Last night I was watching one of those masturbatory militaristic extravaganzas they like to show on TV on patriotic holidays; this one had the improbable title of "World War Two in High Definition". You can't make this stuff up.

This particular episode was about the invasion of Okinawa, one of the most gruesome and savage battles of the Pacific campaign, and there was one particular scene that struck me as specially incongruous. There was old, grainy video of a child, perhaps two years old, an innocent civilian victim of the fighting. The baby was probably orphaned, totally naked, crying and shivering, panicking as a GI offered it a drink from his canteen. The babe's body was covered in filth and sores, or perhaps burns, it was hard to tell from the old film.

This is the penultimate obscenity, although I am enough of a realist to accept that perhaps it is also an unavoidable one. The innocent will always suffer in wartime, but even the most hardened warrior sometimes finds a moment in battle to reveal his compassion and tenderness.

But the ultimate pornography occurred much later, in our own time. The producers of the show were no doubt determined to spare the audience the unspeakable horror of catching a glimpse of a child's genitalia. After all, there may be children in the audience.

In the midst of the images of gore and carnage, limbless men on stretchers silently screaming in pain (they dub in the sounds of explosions and gunfire onto the old footage but never the pathetic squeals of the wounded) and smoking heaps of napalmed bodies; somebody had the presence of mind to digitally pixellate out the little boy's wee-wee, (or maybe the little girl's woo-woo). Due to this fortuitous electronic censorship, its gender was indeterminate.

There is something really twisted and sick about this.