Jacoby on Soldiers’ Coffins
Jeff Jacoby supports
the ban on photos of soldiers’ coffins. His reasoning is that
it is disrespectful to show photos of those anonymous coffins, that the
photos utterly dehumanising.
He’s incorrect: it’s
not the photos that are dehumanising, but war itself. He writes:
They reduce Americans who died for their country to an abstraction. They deprive them of every shred of their individuality and personality. They turn them into nothing more than an icon—a seven-foot box covered with an American flag, just like every other seven-foot, flag-covered box in every other picture of caskets coming off a C-5 cargo plane at Dover Air Force Base.
The truth of the matter is: that’s what they are. For every one of those men, every hope, every dream, every effort of his parents to raise him well, every love, every pain, everything about him: all those things have been reduced to an anonymous seven-foot box. That’s the great tragedy of war. Even when done for the very best of reasons, it’s a terrible thing.
