Due to their omnipresence, due to the prevailing rule of the world of making everything visible, the images, our present-day images have become substantially pornographic. […] they embrace the pornographic face of the war. (Baudrillard, 2005a: 205 – 206) French girl engaged to German soldier follows him into prison compound after his capture near Orleans by U.S. forces. This would have been around August 1944. She undoubtedly was safer in there with him than on the streets, subject to abuse by the partisans. Mark Thompson, ‘Iraq: How the CIA Says It Blew It on Saddam’s WMD’, Time September 6, 2012. http://nation.time.com/2012/09/06/iraq-how-the-cia-says-it-blew-it-on-saddams-wmd/; accessed: April 22 2014.

According to Greif, sexual abuse and rape of Jews, including children, was a limited phenomenon because of the Nazi racial laws that prohibited Germans from having sexual relations with Jews. In the wake of Ukraine being declared a war zone, a sizable portion of the global population — enough to push “Ukrainian girls” to the top of the trending search list — reacted by seeking out videos of the inhabitants of said war zone engaging in sexual activity. This is, disturbingly, nothing new. Since at least 2015 there has been a dramatic increase in searches for “refugee porn”, linked to the ongoing humanitarian crises in the Middle East. The very first stages of the COVID outbreak in China were coupled with the creation of “ Coronavirus-themed porn”. The Japanese attitude towards this subject is mentioned by Lieutenant Colonel Mahmood Kan Durrani in The Sixth Column (Cassell and Co., 1955). He was a prisoner of the Japanese and quotes a lecture given by a Japanese officer on how leaflets should be prepared. One of his six recommendations was: The leaflet should have, if possible, the picture of a beautiful woman, after the method used by the Germans in the First World War. This device would insure that the soldier would be attracted and would be unable to resist looking at the picture over and over again. This would rouse his passion, and his heart would be inclined for love and to hate fighting.

WHEN DOES WAR BECOME PORNOGRAPHY?

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: Four fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London, New York: Karnac, 1977).

Research has linked the regular consumption of violent pornography with increases acts of real-life violence. Picture: Getty For its cruelness and brutality, albeit organised, the space of war is a highly contended and emotionally loaded landscape. Over the past few decades the fascination with the phenomenon of war, its space and in fact even with its cruelty – manifested in a desire to make suffering visible – permeated political and social discourse. War is no longer a distant affair affecting only those ‘on the ground’ (and the families of the wounded soldiers), through television and media war became a virtual and an entertaining phenomenon (Der Derian 2003). From the Vietnam War where media turned into an unwelcomed partner on the battlefield via the First Gulf War when embedded journalism became an integral part of a military-complex, to the most recent soldier-driven accounts from the battlefield (Kozol 2012), media and reporting from the frontline radically re-shaped public perception of war. Not only is there a desire to see more, further and to a greater detail, but also, when there is nothing to see, an expectation (to see, create or produce) persists.

For the images … have become today as virtual as the war itself, and for this reason their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war (Baudrillard, 2005a: 207). If child wellbeing was a national priority, we would act on eSafety’s plan to trial ways to protect young kids from online porn,” National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said in September.