The death of Muammar Gaddafi

I have the luxury of writing this as a person unaffected by the brutality and unconscionable violence which marked Colonel Gaddafi’s regime. I did not lose sons or daughters in Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, members of my family did not disappear into Libya’s dark prisons, never to be seen again. All that means that I cannot possibly imagine the joy or relief of those for whom Gaddafi’s regime is over.

However, that does not prevent me recoiling from the wanton repetition of footage of a barely alive and bloodied man being tossed from one fighter to another like a rag doll. When definite news was scarce yesterday, news services chose to loop the shaky mobile phone  footage of Gaddafi (or was it his corpse?) over and over again. I felt like I was watching a kind of victory porn. Isn’t the nature of porn that it diminishes both watched and watcher, making them less than human? Doesn’t it turn victims into objects and watchers into voyeurs? There are reasons why we have conventions on these things, I believe.

Maybe this  photo , by Goran Tomasevic, says more than any number of images of Gaddafi’s bloodied corpse. Where is Libya heading now?