Susan Sontag, The Pain of Others

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an US writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She was born on January 16th of 1933 in New York City and she died the 28th of December of 2004 also in NYC although she was buried in Montparnasse Cementery (Paris).

Her work The Pain of Others talks about Virginia Woolf's reaction on the pictures sent by the Spanish Republican Government during the Civil War against Franco and the fascism.

First at all I am surprised, in a good sense, knowing that someone from the States cared about the Civil War in Spain. I am not saying that nobody cared, but it is true that Hitler took all the spotlight about the fascism in Europe and, while being studying at Lycoming College, in a class named US Government and Politics, the professor said the dictatorship of Franco was an "authoritary government". It is good to know that not everybody was so ignorant about this matter since, as far as my intelligence tells me, a government means somebody voted for you to be in charge of a nation, country or state... What happened in Spain was a massacre: during the Civil War and during the 36 years of dictatorship we suffered afterwards.
That being said, I presented here the three abstracts from her work that have caught my attention:

1.- «Had the question been, How can we best contribute to the defense of the Spanish Republic against the forces of militarist and clerical fascism?, the photographs might instead have reinforced their belief in the justness of that struggle. The pictures Woolf has conjured up do not in fact show what war, war as such, does. They show a particular way of waging war, a way at that time routinely described as "barbaric," in which civilians are the target. General Franco was using the same tactics of bombardment, massacre, torture, and the killing and mutilation of prisoners that he had perfected as a commanding officer in Morocco in the 1920s. Then, more acceptably to ruling powers, his victims had been Spain's colonial subjects, darker-hued and infidels to boot; now his victims were compatriots. To read in the pictures, as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics. For Woolf, as for many antiwar polemicists, war is generic, and the images she describes are of anonymous, generic victims. The pictures sent out by the government in Madrid seem, improbably, not to have been labeled.»

It is obvius that many wars have been captured since the invention of photography. Many photographs can look the same: destruction and death. There's no other way to look at war pictures but for what they bring to living beings. Sometimes we feel numb when we see them but everything depends on the eye of who's watching. When there are about someone or something that feels close to us, we feel touched and moved and we, obviously, will feel rage against those who provoke that death and destruction, that's why Susan mentions after this paragraph what a Jew will feel about a Jewish kid killed by a islamic terrorist and what a Palestinian will feel about a kid killed in Gaza by a Jewish. It always works the same and usually the guilty part will try to put the blame in the victims, like Franco saying it was the basque people who bombed themselves while it was actually the Condor Legion sent by Hitler to help him win the war he started in an attempt to destroy the democratic Spanish Republic.

2.- «Cite the most famous photograph taken during the Spanish Civil War, the Republican soldier "shot" by Robert Capa's camera at the same moment he is hit by an enemy bullet, and virtually everyone who has heard of that war can summon to mind the grainy black-and-white image of a man in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves collapsing backward on a hillock, his right arm flung behind him as his rifle leaves his grip; about to fall, dead, onto his own shadow.»

La muerte de un miliciano by Robert Capa

The powerful photograph Susan Sontag is talking about is above these lines. This image proofs, not just the cruelty of wars but the ephemeral life. The verb to shoot has two meanings in English, Robert Capa was using the harmless one at the same time a fascist was aiming his rifle to a living person. Probably Capa shot his camera at the same time a fascist was pulling his trigger. Probably the sound of the bullet got to their ears right after it pierced the soldiers body... And that's the outcome of wars: people being killed by the thirst for power of a few. And that's what war photographs' communicate: the horror, the fear, the cruelty and the death. But sadly sometimes we just get used to them and we don't see what's behind of them anymore.

3.- «Among single antiwar images, the huge photograph that Jeff Wall made in 1992 titled "Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush Susan Sontag . of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986)" seems to me exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power. The antithesis of a document, the picture, a Cibachrome transparency seven and a half feet high and more than thirteen feet wide and mounted on a light box, shows figures posed in a landscape, a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist's studio. Wall, who is Canadian, was never in Afghanistan. The ambush is a made-up event in a savage war that had been much in the news. Wall set as his task the imagining of war's horror (he cites Goya as an inspiration), as in nineteenth-century history painting and other forms of history-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—-just before the invention of the camera—such as tableaux vivants, wax displays, dioramas, and panoramas, which made the past, especially the immediate past, seem astonishingly, disturbingly real.»

A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986 by Jeff Wall

I honestly cannot understand where is the fun of mocking war photos (since the one above this lines is a set up) but at the same time, as Susan Sontag explains later on, it's not the staging itself but what we cannot understand from a war, no matter how many images you see. We will never understand the pain, the terror, the smell of blood, of burning flesh, of death... Only those who fought or tried to capture it through a camera could tell.



I think is pretty obvious that, as a Spaniard, I was going to choose parts that are related to my history. Is not that I just believed that this events were very powerful in the history of my country (because there's still, what we call "two Spains" since the crimes of this war have never been judged and the memories and repercussions of the dictatorship of Franco still have a huge influence in the Judicial, Legislative and Executive powers of my country and also influence in the government) but also because my family was personally involved since my great grandfather and my great uncles were killed because they refused to fight for the fascists.
It is true that I can just imagine how it was a war. I was lucky enough to not go throug it. I was lucky that my grandmother survived because her dad and brothers loved her so much that asked for a favor to some policemen so they would save her life... But we need to wake up. We need to stop being unmoved by wars. I didn't live a war, but I grew up learning my family history, told by my grandma. So many times I asked her to tell me again that I almost could feel what she felt.
I have Fulbright friends from Gaza who go to sleep in their Colleges in the US without knowing if their families will make it through the day or the night...
In a world with so many information within reach, we shouldn't be quite, we shouldn't be feeling numbed by those awful images. We should be shaken everytime and we should rise until it ends.