I remember seeing a documentary in which the photographer who shot the crucial photographs in the Black Hawk Down incident talked about the depths of guilt he had fallen into, and the struggles he went through to recover. You see, many have said that it was those shots of dead, American soldiers which led to the US not intervening in the Rwandan genocide. Nearly a million people were slaughtered, when the world did not step in.

How does one live with that despair! (Even when no-one at all could point a finger of blame at him.) It reminds me of another documentary about war photographers, and the traumas they live through after returning home.

Unrelated, in both scale and subject matter, I, never the less, often find myself wondering how Terence McKenna lives with the thought of what he did to the Khadr family. He had a streak of interviewing media-unsavvy people we don’t like, getting them to say inflammatory things on camera. A Palestinian mother–another people abandoned by the rest of the world–bore the brunt of this.

And the end result is a teenage boy crying under interrogation.

His work brought out an uncharacteristically mean-spirited Canada. A seething vengeance that has not abated in nearly a decade. All the lofty talk about civilization and the rule of law got tossed!

The Founding Nations do not seem to ask themselves what their Others are thinking in their living rooms; not what they say in public, but what they say, between themselves, in the privacy of their own groups.