BlackLab: Adventures in Still Pictures

The Forgotten 100,000

This decade has been one in which the West’s resource wars in the Middle-East have escalated to unthinkable levels. According to Iraq Body Count, the number of recorded civilian deaths from violence since the war began in 2003 is between 94,544 and 103,160. The absence of a compulsory draft means most of us are well removed from what’s being done to innocent civilians thousands of miles away.

In contrast to the sanitized conflict represented on our TVs and in our newspapers, the internet allows us to witness the catastrophic consequences of our politicians’ actions marked on the bodies and lives of innocent men, women and children.

In memoriam to the forgotten 100,000, each of the following dots represents the death of a single civilian in Iraq to date.

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
Albert Camus

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
Adolph Hitler

“War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.”
Charles Evans Hughes

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”
Bertrand Russell

“If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.”
Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War