This week Rolling Stone Magazine ran a series of “war crime photos the Pentagon doesn’t want you to see.”

Intrigued by that advertisement on the cover when I picked up my issue, I flipped to the middle and stopped in my tracks. I stood there paralyzed, but not surprised.

War is the ugliest of human interactions, a playground for all that is evil and inhumane. But civilians rarely see what they should — war as it is.

This is where journalism steps in, especially photojournalism. Actions speak louder than words, and a camera transcends language. A picture can leave words worthless.

While I encourage every reader to look at the photos themselves, I want those who do not want to see the raw images or can’t find them to know what they are missing:

• A U.S. soldier lifting a flattened Afghan boy by the hair after killing him and cutting off his finger. The boy was unarmed. Ever seen a picture of a hunter and his fallen 10-point buck? Same shot.
• A pair of reportedly “innocent farmers” lying back-to-back with their wrists bound together. The man with his face to the camera has a bullet hole on the left side of his face. The pair was reportedly murdered by a U.S. platoon.
• A severed head with no jaw. While the details of the man’s demise are unknown, the image was found on the computer of a member the 3rd Platoon, known as “The Kill Team.” Dispersing such photographs is against Army standards.

But not against journalistic standards. Yeah, Rolling Stone is benefiting from the sick motives of some infantrymen by running photos that never should have been taken. But why are they running them?

For a couple reasons. The images will draw more readers to what could easily be seen as “just another get-the-hell-out-of-the-Middle-East” article. But the images are also a story in themselves.

Millions of Americans are privileged enough to not be able to imagine that such acts or pictures could really exist in this world. In the face of hell on earth, many a mind turns to numbed disbelief. That is not an option here. These shots are real.

America needs to be shocked about war. The skewed demagoguery flooding our airwaves about “what is really going on in Iraq and Afghanistan” must be countered. Sadly, gut-churning photographs are part of the solution.

But there is so much more — and not nearly enough column space.

Violence is not cool, and we need to let our population know that. We don’t need to start banning violent video games; we need to stop starting wars.

We need to take the billions of dollars we annually throw toward human destruction and redirect them toward human stability and education. The inbred, white trash, single-brain-celled American bigots known as “The Kill Team” are products of a culture that devalues education, life and love and promotes unchecked aggression, annihilation and nihilism.

These men are clearly willing to follow through on their beliefs and motives. Imagine what they could offer if they were driven by good.

In our journalism classes, we talk about the “newsworthiness” of graphic images and vulgar words when determining whether to run them or not. The answer is usually only in unusual circumstances.

Murder should be unusual. But war is normal for the United States. Extreme violence becoming typical is the unusual circumstance that makes these photos worth running. The images should not shock us because they are gruesome. They should shock us because the circumstances that led to them are so commonplace to our culture.

Phil is a junior in Media.