“I Killed The General With My Camera”
Blue Crab Boulevard:
“The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?’”
I’ve written before about those words that Eddie Adams wrote in Time Magazine describing the photograph he took of General Nguyan Ngoc Loan summarily executing a captured Viet Cong. Eddie Adams, who died in 2004, regretted taking that picture and the damage he had done to a good man’s reputation.
Daniel Finkelstein at The Times Online Comment Central writes today about a revisionist myth again propagated by British televison.
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That VC in the pic killed that SVN soldier’s family in cold blood. So he gave the scum a taste of his own medicine. At the time that I saw this on TV (it was played on CBS) I saw this a good indication that we were fighting that war like we did in WWII. Little did I know that we were about to be Nifonged” by Walter Concrete.
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:20 pmStill pictures, and even video, are so out of context of the entire picture. And the MSM knows this, and uses it to their own agenda.
Most people have absolutely NO concept of the reality of battle/war. They allow their perception to be manipulated by what the media [permits] them to see. As we have seen in the Iraq/A-stan wars, and in other troubles in the Middle East, the media is no longer satisfied with taking a roll of film and sifting through to just the [right] frame that will get the layman to see/think/believe what they want them to as they are now photo-shopping images.
I was a pre-teen when I saw this photo in Time. I was horrified, but I was also a child who was sheltered in a country that didn’t have war taking place on its soil … nor did I understand who was what in that war. I couldn’t keep all the different “Viet”s straight. And nor did I have any historical comprehension of the endless wars in that Asain corner of the world.
The fact that Eddie Adams felt so responsible for his craft and the results of having presented this image of the General, and then the media/public misinterpretation of it is honorable and admirable … something that quite frankly, in general, is severely lacking in the news industry today. Which makes men such as Pat and Michael Yon (who has taken countless photos that reflect the honesty of war) such important historical documentarians in an age where the MSM has lost its collective mind.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:06 pmNobody would listen to Adams, it didn’t fit the narrative.
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:06 pmthis is why, when 60 minutes made the death film of us going over to the gulf warI, they had to depart us the day after we stepped off of the plane. No other “media” was allowed near us. it’s a shame not all lessons are learned from following generations
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:41 pm