29.

Sarcasm wears after a while. (Ask my friends.) Yes, there’s a time to smirk sardonically at a celebrity’s meltdown (Charlie Sheen’s being the most recent) or a colleague’s comeuppance. But what of someone who watches actual beheadings on the Internet? This is a different story. This is not aestheticized macabre, macabre at a distance, where no one really dies or even gets hurt too bad—not fictional or artistic or filtered through slicked-up media. This is a matter of real blood, real pain, real death.

After 9/11, beheadings of American citizens were made available to millions on the Internet. Take the case of Eugene Armstrong, known as Jack, a construction worker from Michigan who moved to Iraq because of the lucrative work opportunities there.

On September 16, 2004, only months into his stay in Iraq, Armstrong and two other GSCS employees were kidnapped by the Tawhid and Jihad terrorist groups, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The terrorists claimed they would free the men if the United States would release the female prisoners from Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison being run by the American military. If the women were not freed, the terrorists went on to say, all three men would be killed. When the United States decided not to release the two Iraqi women incarcerated there—scientists allegedly involved in Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs—the terrorists stayed true to their word. On September 20, they beheaded Armstrong. A video of the horrendous act was posted online. Over the next weeks, the two other hostages were decapitated, and videos were again uploaded.

The Armstrong video traumatized the world. Several masked terrorists stand behind him. He is kneeling. He wears a blindfold and an orange jumpsuit. One of the terrorists reads a statement demanding the release of the female prisoners. He finishes. The others hold Armstrong, and he slits the prisoner’s throat with a knife. He then begins sawing Armstrong’s bloody neck. The sound of squealing pigs in the background makes the scene more horrific.

Despite the appalling nature of this episode, millions watched the video only hours after it was streamed. Internet servers had trouble managing the traffic. More than half of these viewers lived in the United States, Armstrong’s home country. Many millions more watched the beheadings of the other hostages. Seven years later, multitudes continue to view these and other beheadings on websites such as liveleak.com (formerly ogrish.com). These sites peddle a new genre of exploitation: war porn, video footage of actual beheadings and also of live combat, often supplied by the soldiers themselves.

One man, going by the pseudonym “John,” tried to explain his obsession. “It’s the thrill of quasi-participation, I suppose. This is no horror movie. If it is titillation I feel, then it is because this is happening to a real person. The fear is real, the brutality is real, the blood is real, it is all real.”

The viewing of grisly violence as an experience of bare reality—this is a prevalent assumption in the war-porn world. Ogrish.com once marketed itself with this blunt question: “Can you handle life?”