The first Director General of the BBC, Lord Reith, defined public service broadcasting’s mission: to inform, educate and entertain.
Following in the true spirit of Reith’s core mission, to inform and educate, HBO’s documentary Children of Beslan, was broadcast on BBC 2 tonight. And in a broadcast world polluted with pornographic reality programming, reality was redefined by the poignancy of the children of Beslans' tortured testimony of the torrid three days of hell that beset their peaceful town and destroyed their childhood innocence. Informative and educational and gripping. Entertainment maybe not.
“Children of Beslan” is broadcast in the US on HBO. For those that cannot or did not see this documentary I implore you to seek it, download it and view it.
Reith would have been proud.
This was television in its purest and most powerful form. Television that makes one wonder, ponder and reconsider ones beliefs and values. So in rekindling the horror of mans’ ability to degrade and destroy another mans’ dignity, all in the words of the children, I was left wondering; wondering about the deeper tragic horror of what will accompany these children as they grow.
There is a moment in Paul Haggis’s mesmerising film Crash where a five-year-old child believes she has saved her father from sure death by deflecting a bullet using her protective cape. Because with childhood comes fantasy and dreams.
And it was amidst the comments about vengeance and retribution that the most tragic moments emerged when some of these children explained how they waited and expected Harry Potter to arrive to rescue them with his invisibility cape, or for the Terminator to enter and destroy the perpetrators of this evil.
No one appeared, no one saved; no cavelry arrived to the rescue.
In these moments, besides their parents and friends dying, the surviving children's childhood died. And here’s where the real tragedy begins. Born from this loss is hate.
More hate, another generation fuelled to instil in another generation with even more hate, violence and resentment.
Ok. When you hear these angels talk so candidly about their friends having their heads blown off with rocket propelled grenades and to watch their parents and friends butchered, mutilated and incinerated in the name of another's vengence one can easily feel and share their horror and hate.
But this documentary left me with one phrase reverberating in my mind, something that was not mentioned in this film. One mans' terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”. The men and women that perpetrated this evil must have once experienced evil done unto them.
Now I have no idea what these murdering butchers endured to drive them to become cold hearted killers. But logic tells me that when I watch a child bereft of innocence explaining how he or she wishes to avenge, burn and slice the throats of these terrorists, I sense that another cycle of hate and violence has simply begun. Everyone is to blame but no one is at fault.
To watch a young girl sketch the image of a balaclava’d “terrorist” and explain as she strikes a match and ignites the paper, that she “draws them so she can burn them”, I weep.
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