IN EVERY WAR, propaganda trounces the truth, buries it in subterfuge, euphemism, blatant lies. But truth survives under the rubble, and occasionally breaks through. Today, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Americans are thinking of war, and not only that one.
This came to me as I was leafing through a photo album, American Photography: A Century of Images. I see an infantryman, swimming determinedly toward Omaha Beach, a shot by Frank Capa. An April 1945 picture shows a man with a hundred winters in his face as he bleakly regards a pyramid of bodies, naked and dead inmates of Buchenwald. It is Sen. Alban Barkley, chairman of the House-Senate Committee on War Crimes. The truth was out, for all the world to see.
The images that second photo brought to mind was of Abu Ghraib prison, and the strutting GIs of the 372nd Military Police Company, their leering poses over a pyramid of their own construction of naked and shamed Iraqis.
FOR THE RECORD - Correction An article on Sunday's Opinion * Commentary page incorrectly identified the photographer of a photo taken at Omaha Beach. It was Robert Capa. The Sun regrets the error.
Once again, the truth is out. It mocks the Bush administration's attempts to gloss the American experience in Iraq, with its fantasies of joyous welcomes to our invading army, of Muslim gratitude, democratization - a grand crusade sullied only by a few bad apples.
There is no certainty that the pictures from Iraq, that have twisted the stomachs of millions of people all across the world, will come to symbolize this war in the long run. But it is possible. Words and images are the way humans communicate. They have their particular strengths. Words, elegantly selected and honest, go to the brain, sometimes to the heart. Pictures go to the gut.
Tammany Hall's "Boss" Tweed knew that. He railed against the images drawn by newspaper cartoonists, of himself as octopus, spider or other loathsome creature. He didn't care what the papers wrote about him, he said, but "them damned pictures." No doubt those words have come to the mind of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recently.
Images, photographs, more readily achieve iconic value than words. Even illiterates can understand them. They bond like Super Glue to the events they depict. I can't think of Vietnam without two images flashing into my head. 1968: Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's national police chief, sends a bullet through the head of a Viet Cong fighter in Saigon. 1973: Kim Phuc Phan Thi, 9, her clothes burned from her body by napalm, rushes screaming into history.
