Video Killed

... in My Mind and in My Car
We canm rewind we've gone too form

This text about what has been happening with us for several years in each individual moment. Previously, this was called "Zaitgai"; So, today we are part of a very strange Ceatgayst that requires a human being to make an effort to think, and then still make an effort to do something. Moreover, oddly enough, to make an effort of morality.

At the very beginning of 2015, ghouls from an organization called IS and ISIS ( in Russian “Islamic State”), they burned the Jordanian pilot alive, whose plane was knocked over over their positions. For several weeks they hid that the prisoner was dead, negotiating with the Jordan authorities on the exchange of a pilot in Islamic radicals sitting in the prison there. Why did they do this is incomprehensible. One way or another, at the very end of January they published an online video where the Jordanian, standing in a cage and doused with gasoline, is stacked by cinematographically, using one of the tricks popular in Hollywood: the lighter is brought to the end of a gasoline trace, a fuel road that runs to the victim. Bruce Willis did this in a “strong nut”, only more spectacular. The video is well mounted and makes a huge, unforgettable impression. In a sense, it completes the whole period in the history of the IS video production.

2014 opened a new era, an era of demonstrative conveyor decapitation. Cunning monsters, which relatively recently captured part of the territory of Syria and Iraq, launched a serial video genre into the circulation, in which they cut their heads to the next Western hostage. The video could be called staging, if it was not depicting a monstrous fact of a real murder. The calculation is accurate: the Western man at the computer, who is used to looking at the fake horrors in the cinema (which means he saw on the screen, and more than once, as a person is drank his throat), but almost never encountered extreme physical cruelty in everyday life, is horrified, but he will still look. What is even more terrible from. Will Selfh in the Essum Essums ( “We Are Passive Consumers of the PornoGraphy of Violence” ) noticed: there are terrible ads of an advertisement, with which Islamists force the West to fork out - in a literal and figurative sense. The hostages are traded, this is not a secret; Even if they are exchanged not for money, but for the fulfillment of absurd requirements, this is still trade. However, the main product in the assortment of IS is not the life of the unfortunate, who fell into their paws, but the fear of the public. Islamists are trying to materialize the metaphor: do not forget, the word terror is etymologically dates back to the word “horror”. Ghouls want to inspire horror to peaceful people, paralyze, make the very name of their gang inspire awe. Therefore, they burned alive the unfortunate Jordan, and even in the cage. Symbolic capital in the modern world is much more important than real.

The killers know how to take off their killings so that the spectacle shakes blood. They know how to mount how and where to lay out online, even natural scenery and wardrobe of participants in the ominous performance are carefully thought out.

Many, including the selffie, believe that before us is a phenomenon that is characteristic of us precisely for Western life. The point is not only in the masterful ownership of modern technology - killers know how to remove their killings so that the spectacle shakes blood. They know how to mount how and where to lay out online, even natural scenery and wardrobe of participants in the ominous performance are carefully thought out. It is known that one of the main executioners, the British by origin, is crying Jihadi John ; The devilish sense of humor is clearly present here - three more were nicknamed Paul , George and Ringo . Jihadi Beatles , that’s right. ISLAMIC STATE has a lot of people with a western background, Dostoevsky’s characters go there, who were going to play a bloody scandal with dozens (still dozens) thousands of killed and mutilated, go there. They were exactly the same to go and go to the Donbass - to the gangs of fascizoids, according to thoughtlessness called "separatists" or "militias." The “separatist” was Roger Keysent or even Mahatma Gandhi, and embittered losers who crawled out of social cracks carefully equipped with Russian power - no, these are just bandits. It is curious that they behave according to the same scheme as the Jihadi John company,-use technologies invented by people whom they hate and exterminate, try to inspire horror with the help of Hi-Tech , think exclusively with pop culture stamps (the very one that was invented in the damned West). There are only two differences. Jihadi John knows that he is doomed and he will have nowhere to hide (and there is no need). The conditional Russian “militia” in the Donbass is confident that behind him the entire nuclear arsenal of Russia and (once bottomless) purse Putin personally: in which case they will cover. Jihadi John would have knocked the Malaysian liner with great pleasure, turn out to him such a case - and then he would take dozens of beautiful videos with torn corpses. The Russian separatist accidentally ruined more than two hundreds of strangers - and immediately began to lie, dodge, but could not resist the temptation to shake the dead and pose (beard, “kalashnikov”, gloomy erysipelas) among air explorers and corpses. But the courage was not enough - the hero caught himself and began to tell stories about the enemy photographer, who nailed on the valiant defender of children and women.

Talking about the "battle of civilizations", "collision of cultures", etc. In this case, they are meaningless. The above characters are inside one “civilization” if we allow ourselves to use a dubious term. We are in the West, only this West is now everywhere - in the north, south, east and itself of the West. The era of colonialism and decolonization ended with the fact that everything became a metro and - at the same time - a province. I'm not talking about the standard of living or accessibility of goods: I'm about the arrangement of people's consciousness. Before us is the world, obsessed with hyperreal, which is why he lost every idea of ​​“just reality”, the reality of human suffering, fears, pain, joy, forgetting about the reality of common sense. Therefore, any well-meaning levoliberal explanations of what is happening in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, in the east of Ukraine, in Nigeria-they say, we are observing the reaction of unfortunate people tortured by Western colonialism, their atrocity is a way to act in the absence of the opportunity to act, the rebels (as one freedom-loving journalist once put it) cut the throats with prisoners to make a political problem to make a political problem The independence of their people is more convex ” - such explanations are not only working - no, they are crushing and dangerous. Stupidity is generally a very dangerous thing, right? If you don’t even remember Baudrillard and his famous (and very true, if you think about it) discussions about the “war of the bay”, then the difference between hyperreality and reality can be described quite simply: hyperreality is observed , ahaya, covered with cold later, claiming that it is, true reality, and live in real reality, they participate in it. The killers of all stripes are in a passionate desire to become famous and work today for those who are ready to observe their tricks on the screen. Until then, of course, to observe until the audience themselves find themselves with tied hands, in an orange robe, with a knife by the throat, against the background of an infinitely beautiful desert. The opportunity at any time to change places with online and television actors determines the belonging of most of the current population of the Earth in what is very inaccurately called “Western civilization”. This is the civilization of consumers who excites and scares the opportunity to be consumed.

“To imagine yourself in the place of someone depicted on the screen” and is called today to “consume”. You are not, you are a role, a function that can change. It is hoped that it is you that you will watch how exactly they cut off his head.

It is here that the border between the lack of moral choice and its presence runs. Two areas: one is an area of ​​passive contemplation, consumption of images of cruelty (as well as images of meticulous hyperrealist sex in pornography); The other is the area of ​​active participation in real life. In the first case, the choice for you is made - or at least not you make a choice. You - observe, horrified or excited. Both you do, imagining yourself in the place of the killed (or copied). “To imagine yourself in the place of someone depicted on the screen” and is called today to “consume”. You are not, you are a role, a function that can change. It is hoped that it is you that you will watch how exactly they cut off his head. You are scared: after all, you yourself could be in his place. Cool .

The second case is completely different. You do not participate in this game. You do not shudder, imagining a jagged blade under the chin. You will compass the victim only because he is a person, like you, but - and this is very important! - He is another person . You do not want a terrible fate not to yourself , but specifically to him or specifically to them . Out of respect for another - and for yourself - you do not consume video art Jihadi John 'a.

And then there is a need to act. It is not necessary to pick up a weapon and go to Iraqi Kurdistan to save the Yezidov; Thank God they will try to save themselves - and many in those parts will help them. The people there are not used to consuming life and death from the screen, they just live and die - how they differ from Jihadi Beatles . Act in reality is first of all to refuse to participate in hyperreality. Someone does not play Bodriyarov a game that has not heard about it or does not have a physical, technological, financial opportunity (and that is good), and someone consciously prefers to sit aside, read a book or just think. That is, live separately. Even such a simple intentional touch of reality to hyperreality destroys the latter, because there is nothing left but ordinary human affairs. Yes, lies, cruelty, violence, murder make up a considerable part of these things, but you can’t do anything here. So it would be and will be so. About this many hundred years ago, on the eve of the next senseless bloodshed, two Indian gentlemen talked, one of which, however, was a god. God advised the interlocutor-warrior: “See only to business, and not to benefit from him. Yes, it will not be your motivation - the benefit of activities! And do not indulge in inaction! "