i guess tons of people have watched the Saddam’s execution video online…
and i wonder what made them watch such a horrible video…
do people watch it just out of curiosity?
do people watch it to seize a reality of death?
wanting to watch people die is human nature?
one of my friends told me to watch it the other day, but i couldn’t and will Never do. i’m not indifferent to Iraqi people at all…and in fact i would watch it if I were Iraqi and suffered because of his regime but i reckon most of them who watched the video were not Iraqi…
Curiosity - same reason I looked for footage of the beheadings in Iraq, and videos of the Tsunami, and of New Orleans/Katrina, and…
Also, I like making an informed judgment. Without seeing the footage for myself I had no idea whether or not the media reports of it were accurate. Now I do.
I didn’t watch it either, nor do I wish to form a judgement about the thing. I think it’s an arbitrary event, too much has been made of ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ in this case. It’s way to late for any of that to apply to this whole debacle in the Middle East. I wouldn’t have blinked if they had released Saddam or if they had crucified him. Both would have made perfect sense in this jungle.
What sort of bothers me though, is the straight face officials manage to keep when talking about justice in this context. I’m constantly thinking: what would the concept justice be worth if it applied to this rotten mess in any form or way? It’d be some leper’s hustle in a flea infested marketplace. I don’t buy it.
I watched it out of curiosity, and so I have a better idea of what happened, it still groses me out.
I watched the Daniel Pearl tape on the fourth of july a few years ago. Pearl was a jewish american reporter when he was kidnapped and beheaded (with a knife, though it doesn’t show a lot of that shoot) I watched it because I just wanted to get an idea of what happened and what the tape really revealed, and because I was into sociology in school at the time and I was curious of how the capters and captive reacted, but . . . it grossed me out to where I felt sick for the rest of the night, and while I was with my friends watching fireworks, I just felt completely sick. It was terrible, but it gave me an idea of how seriously gross, and seriously REAL this kind of stuff is.
What made it worse was knowing that Daniel pearl is similar to me as a person, a young adult, newly married with kid and a musician. I live a kind of similar life.
When I watch these kinds of videos now a days I usually keep my head tilted sideways so I can look away quick when something is really sick.
Curiousity is why I watched both videos. I feel like I learned something while watching it about the human condition and the nature of human murder/execution in general that you just can’t learn abstactly, but at the same time I am deeply deeply sickened by it, not so much intellectually but emotionally to the core.