ISIS CRAP PHOTOSHOP GRAND PRIX
The Pixel & Spectacle of Slaughter
An Article by Danielle Suzanne Smith
Published in the Digital 'Zine 'Error 404', 2015
false mystification
Published in the Digital 'Zine 'Error 404', 2015
false mystification
The site is plain, black serif-text against white, punctuating paragraphs with grainy gifs. The first moving image holds no qualm with the reader, the beheading brutal and quick, neck against rock against grey cloudy sky. Others follow in a similar pattern, each as focused on the gritted dread of the victims, mercy slipping like whistling wind under the thud of an ax. A snuff site perhaps, the bleeding edge of shock aesthetic too often cultivated in the gloomier channels of the internet? Yet, it ends promptly with a message: share with your friends; Facebook and Twitter icons intact. This is no Gauntlet of Death or Rotten.com, however. Simply a Vanity Fair puff piece of the latest plot developments from Game of Thrones.
"The spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people,
mediated by images."
but a social relation among people,
mediated by images."
[Guy Debord]
Slaughter & Spectacle
This pixel-spectacle of violence clothed in cultural criticism and weekly content-clicks feels almost passe; as the five seasons of Thrones alone heralded more torture, sexual violence and dancing penises on our carefully pirated videos than mere beheadings. It’s not real, the costuming and lighting artificial and precise. It’s not real, for Sean Bean (spoiler alert) settles into new franchises and talk show rounds, the grainy gifs of his untimely death remixed in new shades of color and distortion by fans on tumblr, layered with quotes of “mercy.” It's not real. But the internet is full of "real images", distributed not through HBO Go, but channels far premium.
“The rise of the Islamic State militant group as both a battlefield force and an Internet juggernaut... has given new urgency to a State Department effort to counter online militant propaganda with a U.S. messaging campaign. A U.S.-government-made video that recently made the rounds on social media — with graphic images of Islamic State executions and a beheaded body — is the best known example of the attempt to expose the brutality of the Islamist group and undermine its online recruitment appeals…The short video titled “Welcome to ISIL-Land” and others like it aim to counter militant propaganda by producing eye-catching online material that uses the militants’ own words or images against them…[it’s] a tricky line to walk, since by re-purposing provocative or grisly images to discredit the groups behind them, the State Department also gives them wider distribution.”
[Washington Post]
[Washington Post]
The Islamic State, known jointly by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, began as the group Jamaat al-Tahwid wa-i-Jihad (JTWJ), founded in 1999 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With connections and experience in both Jordan and Afghanistan, Zarqawi was seen perhaps as the converse of Osama Bin Laden, a severe poverty to Bin Laden’s wealth and leadership from afar. From this tale of two men, and two jihadists, we can see the path of brutality in Zarqawi’s philosophy emerge, engaging on the front lines as well as personally carrying out the beheading of captives for Al Qaeda. Despite dying in an United States airstrike in 2006, his factional group grew under new leadership as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), signaling a critical shift in motivations.
“Apart from the power struggle between ISIS and [Al Qaeda], the groups differ in their methodology. [Al Qaeda] favors a more gradualist approach that is willing to work with other factions and attempt to build an Islamic state later, whereas ISIS favors a more direct approach, seeking to seize territory, build a state and enforce Sharia [law] immediately.”
[clarionproject]
On June 29, 2014, the first day of Ramadan, ISIS declared a Caliphate and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph Ibrahim, calling for the immediate loyalty of all Muslims throughout the world. The Islamic State defines no distinction between religion and state, interpreting spiritual law harshly and often incorrectly. If the ‘ideals’ of ISIS are, in some way, ideologically similar to Al Qaeda, then what marks their cruelty as the more unusual? What makes their brutality terrific enough for Al Qaeda to further its opposition through an announcement of jihad? The answer lies deep within the methodology of terror, and most essentially, their methods of dissemination.
Branding Terror
It is perhaps a great irony that ISIS is the most modern of medieval movements. A terrorism, of the post-internet age. Propaganda is present in all ideologies, the rhetoric rich with pathos and misplaced virtue, plaintive posters of courage and fear. What marks ISIS and their efforts for recruitment is their inherent branding; this is no layman’s approach to the internet. They are a brand 2.0, as crafted in social media coordination efforts as Taco Bell or presidential campaigns. Although not the first to disseminate through twitter or other social-media video platforms, they stand apart in a wrenching way – inherent quality of content. This morbid reality is best found in the professionalism of their “videos”, more so productions than the minutes of vertical cell-phone shots so common to terrorist outreach prior. No more nondescript white rooms with bearded men addressing concerns; now, a script, exotic settings, perhaps even evidence of green screen. The executions and propaganda are spectacles, meant to disorient the victims as much as the audiences, at once instilling fear and veneration with every shock of licking flame or rough-sawn knife. ISIS is a network, of rehearsals, scripts, and video editors. They even have ‘hosts’ and celebrities – Jihadi John, as called by the Western press, is a defected former British rapper turned ISIS member, his English accent disconcerting amid tapes of glorified death, settled against color balanced blue skies and saturated yellow dunes, at once evoking Michael Bay.
The extent of this expertise is described in the Guardian in terms that wouldn’t feel alien in a casual television/film review.
Note the language in the title, Clanging of the Swords IV, as if it were a carefully scripted and plotted DVD you’d pick up at the local Redbox, regaling the intended message through carefully modulated imagery. This impact instills 'a way of looking' no media studies or advertiser could misunderstand, yet it betrays the uncanny analogies at play. The lust of violence. The pornography of fear. The strange disconnect between reality and fantasy, as executions are now as false as reality television, slowly pushing the war porn industry toward a darker mainstream consumption. Is this bloodshed a product of internet culture?
“The Clanging of the Swords IV sounds like the latest in a series of Hollywood action movies. It looks like one, too. A feature-length film released online a few weeks ago, Swords IV includes a slow-motion bomb sequence reminiscent of The Hurt Locker, aerial footage that nods to Zero Dark Thirty, and scenes filmed through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle that wouldn’t look out of place in a first-person shoot-’em-up.”
Note the language in the title, Clanging of the Swords IV, as if it were a carefully scripted and plotted DVD you’d pick up at the local Redbox, regaling the intended message through carefully modulated imagery. This impact instills 'a way of looking' no media studies or advertiser could misunderstand, yet it betrays the uncanny analogies at play. The lust of violence. The pornography of fear. The strange disconnect between reality and fantasy, as executions are now as false as reality television, slowly pushing the war porn industry toward a darker mainstream consumption. Is this bloodshed a product of internet culture?
Shock & Awe
The history of shock websites runs concurrent to the history of the world wide web – the first images shared among the bare links and forums of 90’s cyber-culture were as likely to be family photos as collected gore, tit for tat taking on a more nefarious significance as each click could collect breasts, or the severing of such, in an instant. While such studied gore has precedents since Saint Agatha, it was the communities that seemed most novel. Subcultures quickly grew around these sites, including Rotten.com, Bestgore.com and early anime forums such as 4chan, as images from tubgirl to goatse.cx to 2girls1cup grew to a morbidly vaulted form of popularity, memes emerging from a vast, deep-net wasteland of bestiality, scatophilia and war porn. Such enticement can be found in the perverted makeup of human psychology – as we grow desensitized to, or perhaps due to, overwhelming onslaughts of information, we seek stimulation in more hardcore or eccentric means. The appeal of horror films or public humiliation carries over to shock material, our eyes cautiously peeking through fingers in search of new thrills, stomach sickening-drops, and fresh ways to out-gross our friends. It’s a propaganda of the mind, hardening our expectations as we search the syntax of the web, and fail to retain empathy in the assault of representations. We are, in a sense, tangibly and emotionally removed from this 'hyper-reality', the screen protecting our sensations and masking the horrors into an artificial zone.
Crap Photoshop
The artificial jolt of the shock website is among the Islamic State’s most potent, and defining tools. Through its media arm, Al Hayat, hundreds of highly publicized and distributed videos of beheadings, immolation, defenestration and mass-shooting executions are posited by political scientist Max Abrahms as a ‘means of differentiating itself from Al Qaeda’, as well as recruitment and apparatuses of terror. The justification for these beheadings is varied, ISIL claiming Koranic scripture (with passages allowing for these executions in times of war) and lists of grievances against Western Occupation. However, it’s truly an act of mere intimidation, a bullying technique to force control over local communities and the global stage.
“With an act of a sword, they manage to force both [American President] Obama and [British Prime Minister] Cameron to react. The two men, who control the world's most advanced militaries, find themselves at the mercy of the sword. Both displayed physical pain and grief when they condemned the way their nationals died."
[Professor Ibrahim al-Marash]
Come January 2015 then, the fate of two Japanese hostages seemed equally grim, Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto Jogo’s lives valued at over 200 million in a video directed at the Japanese government. As a failed businessman who ventured into Syria of his own volition, and his journalist friend who attempted to help him, they had stated previously they take “full responsibility” for anything that happens, the Japanese government unable to negotiate with terrorist demands. This cruel spectacle however, was to be met with a critical deviation: the power of the populace to subvert propaganda and intention through internet culture. Japanese Twitter users, and members of 4chan forums banded together to re-frame the narrative, utilizing anime and memeic humor to paint the ISIS aggressors as weak, ridiculous and foolish. The absurdist strains of Kawaii eyes, Naruto head swaps, and a rather powerful exchange of the hostage’s heads with Jihadi John, their would-be executor, fingered a delicate line of poor taste and revolutionary empowerment, all under the sarcastic hashtag: #ISIS Crap Photoshop Grand Prix.
"Comedy is protest.
It's 'I beg to differ' if you're fancy
or if you're Jewish, 'Hey, listen to this!"
It's 'I beg to differ' if you're fancy
or if you're Jewish, 'Hey, listen to this!"
[Mel Brooks]
These mocking images appear imprudent, shocking even, but no less so than the actual violence and brutality on display in Clashing of the Swords IV. As Mel Brooks or Charlie Chaplin proved in their satirical take downs of Hitler and fascism, power isn’t necessarily inherent as much as imbued. The myth and notoriety we afford figures in our history, as well as our present, can fuel their narratives and their power, and yet, it can just as easily disable them. ISIS contains power, but it is as much self-inflated as realistic, a complicated conglomeration of leaders and groups paving executions as currency for nationhood, spreading falsehoods over social media in attempts to control more populations.
The Japanese critique dismantles this egotistical, bullying display click by click, flooding social media not with images of terror, but ‘shops of humor and Japanese pride, re-framing the final moments of the hostages as 'a thing of agency', beyond mere victim-hood. It’s a problematic tactic perhaps, borne as much from desensitized minds and the queer gears of internet culture as patriotic effort. Yet, it’s a tactic nonetheless, providing the terrorized with the means to combat terror, not through denial or destruction, but amalgamations of pointed criticism, a virtual taunting of playground bullies with tangible implications. Utilizing humor to resist being controlled by fear. Courage and irrelevancy, a true marker of the humanity lying beneath the artificial divide of computer and user, screen and heart. ◊
The Japanese critique dismantles this egotistical, bullying display click by click, flooding social media not with images of terror, but ‘shops of humor and Japanese pride, re-framing the final moments of the hostages as 'a thing of agency', beyond mere victim-hood. It’s a problematic tactic perhaps, borne as much from desensitized minds and the queer gears of internet culture as patriotic effort. Yet, it’s a tactic nonetheless, providing the terrorized with the means to combat terror, not through denial or destruction, but amalgamations of pointed criticism, a virtual taunting of playground bullies with tangible implications. Utilizing humor to resist being controlled by fear. Courage and irrelevancy, a true marker of the humanity lying beneath the artificial divide of computer and user, screen and heart. ◊
