age

How did they feel, those august American senators and congressmen, as they shuffled into a darkened room on the fourth floor of the Capitol in Washington? What did they look like when they emerged, pale and blinking, having been shown stills and videos from the prisons and dungeons of Iraq?

How did they feel, those august American senators and congressmen, as they shuffled into a darkened room on the fourth floor of the Capitol in Washington? What did they look like when they emerged, pale and blinking, having been shown stills and videos from the prisons and dungeons of Iraq?

Appalled, of course; they were quick to make clear to the press that the scenes of forced sex, of rape and of humiliation meted out to naked prisoners were, as one senator put it, "stomach-churning". But some of the politicians must surely have also felt faintly sullied and absurd - almost as if they were middle-aged bogglers sidling out of a back-street porn show.

It is said that one of the trickier decisions facing the American administration is a legal one: would releasing yet more revolting photographs in the name of full disclosure constitute a breach - yet another breach - of the victims' human rights? Whether or not hundreds of nastier variations on the pictures we have already seen are heading our way, there is one uncomfortable aspect of their publication which is rarely mentioned. Many of the most brutal stills and clips will, without fail, end up on precisely the kind of websites that first encouraged and even legitimised the sadism and voyeuristic cruelty that they illustrate.

It is this point that is being missed by those who argue that unacceptable behaviour has always been part of war, that the only difference today is that there are digital cameras to make it public. Sex may have been part of warfare in the past, from organised rape to the showing of porn videos to American pilots about to fly on a mission in the first Gulf War, but then it was a brutal expression of power. The photographs from Iraq reveal a creepy and demeaning development of our times: in the 21st century, war has become yet another source of sexual gratification.

There is a direct line from Abu Ghraib to millions of home computers across the Western world. Thanks to the ever-adventurous internet, pictures not at all dissimilar to those in this week's newspapers are available as a form of home entertainment. If you tap the words "torture", "rape" or "slave" into a search engine, you will not be led to human rights organisations or academic reports, but to thousand upon thousand of websites specialising in recreational sadism.

It is mind-bogglingly profitable, the depravity business, for it taps into the age's most compelling vices and weaknesses - curiosity, cruelty, voyeurism, boredom - and has the technology to provide its services in virtual secrecy. Its problem is that, like any enterprise, it needs to expand. Consumers are never quite satisfied by what they are offered.

Who could seriously be surprised that, provided with real dungeons as opposed to fake ones, with hundreds of men and some women completely under their control, and with the encouragement of leaders who have been openly contemptuous of the human rights of declared enemies, US soldiers behaved as if they were making a home porn movie? For, as well as encouraging the idea that humiliation is just another thrill, the internet has instilled a sort of camera-dependence. Unless something is filmed or snapped, it is somehow less real, and certainly less exciting.

This is where a tired, sado-masochistic culture takes us. One does not have to be a late convert to the ideas of Mary Whitehouse to see that, when extremes of human depravity are privately available to the majority of citizens, then quickly there will be a moral effect on society at large.

Already the pornography of cruelty and voyeurism has leached into the press, film and TV, pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable, pandering to public prurience in the form of reports and documentaries into the horrors of the moment. Think, for example, of the current interest among TV producers in the search for paedophiles and the way their programmes invariably include screened stills of the pornography in question, as if viewers had no idea what such things would look like. Or the colour magazine of a Sunday broadsheet this weekend which illustrated a story about young Afghan girls being sold to opium traders with glamorous, sad photographs of a beautiful 12-year-old victim. The erotic fascination of cruelty is now so pervasive that we hardly notice it is there.

The personal is the political, it used to be said in the 1960s, and nothing exemplifies this truth more devastatingly than the way that porn movie standards of behaviour emerge in real life when the opportunity - prisons, war zones - provides an excuse. It has not taken long for it to be pointed out that many of the games of Abu Ghraib would be familiar to inmates, particularly black inmates, in American prisons.

The sadism on view this week represents the seediness of a self-gratifying society, in which the conflict between the haves and the have-nots extends even to the realm of desire. If that photograph of Private England dragging a naked Iraqi on a dog-lead symbolises the clash of civilisations, there can be little doubt as to which culture is at the end of its tether.

terblacker@aol.com

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