When a government kills unarmed protesters, pictures of the bodies, copied and passed hand to hand, can become the protesters' strongest weapon. The corpse turns into a medium of resistance, and the spread of these images can push politics in directions that had seemed unimaginable. Their force is real, though often short-lived.
Those killed in a struggle for change are treated as having given a gift, and the living owe something in return: the duty to keep reforming society. Because the dead sit at the root of every later protest and change, this debt can never be fully paid off. It is shared by everyone, not just the families of the dead.
State killings did not just end with the bodies; they were sold. Illegal videos of the massacre went on sale at the very spot where it happened, days later. Killings and the trade in their images helped shift power from soldiers to a 'media-financial complex' that runs on selling and showing.