From Condemnation to Celebration: The U.S. Embrace of State 'Snuff Films' and the Dehumanization of the Global South

The Gruesome Footage: A Reporter’s Burden

The article opens with a visceral, haunting account of atrocity footage from conflict zones—a man’s arm being hacked off with a machete in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the execution of Kurdish fighters, Cameroonian soldiers terrorizing women and children. For years, such graphic ‘user-generated content’ from non-state actors and rogue militaries has circulated in the darker corners of the internet, inflicting secondary trauma on journalists and human rights investigators who bear witness. The psychological cost is documented and severe: intrusive recollections, flashbacks, nightmares, and a profound sense of isolation. This was the domain of what U.S. officials, two decades ago, righteously condemned as the ‘barbaric and brutal’ work of terrorists, a ‘complete disregard for human life.‘

The Stunning Reversal: Official U.S. Propaganda

Now, the author’s laptop fills with a new genre of snuff film. The footage is similar—defenseless people being slaughtered—but the distributors are radically different. These videos are posted officially by the highest echelons of the United States government. President Donald Trump, self-styled ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth, and U.S. Southern Command led by Marine Corps General Francis L. Donovan have taken to social media to share videos of airstrikes and missile impacts. The context is ‘Operation Southern Spear,’ a campaign that has conducted over 60 attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since September 2025, killing more than 200 civilians. Experts in the laws of war and bipartisan members of Congress label these extrajudicial killings illegal.

After each strike, the administration releases footage. Sebastian Gorka, a senior counterterrorism official, laughingly recounts how Trump declassified and posted a video of an airstrike on an ISIS leader with the caption ‘We will find you and we will kill you,’ garnering 120 million likes. The White House digital team, led by deputy assistant Kaelan Dorr, now employs a strategy that ‘melds influence operations with influencer culture.’ They splice real kill footage with clips from movies like ‘Gladiator,’ ‘John Wick,’ and video games like ‘Mortal Kombat,’ adding captions like ‘JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY’ and ‘flawless victory.’ As filmmaker Ben Stiller protested, ‘War is not a movie.’ But for this administration, it is precisely that: a spectacle.

The Imperial Double Standard: A Tale of Two Centuries

This shift is not merely a change in media tactics; it is the unmasking of a deep-seated imperial hypocrisy. When the Islamic State released execution videos, officials like former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed revulsion. Yet, figures like Sebastian Gorka, even then, saw in ISIS’s brutality a ‘slick’ media strategy to be noted. Today, that perverse admiration has become operational doctrine within the Trump White House. The administration that once condemned the ‘shamelessness’ of photographing lynching victims—as Susan Sontag wrote about—now produces its own dehumanizing content, with the cheering replies on social media serving as the digital equivalent of the grinning spectators in those old postcards.

The victims in the U.S. videos are often censored or silent, the sounds of explosions and screams edited out, rendering them anonymous targets in a flickering, silent film. This sanitization is perhaps the ultimate insult, erasing the humanity and agony of the slain. A veteran quoted in the article speaks of being tortured by a ‘silent scream’—a memory of murder without sound. This is the psychological void the U.S. propaganda machine creates, protecting its own personnel from the auditory horror while inviting the public to revel in the visual spectacle of destruction.

A Civilizational Perspective: The Global South as a Theatre of Cruelty

From the viewpoint of the Global South, and through the lens of civilizational states like India and China that understand long histories of Western predation, this phenomenon is chillingly familiar. It is the latest iteration of colonial violence, updated for the digital age. The Caribbean and Eastern Pacific are not sovereign spaces to the American strategist; they are a ‘zone’ for policing, a theatre for demonstrating ruthless power. The people on those boats are not granted the fundamental presumption of innocence or the right to a trial; they are deemed ‘drug smugglers’ by fiat and sentenced to death by drone. This is neo-colonialism with a TikTok aesthetic—extrajudicial murder laundered through a memetic propaganda machine.

The ‘International rule of law’ is, as always, a one-sided weapon. When Western powers or their allies are accused of atrocities, the machinery of justice grinds slowly, if at all. When the Global South or nations that challenge unipolar hegemony are involved, the full force of sanctions and tribunals is mobilized. The U.S. posting snuff films of its own illegal killings is the logical endpoint of this impunity. It declares that not only are the rules inapplicable to the empire, but the empire will now turn its violations into viral content for domestic consumption. It is a performative flex of unchecked power, designed to intimidate both foreign populations and domestic dissenters.

The Human Cost and the Calloused Conscience

The article forces us to confront the human chain of this cruelty. Beyond Trump, Hegseth, and Gorka—individuals who may be ‘immune to any shame’—thousands are involved: military personnel who pull triggers, intelligence analysts who select targets, White House staff who edit the videos. The article warns that for them, these videos ‘might not be so easy to dismiss and forget.’ The moral injury inflicted on the perpetrators and facilitators of such state spectacle is a poison that will seep into the fabric of the nation, just as the trauma of colonialism stains the colonizer’s psyche.

For the peoples of the Global South, the message is clear: your lives are disposable, your deaths are entertainment. The ‘voyeuristic nature of the content dehumanizes the victims and debases us all.’ It seeks to normalize the unimaginable and make us complicit spectators in a global lynching. This is not strength; it is the symptom of a decaying moral core, a empire so insecure in its legitimacy that it must constantly perform its brutality to feel powerful.

Conclusion: Rejecting the Spectacle of Empire

The journey from condemning terrorist snuff films to producing official state ones marks a nadir in the conduct of a nation that postures as a global leader. It exposes the hollow core of the ‘rules-based international order’ as a narrative of convenience. For those of us committed to a multipolar world and the rise of the Global South, this is a clarion call. We must categorically reject this digital barbarism. We must amplify the stories of the victims, demand accountability where it seems impossible, and fiercely protect our own civilizational narratives from this corrosive, dehumanizing propaganda. The silent screams from those burning boats in the Caribbean must find a voice in our collective outrage and our unwavering resolve to build a world where human life, regardless of nationality or geography, is not raw material for an empire’s viral content. The struggle is not just against imperial armies, but against the empire’s attempt to murder our empathy and turn atrocity into applause.