Body count
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- There is also a musical group called Body Count.
Body count refers to the total number of people killed in a particular event.
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[edit] Military use
Body count figures have a long history in military planning and propaganda. The military gathers such figures for a variety of reasons (determining the need for continuing operations, estimating efficiency of new and old weapons systems, planning follow-up operations, etc. Body counts were frequently released to "prove" that the U.S. was winning the Vietnam War; however, the accuracy of these counts was frequently questioned. Further controversy plagued body counts from the Gulf War, especially in the bulldozing Iraqi trenches incident.
[edit] 2003 invasion of Iraq
In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military adopted an official policy of not counting civilian deaths. General Tommy Franks statement, "we don't do body counts" was widely reported. This claim to be making no attempt to calculate the numbers of noncombatant casualties of war was actually a refusal to release these numbers to the public, based on the knowledge that civilian casualty figures are 'bad publicity,'. In response, several independent groups of researchers attempted to gather and tally credible accounts of civilian deaths. Most widely circulated is probably the Iraq Body Count project. A survey by the Johns Hopkings Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated 100,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war, but some critics highly suspect this estimate.
At the end of October 2005 it became public that the US military had been counting Iraqi fatalitites since January 2004, though only those killed by insurgents and not those killed by the US forces [1] [2].
[edit] Movies
In censorship, "Body count" has been used as a criterion to judge the 'shock value' of a movie, and hence its suitability for younger viewers. It is usually calculated by the number of deaths or bodies shown on-screen. This has led some directors to imply deaths instead of showing them, for example showing a group of unarmed people facing a villain, then cutting to the villain firing a gun and grinning. The victims' bodies are never shown, but the viewer will understand that they were brutally murdered. However, it can be argued that the suffering and the pain of victims should be shown in order to demonstrate that violence is bad – only showing the perpetrators fulfilling their act of violence, even with them showing their joy, could lead people to the assumption that violence is joyful and painless.
In a move to spoof this, the parody movie Hot Shots! Part Deux includes a "Body Count" meter that appears in a scene when Topper Harley opens fire "Rambo-Style" in an Iraqi Army Compound. Much of the sequence involves repeating footage, having extras literally "pile-up" as they aimlessly charge at Topper, while the meter exponentially speeds up counting.
[edit] Television
Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer kept a body count of the vampires, demons, and humans slain by the Slayer, both by episode, by season, and cumulatively for the entire series (all seven seasons).
