The BBC, during their main news programme of the day, has just broadcast the graphic mobile phone footage of Gaddafi being first detained, and then seemingly killed in cold blood. It climaxed with a lingering shot of Gaddafi’s bloodied and lifeless face.
I’m not here concerned with the morality of his killing, beyond observing that there is a difference between the actions of an amateur army made up of those directly at the sharp end of a dictator’s brutality, and the planned summary execution of Bin Laden by trained US marines. So I would hesitate to condemn Gaddafi’s killing in quite the straightforward way that I did Bin Laden’s. Rather, I’m interested here in the reporting, and in particular the broadcasting of that video footage.
There seem to be two fundamental positions. On the one hand, there is the view that showing such graphic and violent imagery dehumanises the viewer as much as the person taking the video. It is unnecessary and merely sensationalist prurience, appealing to all our basest and most primitive instincts. On the other is the claim that we need, indeed have a moral duty, to be exposed to the reality of what’s being done in our name. War is too sanitised, and we too easily forget what it really means, and perhaps too easily acquiesce in its commission. We require our noses to be rubbed in all its violent and disturbing reality.
I genuinely do not know what I think about this. I can see powerful arguments in both directions. I have a strong suspicion that we do too easily protect ourselves from realities we’d rather not face. But I also worry about the thirst we seem to have to see the blood, to treat the world as if it were a horror film or a video game.
I can only leave you to draw your own conclusions, and come to your own rapprochement between these two legitimate positions. But one thing I do know. It is not necessary, nor is it proper or civilised or acceptable to print, as the distasteful and ever-repugnant Sun has done, a full-page photograph of Gaddafi’s half-blown-off face along with the headline, “That’s for Lockerbie”.
Fr Stephen Brown 
Very well said. Did you see the ‘Lockerbie relative’ on BBC Breakfast? He was fantastic – wrestling with doubts about how he would have preferred Gaddafi to have been brought to trial in The Hague, if for no other reason than to answer questions. But at the same time acknowledging the more immediate aims of the Libyan peoples to have ‘justice’. but he felt no sense of justice. He was also very open about how he claimed he has no evidence that Gaddafi knew anything about Lockerbie, that the evidence pointed more strongly towards Iran. Hmmmm…
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I didn’t, I fear. I think it’s hard to argue that killing Gaddafi was a more moral route than having him stand trial, but it has also to be admitted that such a trial would have brought its own perils on the ground.
But you’re right to focus in on the simple fact that we don’t actually know whether, or to what extent, Gaddafi was responsible personally for Lockerbie in particular, and that merely adds to the vileness of the Sun and all its works.
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