The Stuff of Life

Unsubscribe Me is Amnesty's campaign against state sponsored torture as part of the War On Terror (tm). As part of this, they are producing a series of short films. The second looks at waterboarding, and shows how the Stuff of Life can be an instrument of torture...

Maybe not quite as shocking as the first film, but still powerful stuff. Particularly it's use of advertising's style conventions to give the whole thing a harrowing gloss.

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Comments

[Cam Beck]

Once they create their own microsite to combat the sawing off of innocent journalists' (and other heathens') heads, maybe I'll start listening to what they say about waterboarding.

[Jon Howard]

Cam, I think (and so do Amnesty) that you can be vehemently opposed to the (without doubt) evil works of extremists yet still believe our own Governments should hold higher standards - just because others do bad things, doesn’t make it OK for us to do the same.

To my mind torture is always wrong on all sorts of levels – politically, socially, morally, culturally, spiritually, it’s just not right. Particularly for people who should be ‘innocent until proven guilty’…and often ARE innocent.

I also recognise that this is opinion though, and others may think differently. But even if you do, there must be a place for organisations like Amnesty (or Greenpeace in the environmental debate) in a democratic society.

Even if you disagree with what they say – and they are not always right – it is important to have people holding our Government, businesses (and the rest of us) to account by asking difficult questions of them. The fact that they don't explictly challenge the acts of extremists isn't the point - plenty of people do that any way.

Without these voices at the margins you all to easily slip into casual dictatorship; a disinterested amoral vacuum where what the powers that be do and say is accepted without question.