On the treatment and care of icons
Dedicated Rainy Day readers (Is there any other kind? Ed.) will, no doubt, recall the outrage expressed here this week three years ago when the German magazine Der Spiegel, turned an iconic image of the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center on its head in an effort to boost sales. This was unforgivable in our eyes because the world knows that when this photograph was taken death, pain, fear, suffering, loss, grief, despair and tragedy were being visited upon thousands of people. To use this image, then, in such an insensitive form suggested to us, at least, that those who knowingly exploited it for profit had hearts of stone and no souls. Just like those who recently published photos of the dying Lady Diana, in fact.
Three years later, alas, the same amorality reigns. Last Friday, the magazine section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a newspaper that draws from the same poisoned well of anti-Americanism as Der Spiegel, Photoshopped this image of the burning Twin Towers onto a sub-Saharan savannah. The reason? To illustrate a story titled "An African Tragedy". This was accompanied by a subhead that deserves to be preserved in an archive of illiteracy, dishonesty and fantasy: "Every day in Darfur has been an 11th of September for two years now. The International Court should intervene". This incongruous statement was followed by an article of the most utter mediocrity.
Can we expect to see more of this? Will some hack's reminiscences of Rwanda be illustrated with the collapsing towers? Might an account of a Provo's "struggle" in West Belfast be decked out with the plume of smoke as seen from New Jersey? Where's the end of the line that began with the inversion of the burning buildings and has continued with their transportation to Africa? Surely, some things must remain beyond the Pale of trivialization?
Let's consider an example. Say we're doing a story about Italy, about Tuscany, a favourite of magazine publishers. Regardless of the point being made, whether about truffles or terror, it must remain taboo to illustrate any aspect of it with certain images from the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema where on 12 August 1944, the SS rounded up 560 men, women and children and shot and burned them. Same goes for the Emilia-Romagna region. Some images of Marzabotto are off limits because around that small Italian town between 29 September and 5 October 1944, soldiers of the 16.SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Reichsführer-SS, led by Sturmbannführer Walter Reder, murdered almost 1,000 people. Among the victims, 45 were less than two years old, 110 were under 10 and 95 under 16.
Need another example? Back then when much of Europe was being run by a terror organization, one of Germany's top terrorists, Reinhard Heydrich, was killed on the outskirts of Prague by Czech "insurgents", to use a modern term. What was the response? On 10 June 1942, German forces surrounded the village of Lidice, murdered 340 people and razed it to the ground. Are we going to use images of Lidice, Sant'Anna di Stazzema or Marzabotto to draw attention to Darfur? Not very likely. And for good reason, too. There are standards when it comes to the treatment of icons. And the same should apply to aspects of 9/11.
