Prior to the 19th century, there were two ways you knew what war looked like: see for yourself, or see a handcrafted depiction, such as a painting or tapestry.
The development of the camera brought the novel phenomenon of war photography. There are photographs of the American Civil War. For the first time, it was possible to see a lifelike depiction of warfare. Sure, by then, the world's most skilled painters had developed a level of realism that rivals even modern photography in terms of lifelikeness. But even then, making a painting of a war is a highly propagandistic pursuit.
When a representative artwork is made, it is the synthesis of two agencies, the agency of the artist and the agency of the subject matter. The primary factors determining the balance of agency are the technical influence of the medium, the relationship between the artist and the subject, and the spatial-temporal distance between the artist and the subject. More succinctly, the balance between the artist's agency and the subject matter's agency is primarily determined by technical, social, and proximal factors.
Let's consider the technical factor. Handcrafted media, such as paintings, afford a great deal of agency to the artist. There's nothing accidental in a war painting. Every soldier, every horse, every wisp of cannon smoke, is a conscious decision the artist makes. The subject matter has agency, too: the artist is probably on the payroll of the winning side, after all. But in strictly technical terms, the artist has all the power.
But in a photograph, the balance slides more towards the subject matter. The photographer is likely to capture unintended details. A war painting is going to make war look like a glorious pursuit, a cathartic exercise of power by the victor over the loser. A war photograph, on the other hand, is going to make war look like a terrible mess of chaos, uncertainty, and gory violence on both sides. A war painting is made by an artist spatially and temporally distant to the events depicted, after the events of battle have been intepreted and integrated into a narrative. A war photograph necessarily has to be made by a photographer who is at the battlefield, at the time of the battle. By shifting the balance of agency away from the artist and toward the subject matter, the photograph democratizes the artistic process. We get a representation of war that is closer to the experience of the poor grunts who have to fight it, a representation that can't help being less concerned with the interests of the politically powerful.
Of course, it's black and white. It's grainy. It only captures a moment. To be published and circulated, photos must pass editorial review, which will select against photos that are inconvenient to a political narrative. But these are technical limitations of the medium.
With the 1930s came war reels. Still heavily edited, still censored. You aren't going to go to the movie theater to see war footage that your government would prefer for you not to see. But if a photograph is an opportunity for the subject matter to exercise agency beyond the control of the artist, a film takes that same opportunity 20 or 30 times a second.
In the USA, the postwar boom and the rise of television create a media environment in which war footage may be displayed to the general public that the government would not have chosen to show if they'd had unilateral editorial control. Of course, the government still has the power to censor anything on television they want. But, one way or another, the 1960s had very disturbing footage on the televisions in people's homes. USAmericans see the Vietnam War differently from how they saw previous wars. The Vietnam War is not an act of heroism bravely carried out by the US, but a protracted campaign of incomprehensibly brutal violence conducted at the behest of politically powerful cynics. The masses object to the war on the basis that it is cruel and pointless.
This democratization of media is a revolutionary program initiated by the technology of photography and film. Technologies are agents of change that can act outside of the goals of human beings; as a technology develops, its power to independently affect the social sphere is only amplified. Consequently the logic of media democratization becomes a hyperlogic in the present historical moment. We don't have war reels anymore - now, we have war TikToks.
In an unprecedented feat of media democratization, we have put unreasonably high-definition digital video cameras in the hands of almost every person on Earth[1], relegating 20th-century-style journalistic videography to the dustbin of "legacy media". The dialectic between artist and subject matter has reached a final synthesis: they are literally the same person, a combatant or unfortunate civilian recording events unfolding around them in real time, with their cell phone, publishing the footage online so that it reaches its audience so quickly that editorial review cannot possibly censor it.
[1] Editorial: Eating in the Age of Smartphones: The Good, the Bad, and the Neutral
It sure is amazing that the horrors of war can now be livestreamed.
The war in Vietnam resulted in an antiwar movement in the USA that arguably contributed to the empire's first military defeat. The war in Gaza has seen the same process unfold in speedrun fashion. The US got involved in Vietnam years before the antiwar movement reached its zenith. At the time of writing, it has been scarcely more than one year since the war in Gaza began, yet the war is already incredibly unpopular among the American people. I remember, when the war started, I was worried that the masses would side with Isr*el. But contrary to my expectations, it's astonishing how rapidly the general mood has turned in favor of Palestine, considering how this squarely contradicts the pro-Zionist narrative that the political establishment pushes via policy and legacy media. It's heartening to see that media democratization can be so effective at undermining domestic support for imperialism.
But I don't watch war TikToks myself. I don't have TikTok, and if I did, I wouldn't want to see war footage. It's gruesome. It turns my stomach, and engages my empathy in ways that aren't conducive to my best interests. It makes me wonder what impact this has on the public consciousness. Where does this hyperlogic lead? Clearly, it is leading to general opposition to war, as well as a strong and personal sense of empathy toward the oppressed masses in the context of a war of anticolonial resistance. It cultivates a sense of distrust and revulsion towards the bourgeois state. It even seems to be a vehicle for class consciousness: the war in Gaza, more than anything else happening right now, is polarizing along class lines. The bourgeoisie are all firmly, unanimously Zionist. You can immediately tell the class background of a publication on the basis of what it calls the war. Media owned by the bourgeoisie call it "the Israel-Hamas War" - even Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia", abides this convention. Only the people call it "the war in Gaza" or "the genocide in Gaza".
The likely result of this? The people organize against the war. A patchwork of left-wing organizations emerges to form a dynamic, decentralized grassroots coalition, organizing protests and conducting political action, of the direct *and* electoral varieties. This is what's currently happening. Opportunities to organize will drop themselves right into your lap. We are seeing large protests and campus occupations - this will continue, and amplify, developing into a protracted resistance campaign. What is the critical mass of US residents that must be organized before the bourgeois state is forced to concede the demand for Palestinian national liberation? Twenty million? Thirty? We will blow right past it. You might wonder how activists are going to educate the people, how they are going to raise awareness to such a point that a mass movement can achieve concrete aims in the hyperindividuated social environment of the contemporary US. But it is already happening, no matter what you or any other individual does. Some fear that the people will lose interest in the struggle for liberation; this fear is unfounded. There is no greater force radicalizing the masses than the actual material circumstances at hand.