Souvenirs for the Prurient Swine who Drink our Blood and Eat our Flesh

The Real Purpose of the War in Afghanistan

The remarkable thing about the photographs shown here en montage is that they were taken by U.S. soldiers themselves, after they had poured out of their night-raiding NATO helicopter, at about 1:30 in the morning, on the 26th of December, 2010, and entered the house in Kunar province where the nine boys, ages 12 to 18, lay sleeping, rounded them up, handcuffed them, and shot them dead. "Their guns kill without a noise." Then they took pictures of the boys' bloodied faces. As, I believe, sadistic serial murderers are wont to do with their victims: John Wayne Gacy called the accruing corpses in the crawl spaces of his house "trophies." But if we acknowledge that these sickeningly well-organized photographs are indeed, as they appear to be, mementos--who are they for? Not the soldiers themselves, I'll warrant. Nor even for their next in command. In fact, the meticulous way they're arranged and provided for suggests several "people" (cautionary quotes because I think they could very well be, as Louis C.K. says, flesh-eating lizards from outer space) with a liking for snuff porn, of at least the rank of General. Maybe even Chiefs of Staff. Maybe even Presidential Rank: There's nothing really very nice about Barrack Obama--no indeed, nothing at all--and it is, after all, his war. One can't help thinking about Hitler in his inglorious, infinitely protracted defeat, watching the movies that he'd had made of his generals (the ones who'd tried to kill him, and who didn't immediately commit suicide) being strangled to death with piano wire, over and over, for days at a time--his minions in the S.S. knew the Führer's (ahem) tastes, and could make a man's dying last three days, easy. And these photographs are like that, bespeaking prurience and lust, and the kind of sadism that's going, at some point, to have somebody's hot spunk shot all over them.