SUSAN SONTAG

Regarding the Pain of Others

“You, Sir, call them "horror and disgust." We also call them horror and disgust…War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped.”

Sontag uses this quote in her essay, which was written by Virginia Woolf in 1938. This quote, in my opinion, just shows the effect that war brings on everyone. Men and women are both influenced by the consequences of war, elderly and children are also affected by what war brings back to the countries and places that are involved. War is something that is not necessary at all, and the people that caused the war are most of the time the least affected by it.

“But is it true that these photographs, documenting the slaughter of noncombatants rather than the clash of armies, could only stimulate the repudiation of war?”

I think that in our time we are so used to seeing these horrible photos of people: noncombatants or soldiers, nothing will stimulate the idea of rejecting war. No matter how many of these photos are displayed on our screens, we won’t just stop fighting. Some people don’t realize the pain and grief that is happening right now, some people even forget that we are at war right now; who thought that these photos could spark the idea of repudiation of war, even if the photos are showing citizens?

“For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”

As a young adult in the twenty-first century, I can see why some people use to think this, but I don’t think this would ever work on someone my age. For example, I have been taught about American history many times, I learned about the Civil War and the Revolutionary War three times in the span of seven school years. I have been taught about war and what events caused it, happened during it, and why it ended since I was nine. I learned so much about the wars we have been in that I’ve become numb to them. Every time I see a photograph from the timeframe, I just think, “I’ve seen that before.” My generation and the generations around mine have become so immune to these types of photographs before the time we can even join the army for ourselves. The “insanity of war”? That’s not the phrase I would use.