Belgium. Iraq. Pakistan.
Each of those countries was rocked by at least one horrific suicide blast last week. In Belgium, it was a crowded airport and metro. In Iraq, a soccer field. In Pakistan, a park popular with women and children.
The combined death toll from those attacks alone: more than 130.
Terrorism, by its very nature, is meant to instill fear. That means terrorists must be unpredictable, and to a certain extent indiscriminate in who and what they target. But today’s terror is in some ways fundamentally different in character than that which the world has witnessed in the past. Al-Qaeda, for instance, did not target the World Trade Center because they hated tall buildings and if their sole purpose was to kill 4,000 people, they could have figured out a far simpler way to do it.
In Bin Laden’s eyes, the towers were an ostentatious symbol of capitalism - a monument to everything the “infidels” stood for, cherished, and sought to force upon the Muslim world. For him, more important than the number of people killed were the indelible images that will forever remain seared in America’s collective consciousness. Although civilized society likes to pretend that the victims will remain in the public’s thoughts and prayers for all eternity, Bin Laden knew that wasn’t true. Rather, he wanted to make sure that the phrase which is so often repeated after a tragedy - i.e. “we will never forget” - actually meant something when it came to his legacy. That necessitated the destruction of symbols, not people. Sure, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs so “some” (maybe even several thousand) people would have to die, but the final number didn’t matter. It could have been 30, 300, 3,000, or 30,000. The point was to send a message. Does that make it any less horrific or in any way excuse it? Obviously not, but that isn’t the point.
Many of the attacks we see today cannot be justified by an appeal to the kind of perverse, psychopathic logic that Bin Laden and his ilk so often employed. Bombing women and children at a crowded park in Lahore, killing fans at a soccer match, and targeting civilians standing in line at an airport Starbucks are senseless acts of violence - meaningless even in the minds of the murderous. Consider for instance that before his death, Bin Laden himself derided the brutal, indiscriminate violence employed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq which was the precursor to ISIS.
None of this is to say that one terrorist is “better” than another, or that the world should long for the days when terrorism “made sense.” Rather, it’s simply to say that now more than ever, tragedy can strike anytime, anywhere. The term “targets” is now meaningless. The question isn’t “who or what should we hit?”, it is “who or what can we hit?”
With that as the backdrop, consider the following collection of visuals from artist Simon Menner who, after combing through hours of footage from suicide bombs, car bombs and attacks, captured the following images of the very last frame before tragedy struck.
From The Washington Post:
“It is very absurd, but apparently the war needs a PR department to function,” artist Simon Menner said. Many new battlefields and weapons of war — drones, surveillance, snipers, cyberterrorism — are invisible and rely even more on media to affirm their existence and threat.
Menner’s ongoing project, “Last Frame Before Blast,” dwells in invisible warfare. In combing through hours of found footage from suicide bombs, car bombs and attacks around the world, what he found most striking was the moment before a blast. A Russian street scene–the white car is about to blow up. A government office in Sri Lanka–a woman reaches into her sari to detonate her explosive vest.
A photograph takes a split second in time, and stretches it into eternity. For those caught in Tuesday’s horrific attacks in Belgium, many would probably like nothing more than to return to that last moment of normalcy before the bombs shredded the Brussels airport.
Menner’s frames captures a bit of this wistfulness. But they are also heavily pregnant with anxiety about where the blast will come from, and the knowledge that everything is about to change. “Once you perceive the threat it is almost indistinguishable from the real threat,” Menner said via email.