There is a video online showing the bodies of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik. They are covered in the dust and rubble of a destroyed house, its grey concrete set against a grey sky.
It is shocking, though almost commonplace now, to see friends and relations like this, their agony beamed around the world before you have even been informed, still less taken in the news of their deaths. Instancy is more important than contemplation.
But what is more shocking is that for every Westerner caught in the firestorm, there are thousands of similar images, reflecting similar realities, of those who have no names and only simulacra of stories, and those often forgotten behind the potency of the visible. The man being whipped into unconsciousness in an Idlib police station, or beaten by a braying mob of soldiers bearing down in escalating waves in a Hama street – did anyone ever discover who they were, what they had done, or whether they survived?
Marie Colvin, in her last posting on the Facebook group with which she shared the traumas that she was witnessing, described the death of a baby, whose name will probably never now surface in any newspaper. “Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing,” she wrote. “His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped.”
This is how it has been for three weeks now in the suburb of Baba Amr, a daily repeater gun of death. Siege is as old as war itself, of course; there is nothing new in that. Tyrants have bombarded even their own cities, notably President Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez in Hama 30 years ago.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9099318/Marie-Colvin-Syrian-violence-is-the-hideous-death-cry-of-a-species-sinking-towards-extinction.html
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