Warning…gruesome details in photo…

The Spanish press go much further than the Anglo-Saxon papers in publishing gruesome photos of war which often serve to bring the utter horror and waste home to the ‘comfortable’ viewer in the West, although the New York Times recently ventured into this space.

This above-the-fold image in a leading Catalan newspaper today, El Periódico, hit me like a kick in the stomach, so I share it as a reminder for me and an instruction for those brave enough to zoom in. The headline relating to Bucha reads, ‘To walk into the street, you had to jump over corpses.’ I won’t easily forget the head of this modern-day dead father with his red anorak on sticking out of the mud of a common ditch-grave. Not the way he could ever have expected his trip out to buy bread or collect wood to end.

The journalist, Ricardo Mir De Francia, wrote, referring to the ‘Ukrainians are Nazis’ myth, ‘The crueler the knife, the more the enemy has been dehumanised.’