I remark on an emotional evolution in me. I have become less reactive and more responsive. I am ambivalent about gory videos.

Watching human carnage on BestGore.com

I used to consume the worst of the worst gore on this site. Almost daily (but not obsessively) I would watch the latest atrocities in graphic detail on my laptop. I watched beheadings by the Islamic State, chainsaw executions by Mexican cartels, mob lynchings in Africa, and sloppy live dismemberments by Brazilians in the forests on the edge of poor jungle towns.

It must have given me a thrill, as much as my stomach sometimes churned. But I also thought I was confronting a hidden truth of humanity head on, a truth that was often glossed over in traditional media. I may have always had an interest in the dark corners of the internet. I recall going to the Wikipedia page about “shock sites” and visiting every single one when I was far too young to be doing so.

The curation and comments on bestgore.com also had an ideological bent. The man who ran the site had a consistent anti-government voice. He had been prosecuted in Canadian courts for no other reason than that he embarrassed the state by exposing the sick serial killers and rapists that operated within the borders. This included Luka Magnotta. He had fringe views against state control. He was racist and misogynistic and eventually left to live in isolation in the Caribbean.

He opposed police brutality and excessive state powers long before the Black Lives Matter movement arose and made the same arguments. Many videos were of police killings of civilians. I would sometimes compare news media coverage of the police killing with the graphic video on the site and see that the media omitted or obscured key facts that were evident in the video.

The gore website runner opposed censorship of all kinds, including the sudden and total process of de-platforming, where his advertisers withdrew, his hosting service no longer allowed the content, and the search engines cut him off.

The comments section was something else. Mostly racist, dumb and voyeuristic, but also a community that critiqued the videos and sometimes shared stories and images of their own self harm and gory accidents. I felt that although I would never want to meet these people, they were right to face awful aspects of life head on, without removing bits of the truth before it can reach the next person.

The commenters ranked videos in brutality. They pointed out, correctly, that the routine violence in Mexico and Central America was worse and occurred on a much larger scale than the geographically limited and temporary Islamic State uprising from the mid-2010s.

The popular press would never display the true brutality that’s out there. Dozens of faceless editors and gatekeepers and third parties intervene to prevent the end user from seeing the full picture. On bestgore.com, you could watch a 15 minute video of Guatemalan drug dealers flaying the facial skin of an enemy and torturing him with boiling water and knives to the eyeballs and throat before killing him. The New York Times might call this “drug-related violence.” Which does not exactly capture the experience of the victim. The readers and viewers of the popular press would rather look away or think about issues abstractly.

One journalist did try to understand the site’s users but gave an insightful but incomplete picture. A true ethnography conducted by a sociologist might have done it justice.

Video testimony of a Ukrainian woman whose husband was killed

I never shed a tear when watching all this. I would watch with detachment and note how fucked up some of humanity is.

But today I opened a few YouTube tabs and found myself unexpectedly crying when I watched this woman describe finding out her husband was dead in a town outside Kyiv, Ukraine.

She said her husband was missing for a couple of days. She searched. She went to a humanitarian facility and they pointed to two bodies. As she neared, she recognized his clothes. The body was that of her husband. He had been tortured and killed by Russian troops as they retreated. She said his face was mutilated and his body was cold.

She wept as she offered to show the journalists his grave, dug three feet deep in an improvised muddy spot, “so the dogs won’t get him.”

I cried and cried over this woman and her story. In my other tabs were dumb movie previews and personal development topics. I went for a walk to get away from it and the tears kept welling up. The rest of the Ukraine video included civilians who were shot while riding bikes or lined up in suburban locales with their hands bound.

I am glad for my inner changes and glad I once watched those awful videos

Thanks to some work and study, I am a more emotionally responsive person. I no longer view my emotions or those of others as a burden. At the same time, I am less emotionally reactive. I don’t feel pushed and pulled by external events like I used to be.

I think if bestgore.com still operated, I would visit occasionally to check out the worst of the worst. I don’t want to look away. But videos there focused on graphic detail of the atrocities themselves. The victims who underwent unspeakable tortures were almost all male. The more impactful and wrenching video would have been an interview with a survivor (typically a woman) who did not undergo torture and execution. Yet one’s heart goes out to her, not him.

Now, when rfi.fr mentions “violence in Congo’s east,” I have an image of what this means. Sometimes it means a public “necklacing” where a mob places a burning tire around a victim’s neck. Or it means an entire village is bludgeoned and massacred with garden tools. I don’t just skip past this mundane language.

The Ukraine video also had images of a man on a bike who was killed and left there in the street. This one was piercingly sad for me because I related to it. I thought of myself on a bike, killed while going about my day. The news outlet published the video of his back but not his face. Would it have motivated more international outrage if they had shown his gray, dead face? If I were the victim, would I want my dead, contorted face published, if it meant more intervention from abroad? Or would I consider it exploitation and indecent journalistic liberties with a corpse?

I thought of a Ukrainian music group I saw perform in Portland. I even sat next to one of them on a plane before their show. They started as street performers in Kyiv. I wondered where the six of them went. Would I tolerate seeing their dead bodies in a gory video that provokes outrage? Or just in a sanitized version that provokes concern?

I think if more Americans watched videos of Central American violence, they would be more receptive to asylum requests from migrants fleeing gang violence (not a traditional asylum category).

I think if people watched videos of the carnage that follows the daily car wrecks you read about in the news, they would advocate for lower speed limits and safer design of roadways. They would also be less likely to drive while drunk.

If bestgore.com was still operating, the videos might have prompted more decisive action to stop the carnage. Perhaps people could see what’s going on without so many filters.

I don’t want to ever look away and deny what’s happening out there. I feel I’m still looking at the truth head-on without leering at it. Some people will experience legitimate trauma from this kind of content. Perhaps they should still watch it and make an effort to understand their response.