You look at a photograph and you think that words are useless and are given to slackers only for pastime. An image can contain the entire pain of the world, and the flicker of a goal can be more shocking than an entire library of books; when they come out they do it abruptly, brutally like a scream, a challenge, an offense. They’re bullets, knives. They tear apart. Already. Nothing is truer than photography, the infinite instant against which there is nothing else to do but look and reflect. And accuse. Because the photos accuse, they are irrefutable evidence against them, they say, they reveal the guilty, they are an anthology of indisputable clues that nail the murderers, the cruel, the fanatics every time. There is nothing left between here and there where it all happened. There is absolute security in everything, as if the images knew more about themselves and their position in the world. No more doubts, why should you? You know. There is a photograph.
Then you realize that history is full of lies of which photography has been a tool. Because something fundamental was missing: the caption, which testifies the place and time in which it was taken, the circumstances, the names of those who were portrayed, especially who had taken it and why, and who had spread it and given to newspapers. From the false mass graves of Gaddafi to the massacres of Timisoara, the retouched, constructed and plagiarized photographs have done good service to revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, to tyrants and their enemies, to democracies and totalitarianisms. And it is frightening to see how much we Westerners have become deceitable, the West which for many remains the eternal nest of knowledge.
Because in the middle, between us and the ” real ” photographic, propaganda slips, which sells false truths, modifies the facts, dresses them in its image and likeness. And against which the only weapon we have left is prudence, infinite doubt, the suspicion of the inquisitor who is in no hurry but always wants to verify. It doesn’t always happen.
For example, Afghanistan afterwards: after us, after the West, after the rout, after a democracy that basically never existed except in its propaganda figuration (also made up of images alas! to reassure us these twenty years), after another tens of thousands of innocents ended up in the sovereignty of fugitives, refugees, beggars. The Afghanistan of emptiness because it is full of the Others, of the Taliban, of the enemies of women of the tolerance of everything. Who now seem to live alone, without witnesses. Perfect background for any crime. Forge of rumors, unverifiable news, disinformation, propaganda, from many sides. From that sudden void of images come two photographs.
The first reproduced, multiplied, exhibited, is terrible: children’s feet coming out of a pile of rags, siblings who died of hunger, neglect, criminal disinterest that God’s students have for everything that is not their paradise of prohibitions and sharia law. The faces are not seen, you cannot see the glassy and inexpressive eyes of the dead, wide open in the immobile body, of an eternal cruelty. The photo speaks indeed screams: of pain, of that Inhuman we call that to exorcise it and instead, here and now, in this third millennium, it is everywhere around us, it is human, too human.
In front of the photo he is horrified, swears and deprecates, he wonders, what naivety! to do what we have not done by signing the delivery of 34 million people to these zealots of violence and purifying hunger.
The photo is perhaps true, unfortunately, perhaps the children really died of hunger. But someone cautiously asked himself, before publishing it, who took or sent it? The gaze falls on the wording. He explains how the photo was picked up by news agencies from the Facebook profile of former Afghan MP Haji Muhammad Mohaqeq. Do you know who this person is? Has anyone done at least some research on him before relaunching it as an indisputable document of horror? This man is one of the biggest criminals of the Afghan civil war! Among the most ruthless mujahideen that the Americans then put in government. During the civil war, his men drove nails into the skulls of prisoners. He and his group in the streets of Kabul were capable of the worst violence.
Mohaqeq is well acquainted with the horrible practice of “raqsi morda”, the dance of the dead: when they cut off the heads of the enemies, they poured boiling oil into the body which, still in the grip of convulsions, for the last nervous jolts, moved, and accompanied them with the music of portable radios, turned on for the show. Not to mention the end that fell to the prisoners who ended up in the hands of the mujahideen, left inside containers under the sun, at 45 degrees, until they died “cooked”.
So are we sure about that photo? What are we “posting” and pasting on social media? As it happened days ago with the young volleyball player who died … without even a search, without ascertaining how and why she died. We wondered why this person posts a similar photo on Facebook, what interests move him…? Why do you care about Afghan children? Children were dying of hunger even months ago, when America controlled the country, and Mohaqeq was a deputy… And not only Hazara children, even those of other ethnic groups were dying like flies! No one has wondered if this photo is true… When you’re starving, pretending to be dead children can earn you a meal for the whole family. There is no certainty, we will never know.
Another Afghan photo, this one less bloody: the son of Mullah Omar, Yaqoob, minister of defense, in a Taliban turban and the air of knowing very long, with a general next to him, in a very braided uniform that looks like a survival of cobwebs great-grandparents. This photo was posted online by the Taliban. Simple breaking latest news of the new Afghanistan? You notice a sensational detail: the man, wearing the uniform of the old regular army that fought alongside the Westerners against the Taliban, wears a voluminous pair of Soviet mustaches. But he doesn’t have a beard.
Propaganda: it serves to suggest that the Taliban are not fanatics at all, alongside them and in positions of high responsibility there is also room for those who, even if a little beaten up, plucked by events, belong to the other Afghanistan, ours. And so… trust us.