George Orwell said that good prose was like a windowpane. He should know; his own windowpanes often revealed painfully clear views of the 20th century. When a writer's work is capable of being admired by both extremes of a political spectrum, in this case Christopher Hitchins and Michael Moore, then surely it contains something essential about the human condition.
One of Orwell's As I Please essays, written on September 8th 1944, has special bearing upon the Abu Ghraib pictures. In his essay, Orwell wrote about the humiliation of two female French collaborators:
"I have before me an exceptionally disgusting photograph, from the Star of August 29, of two partially undressed women, with shaven heads and with swastikas painted on their faces, being led through the streets of Paris amid grinning onlookers. The Star — not that I am picking on the Star, for most of the press has behaved likewise — reproduces this photograph with seeming approval."
Brutality souvenirs are not new.
In the old American south, photographs of lynchings were sold as souvenirs and keepsakes. In Nazi Germany, ordinary soldiers sent back photographs of their murdered victims. Hunters like to pose with their quarry [Image source: deendayal.com]. In many of these brutality keepsakes, perpetrators are in high spirits. The source of their humor is not clear, but perhaps it's the relief that they are not them or it.
In his essay, Orwell suggested that people wearied by years of unending warfare against a brutal enemy tend to become brutes. He ended with a quote from Nietzsche — always reliably gloomy — who warned against staring into abysses and fighting dragons. It's a plausible hypothesis.
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