CONNECT/Eddie Holt: Jean-Luc Goddard once remarked that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.
Considering the eternal, elemental human conflict between beauty and brutality, he was broadly right. Now, following bombs in Beslan, beheadings in Baghdad, a glut of broken and bloodied bodies in news bulletins and press photographs, even Goddard's symbolic formulation seems tame.
News - especially 24-hour TV news - means that butchery in an age of global communications is regularly beamed directly into homes. TV crews and press photographers can legitimately claim they are merely showing actuality but the results of seeing all the gore must be desenitising. The human appetite for horror is not simply being appeased - it's being amplified.
Winston Churchill believed that if the truth of casualties and conditions in World War I were known to the public, the war would have been stopped within days. The media - which then meant the press exclusively - was neither allowed nor keen to report the truth so propaganda allowed unspeakable slaughter to continue. Now, unspeakable slaughter is being used as propaganda.
It always has been, of course, but primarily by the victors. Mass public crucifixions in Rome, heads on spikes until a few centuries ago, Hiroshima, newsreels, even the Sun's sick 'Gotcha' - all used slaughter as propaganda. Now, with states seeking a sanitised presentation of their own atrocities, it's freelance terror groups that are keen to publicise their own brutality.
This month we have seen, not only snippets of the duration and aftermath of the Beslan outrage, but the hostage-takers' video from inside the school. It was, remembering that we knew the outcome, heart-stoppingly horrific. It was intended to be as are the beheadings in Iraq - though only ghouls who bother to surf the Internet will view the grisly decapitations.
The media has long been a key propaganda tool in war and conquest. Nowadays however, with so much media, it's practically as important as military hardware and ammunition. Terror groups conduct 'spectaculars' - none, to date, more grossly spectacular than flying planes into New York's World Trade Centre - while states typically commit atrocities in private.
An exception was the disgusting 'Shock and Awe' opening to the attack on Iraq. Mind you, we saw very few of the mangled and dismembered bodies caused by such intense bombing. It was portrayed as practically a bloodless business - a form of military keyhole surgery to root out Saddam Hussein and his supporters. It wasn't, of course. It couldn't be.
It too left behind headless bodies. Yet distance from the results of your actions makes it easier to deal with them. Few people - thankfully - are sufficiently barbaric to cut off another person's head with a blade. But many are prepared to aim bombs from 15,000 feet knowing, yet not having to witness, the results of their behaviour. The blade is mediaeval; the bomb modern.
The thug (or thugs) who this week beheaded Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley deserve to be bombed. 'Live by the sword, die by the bomb' seems a fitting formulation for such barbarians and few Westerners, at least, would quibble with that. 'Live by the bomb, die by the sword' is however another matter entirely and especially so in the wealthy, machine-driven Western world.
Eugene Armstrong, Jack Hensley and Ken Bigley were not, of course, Westerners who lived by the bomb. Their thuggish and frankly, cowardly captors abducted them because they were soft targets. If however, the kidnappers had abducted and say, shot three bomber pilots known to have dismembered dozens of innocent Iraqis, might comparable revulsion ensue? It's unlikely.
It's unlikely because using a blade to sever a human head is viscerally ghastly. That's precisely why it's being done. It is unspeakable slaughter as propaganda. It reaches parts of the human psyche that bombs seldom do. The thought of doing it or having it done to oneself is chilling even though the result may be no more gruesome than that caused by bombs or even bullets.
After all, forced to choose between pressing a button that could kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people and cutting off another person's head with a knife, most people would choose the button. Technology, as well as media, has already desenitised us and in this regard, American troops, because they have the best technology, are the most desenitised of all.
This week, the British ambassador to Rome, Ivor Roberts (who was formerly ambassador to Dublin) described George Bush as "the best recruiting sergeant ever for al-Quaida" adding that "if anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it's al-Quaida". It's true: the sadistic thugs beheading Westerners in Iraq will prosper more under Bush than under Kerry.
It's ironic that because of their inhumanity, they have managed to personalise the conflict in Iraq. The fate of Tony Blair is now metaphorically mirrored in the fate of Ken Bigley, whose abductors are exploiting the global media. Goddard was right about the girl and the gun. The abductors have cornered a global audience with their unspeakably vicious variation on an eternal theme.