BS 63a - Bad Subjects

Transcription

The “bad subjects” … on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State
apparatus. But the vast majority of the (good) subjects work all right “all by themselves,” i.e., by ideology.
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— Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Political Education for Everyday Life
A p r i l
2 0 0 3 /
I s s u e
# 6 3 /
F R E E
Iraq War Culture
Bad Subjects
Bad Subjects
<http://eserver.org/bs>
April 2003
Lockard on heroic necrophilia* Sousa Santos on collective suicide *
Roberts on being the enemy* Wallace on being American in Croatia *
Manning on two (or three) marches * Kasravi and Mohammed on freedom
of speech * Matisons on academic normalizations * Fraad-Wolff and Wolff
on the empire's war * Shaw on making Starship Troopers * Aldama on the
'reality video game' * Fuchs on "the war show" * Rahimi on representing
sacrice * Hoffman on war as sports * Rubio on weblogs * Rittenhouse
and Hurst on misdirection * Snaza on reections and visibility * Kampmark
on Saddam and the DC sniper * Norton on Marines versus Fedayeen *
van Veen on affective tactics
Bad Subjects
2
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© 2003 BY THE AUTHORS
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April 2003
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Iraq War Culture
Cutbacks and Repression
According to a January survey by the National
Council of State Legislatures, US states had
cut $49.1 billion in public services, health and
welfare benets, and education in their scal
2003 budgets, and were due to cut another $25.7
billion. That $74.8 billion in cutbacks represents
signicantly less than the Bush administration’s
initial $80 billion budget request for the Iraq
War, with many billions of future supplementary
requests certain to follow. This is a war that is quite
literally being fought on the backs of schoolchildren
and university students, the working poor, single
mothers, hospital and home-care patients, and
now-unemployed teachers, health workers, and
other public employees.
Simultaneously, at a domestic level in the United
States — one that can no longer be described
accurately as domestic given its global integration
— a set of repressive legal enactments adopted
in the name of national security have been
establishing new models for international imitation.
Where Britain’s Emergency Regulations once
established the legal mechanisms for colonialism
in India, Hong Kong, Kenya, Palestine and other
locales, in this still-new century the United States
is framing the security legislation that is already
being promulgated by other West-allied nations. If
enacted, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act
of 2003 — also known as the USA/Patriot Act II —
will radically alter constitutional legal protections,
already in substantial decline since the rst
Patriot Act. Should John Ashcroft prevail, Fourth
Amendment protections against domestic security
surveillance will fade into a ghostly remnant,
where surveillance would be conducted entirely
April 2003
Culture, conceived in the broadest sense as the
social exegesis of mass phenomena, assembles,
integrates and responds to these profound and
rapid social developments. Iraq War culture
is much more than its imagery of Homeland
Security orange alert warnings, proliferating
global protests, video shots of nighttime blasts
in Baghdad, or the still image of a wounded Iraqi
woman caught in cross-re. This culture represents
a revolving economy between violent imagery
and US political hegemonism that reinforces itself
through reference to the same violent imagery.
As a culture, it is an accumulation of adverse
phenomena at crisis point, a continuing social
cross-re created by capital making markets
and un-making labor rights. It is the clearance
of shared communities — from villages in the
A key linkage exists here, because the Iraq War
marks the emerging division between global
domains where interventionist violence is visible
and labor invisible, and those where violent
intervention is invisible and elite labor visible.
Iraq is the site of permissible imperial violence
and majority un- or underemployment, whereas
military violence is nominally impermissible in the
United States and its economy responds either
favorably or less so to the success of overseas
violence. We have reached a new high tide mark in
the consolidation of global economic inequalities
and the compounding advantages of Western
economies that can nance information-driven
and superior war technologies. Such is the cultural
hierarchy that information labor has produced.
Iraq War culture is the cutting edge of American
economic, military and information culture, with
its techno-aesthetic and assertion of universal
dominion under an ideological banner of Freedom
Incarnate. The truly liberated class today is the
mercenary migrants of state violence, the global
warrior class that asserts its rights of mobility
and occupational freedom, with digital video
uplinks from the front lines to document its
work product.
The US political landscape of the Iraq War is
characterized by massive cutbacks in social
expenditures, together with tax structures that
underwrite capital accumulation by a narrow
alliance of social allies. Corporate, military
and government leadership have become an
integrated, interlocking circle, one that promotes
an ideological culture of the nation-state as the
fundamental source of progress and power to
consume. Yet this is a crisis-bound society in
need of afrmations of its superiority. Since the
inauguration of the Bush administration, the
US economy has lost 2.1 million jobs. The
US educational system is in the middle of
nancial crises generated by astonishing military
expenditures, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways
to the rich.
occupied West Bank to cohesive but impoverished
working-class neighborhoods in Cairo that send
workers to the Gulf — and labor migrations
endured by peoples of color without alternatives,
the unrecognized neo-slaveries that support
contemporary economies. This is a culture of
exhibitionist violence and invisible labor.
Bad Subjects
Joe Lockard, Issue Editor
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April 2003
Bad Subjects
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at the Attorney General’s discretion without
judicial review. Secret warrantless searches would
expand; nearly any private record would be subject
to investigative demands; secret detentions would
be permitted without criminal charge, and habeas
corpus would be annulled by provisions to prevent
such litigation and even forbid release of basic
information about detainees; lawful residents could
be deported without a hearing; and federal and
state orders limiting police spying on community
activists would be cancelled.
A new culture of systematic automated surveillance
and Total Information Awareness has established
itself, one that points to a vista of unending conict
as its self-justication. There is no particular note
of social apocalypse here, only a gray statement
of the rationales of perpetuation required in order
to integrate an information economy with an
economy that produces and exports violence, then
must guard against its return. If this information
culture attempts to transform the transactions
that constitute social life into a security database,
it treats absence of information as an identied
object of suspicion. Non-integration into the
global database signs either ungoverned or
ungovernable; it signs the presence of an atavistic
and potentially barbaric subject. The discipline of
market control — and social cutbacks — cannot be
exerted where citizens remain unintegrated into
the dominant information culture. To be outside
control, whether as nation-state or citizen-subject,
is to invite the discipline of information technology
and its potential forms of destruction.
Iraq War culture is a culture that promotes
the objectivity of a consensus of power. The
test of cultural validity comes in its conformity
with information power. When Iraq’s minister of
information, Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, looks into
an al-Jazeera camera and speaks of crushing US
forces, while 3rd Division tanks are moving at will
through Baghdad, he occupies a paradoxical —
and deeply antiquated — position as a political
fabulator whose rhetorical disinformation meets
simultaneous disproof via live feeds from the same
city. The minister is reduced to arguing that these
are Associated Press rather than Arab-owned
media feeds. It is as though the minister has
been transplanted from the Nasserite rhetorical
world of the late 1960s, part of a once-collapsed
and now-revivied rhetorical bubble. Al-Sahaf’s
extraordinary denial of reality was in part a retreat
into a ctional, could-be, and might-still-be world,
a familiar reaction to the imminence of cultural
defeat. Validity and falsity are now functions of
transmissibility and integration into technological
networks. The information ow that matters in
Iraq today comes from US Army colonels in P3
Orion intelligence planes, riding electronic shotgun
with laptops and streaming video, ying over their
advancing columns. An incorporative disciplinary
culture stretches today between the US and Iraq,
one based on the absorption of unincorporated
territory into the infosphere.
Necrophilic Speech
The war occasions more than the war; it is a
beginning of progressive regimentalization. It
supplies rationales of repression, demands for the
subordination of counter-argument, delimitations
between permissible speech and silence that
knows its place. War culture is speech in its
own right, one that functions in rhetoric of
demand and conquest. Yet the geist of attempted
homogenization of opinion is unworkable homefront psy-ops, one that will fail because mass
political opinion is chaotic in nature and hysterias
are transitory phenomena. War culture, in all
its efforts to heroicize and memorialize the
dead, embraces state violence as the apogee
of citizenship. Public speech responds to the
demands of citizen-sacrice.
Russ Castronovo argues in Necro Citizenship
that “While US political culture revolves around
intercourse with the dead — from suicidal slaves
to injured white male sexual subjects, and from
passive female clairvoyants to generic though
lifeless citizens — the dead do not remain eternally
estranged. No matter how enamored the state
and its citizenry are of passive subjects, political
necrophilia is also charged with an impossible
desire to forget the dead.” Iraq War culture
expands the discourse of state-sanctied death,
but that same vision of an ennobled battleeld
requires symbols, codes and ideologies to mask
its barbarism. Memorialization of the fallen-to-be
proceeds before the fact and to dissent is to
disgrace the memories of citizen-soldiers who
have not yet died but must die. Speech that
opposes unnecessary death is itself unnecessary,
and political necrophilia waves its ags. But as
Babak Rahimi points out, there is a collective shared
experience of death that demands transformation
through public rituals and ideological appropriation
of citizen ‘sacrice.’ “All of America is grateful for
your sacrice,” George Bush tells Marines at Camp
Lejeune, honoring the collaboration pact with civil
suicide promoted by classes that remain alive
to make speeches.
Where opposition to necrophilic citizenship was
once limited to combatant nations, the last
century’s history has witnessed an ever-expanding
international public assertion of entitlement to
oppose state violence. Jurisdictional assertions
This special issue of Bad Subjects is born in political
anger and the need to develop a critique. Like
millions of others worldwide, many Bad Subjects
editors have turned out for demonstrations and
demanded international justice and peace. Most of
those same millions demonstrated and marched
with few illusions about either the nature of
the Bush administration’s plans or the Iraqi
When Theodor Adorno wrote “Cultural criticism
rejects the progressive integration of all aspects
of consciousness within the apparatus of material
production,” he specied the task of cultural
criticism in the contemporary US where the
integration of global production functions to supply
the means of empire and its military policing.
Inasmuch as social justice begins with the framing
of grievances and their rationales, cultural criticism
is integral to anti-war politics in the Iraq War
era. Criticism’s function becomes to disassemble
a consciousness based on what, in his excellent
essay that opens this issue, Portuguese critic
Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes as “a
political logic [based] on the supposition of total
power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection
of alternatives.” de Sousa Santos argues that
the Iraq War has its roots in the prevailing
climate of neo-liberal globalization and that violent
domination on behalf of the West is an endemic
force of these politics. Adorno speaks here to
a role for cultural criticism as a mobile force,
as a resistance to immobilizing ideologies and
pseudo-knowledges, as a discourse that oodlights
intolerant antagonisms and privilege embedded
within claims to an objective and non-ideological
knowledge. Where there is a repressive surveillance
and suppression of dissent, normalized as broad
public agreement, cultural criticism has an
April 2003
Anti-war Cultural Criticism
Even as such aggression contravenes international
law, it also constitutes a window of publishing
opportunity for cultural politics, for that aggression
emerges from US culture that desperately
needs analysis. No one journal or special issue
can pretend to offer more than a glimpse, a
provocation, or a public rumination. To publish
an emergency issue at this time is a collective
re-assertion of the same democracy that has been
abused by Iraq War culture; it speaks towards an
alternative culture based on values of dialogue,
reason, and repugnance towards militarism.
In short, this issue afrms the global social
justice that the Iraq War attempts to deny
but cannot.
5
In the world of opposition, Iraq War culture is
the raw emotion of street demonstrations; of
myriad coffeehouse discussions of energy-driven
US imperialism and corporate colonialism; of
popular intellectual counter-hegemonism in
formation and yet-to-form; of experimental
thought and democratic expression. Global
contempt towards the US cites its transparent
imperial interests, the hypocritical distance
between its idealistic advocacies and barbaric
means, and the transformation of a post-World War
II model-nation (undeserved as this reputation
may have been) into a twenty-rst century Dirty
Harry nation-state. Oppositional culture has found
its anti-model, the sole remaining superpower
operated as a fundamentalist Christian franchise
licensee. In the days of its greatest success,
US war culture has generated its greatest and
most energetic opposition. Yet because ‘culture’
cannot be understood in itself as immanent and
self-explained, its originating political and historical
frameworks intertwine themselves throughout
that expression. Without this simultaneity of
understandings, an opposition remains inadequate
to its purposes. Sloganeering critiques of US
war culture mirror the simplications and hollow
cultural ‘knowledges’ that enable US policymakers
to model a world that will appreciate its heroic
necrophilia.
regime. Despite overwhelming opposition from
international opinion and the refusal of the United
Nations to sanction an Anglo-American imperial
expedition, a twenty-rst century version of Lord
Kitchener’s Nile campaign, the war proceeded,
driven inexorably by the preemptive and militaristic
unilateralism that has been brewing in right-wing
US policy circles for a full generation and
more. Prosecution of this war represents the
defeat of international democracy, not the vision
of Baghdad’s liberation that emerges in the
Napoleonic rhetoric voiced by George Bush.
Bad Subjects
have followed, entrained on that developing
international consciousness, as the inauguration
of the International Criminal Court evidences.
Despite this development, the US invasion of Iraq,
undertaken in deance of world opinion, has been
underwritten by State Department assertions
of international legal exceptionalism for the
US military and its actions. The American
Empire is being underwritten by claims that a
national willingness to promote and engage
in a harmonization of collective necrophilia
and destructive techno-worship entitles it to
a higher standing in international citizenship.
The transparent inadequacies of such US claims
to national exceptionalism contribute both to
immediate antagonism and to the continuation of
global efforts to create and enforce preventative
mechanisms based in international law.
6
irreplaceable function in developing critiques of
that consciousness.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
Protest and Resistance Narratives
American cultural insularity is arguably a major
contributing factor to the Iraq War, one that enables
and animates a nationalistic mono-perspective.
A counter-tradition, identifiable in American
narrative since at least the eighteenth century,
emphasizes the social enlightenment and selfunderstanding gained from distance. To be
profoundly ‘American’ does not necessarily
correspond with physical location within the
United States.
Two US academics, Leslie Roberts and Dickie
Wallace, contribute essays from New Zealand and
Croatia respectively. As Roberts joins a peace
march in Christchurch with her daughter, she
discovers that, against her own desire, she wears
the unwanted identity of ‘enemy.’ Wallace writes
from the Croatian town of Knin where news of war
crimes trials dating from the Yugoslav break-up
form a paradoxical and very current backdrop
against which to view news of the US invasion of
Iraq. Both essays evidence the profound discomfort
of US citizens abroad who are contemptuous of
their government’s international behavior and
who need to voice their alienation. If US globalism
represents an empire of privilege, it also creates
a space from which its subjects can construct new
civil visions from the outside, from places that are
not America and better off for it. From New York
City, David Manning reects on participating in
the massive February 15 pre-war demonstration,
contrasting its “much fuller demographic spectrum”
with memories of demonstrations against the
Vietnam War where “we were bound by a sense
of self-selected minority identity, sociological
martyrs united in spirit against the misguided
mainstream.”
Expressive rights are fundamental to an anti-war
movement, since to contend with violent nationalist
ideologies is to refuse their articulations and thus
speak from an alienated, inherently questionable
citizenship. Hostile delimitation of the extent of
expressive rights increasingly relies on ‘market
forces’ and, in public environments, on nominally
benign institutional guidelines. Two essays focus
on the incursions against speech and civil rights,
part of the Iraq War cultural environment. Niaz
Kasravi and Rak Mohamed review two post-9/11
high-prole free speech cases — Bill Maher and
Michael Moore — to illustrate how corporatedenominated ‘profitable speech’ operates.
Michelle Matisons examines how a university
that protects free speech in relation to the Iraq
War simultaneously sets out to channel unruly
expression and sentiments via teaching guidelines
that normalize a war culture.
Another group of essays reect on the American
Empire and its iatrogenic social communications.
Max Fraad-Wolff and Rick Wolff review and
describe the basic form of imperial America and its
elements, emphasizing their inseparability from
the lengthy history of global imperialism. A vital
interrelationship between games, entertainments
and empire, once the sustainer of the British
empire, has re-appeared in Iraq War video
culture that conjoins military training and media
reportage. Debra Benita Shaw relates the ethos
of Iraq War militarism and its ‘invincible warriors’
to Robert Heinlein’s science ction novel, Starship
Troopers, as sharing an endless military-political
pursuit of empire. In a set of personal reections,
Bad Subjects Collective editor Arturo Aldama
explores similar themes of video-games and reality
television as para-war imaginative entertainments.
Television critic Cynthia Fuchs continues such
engagements in her essay, “The War Show,”
which examines the features of televised war, its
embedded reporters, and the specter of a ‘disloyal’
media informant like Peter Arnett. Babak Rahimi
argues that US media are deeply implicated
in formulating and transmitting a ritualistic
cycle of war sacrice, memorialization, and civil
resurrection of the dead. CNN, MSNBC and other
major networks become, in this reading, sites
of “ritual enactment that [allow] the deceased
soldier in the immortality of a transcendent
entity…the nation.”
The rituals of American reportage provide an
interpretive key for Michael Hoffman’s reective
essay, one that implicates pattern repetition
across an array of media reports of historical
events during the past decades. In the end,
Hoffman prefers the cool medium of newsprint to
understand the Iraq War. Mass communications
lecturer Nathan Snaza maps out reflections
emerging from this parallel. New sets of permitted
visibilities and enforced invisibilities create conicts
that demand humanization without reference to
particularistic identity.
Binoy Kampmark examines the paradox of an
American demand that a foreign nation disarm
while US citizens arm themselves as part of a gun
culture unequalled anywhere else in the world.
Gun culture provides a false emancipation, a
belief that freedom arises from an equality of
fear. Kampmark’s essay points to the role of the
gun-state, to the symbolic reication of destructive
will in underwriting political monopolies, and to
the equation of precise sniping with precision
Developing responses to the persuasive capacities
of capital-intensive media that dramatize and
provide running commentary on exhibitionist state
violence is crucial to creating resistance. tobias
van Veen discusses Brian Massumi’s theorization
of a tactics of affect, a discussion that reformulates
a historic debate in US progressivism, dating to
at least the early nineteenth century, between
the roles of warm sentiment and cold analysis in
shaping a receptive political topology. van Veen
advocates mass media involvement and “tactical
engagement with affect” as means of creating
positive and communicative politics.
This Extra Bad! edition of Bad Subjects is only a
beginning, a sample of social critique occasioned
by rampant state militarism. Go read, go act, be
extra Bad! yourself.
Joe Lockard teaches early American literature
at Arizona State University and has been
a member of the Bad Subjects Collective
for nine years. He joins the Collective in
thanking Elisabeth Hurst — eshet hayil — for
her instrumental work on this emergency
issue.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Sacricial genocide arises from a totalitarian
illusion manifested in the belief that there are no
alternatives to the present-day reality, and that
the problems and difculties confronting it arise
from failing to take its logic of development to
ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment,
hunger and death in the Third World, this is not
the result of market failures; instead, it is the
This political logic is based on the supposition of
total power and knowledge, and on the radical
rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative
in that it aims to reproduce innitely the status
quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of
history. During the last hundred years, the West
has experienced three versions of this logic,
and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of
history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable
efciency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of
racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic
of insuperable efciency of the market. The rst
two periods involved the destruction of democracy.
The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it
in the face of social actors sufciently powerful
to be able to privatize the state and international
institutions in their favor. I have described this
situation as a combination of political democracy
and social fascism. One current manifestation of
this combination resides in the fact that intensely
strong public opinion, worldwide, against the
war is found to be incapable of halting the war
machine set in motion by supposedly democratic
rulers.
At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic
heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming
collective suicide, only preventable by the massive
destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader
the denition of the other and the efcacy of
April 2003
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has
repeatedly been under the illusion that it should
try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This
is a salvic and sacricial destruction, committed
in the name of the need to radically materialize all
the possibilities opened up by a given social and
political reality over which it is supposed to have
total power. This is how it was in colonialism,
with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the
African slaves. This is how it was in the period
of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of
deaths in two world wars and many other colonial
wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with
the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust.
And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism,
with the collective sacrice of the periphery and
even the semiperiphery of the world system.
With the war against Iraq, it is tting to ask
whether what is in progress is a new genocidal
and sacricial illusion, and what its scope might
be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the
new illusion will not herald the radicalization
and the ultimate perversion of the Western
illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion
of saving it.
outcome of market laws not having been fully
applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to
the violence of the conditions that generate it;
it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence
has not been employed to physically eradicate all
terrorists and potential terrorists.
Collective Suicide?
7
Bad Subjects
bombing. Claire Norton identies another paradox
in the naming of the agents of violence, or
why Western combatants are called ‘soldiers’
while Iraqis are called ‘fedayeen.’ The naming of
enemies is heavily value-laden and by legitimizing
government terminology the media situates
enemy combatants within an ofcial narrative
whose purpose is to legitimize the US-British
invasion.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
8
its destruction, the more likely collective suicide
becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version,
neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization,
neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism.
Its death drive takes a number of forms, from
the idea of “discardable populations”, referring
to citizens of the Third World not capable of
being exploited as workers and consumers, to
the concept of “collateral damage”, to refer to
the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands
of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic
heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according
to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental
Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and
260 thousand civilians will die during the war and
in the three months after (this is without there
being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war
will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the
health costs of the world’s poorest countries
for four years.
Is it possible to ght this death drive? We must bear
in mind that, historically, sacricial destruction
has always been linked to the economic pillage
of natural resources and the labor force, to the
imperial design of radically changing the terms of
economic, social, political and cultural exchanges
in the face of falling efciency rates postulated
by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion
in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers,
both when they are on the rise and when they
are in decline, repeatedly go through times of
primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most
shameful violence in the name of futures where,
by denition, there is no room for what must
be destroyed. In today’s version, the period of
primitive accumulation consists of combining
neoliberal economic globalization with the
globalization of war. The machine of democracy
and liberty turns into a machine of horror and
destruction.
In opposition to this, there is the ongoing
movement of globalization from below, the global
struggle for social justice, led by social movements
and NGOs, of which the World Social Forum (WSF)
has been an eloquent manifestation. The WSF
has been a remarkable afrmation of life, in its
widest and most inclusive sense, embracing
human beings and nature. What challenges
does it face before the increasingly intimate
interpenetration of the globalization of the
economy and that of war?
I am convinced that this new situation forces the
globalization from below to re-think itself, and to
reshape its priorities. It is well-known that the
WSF, at its second meeting, in 2002, identied the
relationship between economic neoliberalism and
imperial warmongering, which is why it organized
the World Peace Forum, the second edition of
which took place in 2003. But this is not enough.
A strategic shift is required. Social movements,
no matter what their spheres of struggle, must
give priority to the ght for peace, as a necessary
condition for the success of all the other struggles.
This means that they must be in the frontline
of the ght for peace, and not simply leave this
space to be occupied solely by peace movements.
All the movements against neoliberal globalization
are, from now on, peace movements. We are now
in the midst of the fourth world war (the third
being the Cold War) and the spiral of war will go
on and on. The principle of non-violence that is
contained in the WSF Charter of Principles must
no longer be a demand made on the movements;
now it must be a global demand made by the
movements. This emphasis is necessary so that, in
current circumstances, the celebration of life can
be set against this vertiginous collective suicide.
The peace to be fought for is not a mere absence of
war or of terrorism. It is rather a peace based upon
the elimination of the conditions that foster war
and terrorism: global injustice, social exclusion,
cultural and political discrimination and oppression
and imperialist greed.
A new, cosmopolitan humanism can be built above
and beyond Western illuminist abstractions, a
humanism of real people based on the concrete
resistance to the actual human suffering imposed
by the real axis of evil: neoliberalism plus war.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a leading
Portuguese social theorist, the director of the
Center for Social Studies at the University
of Coimbra, and has written and published
widely on the issue of globalization.
Original in Portuguese; Translation by Jean Burrows
Contribution by Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais,
rst published in ZonaNon - Revista de Cultura
Crítica on 20 March 2003
When the Enemy Is Me
It was a rainy, early autumn Sunday in Christchurch,
New Zealand, the sort of benign, expected grey
weather that pushes you out of the house for
a museum visit. And so we found ourselves
doing just that, myself, my six-year-old daughter,
Helena, and her friend Rylee. The Canterbury
Museum, our destination, sits on the edge of the
Botanical Gardens, which merges into Hagley Park,
the third-largest urban park in the world after New
York’s Central and London’s Hyde.
The rain had subsided by the time we arrived
at the museum itself, in time to see protesters
gathering for an afternoon peace march. The
pickets were hand made, white paper on sticks,
“Some village in Texas is missing its idiot!” read
one held by a ame-haired woman.
The folks who met with Rep. Leach were
medical students, psychologists, navy reservists,
professors, nuns. We were all for peace. I held
In a line of vendors, a bearded man of about
50 sold The Militant for three NZ dollars, from a
card table in front of the museum. The headline
read, ‘Washington Launches Slaughter of Iraqi
People.’
I had already noted that I found myself trying
harder to adopt the local dialect, the “g’day,” the
“ey, mate,” to cover my Americaness. Yet I am
proud to be an American. I just don’t think George
Bush is doing very American things right now.
Right now, as a matter of fact, I think he is doing
some very German things, the sorts of things the
Germans thought were a good idea in the late
1930s. We joined the rear guard of the peace
march. It wove through this most English of all
New Zealand cities, across the river Avon, to the
Cathedral, where speeches and a protest dance
were taking place.
An American geologist at the University of
Canterbury where I do my research commented
that on a recent hike around Mount Cook, an
Austrian named Boris would not talk with him
and the other Americans. “Denite tension about
“our war” up there on the mountain,” he added
shaking his head.
We marched with people who had made their faces
white with black-lined eyes, just like skeletons. “It’s
like Hallowe’en,” my daughter said gleefully. She
was caught up in the pageantry of it all.
I recalled how at the height of the arms race,
the skeleton faces were ubiquitous at marches;
it was a time that seems so controlled and
understandable and a little bit naÏve now. First
they would launch theirs, then we would re
back, and so forth. Then someone would run
out of bombs.
At the front of the demonstration, an American
ag was held upside down. And so we entered the
square. In the meantime, the sun had decided to
come out, and the wall of grey clouds had been
blasted back by the winds that roar unchallenged
around the bottom of the world.
April 2003
I cannot say it is easy to be a pro-peace American
living in New Zealand right now. Then again,
I cannot say that it is easy to be anyone with
any beliefs living anywhere on the planet right
now. When I left my home in Iowa City, Iowa, in
February, to begin a one-year Fulbright scholarship,
I had recently met with Rep. Jim Leach, our
congressman, to get him onto our peace team.
About a dozen of us attended the meeting in
a windowless Cedar Rapids conference room.
Outside the air smelled of the sweet decay that
accompanies industrial-sized vats of oats. They
make a lot of oatmeal in Cedar Rapids, or so I
was told. One of the other people in the room,
a lm professor at Iowa, was later arrested for
staging a peaceful protest in Iowa City. She and
others laid down and blocked trafc. Stop the
trafc, stop the war. Students, many farm kids of
German-Scandinavian extraction, and proto-savvy
Chicago suburbanites, screamed from their stalled
cars. “Bitches!” I was told they hollered.
Americans Abroad Marching
It is a rare link these days. London and New
York arrive here, beamed down from outer space,
places where two men with grey hair point ngers
at reporters who diligently scribble remarks into
pads; a low-tech revelation, knowing that these
words, which hold so much import for all of us
now, are transferred from sound, to notes, to
computer, to news program.
the hope then that somehow the war would
be delayed for a few months, although my lessromantic colleagues rolled their eyes at this. “We’re
doomed,” my friend Kembrew moaned. “This is the
same time table as the rst Gulf War.”
Bad Subjects
Leslie Roberts
9
April 2003
Bad Subjects
10
New Zealand has determinedly said “no” to war
this time, with Prime Minister Helen Clark standing
up to Australian and American calls to arms.
Every day, people gather in Christchurch, a city
of 300,000, which after Australia, is closer to
Antarctica than any other continent, to pray for
peace at St. Mark’s Methodist Church, to pray
for peace in the Peace Sanctuary at St. Luke’s
Anglican Church. On Fridays, the Catholic Workers
hold a vigil at the US Air Force base at Harewood,
which is near the main Christchurch Airport. They
meet at the Totem Pole, a Totem Pole made
in Portland, Oregon. Christchurch is the main
staging ground for US operations in Antarctica
and the Totem Pole was a gesture of thanks. Each
Saturday, there’s a peace vigil at the Chalice
in the Square.
Mayor Garry Moore
spoke: Mothers of
the United States
and Britain have
to rise up and say,
‘don’t do this to our
children,’ he told
more than 1,000
people gathered.
Signs bobbed up
with cheers, No
Blood for Oil, Bush
Butcher
of
the
World, Bush Blair
Howard Axis of
Evil, and Genocide
George, made to
look like Hitler. One
shopkeeper blared
“Imagine” from his
stereo. The Mayor
of Christchurch is
soon off to Brisbane, Australia, where he plans
to ask the Cities of the Pacic Rim Conference
“to rise up and stop the madness.” Then an
Iraqi immigrant took the mike. His name was
Hussam Razzaq and he said, “Iraq is an innocent
nation that has suffered two wars and years
of sanctions…” He described America’s smart
bombs and witnessing the damage in the last
war, especially to children, of the 75 percent
that were not ‘smart’ enough to hit their targets.
“There are no words to describe the still eyes
of a dead child.”
I watched my daughter and her friend, captivated
by a circle of people blowing bubbles. One man
had a pie tin and an enormous ring and created
iridescent, shimmying cells that caught the light.
They rose, wobbling in the breeze, exploded. My
daughter jumped to touch them, again and again
she jumped, even though they were more than
ve feet above her head.
When the rally ended, records were played on a
turn table set up behind an enormous military
transport truck. “It’s the end of the world as
we know it,” Michael Stipe sang out, as people
danced beneath the hundred-year-old spire of the
Cathedral. “And I feel ne.”
People started to drift off. When we arrived home
that evening, I turned on the weird German news
network, where they mix German and English
language narration over footage of the war. The
crawl across the bottom of the screen offered
the same blend. Tanks screamed across a vast
desert road. I could not understand the German,
got tired of trying
to gure it out, and
switched on TV One.
They don’t call it
“ O p e r a t i o n
Freedom” and they
are not renaming
French Fries here
in New Zealand.
Instead, the logofree news desk talks
about the day’s dead,
British soldiers killed
by their American
colleagues. When
they do have to
name it, they call
it the war, or The
Crisis in Iraq. The
network news offers
interviews with Iraqi
people living in Iraq,
Cairo, and New Zealand, among other places.
These are the very people who are so eager to
be set free from Saddam Hussein, as I have been
told by the American news media. A woman,
speaking clearly and thoughtfully, notes that she
is no supporter of Saddam Hussein. But it is
their problem to deal with, she said, not Bush’s.
Interestingly, I can tell this is not America because
Don Rumsfeld does not immediately get spliced
in, talking about how terrorized Iraqi people don’t
even know what they’re saying. In New Zealand,
the discussion gives me pause because of its
foreignness; that is, the language and tenor of the
talk ts the actual. There are no dynamic graphics
packaging the calamity. There is a quiet, somber
air to the reporting.
‘You are the Enemy’
In February, when we rst landed in Wellington,
the capital city, the rst city parade since World
War II honouring returning service men took
As one New Zealand, or Kiwi, friend remarked in
a recent email, “It’s not like bloody brutal leaders
don’t do their thing the world over on any given
day. What’s most alienating about watching Bush
and Rumsfeld and their war machine is that
somehow — and never in my lifetime did I
think it would be America — they’ve become
the brutal bloody tyrants. Bugger me. You are
the enemy.”
Leslie Roberts is a J. William Fulbright
scholar at the University of Canterbury in
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Artwork (Pax) by Melissa Usher.
Defending the Homeland
War: A View from Croatia
Dickie Wallace
The Homeland War
All over Croatia people have taken to the streets.
They’ve not been out in the thousands, not even
in the hundreds in most places, but the presence
of dozens and dozens of protestors blocking major
thoroughfares in a country that has virtually no
This type of protest has been happening whenever
a Croatian soldier is found guilty of war crimes and
is given any kind of prison sentence. The veterans
of the Homeland War come out in defense of their
comrade in arms and the most effective way they
have found to get attention is to block the
roads. In the second week of the US-led war
on Iraq, the Croatian veterans defending the
memory of their Homeland War has been leading
news story.
Three men were sentenced on March 24th 2003
in a court in Rijeka. They were part of what was
known as the “Gospić group”, Croatian soldiers
and ofcers accused of having committed war
crimes, namely for involvement in the massacre
of Serb civilians in the heavily contested town of
Gospić in late 1991.
April 2003
In Croatia, the leading news story at the end
of March 2003 has not always been the war on
Iraq. It was for a few days. The night of the
rst bombing and at the beginning of the ground
offensive, some Croatian journalists were in
place to report from Amman and Kuwait City and
they were well supplemented by the barrage of
reporting from Western news organizations. So the
rst few days and indeed the rst weekend of the
war, the war on Iraq remained the lead.
However, in its second week, the war on Iraq is
the second story. Some evenings this week, the
main television news, Dnevnik, has taken close to
ten minutes to even mention Iraq.
highways can be quite disruptive. Some of them
are in wheelchairs, and police clearing protestors
in wheelchairs makes for good photos.
And the whole world, as they say, is watching.
Perhaps it is this last idea that provides solace in
these dark days. That there are places, like New
Zealand, where the media tells a story of war not
designed to get the best ratings, not designed
to be the most sensational, not designed to root
out insider-controversy. It is a day in, day out,
grinding sort of narrative. Men die. Children
die. Women are carried in bloody, make-shift
stretchers from bombed marketplaces. Screaming
people clamour for food in cities whose names
none of us knew even two weeks ago. The media
here makes it all so hideously real in its restraint.
Perhaps it is because so many New Zealand boys
have died over the years in European wars —
from the South African War at the turn of the
20th century, to most recently as peace keepers
in East Timor.
11
Bad Subjects
This is war. Children are being killed. Iraqi people
are terried. The motives for the invasion are
suspicious.
place. My daughter and I balanced on the curb. As
the bagpipers came through, we waved our blue
and red New Zealand ags, a ag built around a
constellation, the Southern Cross. I wept. They
stepped so high, the bagpipes sounded a dirge,
they snapped their heads around at attention
at their commanding ofcer. They were coming
home from East Timor, where a handful of
their peacekeepers had died. Soldiers of peace,
representing the muscular end to a conflict
that saw more than 200,000 Timorese die over
years of wartime.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
12
This was a time when Croatia was trying to break
away from the then-existing Yugoslavia. Croatia
had declared itself independent, but members of
the Serb minority in this newly founded Croatia
were not going along with
this and were keeping
their allegiance with the
Milošević government in
Belgrade. Through the
Yugoslav People’s Army
and through paramilitary
groups, Serbs, breaking
away from the erstwhile
breakaway Croatia, were
holding major swathes of
Croatian territory, laying
siege to Croatian cities.
They had virtually cut the
edgling country in two.
These were desperate times
for the inexperienced and
ill-equipped Croatian army
in besieged cities like Vukovar, Zadar, Karlovac
and Dubrovnik. Of the Croatian territory that was
not occupied or under direct siege, more than
two-thirds was easily within striking distance of
Serbian short-range missiles.
Many Croats then and today credit these men of
the Gospić group as having kept an important
piece of territory in Croatian hands throughout
the time of the Serb occupation of their country in
the rst half of the 1990s. In other words, very
many Croats consider these men as key gures
in the defense of their homeland, and of these, a
minority feel strong enough about it to take to the
streets to ght for their “war heroes”.
The ICTY and International Pressure
Most Croats see the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague
as very necessary. After all, they are waiting
for the grandmaster of the Serb devastation of
their country, Slobodan Milošević, to get what is
coming to him. But, while the Gospić group
was tried within the Croatian domestic court
system, it almost goes without saying that these
men necessarily had to have been found guilty.
Otherwise, The Hague and the Western powers
behind the ICTY would have come down on Croatia
hard. In order to appear balanced and to appear
to be not just out to prosecute Serbs, the ICTY,
Croats claim, goes after their homeland defenders
and a guilty verdict must be found. And so, guilty
they were found, with three Gospić defendants
receiving sentences of ten to fteen years.
Then the street demonstrations begin, the roads
are blocked, as happened the last time a Croatian
war hero was sentenced for war crimes. Veteran’s
groups accuse Croatian President Stipe Mesić and
Prime Minister Ivica Račan
of groveling to the West.
One local veteran leader
uses inammatory rhetoric,
threatening that one day
soon Mesić and Račan
will be having breakfast
with recently assassinated
Serb Prime Minister Zoran
Đinđic.
A majority of Croats recoil
at this type of threatening
language, assuming that
the speaker is not much
more than the illiterate
football hooligan type of
person he appears to be.
In Knin, a town historically contested between
Serbs and Croats, some of the local unemployed
and bored young men nd this a cause to make
some noise about, much to the disgust of other
locals who would like to believe their town could
rise above the din.
The Gospić Group Verdict and the Iraq War
Yet, at present, this leading news story, the
sentencing of the Gospić group, may be in a
position to get more attention than at anytime in
the past. These “war heroes” and their supporters
can garner greater sympathy because this is being
played out with a world backdrop of the second
leading news story: the United States bombed a
marketplace in Baghdad killing fteen civilians on
the same day as the Gospić protests began. The
U.S. military spent most of that day denying that
it was their mistake, instead blaming the Iraqis,
claiming that that Iraqi artillery had misred.
Ultimately, however, as various international news
organizations have explained it, the responsibility
appears to rest with the American forces.
Outside of peak daily viewing times, Croats have
been able to follow US and British movements in
Iraq via real time rebroadcast of various Western
news channels, including American, British, French
and German news, on Croatian state television’s
third channel. The former of the these offerings
(including CNN and at least once, Fox News) has,
very obviously, given us the American view of the
situation, emphasizing the need, the will and the
relative success of American forces in achieving
their military objectives as they, implicitly, “do the
right thing” and inexorably move towards victory
Because the American media
are telling them that it must be,
I answer that Saddam should
not be appeased, that he has
ties to Osama Bin Laden. “But
you have free media, you have
so many choices in your radio
and television news, you have so
many newspapers, don’t you?
You have 100 channels on your
televisions, doesn’t anyone see
what is going on?” I try to
explain about the consensus
reached in the United States,
about the market-driven media, about the insular
nature of US public opinion, and about American
exceptionalism.
Guilt and Hypocrisy
I believe the “Gospić group” may
have gotten off lightly. I haven’t
paid much more attention to the
trial than the average Croat, but
some journalist friends more in
the know have told me about the
intrigue and attempted coverups concerning war-time Gospić,
including the car-bombing death
of a suspect that seemed to be
turning state’s evidence. One
friend was a young journalist
reporting from Gospić during the
darkest moments of the war and
still appears to feel some guilt
by association with these men.
They helped look after her safety
in the besieged town, but she
knows that there were things
that she was not to supposed to
ask about and therefore did not,
things that were coming out in
the trial a dozen years later.
Most with whom I regularly talk see the guilty
verdict as necessary. Indeed, a poll conducted
at the same time as the protests shows that
most Croats support the idea of trials for war
crimes, despite the sympathy for Gospić group
defendants. The war to defend the homeland was
an ugly affair, Yugoslav against Yugoslav, Croat
against Serb, neighbor against neighbor. Lines
were drawn too easily around ethnicity, but those
lines were badly drawn in geography and history,
hence a dirty war, as all wars will be.
Those adamantly protesting the sentencing of the
Gospić group would like to think in unsullied
terms of good versus evil, as if Croats could have
done no wrong in ghting for their homeland.
Most Croats take a more sophisticated view and
April 2003
In a nationwide address on the eve of the war,
Croatians heard President Mesić call the war
on Iraq “illegitimate” without a United Nations
mandate. Other politicians have given the US
more support for its war than their president,
but most of this support is tepid at best. There’s
almost a palpable feeling of arms being twisted
behind backs when a politician gives his or her
non-negative view of the war. Or there’s the
feeling of a backroom deal – indeed, the word
is out that the leading political party in Croatia
to come out in favor of the US war on Iraq
already has campaign funds in the pipeline from
the United States.
13
Croatian friends point out that CNN cannot be
considered credible and that the American view
is preposterous. In my workplace, they long
have teased me, asking “How did you elect that
stupid cowboy?” But the teasing was getting
more pointed recently as U.S. posturing grew. In
the weeks leading up to the war, as the U.S. was
trying to pressgang countries into its coalition and
into allowing U.S. military the use
of airspace and military bases,
the questions were increasing.
“Why are the American people
letting them get away with this?
Why are they tolerating this
‘cowboy’ war?”
At the same time as US forces have been killing
Iraqi civilians and we’ve been seeing their
spokespeople prevaricating, Croatian people have
seen their army ofcers sentenced to prison
terms. It’s hard for intelligent people not to make
some kind of connection. Whether my Croatian
friends and colleagues seen the Gospić group
as guilty as sin or as the war heroes that the
protestors seem to see, there’s no hiding the
fact that these Croatian soldiers are being held
accountable for their actions. The question I
have had to deal with from Croatians is this:
is there anyone, is there any power that is
or will be, ultimately, holding the Americans
accountable?
Bad Subjects
in Baghdad. Meanwhile, the European channels
tend to emphasize problems and humanitarian
problems. The move towards victory is not
presented as inevitable, but instead a shadow
of doubt exists in French, German and even
British reporting, a doubt not just in the ultimate
successful outcome of the mission, but also with
the mandate itself as the question is implied: “Is
this the right thing to do?”
Bad Subjects
14
therefore support the war crime trials even when
they know that the guilt of some Croats thereby
may be established. Having pride in their young
nation, having pride in its strength and its future,
they can withstand if the truth will out. While
a peaceful breakaway from Yugoslavia, a velvet
break-up would have been the path chosen by all
but the most militant Croats, the militant likes
of Slobodan Milošević would
not let that happen. Croats
take pride in having won a
war for their independence
that makes sense to them.
By contrast, the U.S. war on
Iraq does not make sense in
Croatia. No one sees this
war in black and white, as if
the U.S. is the will of all that
is good and Saddam Hussein
is all evil. The words used
to justify the war -- “freedom,” “liberation,” and
“democracy” -- spoken with an American accent,
are being diluted more and more as U.S. forces
appear to be colonial conquerors, chasing oil.
Croatian friends ask me about this: as U.S.supported international aid organizations take up
ofce space and drive around Knin in SUVs twice
the size of average people’s cars, they carry
with them the mandate of creating “democracy,”
“civil society,” and a “free press.” But how can
Americans discuss these issues in Knin, Croats ask,
when American democracy is failing so badly in
allowing such an unjust war to proceed?
As some Croats block the roads to protest the
judging of their soldiers in Gospić and as some
Croats accept the verdict as a necessary step
in bringing their country into line with modern
states, few, if any, can nd it acceptable that the
Americans do not have to submit to international
scrutiny. It is unacceptable that they can act
without a United Nations mandate, that no power
exists that can be in a position to judge the war
on Iraq and deliver sanctions based on these
judgments. No one can check the bombing
of marketplaces, no one can check to be sure
that civilians are not maltreated, other than the
Americans themselves.
Here in Croatia, in the second week of the war
on Iraq, the hypocrisies of the American position
reect a glare that makes me shield my eyes as I
look towards my indefensible homeland.
Dickie Wallace is a US citizen living
and working in Knin, Croatia.
He is
a Ph.D. candidate in the Department
of Anthropology at the University of
Massachusetts -Amherst.
A Tale of Two (or Three)
Marches
April 2003
David Manning
The 2/15/03 anti-war protest in New York was
not supposed to be a march; its permit had
been rejected. But as the crowds were funneled
along Lexington Avenue, Third Avenue, Second
Avenue, progressively denied eastward access to
the stationary demonstration on First, it turned
into just that, a march, spilling out of the sidewalks
and into the street. In both its spontaneity and root
cause, this walk in the empty streets hearkened
back to another unplanned migration uptown —
the long silent trek of thousands and thousands of
New Yorkers heading away from lower Manhattan
on 9/11/01.
I remember how strangely beautiful that day was.
That morning — before the events that jolted
America out of one reality and into another — I
found myself walking toward Central Park thinking
“this is an oddly beautiful day.” Not like one of
those familiar September mornings, warm and
crisp with memories lurking beneath the crust, but
oddly vivid and unique, as if Manhattan Island had
oated overnight into the Caribbean.
A half hour or so later, I stood outside my
workplace at Fifth Avenue and 34th and watched
the towers burning as clearly as if I had suddenly
developed telescopic eyesight.
Staring down at the sea of humanity swelling
up from the core of the demonstration to 68th
Street, I was struck by a contrast between the
2/15 protest and those of the Vietnam era. Back
then we were bound by a sense of self-selected
minority identity, sociological martyrs united in
spirit against the misguided mainstream. The anti
Iraq-attack demonstration, however, encompassed
a much fuller demographic spectrum — all ages,
incomes, ethnic groups... a slice of New York’s
full mosaic, along with those who traveled from
their own corner of the mainstream to join in.
Many veterans.
Unlike 1968, this march was overtly patriotic.
These people were not marching in opposition to
the United States, and certainly no one among
the quarter million or so marchers was marching
in support of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin
Laden. There were ags and signs that read
“Patriots for Peace.”
April 2003
Neither event was supposed to be a march in the
rst place — in one case an aberration of the day’s
homeward commute, in the other an inevitable
outcome of the impractical, unenforceable, possibly
unconstitutional stick-to-the-sidewalk rules. In
each instance, the course owed as naturally
as a stream seeking gravity. Likewise, in each
case, the police adjusted accordingly — allowing
We stayed with the flow for a few hours,
deliberately seeking the edges, wondering how
far it would extend. We left after the crowd had
lled First Avenue up to
68th Street. I found this
number intriguing, my
mind hearkening back
to the events of 1968,
a year filled with a
lifetime’s worth of
p e r s o n a l
transformations and
a civilization’s worth
of crucibles. I also
wondered if the opposite
end of the gathering
might be 46th Street,
1946 being the year of
my own birth and the beginning of the baby
boom itself.
By contrast, the more
recent march took place on
a chilly winter day, yet the
mood was exuberant,
and
terribly
comprehensible — a
spilling forth of opposition
to
the
dangerously
misguided,
mislead,
response to the cause
of the rst march. But
there were significant
similarities between the
two. Day-to-day resilience
is as necessary in New York as a wet suit in ice
water, in part to deal with fractiousness of the
city’s own creation. New Yorkers have a way of
confronting the outrageous with blasé nonchalance,
but they summon that same resilience to unite
in the face of disaster. Though the mood and
goals were quite different on 9/11 and 2/15,
the sense of community was the same. Although
the anti-war march was certainly purposeful,
energized and vocal, there was also, as on
9/11, a sense of quiet, self-containment within
each individual. There was never a feeling in
either crowd of mob mentality or impending
loss of control.
“Isn’t that illegal?” asked a protestor behind me
in mock naiveté. “Shouldn’t they be arrested?”
The cop was stunned into silence. What is legal
and what is not can be as much a matter of who
is in charge of enforcement as what the laws
are in the rst place.
15
Bad Subjects
By late morning, I was part of a silent procession
of somber refugees calmly heading uptown away
from the merged pillars of smoke and into an
uncharted new world, one with no prior context.
Instead, a new context transcended all others.
Something terribly vast had happened to transform
the very nature of reality, but it was all so
ungraspable, incomprehensible, unimaginable...
we were all extras in a surreal movie that
was so surreal it had taken over reality itself,
beyond fear, beyond panic, beyond rage, beyond
understanding... void of the measurable references
that give perspective. The light remained vivid,
but odd now, as if God the director had suddenly
decided to shift from Kodacolor to Fujichrome.
the stream to ow its course when practical and
forming barriers when not. At one point, the
police parted the human stream and channeled it
through one half of a particular block, guiding us
past yellow tape setting wider boundaries around
a brick apartment building. “They’re throwing
things out of the windows at the marchers,”
explained a cop. “It’s their way of protesting,”
he added sardonically.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
16
More than any other particular target, the protest
was aimed at Bush and his cronies. “Drop Bush,
Not Bombs” or “Empty Warheads Found in White
House.” New Yorkers, if anyone on earth, want to
get bin Laden; most, however, just do not think
Iraq or collateral Iraqis should get in the way
of that goal. Even if one agrees with the stated
goals of the Iraq attack, one mistrusts the people
stating them. This is an administration that has
consistently hidden its radical right wing agenda
behind Orwellian curveballs, conating opportunity
with opportunism; packaging pollution in “Clean
Skies” decrees; shouting environmental protection
while decreeing environmental destruction;
belittling allies in the name of alliance; erasing
constitutional rights in the name of freedom;
punishing the poor in the name of compassion;
preaching freedom of religion while practicing
fundamentalist ideology; and sacricing national
security on the altar of outdated weaponry.
The 9/11 march was a ow of humanity seeking
its level of relationship to the world. On 2/15,
the marchers were protesting the trivialization of
that profound relationship into an excuse for a
far different agenda.
David Manning is a writer living in New York
City. He was for many years co-director of the
critically acclaimed Synergic Theater.
Freedom of Speech...
Just Watch What You Say
Niaz Kasravi and A. Rak Mohamed
The nefarious terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center in New York City and the Pentagon in
Washington, D.C. triggered a series of changes
that would, at least in the short term, signicantly
alter American society. First, it was clear that we
were going to be militarily engaged with some
country, regime, organization, or all of the above
in the not-so-distant future. Second, our sense
of national vulnerability and anxiety, which on
September 10 was seemingly all but absent, was
about to be heightened to levels unseen in most
of our lifetimes. And nally, certain “rights” that
we presumably have in ofcial times of peace and
profess to be inalienable were going to be called
into question by government, corporations, and
private citizens alike. The purpose of this article
is to discuss this last aspect of our national crisis.
Specically, our focus is on our “right” to free
speech, the extent to which we believe it to be
a fundamental freedom,
and the degree to which
it in many respects has
historically been and
continues to be an idealized
ction, both legally and
socially.
In
order
to
really
understand the life of free
speech, it might be useful
to return to the “simpler”
times of the 1970s. In
the middle of this decade
perhaps best known for
disco, bellbottoms, and Nixon, ABC TV began airing
School House Rocks. Prompted in part by a bout
of patriotic fever spawned by the bicentennial,
School House Rocks brought to the viewing public
a series of short cartoons that taught a generation
of American kids about government, history,
math, grammar, and science. In one of these
cartoons, an anxiety-ridden little scroll of paper
is dragged through the labyrinthine legislative
process by which a bill becomes law. As the now
infamous “Bill” described it, “some folks back
home decided they wanted a law passed so they
called their local congressman.” This basic civics
lesson and others in the School House arsenal
effectively taught youth that, through our system
of representative democracy, all of us have an
equal say in politics. It would seem that this lesson
has been well internalized by many Americans,
including the President. But, virtually everyone
involved in the business of scholarship knows this
has never been true in the United States. And this
is certainly not the case
today, as evidenced by
the campaign finance
reform debate and the
idea that large corporate
contributions to political
parties provide those of
means undue access to
government. Simply stated,
some Americans are better
“represented” than others.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this
representative void more
pronounced than in the
arena of free speech.
Furthermore, and contrary to what our little
friend “Bill” might suggest, changes in the right
of free speech did not come as the result of
purely democratic processes. At the time of its
ratication, the “We” in the Constitution’s “We
the People” excluded virtually everyone except
the upper-class, white, landholding gentry.
The Constitution protected “the people” from
government tyranny, but some people, notably
the relatively elite, mattered more than others.
Thus, just as freedom of religion has been largely
held in practice to mean the free exercise of most
forms of Christianity, freedom of speech has, in
practice, endured the same fate. As evidenced
by those present during the drafting of the
Bill of Rights, “the people”
with the economic means
to dominate politics have
always been able to speak
freely, while minority voices
critical of the political
and economic system have
consistently been squelched
by leadership.
During both Weber’s and Schumpeter’s time, the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
April 2003
Obviously this notion of
unequal representation and
inuence on government is
nothing new. For example,
in his theory of democratic
elitism, Max Weber reasoned
that direct democracy is
impossible in large-scale
societies like the United
States. Representative multiparty democracies
help defend against arbitrary decision making
by leadership and against the monopolization
of power by any one group. However, Weber
conceded, even in these systems, rule by elites is
inevitable. Our best hope, according to Weber, is
that ruling elites will enact policy that is consistent
with the collective interests of the rest of us
relatively voiceless masses. Building on Weber’s
theory, economist Joseph Schumpeter more
optimistically, but still cautiously, argued that
modern democracies only offer voters the
opportunity to replace one political leader or
party with another. Because of this, Schumpeter
deduced, politicians are at least minimally
responsive to the demands of the electorate as
they need to secure votes to stay in ofce.
17
The free speech discussion
often stops right here,
however, simply outlining the
limited areas in which governmental infringement
of speech is tolerated by the courts. All other
speech, we are led to believe, can be carried
out without repercussion. We proud Americans
typically fail to realize that current interpretations
of the First Amendment and manifestations of our
free speech rights are relatively recent phenomena.
Despite its promise in the US Constitution and
more recent carvings-out by the courts, this idea
of freedom of speech did not exist in practice prior
to the labor movement of the early/mid twentieth
century. As Lawrence M. Friedman suggests in A
History of American Law, it is foolish to imagine
that legal words, concepts, and phrases such
as “free speech” have an important life of their
own. Instead, their meanings utter over time
in response to changes in conventional morality,
economic interests, and other social forces.
Essentially, the idea of a timeworn right of free
speech is little more than an idealized ction — a
nostalgic clinging to a notion that has never been.
And, as we are seeing in the wake of September
11, truly free speech is an idea that quite possibly
still has not come to pass.
Bad Subjects
It is safe to say that virtually every adult American
lays claim to freedom of speech and views it as
one of the most axiomatic guarantees afforded
us in our society. Even today, a year and a half
after the September 11 attacks, as we still have
troops in Afghanistan, and are in the midst of
an invasion of Iraq, most citizens of the United
States would probably prioritize their freedom of
speech above all other personal freedoms, with
the possible exception of freedom of religion.
As David Kairys denes it in The Politics of
Law, in its most basic form, free speech as we
know it consists of the ability, without restraint,
punishment, or content-based limitation, to
criticize government and public ofcials and
private institutions and individuals; to express
one’s view in public places; and to associate with
others for political purposes. To an extent, these
visions of what free speech ideally means are
not that far from how it
has been dened through
sociolegal discourse and,
most importantly, by the
courts.
Judicial
interpretations of the First
Amendment and review of
laws limiting free speech
have allowed government
regulation only over a very
limited class of expressions
generally understood to
include obscenity, so-called
ghting words, and libel.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
18
economically prosperous people certainly had
a hand in politics. However, these two perhaps
never foresaw a time when the ruling elite would
choose to almost completely shape policy from
the outsides of formal government. Instead of
directly assuming positions of government power
and vying for votes, as was the historical norm in
the United States, the elite would use their nancial
wherewithal to externally shape legislative,
executive, and judicial decisions in their interests.
Typically, these interests involve the preservation
of a status quo that secured to them economic
windfalls at the expense of the populous. Thus,
the electorate to whom politicians are most
responsive in contemporary times are those
very same types of people who used to control
government from the inside.
Beginning in the mid-to-late twentieth century,
what the increasingly powerful corporate elite
effectively happened upon was a backdoor to
American politics that offered them all the benets
of leadership without the hassle of bureaucratic
red tape. The beauty of this backdoor approach
was, because of their non-governmental status,
the corporate elite could not only control politics
through their enormous nancial resources, they
could also place limitations on the actions of
others without being beholden to an electorate
or running afoul of the political constraints and
constitutional safeguards that typically reign in
formal government actions. Thus, the corporate
elite have now taken on a quasi-governmental
status without the political accountability that
goes with formal governance. What is even
more disconcerting is that they also control the
electronic and print media — the primary outlets
through which we may “freely” exercise speech
that would be potentially critical of the leadership
that their campaign contributions elected and
the leadership that subsequently allows them
to run amok.
In our technology-driven nation of 280 million
people, speech that threatens governmental policy
and the system’s legitimacy are no longer going
to come from a disenchanted reverend in the
village square. In order to muster up the public
interest necessary to trigger a viable challenge to
the status quo in today’s society, access to mass
media is an absolute must. Toward preventing
the possibility of such challenges, in exchange
for seemingly unfettered and unpoliced access to
outrageous and increasingly disparate material
rewards, corporate elites now quietly police many
of those areas where the formal government is
constitutionally hindered from restricting public
access. This relatively new corporate backdoor
has ensured is that no one will be able to, without
restraint, challenge or be signicantly critical of
government unless it is in corporate interests to
have this voice heard.
Among these new domains of corporate power is
that of policing “dangerous” speech. As evidenced
by the swift, certain, and severe backlash directed
at those critical of our foreign and domestic
policies in the wake of September 11, it is
now corporate America leading the charge to
silence political dissidents, not the government.
Certainly, the government has received some
limited criticism for its seeming suspension of
due process for those accused or suspected of
terrorism, but the government did not do much
to silence these critics. Rather, corporate America
has moved much more aggressively than the
government to mute those openly critical of our
response to the terrorist
attacks. Like the politicians
who personally opposed
the draconian drug laws
enacted in the 1980s but
who voted in favor of these
laws for fear of seeming
soft on crime, corporate
ofcials seem to feel that it
would be nancial suicide
to allow rational voices
critical of US policy to grace
the airwaves.
Corporate Maher-terdom
The plight of Bill Maher drives this point home. For
those unfamiliar with his work, Maher is a former
stand-up comedian turned professional political
satirist and talk show host. His late-night show,
Politically Incorrect, originally part of the repertoire
of cable TV’s Comedy Central, was aired by ABC
afliates. From its inception, the show’s creed
was a critical but humorous discussion of politics.
The show appeared to be pushing along ne
— a seemingly wise investment. However, on
September 17, 2001, less than one week after the
attacks, and in response to another panelist on the
program, on-air Maher commented:
But also we should [blame ourselves for
other nations’ animosity toward the United
States] — we have been the cowards lobbing
cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s
cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits
the building, say what you want about it, it’s
not cowardly. You’re right.
Needless to say, news of Maher’s comment spread
like summer wildres and, at the highest point of
What happens when it is no longer government
who attempts to deny individuals’ rights of free
speech? What happens when corporate America
— by virtually every account as inuential in
American politics as any branch of government —
skirts the traditional routes of lobbying for political
inuence and more or less directly takes on the
task of limiting our constitutional right to speak
freely and to be critical of government? The
short answer to this question is, as evidenced in
the aftermath of September 11, “nothing.” The
Does this mean we are without hope or indemnity
against the tyranny of the new corporate
government? Not necessarily. Another example
whose outcome is perhaps more optimistic
also came in the aftermath the September 11
drama. Author and lmmaker Michael Moore was
scheduled to release his most recent book, Stupid
White Men...And Other Sorry Excuses for the State
of the Nation, in the days immediately following
September 11. Moore’s book offers a critical look
at the present Bush administration and politics
in general. Had the attacks never happened, the
book would probably still have been a best-seller,
but its political signicance would more than likely
have been negligible and written off by the powers
that be as the rantings of a disgruntled leftist.
However, in the wake of the attacks, HarperCollins,
the book’s publisher, apparently felt it too risky
for prots in a hyper-patriot social climate to ship
the book as it was written. Despite the fact they
had already produced thousands of copies, the
publishers refused to release the book without
substantial rewrites. The short of the story is Moore
refused to rewrite “a single word,” HarperCollins
opted to “pulp” the book instead of releasing it in
its originally approved form, and after a substantial
battle between Moore and the publishing giant,
David amazingly slew Goliath by getting the book
released un-re-edited.
Stupid White Men was ultimately released, but
not because the publishing house felt remorse
for curtailing Moore’s freedom of speech. Rather,
during the back and forth, Moore mustered the
nationwide support of librarian organizations that
got wind of the censorship, were immediately
incensed, and reacted with threats of their own
to HarperCollins. The term “librarians” often
captures images of mousy and sensibly dressed
bookworms rather than activists and people
of political consequence. But, contrary to this
stereotype, librarians have considerable clout with
publishers as, through their book orders for library
systems, they are responsible for a signicant
share of publisher revenues. Weighing the costs of
censoring Moore’s pre-9/11 critique of government
against the costs of alienating the librarian
community, apparently HarperCollins saw it t to
acquiesce. Thus, by default, Moore’s freedom of
speech was eventually recognized.
April 2003
Here we see the corporate backdoor to political
hegemony in all of its splendor. For exercising
what he thought to be his First Amendment right,
without restraint, punishment, or content-based
limitation, to criticize government and public
ofcials, Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect were
pulled from the airwaves. Ironically, last year ABC
once again made room for School House Rocks
in their Saturday morning lineup, initiating the
minds of another generation on the principles
of democracy while doing its own part to limit
free speech.
Corporate Censorship and Michael Moore
19
Of far greater significance was the equally
immediate and considerably more debilitating
corporate response to Maher’s commentary.
With the complete support of the network, local
affiliates, including Washington, D.C.’s WJLA
afliate, presumably afraid to offend their viewers
with anything too critical of government in this
time of crisis, yanked Politically Incorrect from the
airwaves. Advertisers, not wanting their products
to be associated with anything that could even
marginally be construed as unpatriotic in this time
of crisis, threatened to pull their sponsorship from
Disney-owned ABC and its afliates if Politically
Incorrect was not taken off of the air. When
asked about Maher’s right to express himself
freely, network executives and advertisers alike
unabashedly stated that prots and loyalty to
corporate shareholders superceded any interest
they might have in protecting free speech.
Constitution only protects us against state action
— improper governmental intrusions into our lives.
When corporate elites curtail our ability to speak
freely, regardless of their quasi-governmental
status, the US Constitution is impotent to
protect us.
Bad Subjects
post-terrorism patriotic fervor, elicited widespread,
largely negative high-prole response. The day
after Maher’s comment White House spokesman
Ari Fleisher lamented, “There are reminders to all
Americans that they need to watch what they do,
and this is not a time for remarks like that; there
never is.” Fleisher later implied that Maher and
his program were just as reprehensible as the
terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center.
While Fleisher’s ofcial reaction is noteworthy in
and of itself, in reality it lacked teeth. Fleisher’s
disdain on behalf of the White House was duly
noted; however, it did little to affect the fate
of the show.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
20
What was once a concern about government
tyranny and censorship of “suspicious opinions”
has become a generally accepted pattern of
private sector, quasi-governmental abridgement
of free speech. Since we are taught from the days
of eating Froot Loops and watching School House
Rocks that the prot motive and protections for
business are desirable in the capitalist American
marketplace, we rarely question such censorship.
Instead, we see it as just and simply them, the
corporate elite, exercising their rights to free
speech. So, free speech gets turned completely
on its head, from something that most Americans
believe to be a protection of their right to criticize
government and otherwise act freely in the
United States to how it actually plays itself out in
contemporary politics, with the vast majority of
American voices remaining marginalized and by
silencing in the interest of corporate free speech
those few voices of dissent that slip through
the cracks. After all, who owns the means of
communication? Unfortunately for the rest of us,
this behavior is arguably as insidious as outright
government censorship with the effect of taking
us back to the days when our speech was not yet
free. All the while, the federal government has the
luxury of sitting back and reaping the benets
of unfettered and unquestioned behavior. In
America we still have freedom of speech — just
watch what you say.
Niaz Kasravi received her doctorate in
Criminology, Law and Society from the
University of California, Irvine. She currently
conducts research on civil liberties and
racial proling for Amnesty International’s
US Domestic Human Rights Program. A.
Rak Mohamed is an assistant professor of
sociology at the University of San Diego. He is
currently writing a book on race, masculinity,
and resistance in urban America.
Saying Something:
Academia's Normalization
of Crisis
Michelle Renee Matisons
Many have acknowledged that the size of the US
anti-war movement is historically unprecedented.
At any given San Francisco anti-war rally, one can
see such a wide variety of people that it is, on the
fact of diversity alone, inspiring. There are a variety
of social and cultural groups represented ranging
from students, queers, veterans, church-goers,
environmentalists, Arab-Americans, etc. More
surprising is that this diverse movement also
includes sectors of the middle and upper classes,
as many local businesses are anti-war and not
ashamed to say it. For example, in San Francisco,
a Valencia Street women’s clothing shop ran an
ad in the Bay Area Guardian for a few weeks last
fall with a “soccer mom” type wearing weekend
leisure wear. The caption read something like:
“What are you wearing to the anti-war march?” It
is not uncommon to see the specialty boutiques
along Hayes Street and similar upscale bohemian
neighborhoods with anti-war signs in their windows.
This massive level of resistance to the war in
some places is overwhelming and exciting because
clearly something new is happening.
While it is easy to get caught up in the promise
of a mass movement, it is important to reect
on some of the major institutional obstacles that
impede the growth of new forms of consciousness
and analysis. In the United States, higher academic
institutions present many political challenges,
particularly as the Iraq war gets more complicated.
Issues of free speech on college campuses are
always heightened during wartime, and they have
once again taken center stage after 9/11 and the
passage of the USA Patriot Act. For those who
teach on the college level, the war on terrorism
provides a challenge to the very principles of
academic freedom. There are many diverse free
speech related problems that, in many ways,
depend on individual campus cultures.
Classroom War Guidance
In late March my institution, Sacramento State
University, released a widely distributed document
entitled “Thoughts for Teaching Regarding the
War in Iraq.” I was simultaneously relieved and
disappointed to read it. On the one hand, I agreed
with the document’s initial declaration that “You
may choose to say a little or a lot, but you should
at least say something.” I drew a heavy sigh after
reading these words. At least my decision to “say
Regarding the guidelines I analyze here, professors
are told to “be aware of the routines of your class.”
It acknowledges that some students may be
experiencing difculty, so we should be sensitive
to their needs — such as allowing make-ups.
Sensitivity is not what I am criticizing. An
important feature of women’s studies classrooms
is sensitivity to student needs and experiences.
Therefore, sensitivity toward students is something
we all should do, and not just in the elds where
we are discussing politically sensitive topics.
April 2003
There are several problems
behind the ideas of both
setting time limits and
ensuring that issues are not
minimized, and these are a
particular concern for those
professors who oppose the
war. What is an appropriate
time limit to set up the
terms of a discussion about
war? When I was a student
activist against the Gulf war,
a group of us disrupted our
classes and insisted that we talk about the war
instead of the regularly scheduled syllabi. We
believed that since US bombs were currently
“interrupting” the regularly scheduled lives of
Iraqi people, that our lives could stand a little
interruption as well. These days, anything short
of disruption in the schedule feels like capitulation
to the normalization of war. Even as a women’s
studies professor whose syllabi and textbooks
cover a range of relevant topics — including
militarism, nationalism, Islam, civil disobedience,
and globalization — I still welcome student
insistence that we talk more about the war or
other current events that concern them. A mere
pause in the schedule does minimize the impact of
the issues, no matter what we say or intend. This is
one of the dilemmas emanating from our positions
within empire; the US has not experienced a war
on its own soil since the Civil War. How can we
then decide what is an appropriate response to
There is another educational concern that has
been an ongoing problem since 9/11; this is
the “privatization” of violence and war through
therapeutic, instead of political or historical,
language. After 9/11, the main focus on college
campuses was helping students adjust to the
shock and horror of the current events. Faculty
members were encouraged to let students voice
their feelings and confusions about the attacks.
In and of itself, this is not a problem because
everyone was shocked and confused. However,
one emotion that professors were not encouraged
to draw out among our students was anger
or indignation; actually, anger against the
perpetrators of such violence was ne, but what
about students’ political rage against US foreign
policy and all of the systems of power maintaining
US global hegemony? When we automatically jump
to therapeutic language after
a signicant event, such as
an unpredicted attack or
the beginning of an US
led bombing campaign, we
are suggesting to students
that emotions should trump
analysis in our reactions.
I worry about infantilized
responses, especially when
higher education is trying to
shape analytic and critical
thinking skills. The two
(private emotional reactions
vs. political reactions) are
not neatly separated, but it is notable that a
therapeutic discourse competes with a political
one within the classroom walls. For obvious
reasons, the therapeutic discourse is the preferred
discourse of most university administrations as this
particular war heats up and the war on terrorism
continues. But doesn’t this fundamentally limit
educational objectives in the classroom?
21
The rst suggestion of the document asks us to
consider taking “the initiative to acknowledge
these days as meaningful and important to all of
us.” It further suggests that professors should set
time limits on the discussion; “just a minute”
or ten minutes are suggested as examples of
time limits. It is also asks us to: “. . . ensure
that students do not feel we are minimizing the
importance of these events or their feelings about
it by ending with a statement such as, “Nothing we
can say now or do now will lessen these searing
events . . ..”
match, not minimize, the impact of war? It is not
easily resolved, but a tokenistic acknowledgement
in class and the professor’s own micro-managing of
the time frame feel like inadequate expressions of
the seriousness of the world situation.
Bad Subjects
a lot” about the war could be backed up later by
university administration paperwork. At least the
university was not explicitly encouraging silence
in the classroom. But beyond that, I could not
help but notice how little the document actually
provides in terms of theoretical assumptions and
practical guidelines. In fact, the well-intentioned
university guidelines reminded me again of
higher education’s limits — especially during
this new climate of multiple, overlapping and
endless (?) crises otherwise known as the “war
on terrorism.”
Bad Subjects
22
Of course, there are students who have family
or friends in the military, or students of Middleeastern descent who face hate crimes, threats,
and isolation. My intention is not to minimize
these unique wartime experiences in any way.
But what about my students of color who endure
the routine daily obstacles of systematic racism?
As further attacks on afrmative action are
anticipated and California’s Racial Privacy Initiative
is being hotly debated, I am wondering when I
am going to get teaching guidelines in my box
about this pressing concern. “You may choose
to say a little or a lot, but you should at least
say something about new forms of American
racism.”
April 2003
Talking Sensitivity, Talking Imperialism
The issue of “wartime sensitivity” is the gateway
to another larger issue about this whole business
of establishing guidelines for “teaching during
war.” Most of us who oppose the war see
it as symptomatic of other socio-economic problems
that are more “mundane” and less sensationalized:
capitalism’s next phase of
imperial expansion; hatred
fueled by religious and racial
supremacist ideologies; and
patriarchal power’s fixation
on domination through violent
intimidation and murder. Does
setting aside time in class to
acknowledge the war reinforce
the
same
ethos
of
exceptionalism that drives the
media’s own coverage of the
war? And how do we avoid
this?
Another way of phrasing my concern is in the
form of a question: “When do we stop talking
about the war?” Is it when the occupation
is accomplished, the new leaders have been
chosen, and the mainstream media moves on
beyond occasional updates? When do professors’
“initiatives” end? Since women’s studies is a
multidisciplinary eld that emerges out of a
social movement, I have ongoing opportunities
to address many current events issues. But even
then, what are the protocols around “moving
on?” How can we resist letting the media set
our own agenda, framing “the crisis” for us —
from “beginning” to “end.” And what about other
“crises” that do not get nearly the amount of
attention as a full-scale war, but are no doubt
systematically related and urgent: poverty at
home and abroad; the expanding prison industrial
complex; cuts in education; violence against
women — just to name a few. I joked to a friend
that in addition to having women’s studies, ethnic
studies, and our respective celebration months,
perhaps universities should establish a calendar
of current events crisis topics that all professors
could follow: Monday, mention the AIDS epidemic
in Africa; Tuesday, how are we all feeling about
sweatshops?
Thankfully, the document “Thoughts for Teaching
Regarding the War in Iraq” states that professors
be on the alert for “ethnic proling” and “overly
belligerent expressions of patriotism” in the
classroom. Here I appreciate the recognition that
pro-war people can be violent, since it’s usually
the much-vilied anti-war protestors who carry
that stereotypical burden. But what exactly is
an “overly belligerent expression of patriotism”
when many believe that support for the illegal
occupation of Iraq is itself belligerent? In the
classroom context, students or professors who
express hateful rhetoric that shuts down productive
conversations are a big problem. But another
problem is the implication that our main role
as professors is to neutrally
facilitate this exchange of ideas.
In the face of such a crisis in
leadership at all levels — is
neutral facilitation enough? I
don’t believe so. And isn’t it
qualitatively different to make
our anti-war and questioning
students feel safe when our
pro-war (excuse me, I mean
pro-troops) students’ beliefs are
getting reinforced by so many
other institutions? How does
neutrality fare as a teaching
strategy in the context of the corporate
normalization of mass murder? In my assessment,
not so well.
It’s Not About Civility
The university’s guidelines end with one simple
reminder: “You are the arbiter of civility and
common decency in the classroom.” Here I must
acknowledge that in some ways wartime classroom
experiences are exceptional. War is the most
transparent example of the violence of our social
order. In this way, war fundamentally challenges
our humanity — or our “civility”. In the context
of this particular war, which is accompanied by
incredibly sophisticated military technology and
the mind-spinning views of embedded reporters,
the very notion of “civility” is being hotly debated.
War supporters say that this is an important war
to liberate a people and civilize a society that has
been living under tyrannical rule. The anti-war
Our television sets and political leaders tell us war
is normal; the tones of reporters’ voices are calm
and subdued, and balanced pros and cons views
on a number of events are regularly featured. Is
civility the main goal of our teaching when the
motives of the Bush administration are anything
but civil or decent? Of course not. How do we
proceed in the classroom, especially when the
war is ofcially declared over, the well-intentioned
peace buttons start to come off, and we return to
an eerie, numb silence about this far away place
called Iraq . . . or Afghanistan . . .
Finally, it is important to reect on the motivation
behind universities ofcially addressing political
crises at all. Is it a co-optation of anticipated
student militancy? If professors set aside a
minute or ten to discuss the war, then does this
delegitimate broader student complaints that their
concerns are not being met? Are short, Dr. Phil
inspired therapeutic check-ins the symptom of
new more exible forms of power adapting to the
demands placed on institutions by the war on
terrorism? Is this just simply a way to cover their
asses as we head down the unpredictable path of
escalating military violence?
The world is moving faster and faster, and as
theorists and educators we are always inevitably
a few steps behind. It is difcult to stay abreast
of current developments. Although I have not
provided concrete answers, I am suggesting that
simply intervening in course syllabi to facilitate
discussions on media and university sanctioned
crises isn’t enough. We also need to reassess the
general mission of higher education as it relates
to the new realities of the war on terrorism. From
there we can determine our roles as professors and
students, before these roles become increasingly
determined for us.
Michelle Renee Matisons is an assistant
professor of Women’s Studies at California
State University, Sacramento.
The Empire's War on Iraq
Max Fraad-Wolff and Rick Wolff
alarmism after September 11 to make possible
a global Pax Americana, the brave new world.
Yet many states and millions of people mobilize
complex oppositions. The costly conflicts of
imperialism are both the context for and the key
to understanding the war on Iraq.
Free-market,
private
enterprise economies live
by expanding within and
across national borders.
For American transnational
rms and wealthy investors
to make prots from growing
exports, imports and foreign
investment opportunities,
they must have up-to-date
information, a strategy for
April 2003
All expansions of empire proceed from diverse
impulses and desires. Utopian and dystopian
visions swirl in the clash for and against surges of
imperialism. So it is with Bush’s war on Iraq. His
side promises economic gain, democratization,
security, and rebirth for
troubled souls. Opponents
crying “Drop Bush not
bombs” argue that empire’s
costs outweigh its gains;
their counts stress lives lost,
cultures destroyed, and vast
political and economic risks.
The Bush Regime persists.
Accepting no limit to empire,
it projects US military
superpower and cultivates
23
These criticisms of my university teaching center’s
response to the Iraq war raise more questions than
they answer. For example, what is a professor’s
responsibility to address the war if they are not in
elds — such as science and engineering — that
t more naturally with current political events?
Here the issue of interrupting syllabi gets more
complicated than it may be for social sciences
and humanities professors. Also, regarding the
distinction between “crises” and systematic
oppressions, it can argued that since universities
have women’s studies, queer studies, ethnic
studies, and labor studies, accompanied by their
respective months of special events, that they do
recognize more routine forms of socio-economic
oppression. But is it enough? Many would argue it
is not so long as these forms of oppression still exist
on campuses and in society at large.
Bad Subjects
position says that it is not about civility at all, and
it is instead an illegal occupation with genocidal
implications. When you support the war, neutrality
in the classroom may feel like the way to go.
But when you are against the war, then not
speaking out against it suggests complicity with
an unjustied mass murder.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
24
expansion, and a world that cooperates. Political
and economic leaders therefore work with media
outlets and academics to generate expansionist
paradigms. Today’s paradigm for US expansion
mixes a war on terrorism with a global mission
to dispense democracy and capitalist prosperity.
Appropriate experts identify obstacles and develop
worldwide strategies to overcome them. Masters
of consciousness advertise these policies as
essential to US citizens’ safety, democracy, and
prosperity. Afghanistan was the dress rehearsal.
Iraq is act one of the main event. After the political
threat — you are either with us or against us
— comes the balancing act of economic rewards
and/or military punishments.
The economics of expansion shape foreign policy.
Washington presses countries, developed and
developing, to cooperate. They must secure a
pliable, cheap local labor force and guarantee
private property rights. US exports and investments
must be absolutely free to ow in and out as
prots, cheap wage goods, and plentiful, low-cost
raw materials ow back to the US.
Local governments, subject to military
“recall”, must guarantee a “stable”
currency, “reasonable” taxes, and no
“discrimination” against US business
interests. Among the countries that
cannot or will not comply, several lie
in the Middle East making that region
a prime target. Access to cheap oil is
only the tip of the iceberg. A grandiose
imperial remaking of the Middle East
drives current US policy. The ashes
of hi-tech munitions are burying old
policies and alliances that stand in
the way.
Washington forms, enters, undermines or dissolves
alliances in service to its imperial goals. The
continuing economic downturn since 2000 adds
pressure to expand the empire as a possible
corrective. In the fat years, we could work things
out with longtime allies, but now the Eagle looks
to scavenge. Bush plays and replays the military
card from an increasingly isolated position. He
mobilizes the juggernaut while hoping that its
precision technology does not turn out to be the
Titanic of our time. Nurturing their own imperial
ambitions, increasingly “former” allies — the
European Community, Russia, and China — rethink
their options while steadily ratcheting up their
criticisms of US expansionist policies. They too
will replace old policies and alliances with new
ones that identify Washington as a major problem
and risk for them.
Cultural and ideological campaigns always provide
crucial supports to the economics and politics
of empire. Nowadays, glossy images project the
US as a model for global emulation. Advertising
campaigns, news, music, Hollywood and television
programming celebrate “all things American.”
The enormous college and university systems,
in teaching and publication, play key roles in
educating (“Americanizing”) foreign leaders and
intellectuals. Simultaneously, parallel campaigns
use hype and hyperbole to demonize threatening
regimes, “enemy” leaders, and alien ideologies.
America’s strength, security, wealth and way
of life require a crusade against the dark
forces of backwardness blocking the democracy
and economic progress their people lack and
desperately want. It will arrive courtesy of
the United States Air Force, Navy, Marines
and Army.
These cultural and ideological campaigns for
expansion often stumble when a changing world
requires quick and awkward shifts.
Consider the former US allies in the
Taliban and Al Qaeda who received
massive US assistance to undermine
the Soviets in Afghanistan. Once that
was done, they were supposed to
revert to docile, compliant citizens,
content to cooperate with allies no
longer supportive of their aspirations.
They refused, resented the end of
US support, and pursued their own
religious agendas. Yesterday’s freedom
ghters morphed into today’s grave
threats to freedom. Religious heroes
became religious fanatics. That falling out
culminated in the collapsing World Trade towers.
Iraq’s modern history tells a similar story.
Once a key and richly rewarded US ally against
fundamentalist Iran, Hussein lost US support after
the Iran-Iraq War, and decided to pursue interests
other than and against those of US expansion.
From useful friend, Hussein became a Hitler-like
demon who must be driven out by war.
As a chapter in US expansion, the Bush war on
Iraq also represents the rise to power of the
expansionist right wing of the Republican Party.
For ten years after the USSR collapsed, they
champed at the bit desiring that sole superpower
status remake the world. Rightist Republican
think tanks, PACs and hawks spewed mounting
frustration. When the elder Bush’s war on Iraq
halted, they marked that a failure to reorganize the
Middle East. They hated, attacked and denounced
the Clinton administration for wasting a real
chance to reorganize the entire world in their
The story is as old as empire. Grabs for power
and wealth from and in the Fertile Crescent have
lured many nations over the centuries. Empires
long gone thought they could perpetuate their
control of the area. They too forgot the complex
costs of empire — nancial, political and cultural
— and collapsed as costs and opposition soared.
Pax Americana’s push forward is, at best, an
immensely costly and extremely risky venture
in empire-building. The brutal war on Iraq risks
a cascading series of destabilizing and violent
repercussions. Who will be left standing and
potent amid the wreckage? Only time will tell.
We can be sure only that countless thousands
will suffer and die.
Max Fraad Wolff is a doctoral candidate in
economics at the University of MassachusettsAmherst. Richard Wolff is a professor of
economics at the University of MassachusettsAmherst.
Debra Benita Shaw
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues
in history than has any other factor, and the
contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its
worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have
always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Kinkaid was envisioning a soldier suited to the
kind of war of which Vietnam was to prove a prime
example, predicting, perhaps, the potential for
the kind of opposition which prompted widespread
rebellion against the draft and the effective
mobilization of American youth in the cause of
peace, a stance that some have been lamenting
the lack of in this current crisis.
Verhoeven’s choice was unsurprising. Not only
can Heinlein’s Starship Troopers be read as the
military version of Robocop but with socially rather
than biotechnically engineered programming but
the novel presents a narrative highly suitable for
adaptation to computer game format, a necessary
advantage at a time when the lm and game
markets were increasingly cross-exploiting their
consumers. In fact, the appearance of the lm
seems to emulate the ‘chrome’ of the more
sophisticated games where the characters and the
hardware they manipulate approach air-brushed
perfection.
Interestingly, in 1976 Heinlein himself produced a
board game version of his book. Because the book
contains none of the ambiguity which attends any
real world conict and which gives rise to the
sort of moral and political debate which produces
opposition and resistance it ‘evokes an age of pure
belief and a regression to childhood simplicity’:
the object of the game is to simply kill as many of
the opposition as possible. These words are from
April 2003
In 1959, the ex-politician and military historian,
Eugene Kinkaid was convinced that ensuring the
future of US democracy demanded that ‘every
American parent, every American teacher, and
every American clergyman work to instill in every
one of our children a specic understanding of
the differences between our way of life and the
communist way of life’. In other words, the battle
for the hearts and minds of American youth
was to begin before they were old enough to
ask questions. Kinkaid’s ideal American citizen
should be a ‘citizen-soldier’. Weaned on a set of
incontestable ‘moral values’ and nurtured through
childhood to develop the appropriate ‘strength
of character’, he (and Kinkaid, of course, could
not have imagined that future wars would include
military women) would finally emerge from
Army training ‘something very close to military
perfection’.
Whether or not Kinkaid’s recommendations were
ever seriously implemented, notably, in the same
year, another book was published which came
to similar conclusions and which was to have
a lasting impact on the American military and
popular imagination. Robert Heinlein’s Starship
Troopers, which literary critic Alasdair Spark
describes as ‘distasteful, violent, and near-fascist’
was originally rejected by Heinlein’s publisher
but has endured through several publications and
reprints, the most recent to tie-in with the release
of Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 lm version.
Making Starship Troopers
25
Bad Subjects
version of the US interest. Finally, with Bush II’s
bizarre election, accomplished by their fellow
Republicans on the Supreme Court and in the
media, a new era had nally arrived. Now in control
of both Houses of Congress and a largely compliant
mass media, the great historical moment of
opportunity is at hand. “Old Europe”, the UN,
prudence and world opinion be damned. The
chance will not be missed again. Carried by the
economic tendencies pushing basic expansionism,
this particular Republican circle thrusts war into
Columbia, Afghanistan, The Philippines, Iraq,
and likely beyond.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
26
Julian Stallabrass’ book Gargantua Manufactured
Mass Culture (1996) and he is actually writing
about computer games but much of what he
says can be applied to Heinlein’s book and board
game. Starship Troopers have to attend classes
in ‘History and Moral Philosophy’ in which the
complexities of civil rights and conicting territorial
claims are reduced to allegories of adolescent
concerns such as the training of puppies, cheating
at exams and relationships with parents. Once
they have absorbed these lessons, they are
ready for the next stage of training which is the
excoriating and brutal experience of boot camp.
Those that survive are tested in the eld of battle
(against an arachnoid extraterrestrial enemy,
a ‘hive polyarchy’, known to the troopers as
‘bugs’) and thus earn the right of citizenship. Only
citizen-soldiers can vote because ‘Citizenship is an
attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction
that the whole is greater than the part . . . and
that the part should be humbly proud to sacrice
itself that the whole may live’.
Advanced technology is, of course,
an important element of the Starship
Troopers’ armory. Techno-prosthetics
enable them to jump tall buildings at
a single bound and heads-up displays
on specially designed helmets afford
them a personal view of the eld
of battle. This heavily armoured
‘suit’ is not reproduced in the lm,
apparently because insufcient funds
were available but, because lm itself
is capable of reproducing panoramic
viewpoints and aerial views of the
action, it substitutes as a visual prosthetic for the
viewers/players. The skill both Starship Troopers
and computer gamers must develop is in reacting
quickly to the intelligence provided and deploying
weapons accurately and efciently.
Troopers and gamers are thus connected by a
relationship between the body, technology and
consumer capitalism which constructs war as a
numbers game to be played according to rules of
engagement which derive their moral justication
from the reied structures of the free market. As
Julian Stallabrass says:
Computer games force a mechanization of the
body on their players in which their movements
and the image of their alter-ego provide a
physical and simulated image of the self under
capital, subject to fragmentation, reication
and the play of allegory. Games demand that
the players hone their skills to make the body a
machine, forging from the uncoordinated and
ignorant body of the acolyte an embodiment
of the spirit of the game.
Nor, with the advent of digital TV, is the experience
conned to gamers. Tuning my TV to BBC News
24 recently, I was confronted with a view of the
battleeld from a camera mounted on the gun
turret of a British army tank. As it panned the
eld, searching for targets, I became, for that
moment, complicit in its inexorable mission to
target, aim and re. The precision with which
it accomplished this produced an undeniable
sensation of achievement. This is the ‘play of
allegory’ at its most inventive and deadly.
The ideal gamer, then, is the Starship Trooper, and
the Starship Trooper is the ideal soldier under the
terms of 21st Century war. As Stallabrass reminds
us, General Norman Schwartzkopf dubbed the
rst Gulf War ‘the rst Nintendo war’, a description
that takes on added signicance in terms of Henry
Jenkins description of Nintendo as ‘a conspicuous
consumption of space’ which Mary
Fuller elaborates as ‘feed[ing] the
appetite for encountering a succession
of new spaces (as well as helping
to create such an appetite)’. Fuller,
interestingly, compares the experience
of playing Nintendo to the experience
provided by Renaissance travel
narratives and speculates ‘that part of
the drive behind the rhetoric of virtual
reality as a New World or new frontier is
the desire to recreate the Renaissance
encounter with America without guilt’.
The space race also, of course, borrows the
rhetoric of benign colonization which, in Starship
Troopers, both lm and book, is recast as a
violent encounter. Like the astronaut, the Starship
Trooper is a member of an elite group who, in
Dale Carter’s words:
live by higher standards of behaviour than
ordinary mortals, members of an enclosed
order united by shared qualities and common
risks . . . cool under pressure and skillful at
the edge of disaster . . . calculating risks for
status within a world of permanent testing . . .
act[ing] as bearers and protectors of those allabsorbing, ostensibly supra-American values of
discipline and family, deity and ag.
Carter, here, is actually discussing the original
seven Mercury test pilots selected to inaugurate
NASA who, as he says ‘embodied a nation, a
social system, a whole way of life’ and these
words appear in a chapter that he titles ‘Starship
Troopers.’ Although he makes no direct reference
Similarly, as Carter suggests,
the Mercury astronauts, who
originally rebelled against
their training regime and were
pacied with the promise of
a more active role were also
presented in the public sphere,
not as maverick gamblers but
as ideal embodiments of what
Carter calls ‘those universal
American values of piety and
hard work’; a reconstructed heroic vitalism
in which, to quote Tom Wolfe, the astronaut
‘maintains a sense of discipline while civilians
abandon themselves to hedonism and a sense
of honor while civilians live by opportunism
and greed’.
But Major Steve Austin begins to look like a
relatively benign premonition of the real Starship
Troopers which Captain Robert Smullen of the
US Marine Corps Reserve, in 1996, suggested
it should be possible to produce by prioritizing
unit cohesion in training
simulations because, as the
man says, ‘highly cohesive
units [are] especially critical
today in harnessing the
potential
of
the
new
technology’. Smullen’s article,
for Proceedings of the United
States Naval Institute, claims
‘We Can Make Real Starship
Troopers’ and is accompanied
by a photograph of a combat
uniform with a copy of the
book sticking out of the back
pocket. The inference, that
the ideas that it contains should be carried to the
eld of battle, is inescapable.
More recently, the ethos of the book has again
been evoked by Captain Timothy J Walker in an
article for Marine Corps Gazette (2002) in which
he assesses the viability of the US Army’s Land
Warrior System in Marine Squad operations on
urbanized terrain. He includes an epigraph taken
from Heinlein’s book in which a drill sergeant tells
his recruits ‘We can spare you, but we can’t
spare that fancy suit you’re wearing . . . get
me?’ The System itself is similar to the Starship
Troopers’ combat suit (minus the ability to jump
tall buildings), giving the Marines the ability to see
around corners. The ‘integrated helmet assembly
subsystem’ includes ‘helmet-mounted display
(HMD) (color)’, ‘land warrior assault helmet’,
‘audio system’ and ‘night display’. Walker wants
to assure his readers that the system will be both
cost effective and good for morale but the use
of the quote is telling. Despite the paternalistic
April 2003
The Mercury astronauts could, in fact, be said
to wear their space vehicles in the same way
as the Starship Trooper wears his suit. Both are
technological extensions of the body that wholly
dene the public identity of their operators. Both
are equally protective armour and prosthesis
which carry the marks of an ideology. In Carter’s
terms, the spacecraft was ‘a microcosm of incipient
totalitarian life and its abundance, and the
astronauts were condensed testimonies to the
rewards of incipient totalitarian labour’. In Starship
Troopers the powered suit is a microcosm of a
fully-formed and functioning totalitarianism and
the Troopers themselves condensed testimonies
to the guiding principles of totalitarian labour,
As Marina Benjamin says ‘like outer space,
cyberspace is a cipher for utopian dreams’. The
space race was seen as ‘part of our genetic
inheritance’, a new space in which a new and
improved version of humankind would ourish.
Cyberspace equally invites fantasies of the
emergence of a better, faster human who can
not only leap tall buildings but, with the aid of
visual and aural prosthetics, can approach the
surveillance capabilities of a god. Contemporary
war is the Six Million Dollar Man on cocaine,
at least for the US.
27
As Johnny Rico, Heinlein’s hero, tells us ‘the
beauty of [the Starship Trooper’s] powered suit
[is that] you don’t have to think about it. You
don’t have to drive it, y it, conn it, operate it; you
just wear it and it takes its orders directly from
your muscles’. The Mobile Infantryman receives
his heroism from the chain of command and from
the promise of citizenship that marks him as
a stolid defender of the ideals of the so called
Terran Federation. The suit is a reminder of the
technological expertise and ingenuity that has
produced it which, itself, is
the product of adherence to
these ideals.
whether incipient or otherwise, such as, in
Heinlein’s words, that ‘war and moral perfection
derive from the same genetic inheritance’.
Bad Subjects
to the book, the implication is clear, particularly
where he discusses the conict between the idea
of what he calls ‘heroic vitalism’ and the actuality
of space ight which required the astronaut to be
little more than what he refers to as ‘a pre-packed
human cannonball’ and he asks ‘what happens
to heroic vitalism when its domain is subjected
to the demands of instrumentation and remote
command?’, a question which Heinlein seems
to have anticipated.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
28
rhetoric, it emphasizes the expendability of the
individual Trooper in service of a higher ideal
gured in terms of continuing expansion linked
to technological mastery. And, of course, the
specications of the system (too lengthy to quote
here in full) are pretty much interchangeable with
what might be provided for a sophisticated virtual
reality game. Gerry J Gilmore, writing for the
US Army News Service in 1997, referred to
the Land Warrior System as ‘Robo-Cop in the
Army — the Army’s prototype infantryman of the
future’. Although Computer Sciences Corporation’s
announcement of a $7.2 million contract to develop
the system suggests that the ‘next generation’
will not be available until later this year, on March
21st the US Army’s Material Command research
facility demonstrated ‘technology being used in
the War on Terrorism including operations in
Iraq’ which included the Scorpion Integrated
Protection Analysis Combat Ensemble to be used
in association with the PackBot, a robot ground
vehicle employed to some effect in searching
caves in Afghanistan, which can relay data to all
soldiers in a unit simultaneously. And, on April
1st, the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, out of
Fort Lewis, Washington, demonstrated the ‘digital
bridge’ which can transmit information and pictures
to units on the ground from anywhere in the world
(see http://www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/).
This tight integration of the soldier with digital
systems, armoured vehicles and smart weapons
realizes a dream of cyborg mastery born on
the pages of Heinlein’s novel and nurtured in
cyberspace. As J C Hertz, in her book Joystick
Nation pointed out:
By the age of twenty, most military personnel
have been playing videogames for a dozen years
[. . .]. Today’s joystick jockeys, as Ronald Reagan
liked to argue, are tomorrow’s high-tech soldiers.
The Discovery Channel hammered this point home
in the wake of Operation Desert Storm by showing
Mortal Kombat battle sequences illuminating
shiny faced Latino adolescents while a baritone
voice-over boomed, “These are the warriors of
tomorrow. Their strategic sense, rapid responses
to continually changing threat environments, and
their thirst for the kill, combined with their ease
with computers, makes them ideally qualied to
ght the wars of the future. Years of high-speed
opponents have prepared them for modern war,
where the body heat of distant enemies is spotted
in video screens and esh is seared from bone
by remote control”.
And she adds, ‘Concerned mothers can now rest
assured that their children have a mandate, if
not a moral obligation, to play as much Virtual
Fighter 5 as possible. It’s in the interest of
national security’.
Hardly surprising then, that the US military has,
according to Mike Anderiesz in The Guardian,
been using ‘its own free videogame, America’s
Army, to entice young males to sign up’. And, of
course, the suggestion that Heinlein’s book has
been fullling the same function for some time
is borne out by the knowing and understated
references of Smullen and Walker. The way that
the lm of Starship Troopers co-opts this idea
is through foregrounding the role of the media
in recruiting for the military with cuts to ‘Want
to Know More?’ ads for the Army and blatant
propaganda lms designed to demonize the enemy
which J. P. Telotte, in a Literature/Film Quarterly,
suggests is a device which ironizes the ways in
which audiovisual culture conditions our sense of
reality. But this ironic gesture is perhaps a little too
mired in hindsight to be effective.
Alasdair Spark wonders how Heinlein’s state
operates in peace time and concludes that the
only thing that such a martial system can do
is continually pick ghts. But, in an article that
also compares the lm and the book, Jamie King
argues that this is precisely the point. ‘Heinlein’s
state’, he says, ‘does not intend to stop ghting,
and incorporates a never ending, embattled
frontier into its operational mechanics’. This, as
he points out ‘is the thematic heart of Starship
Troopers’. Elements of frontier mythology are
structured into what he calls ‘a systematized
technology of power in order to reproduce and
reinscribe the mythos of expansionist culture,
both in the ctional spaces of lm and text and,
concomitantly, in America-at-large which looks to
the cultural machine of Hollywood to rehabilitate
its cultural ethos’. The system that the book
evokes nds its fullest cultural expression in
the connection between computer gaming, the
military-industrial complex and Hollywood, and
between virtual war games and virtual war.
Debra Benita Shaw teaches Cultural Studies
at the University of East London. She is
the author of Women, Science & Fiction:
The Frankenstein Inheritance (Palgrave,
2000).
Arturo Aldama
Shocked and Awed
The advent of the 1990s smart bombs during
the rst invasion of Irak probably began the
tendency to use a video game platform to market,
entertain, and worship the US military’s strategies
for bombing and troop/tank movement as a digital
complement to well-paid military consultants. The
current bombing campaign attempts to re-state
In the current invasion, there is an implied
disappointment that the light and reworks show
of the full scale bombing sorties and drops are sub
par in their drama and intensity, and are in need
of good post-production digital effects. The reality
of bombing campaigns, no matter that they are
the largest and most unrelenting ever, falls short
of the adrenaline-producing bombs and explosions
demanded in action lms. Both CNN and Fox,
to “catch and hook” their audiences, now have
brief introductory montages of animated images
of tanks, missiles and hi-tech soldiers with a
pounding military beat. At CNN.com, those who
don’t want to be bored with ‘real’ images of an
April 2003
Now, on April 3, it is “hurry
up and get ready for the primetime viewing of the siege of
Baghdad.” This conversion of
a “real time” full-scale military
invasion into live action blockbuster entertainment
to grab the lion’s share of the viewing audience,
improve Nielsen ratings, and charge more
advertising dollars to companies who want to
feature their products in between live bombing
segments is a heinous example of how market
capitalism makes a buck when and wherever
it can.
This media spin continues
the schizophrenia of American
exceptionalism that drives state
and military policy. American
bullets don’t kill, they liberate;
American bombs don’t destroy,
they remove obstacles to
freedom. America does not
have to abide by any rules
of diplomacy and engagement
because it holds the higher moral
ground. America condemns
torture, yet the School of the
Americas continues to offer
courses on how to electrocute
suspects in the eld with car batteries.
What follows are series of feelings, questions, and
observations in response to yet another US-led
invasion with the hopes of breaking the sense
of isolation, cynicism and futility that has been
imposed on me — and I imagine others — who
resist the onslaught of real, virtual, and media war.
In doing so I want to look at the attempts
by the state and by corporate-driven media
to manipulate and coerce its body politic into
becoming docile entertainment consumers of US
military hegemony. I witness, I act, I write, and
I feel outraged, sad, disgusted as I resist being
bludgeoned by the mainstream media’s marketing
of the invasion of Irak (Spanish spelling). I stand
in a dumbfounded and overwhelmed state of awe
at how the “shock and awe”
campaign was announced and
hyped with its military-esque
sound track, catchy soundbites, and a general feeling
of “hurry back from the break
to witness the largest, most
exciting bombing campaign
ever.”
video games’ visual representation of night-vision
green bomb paths that follow the vectors of
launch, seek and destroy, and the trope that the
bombs’ precision will only demolish the target with
a minimum of collateral damage. In the current
invasion, however, the bombs are marketed as
smarter, larger, and more precise in their surgical
ability to remove the cancerous target without
damage. What happens when you juxtapose the
images of digital reproduction of a smart bomb,
and those of a child whose face is burned, and
scarred for life? The military claims that these
wounded and dead children are the result of
Iraqi bombs, suicide bombers, and the Republican
Guard using human shields, avoiding their own
responsibility.
29
Bad Subjects
The 'Reality' Video Game of
War: Loose Reections on
the Invasion of Hope
April 2003
Bad Subjects
30
assault on the Baghdad airport and tanks on
the move can be entertained and educated by
quick-time animation of urban warfare.
You can also learn more about the “bunker buster”,
“Predator,” “Patriot,” and “e-bomb” with Quick
Time animations. I wonder who will get the site
license to market the next hot game, Eliminate
Baghdad, with thirty-six pulse pounding levels as
you reach the “evil one’s” nuclear-proof bunker
and achieve the ultimate master ranger status?
PS2, Nintendo, or the X-Box? Spin doctors are
paid to continue the jingoism that has marked
Bush’s pseudo-populist presidency, especially
post-9/11, to mitigate/justify/applaud/deny the
violence of shrapnel-ripped skulls and buildings,
groundwater poisoned for decades, the trauma
of a bomb’s noise and the anxiety of impending
death that scar children’s psyches as I write, death
by friendly re, the bombing of open markets
and hospitals, and the use of scatter bombs. Soundbites, repeatable by eight year-olds, are created,
transmitted and
popularized with
a
terrorism
of
d u l l - w i t t e d
demagoguery using
these words that,
in reality, translate
to their opposite:
liberty, freedom and
security.
So as we are told
to sit with our popcorn, surround-sound system
calibrated for maximum sound effects, highdenition images, and chant our patriotic slogans
(Free Iraq, Defend our Homeland, and Operation
Freedom). Then we get offended and feel it is
in bad taste to see the brutality of war, children
bleeding, women crying, scattered limbs, people
hungry and ghting for water, and other visual
tidbits of the carnage of war. Or wait, maybe the
blood and gore are good for ratings? Has the
screening of war entered into the reality television
show craze as a digitally-enhanced streaming
video and heavily-edited and orchestrated “live
coverage” show to compete with Fear Factor, The
Bachelorette, Blind Date, Cops, or Swag?
Stock Tips for the Prudent Investor
The other series of questions, concerns and issues
relate to the supposed economic downturn with
its huge layoffs, hiring freezes, cuts in education,
arts, children’s welfare, growing numbers of
homelessness, complete erosion of civil rights, the
further militarization of the US/Mexico border and
an increase of addictions that alleviate despair
and anxiety. To calm their nerves, people smoke
more cigarettes and consume more alcohol.
But what about the consortium of industries
related to the military-industrial complex: arms,
munitions, fuel, clothes, food, communications,
pharmaceuticals, satellites, and — of course — the
oil industry that can now charge over two dollars
a gallon? Are these industries in a great period
of boom, a resuscitation of Cold War economies
with a global twist?
Every time CNN or Fox reports the nancial news,
the Iraq War takes center-stage through military
music and a tendency by newscasters to tie
market ups and downs to the ups and downs of
the invasion. The big pay-off, markets going bull,
becomes the siege of Baghdad. There is implied
and overt commentary which, to paraphrase,
states that investors support the troops as they
circle Baghdad with an early market rally. So
please call your stockbroker. War is good for
the economy, and is good for well-capitalized
businesses (at least
some). My big tip for
the smart investor
is move your shares
to Halliburton and
other incestuous
businesses that
have
received
billion-dollar
sweetheart deals
in federal contracts
to ght the ‘holy’
war.
Powerlessness as Malaise
Some of the largest (or largest on record, as in the
case of Italy and New York) protests have brought
a wide coalition of folks who refuse to support the
invasion, yet mainstream media ignore them/us
and we are made to feel that we are without
power and without agency. This is precisely the
way we are made to feel, when our protests, as
large, as transnational, as democratic as they are,
have not created a change of policy, and have not
prevented the full-scale invasion.
One of the effects/aims of powerlessness, I realize,
is that you/I/we are made to feel alone, isolated
as if you are the problem, the odd one out. Your
perceptions, feelings, sense of righteousness,
accuracy, and agency are made to be/feel
worthless. It is precisely this feeling/state of
powerlessness that the ‘real invasion’ desires and
enforces in its campaign to subjugate — in tandem
with the corporate-driven media invasion — the
thought, action, outrage, and desire to resist
the despair of war.
The War Show
What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq.
What we are seeing is slices of the war in Iraq.
- Donald Rumsfeld, 21 March 2003
Death and information: the realities of war.
- Peter Jennings, ABC News World News
Tonight, 22 March 2003
Then came the “target of opportunity,” the concept
propitiously introduced into the popular lexicon
as the US shot cruise missiles at Baghdad, in a
display that Roland Watson and Elaine Monaghan
called “a blitzkrieg designed to terrify Iraqi leaders
and their Republican Guard into surrender”. This
blitzing took as its particular targets the “so-called
Peace Palace” and the “so-called Flowers Palace”
(the so-calling is actually Wolf Blitzer’s), in an
effort to “decapitate” the “command and control,”
namely, Saddam Hussein. Or rather, Saddam
The pattern itself is not a little alarming: each
morning, CentCom reports, with grainy bomb-cam
video; each day, US troops engage in erce
ground ghting or long treks, their activities noted
by videophoning reporters; and each night, as
CNN terms it, “explosions rock Baghdad, again,”
displayed on US television in green-tinted night
vision, while “War Recaps” and “Special Editions”
dominate cable and network news programming.
As Wolf Blitzer, Lester Holt, or Peter Jennings
plays anchor, the screen image splits or cuts to
the day’s events, rendered variously: animation
shows how Saddam Hussein might have escaped
the rst night’s bombing, a not so motley crew of
retired generals point to maps, go over the day’s
events, and guess what’s coming next.
Such conjectures are denitely not welcome in
other section of the war coverage, say, daytime
briengs (Donald Rumsfeld has been visibly testy
as the war goes on, as has his boss: “However.
Long. It takes.”) Rather, the ofcial production
focuses on the combination of force and exibility
that denes the Coalition of the Willing’s effort.
Tommy Franks underlined this during his rst press
brieng on 22 March, in Doha, Qatar. Here he and
Brigadier General Vincent Brooks asserted — and
illustrated — in a “media show,” so described by
the Independent’s Donald Macintyre, featuring
explosions and “gun-cam” shots, and staged in
the $1.5 million press center, a “Hollywood set
April 2003
The Bush Administration’s unprecedented “effectsbased campaign” has become increasingly complex.
Effects, it turns out, are not so predictable.
Initially, as Donald Rumsfeld and other admin
spokespeople described it, the campaign was
premised on selective and spectacular targeting,
that is, “shock and awe.” Ironically, perhaps, this
plan depended less on surprise than on intensive
military orchestration, aided by predictable
patterns of reporting, a War Show devised by
US media for US viewers. Indeed, on the rst
night of the war, 19 March, Ari Fleischer made a
dramatic entrance and exit in about 20 seconds.
“The opening stages of the disarmament of the
Iraqi regime have begun. The President will
address the nation at 10:15,” he said. Quite
the news wallop: reporters scrambled to have
their pictures prepared, their cameras trained on
Baghdad. And then, nothing. Imagine the panic in
network HQs: go with Survivor or stick with the
snoozy Baghdad skyline?
I said in that interview essentially what we all
know about the war. There have been delays
in implementing policy, there’s been surprises.
But clearly by giving that interview to Iraqi
television I created a restorm in the United
States. And for that, I am truly sorry, Matt.
- Peter Arnett, Today Show, 31 March 2003
Himself, a term frequently used by news anchors
asking probing questions of guest experts. For
example, “What would Saddam Himself be thinking
at this moment?” Or again, “What if the missile
killed Saddam Himself?”
Speculating about such events “as they happen”
is precisely the imprecise business of television
reporters and those endlessly proliferating
consultants. Since that rst night, complete with
MSNBC’s oft-noted countdown clock, the War Show
has only grown more various and sprawling. In an
effort to contain it, to make it recognizable and
compelling, television’s Operation Iraqi Freedom
includes grandiose theme music, lively graphics,
and colorful banners, with time allotted for
commercial breaks, re-airable packages, and great
images. Was ever a girl more perfectly made for
television than the courageous Jessica Lynch, her
le photo posed before a US ag, no less?
31
Bad Subjects
Cynthia Fuchs
Arturo J. Aldama is associate professor
of Chicana/o Studies at Arizona State
University and a member of the Bad Subjects
Collective.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
32
in the Al-Saliyah brieng room with its soft-blue
plasma screens”.
As an example of the military’s new exibility, the
demonstration was impressive, making good on
the plan set forth by Rumsfeld back when he rst
set up camp at Defense, a time when old school
military types resented his arrogance and efforts
to reshape their longstanding apparatus, so
it would be “faster” and “lighter,” outthinking
and outmaneuvering previous models that had,
for years, been turning abby and inefcient.
Rumsfeld vowed his organization would be sleek
and much improved, as well as expensive;
its war-making would be breathtaking and its
operations camera-ready.
This segment of the War Show involves Franks’
earnestly straight self-presentation, considerably
less amboyant than that of Norman Schwarzkopf,
who loved working the crowd of reporters, who
were, back in his heyday, limited to the information
he might grant them. Flanked by ofcers from
England, Australia, the Netherlands, and Denmark,
Franks stood on the CentCom dais and extolled
the virtues of “precision-shock,” while warning
there may be “tough days to come.”
The rst “toughest day,” 23 March, brought bad
news and dead bodies on frequent display. For
all the military and media’s efforts to adhere to
plan and control information ow, the televisual
frenzy escalated quickly: too much information,
too many embedded correspondents, too many
scenes and stories to track and source and
report. The news gush now comes so quickly
that ticker-tapes across the bottoms of screens
occasionally conict with reporters’ versions, as
when, on 23 March, the stand-up asserted that
a British Tornado GR4 aircraft was downed by a
US Patriot missile, even as the tape below him
rehearsed the US military’s assertion that “no
Coalition planes” were reported missing. Joint
Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Meyers
cites a breakdown in the “elaborate procedures
and electronic means to identify friendly and
enemy aircraft” as a possible cause. During
CentCom’s 23 March brieng, the US rep tossed
a question about the “reliability” of the Patriot to
British General Peter Wall, so he
might insist on the Coalition’s
“condence” in precision softand hardware.
A similar condence, just as
suspect, attaches to the current
wall-to-wall war coverage, as if
more hours equals more truth.
But the pieces remain disjointed
and incoherent. A highlight reel as of 4 April 2003
might include the following: tracers repeatedly
lighting up Baghdad’s nighttime skyline; Saddam
(is he dead or not?) Hussein greeting a crowd
of enthusiastic devotees; a proud young Iraqi
woman, weapon in hand, declaring on video her
intention to become a suicide bomber, for her
cause; and CNN’s Walt Rodgers declaring, after
an interview with a US Army captain, “The score
was at least 20 Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles
killed, no losses for the 6th Cavalry.” (The score?)
Or consider the eager young marines ring a
missile at a target near the Saddam-now-Baghdad
International Airport on 4 April, and cheering
when it hits, like they’ve won big at Grand Theft
Auto. Even the camera gibbered a bit, as if made
giddy by the moment.
This last scene, like so many that comprise the
War Show, comes courtesy the Show’s newest
and most astounding innovation, the embedded
correspondent (also known as the embed or the
embedee). Each is assigned to a unit, according
to the Pentagon, “living, traveling and going
into combat with it. But instead of a weapon,
the journalist will wield a pen [or] videotape
camera.”
As CNN’s notoriously “sensitive” Aaron Brown has
it, these embedded journalists are set to “give
us these snapshots, if you will.” If it’s clear to
the rest of us that such pictures are selective,
the networks tend to promote themselves as
all-knowing: “Be the rst to know.” “We’ll take you
there.” “We report. You decide.” Mm-hmmm.
So far, the embedded reporters in Iraq and
surrounding areas aren’t so willing to risk “negative
feedback,” so rock ‘n’ roll as Esquire correspondent
Michael Herr was — emphatically — in Vietnam; he
regularly and provocatively spelled out the costs
of such attachment: “You were as responsible for
everything you saw as for everything you did”
(Dispatches, 21). But they are surely in for rough
rides, if the rst live-television encounter on 22
March is any indication. As embedded Sky News
reporter David Bowden narrated, US Marines
fought back Iraqi “resistance” at Umm Qasr,
granting viewers the rst instance of live-wartelevision. Staff Sergeant Nick Lerma observed
afterwards that it “rapidly
escalated from a skirmish into
a full-scale battle,” with the
camera rolling.
Bowden crawled along the
ground to put a microphone
into a young GI’s appropriately
distracted
face,
to
ask,
essentially, “What are you doing
This is likely a good thing: war on television
doesn’t need to be entertaining, much as the
networks struggle against that notion. In order
to sustain interest, the War Show does tend
to create, or at least underline, tension. What
would have happened if, on live-war-television,
the Harrier air strike on the Iraqi shooters went
wrong, or the Iraqi shooters were more accurate,
or the cameraman lucked on a shot of the
shooters’ blown-up corpses? Even an American
corpse? The scene might have transformed into
snuff in an instant. Or maybe worse, Iraqi-style
execution footage.
Most obviously, the battle for “hearts and minds”
is largely waged with media imagery. And this
battle has rules: Saddam on television is exhorting
his “henchmen” to do their dirty work (and here
the limits of television are revealed: no one can
quite tell if he is Saddam Himself, or a double,
or a previous tape). The US President can call
his adversary any name he wants, and, as too
many ex-generals have noted, “let loose the
dogs of war.”
Similarly, the display of multiple surrenders at
gunpoint and relentless bombs over Baghdad,
without even a sign of injuries or corpses, is fair.
Al-Jazeera’s decision to air video of US POWs,
wounded or executed, is not. Rumsfeld argues
that, according to the Geneva Conventions, it’s
“illegal for prisoners of war to be shown and
pictured and humiliated.” According to this way
of thinking, mistreatment of POWs, or torture of
“enemy combatants,” is okay, as long as you don’t
tape and air such violence.
Such fudging of what’s fair leads to the next
aspect of embedding. It is, in its way, also a logical
step for the Bush Doctrine, a way to take it to
mass media outlets — not as propaganda exactly,
but as, well, doctrine. Conceived during the rst
Bush Administration (by Dick Cheney and Paul
Wolfowitz, et. al.) and outlined in a September
2002 document known as “The National Security
Strategy of the United States,” the Bush Doctrine
states that the US “reserves the option” to wage
preemptive war and allows for American use
of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states,
unilateral and imperial rights assumed because
the US is “exceptional.” Again, this exceptionalism
allows the US to take decisions against world
opinion when such opinion opposes perceived US
interests and/or ofcial “beliefs.”
Embedded television allows a useful display of
power, exemplifying just why such “rights” might
be “reserved.” That such power can be made so
quickly and blatantly visible on television only
makes the still-next steps seem more inevitable.
Iran, Syria, Yemen, the Saudi royal family, North
April 2003
Ideally, as Lexington Institute’s Dan Goure told
MSNBC’s Lester Holt on 23 March, embedded
reporters will ensure “truth on the battleeld.”
More cryptically, if not more realistically, Rumsfeld
told Blitzer, “The television image is belied by
what’s seen on the ground.” Perhaps this practice
intends to make the television image and the
ground coincide. But this forgets that video is
subjective and selective, like any other form of
reporting. And embedding makes for an entirely
strange-bedfellowing of media and military,
limiting movements and choices on all sides. And
yet, despite (or maybe because of) this obvious
tension, the consensus appears to be that this is
a grand idea: journalists are taking serious risks,
for which they trained and lobbied, and which can
lead to death, as in the case of ITN reporter Terry
If embedding is a next logical step for reality
television, with all stakes raised, for consumers
as well as performers, it’s also a huge leap in
political, ethical, and commercial terms. Who’s
selling what to whom?
33
Embedding is, most obviously, a next step from
Cops, when the uni — here the terse, camouaged
troop — pauses in his work to explain what he’s
doing to an inquiring mind. Except, it’s live. Really
live. This makes the potential for disaster, tragedy,
and exploitation huge. At once horrifying and
seductive, addictive like The Real World, the War
Show invites you to identify with your favorite
embedee. Which is not to say that this latest reality
program has its kinks worked out. According to a
study made of embedded journalism in the war on
Iraq conducted by Journalism.org, “Live reports
in particular often lacked the things that make
reality television such a draw — time and editors”.
This means that fragments, not storylines, are
the rule. Conditioned to think of reality as The
Osbournes or even The Bachelor, viewers may
feel disoriented and anxious.
Lloyd and his two-member team, killed by what Fox
News called “a barrage of coalition re.”
Bad Subjects
now?” The US team shot off some rounds at Iraqis
in a building, then hunkered down while, rst
a couple of tanks, and then an air strike were
called in to decimate the building. In the distance,
caught by the cameraman’s long lens, an Iraqi
soldier ran from the building, on re.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
34
Korea: even the most lay of lay interviewers are
nding such Bush Doctrine-inspired wondering
within their grasp, and expert commentators are
no longer pretending such an expansionist design
is unthinkable. Now, it seems obvious: “Iraq,”
as Shimon Peres and others have repeatedly
recently, “is only the beginning.”
As such, Iraq is both
good and bad for
(and as) television.
War stories multiply,
as do the means to
tell them. MSNBC
came up with an
“America’s Bravest”
wall of photos, sent
in by viewers missing
their relatives, a
latest permutation of
the instant memorials
that crop up at
disaster sites. And, of
course, experts step
up. Henry Kissinger appears on Fox News, talking
with the mightily clueless Rita Cosby: “Do you
think Saddam Hussein is alive?” she asks; “I have
no possible way of knowing it,” comes the answer.
Over on MSNBC, Jesse Ventura, “America’s most
respected independent voice,” has a new gig: the
ex-Navy Seal and Vietnam vet opines to Lester
Holt, “War is the end result of failed political policy,
not the serviceman’s fault.”
To shore up all the opinionating, the studio sets
are full of maps: digital relief types with CGI-ed
“swooping” cameras, large oor maps where
white guys walk around with pointers, Fox News’
fx-ed “Flyover,” and the table maps that allow
ex-strategists to move little blue and red jet
ghters, troops, and tanks around as if on a game
board. The effect can be so egregious that even
the occasional anchor notices it. Holt, looking
earnest, asks, “Have we made war glamorous?”
Ventura, looking annoyed, answers, “It reminds
me a lot of the Super Bowl.”
Some effects are genuinely startling, and foil
instant accounting. Consider the 22 March attack
on the 101st Airborne Division, reported almost
as soon as it happened by embedded Financial
Times correspondent Charles Clover, stationed
at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait. This incident,
at rst so hard to read (an act of terrorism,
a mistake, an inltration?) turned out to be a
fragging, committed by a member of the 101st.
The suddenness of the event inspired some
uncareful thinking out loud, such as Aaron Brown’s
suggestion that the black American Muslim
suspect’s “Arab-sounding last name” might have
to do with the crime.
As it turns out, the suspect, since identied as
Sergeant Asan Akbar (born Mark Fidel Kools)
and sent to Germany to await charges, allegedly
does resent being
ordered to kill fellow
Muslims, but at the
time of Brown’s
remark, no one could
have known this.
So far, two have
died
from
their
wounds, and, as
Ashley Baneld, no
longer Ms. Front
Line, reports from
Kentucky, several
people remember
having conversations
with Akbar back on
the Stateside base,
in which he declared his belief that the war was
waged by Christians against Muslims and he
vowed violent revenge. Even as this “background”
emerges, his family, including his former stepfather,
William Bilal, cite racism in the military as a
likely motivation.
As these stories of violence-and-response-andviolence accumulate, the War Show has become
increasingly layered. It appeared that a US missile
hit a Baghdad marketplace and killed 15 civilians,
though the Pentagon suggested it came from
Saddam Himself, in an effort to cast aspersion
on the US liberators. POWs were taken, including
the “scared”-looking Shoshana Johnson and the
since rescued Jessica Lynch. Sandstorms and
mud slowed US movement to Baghdad: “It was
biblical,” Colonel Ricky Gibbs of the 101st Airborne
tells the New York Times. “There’s a movie,
Scorpion King, that shows this same kind of
sandstorm.”
If it’s not surprising that the War Show reminds
anyone of a movie (even someone who’s in it
rather than watching it), it is remarkable that
the War Show’s fundamental paradox can be so
often forgotten. War, everyone knows, involves
killing and taking prisoners. But while displaying
explosions and gunfire is good television,
photographing such results is morally and politically
off-limits. On 23 March, Rumsfeld denounced the
Iraqis’ “fake surrender” in order to ambush US
Marines at An Nasiriyah, recounted after the fact
by embedded CNN correspondent Alessio Vinci
As if to exacerbate the show-ness of the Show,
embedded reporters have been doing incredible
stand-ups. Sometimes gunre or explosions can
be heard in the distance. Sometimes the reporter
cuts the transmission (“Gotta go! Bye!”), and
sometimes the studio does, when situations
suddenly look too “hairy.” At these points the
War — usually, a landscape or Baghdad streets —
appears as photos in the television screen corner,
with a map in the center and the journalist’s
embedded, wind-battered voice speaking over
the video phone. No snuff television, at least for
now. (That said, on 4 April, the Washington Post’s
Michael Kelly, became the rst US embedded
correspondent to be killed, reportedly in a Humvee
accident — the coverage has been reverent
and mournful.)
If Gupta, like the doctors with whom he is
embedded, can work across sides to save lives,
the same cannot be said for correspondents
who are dealing in stories per se. Peter Arnett’s
dismissal by NBC, for example, made headlines
at rst because the company changed its mind,
rst defending his appearance on Iraqi television
(where he said, “The rst war plan has failed
because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying
to write another war plan”), then condemning it
in the most strident terms possible, by ring him
(he was subsequently hired by London’s Daily
Mirror, Belgium’s VTM News, and as of 5 April, the
pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Arabiya).
Immediately, the judgments rushed in: for such
public doubting, he deserved to be red, his
reporting was “shallow,” his interview with Iraqi
television “Kafkaesque,” “truly unwise,” “ethically
unresponsible,” even treasonous. Arnett himself
mea-culpaed the next day, saying he made a
“stupid misjudgment,” and apologizing for the
“restorm” brought on by his comments. No
matter that, as Arnett noted, others, including
generals and other reporters, had made similar
observations (including his own network-mate,
Tim Russert, just before Arnett spoke with Matt
Lauer on Today on 31 March). The War Show, it’s
April 2003
And yet, some other sorts of reporter misfortunes
(less dire than death, to be sure) are highly visible.
Reporters, it turns out, make great stories, and
not just because they have feral hair like NBC’s
David Bloom. The journalists taken from their
Baghdad hotel rooms — reporter Matt McAllester,
and photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham,
and Johan Spanner — were released 2 April after
8 days in prison, listening to torture down the
hallway. Their recounting of their experiences
made them sensations, the object of much
news-ish mayhem, other reporters poking mics
at their car.
More embedding complications emerged in the
case of CNN’s medical reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s
valiant efforts to perform brain surgery on a
two-year-old Iraqi boy on 3 April. Stationed with
the Devil Docs, he found himself called on to
make a difcult “medical and moral decision,”
in attempting to save the girl, giving up his
“reporter’s” distance in order to do the right thing.
The line he crossed made him look heroic, and
he was interviewed repeatedly by CNN and CBS,
to underline that point. Crossing another line,
perhaps to take up arms against an opponent,
or to help load weapons, would be less easily
condoned.
35
What is the interest, for whom, in showing even
this single “disturbing” shot? Clearly, it upsets
viewers; just as clearly, it rallies sympathy for
troops and ire at the perpetrators of such brutality.
Compare its function to that of CNN’s “Iraqi
casualties” (a series of bloody victims photos,
none obviously dead). Following this brief series
of images, Blitzer introduced a brief comment by
Naji Sabri, Iraqi Foreign Minister, on 23 March
in Cairo for a meeting of Arab Foreign Ministers:
“Those aggressors are war criminals, colonialist
war criminals, crazy people led by a crazy, drunken,
ignorant President like George Bush.” Even if you
sympathize with Sari’s basic sentiment, his bluster
makes the photos suddenly less likely to win CNN
viewers’ sympathy.
And then, in the days following, the released
journalists found themselves treated like stories.
McAllester talked with Larry King and Matt
Lauer (“They were very polite, and it was quite
disconcerting about how polite they were. They
were not aggressive, but the menace was quite
clear”); Bingham with NPR’s Bob Edwards (“I
mean, I was trying to sleep, honestly, because I
knew I was going to be asked a lot of questions
and I wanted to get some rest because I hadn’t
slept in several days”) and Barbara Walters (who,
ever the helpful reality television host, noted,
“You must have been scared”).
Bad Subjects
(and one can only imagine his terror during the
event). Twelve soldiers were called missing or
dead, with at least four visibly dead on a videotape
released to Iraqi television. US media outlets
refused to show the “disturbing” video (though
they described it repeatedly as “disturbing”).
Instead, they showed a still photo, “with no
identifiable features,” showing only mangled
torsos, faces obscured or out of frame.
Bad Subjects
36
clear, is all about winning. It appears that “truth
on the battleeld” is overrated.
Social Death and War:
US Media Representations of
Sacrice in the Iraq War
Babak Rahimi
April 2003
Cynthia Fuchs is associate professor of Film
& Media Studies at George Mason University,
lm-tv-dvd editor for PopMatters.com, and
editor of Spike Lee: Interviews (University
of Mississippi Press 2002)
Surely the most prominent aspect of war is the
phenomenon of death and its potential in arousing
intense emotions. There is the simple but often
painful fact that war entails a horror of demise,
the realization that the power of death is replete
with anguish of nite existence and the threat of
destruction. Emotional reaction to death at times
of war can, however, vary according to how the
loss of life is represented through various media
of communication. Ritualized action, like rites
of commemoration or funeral ceremonies, have
traditionally represented death in ways in which
emotions are coordinated, sentiments are shaped,
and, although not entirely beyond one’s ability of
empathy, attitudes towards individual death are
sustained in stabilizing manner.
Although emotions and beliefs vary in content
according to cultural context and historical
situation, representations of death are essentially
enforced by subtle collective experiences which
one may refer to as the process of social death.
In broad terms, by social death we mean how
individuals experience a transformation of the
biological process of death, as a process of birth,
maturing, aging and dying. Death appears to be
no longer a matter of individual extinction, but
a collective renewal, a social regeneration and a
communal creative power. In other words, death,
in its collective representation, is no longer a
matter of annihilation, but rather regeneration,
a form of renewal that ultimately afrms belief
in immortality.
With the start of the second Persian Gulf
War, televised media have become a pivotal
communicative medium for a collective shared
experience of death. From the constant
broadcasting of American and British soldiers
armed with weapons of destruction to reports
about the annihilation of Iraqi Republican army,
from scenes of Iraqi civilian causalities to the news
of American soldiers wounded at the battleeld,
from the display of a decomposing corpse of an
Iraqi soldier on the road as dogs gnaw on his
limp arm, to reports of fedayeen suicide bombers,
the coverage of war has played a central role in
the number of ways death has been depicted on
television. Whether considering the Al-Jazerah
news channel, where images of both civilian and
military causalities and fatalities are displayed
on screen, or the near silent reports about the
human costs of the US-led war on Fox cable news,
the diverse programs use contrasting ways to put
on view the various representations of death by
targeting the particular viewers that they aim to
entertain. While a study of the audiences, their
cultural and social interests, personal sentiments,
values and tastes remains a signicant element to
better understand the media, it is crucial, however,
to identify the cultural dynamics behind the
representation of death on television.
Considering for the moment American television
channels, one can acknowledge a peculiar depiction
of attitudes surrounding death in context of the
ongoing war in Iraq. In broad terms, the manner
in which the Iraq war has been presented by the
news is the use of cinematographic techniques
to reduce the horror of war to a consumable and
entertaining phenomenon. The focus of CNN,
MSNBC, ABC or Fox News, for example, is on
the real and graphic animation of US military
technology, the three-dimensional imagery of the
battleelds. The constant parade of retired army
personnel commenting on the war brings to mind
an image of an ongoing game that is played,
fought and, ultimately won and displayed on
television. An extensive ow of information about
the high-tech use of weaponry, and in particular its
precision, discursively frames their effectiveness
The above point reects a deep tendency in
Western societies to deny the reality of life as a
biological reality. Historically, as Philippe Aries
has argued, contemporary French and English
people have been deprived of bereavement of
their own demise and the death of others since
the development of modern medical sciences. In
37
the Middle Ages people celebrated the imminence
of their death through diverse forms of ritual
activities, in which the dying person played
a central role in the life of families and the
community at large. These rituals provided a
cathartic release of an individual’s emotions
towards the deceased, as the ritual participants
would return to normal life after the ceremonies.
With the advent of modernity in Europe and the
rise of medical sciences, the doctor came to
preside over the deathbed. Medical practices have
replaced religion in comforting the grieved. As
death has been shoved out of the house and
moved to the hospital, emotions have been kept
to the minimum, and those who might mourn
April 2003
What is more important, though, is the depiction of
the “enemy forces” as objects
of conquest by death. Social
death is about reversing the
biological process of death
into something transcendental,
something permanent. But
that relates only to a member
of one’s community; in the
case of others from an invading
or invaded community, matters
change. The death of the other
is no longer a matter of renewal
after a biological death, say
after being killed in action by
US forces, but an object to
be brought to view only as a
statistical report, almost as
something that can be reported
with
detailed
numerical
information about the number
of missiles launched. “Coalition
forces have killed 254 enemy
soldiers today,” Paula Zahn
reports on CNN. Here there is
little or no talk about the Iraqi soldiers killed in
action. There is no report about how and where
they were killed, and certainly no show of their
bodies. Iraqi soldiers, for the most part, remain
faceless, nameless, placeless and, therefore,
unknown to the audiences. This can be partly
explained due to a strict pattern of self-censorship
in the US media against showing dead bodies.
Although the practice of self-censorship requires
a separate study altogether, for the most part
this deliberate technique in representing the
annihilated faceless “enemy” requires the basic
assumption about the polluting effect it may have
on the audiences. By pollution we mean that since
the “enemy” stands somewhere outside of the
community of television viewers, the show of its
corpse remains a threat to the stability of the
viewing public as a living collective body. A report
of a dead “enemy” can only be a brief one since it
endangers viewer attitudes towards life that are
devoid of degeneration and annihilation, even if
that involves an outsider’s death. In this sense,
the absence of detailed reports about a dead
Iraqi soldier not only denies the death of the
other in terms of loss of human life, but in
fact denies the existence of the soldier’s life
as human subject.
Bad Subjects
and power by bracketing out their destructive
force and their function to cause the loss of human
life. Relentless emphasis on high-tech weapons
overlooks their living human targets, hence
remaining silent about the weapons’ potential
to cause death under the disguise of being
technologically “smart.” While passive audiences
watch them run alongside the troops, reporters
televise images of armed soldiers shooting at a
hidden, faceless “enemy.” Emotions of sympathy
and pride grow as the sense of fear and horror of
death diminishes with the reassuring experience
of watching the war from the safety of one’s
home. In fact, the television screen itself becomes
a medium that unites the audiences with the
coalition soldiers attacking the faceless “enemy”
in the battleeld without feeling fear for the loss
of life caused by ghting.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
38
in public are avoided and viewed negatively. In
contemporary America such processes in the
denial of death have taken a somewhat unique
form. In sharp contrast to the medieval attitude
towards death and its representation in daily life,
the deathbed scene has all but been removed.
Death is usually a moment that occurs at hospitals;
it has left the home where it once identied
the close relationship between individuals in the
household from the time of their birth to their
demise in the natural process of life.
It is in this respect that the event of war can
be viewed as an alternative source of attitudes
towards death as displayed on television. Since
war is mainly about conquest, the fear and the
denial of the fragility of life is replaced with the
ethos of fortitude and triumph, the promise of
sacrice as victory over death. The death of an
American soldier at the southern Iraqi city of
Najaf, for instance, is not usually an event that
occurs at the hospital, where life is protected from
demise, but rather on the battleeld where life is
voluntarily exposed to the threat of annihilation.
War creates a dramatic collective experience of
death not as an act of annihilation in the natural
process of birth, growth, maturing, aging and
dying, but as an event that can indeed suspend
such processes. The televised representations
of death with the display of funeral marches or
a subtle oration by an emotional newscaster in
reference to soldiers killed in action, phrased as
“our brave ghters,” reintegrate the deceased
back into the community through poetic words,
slow songs and oratory praises. The magic of
the television screen is the power to broadcast
the corpse of a soldier concealed under the US
ag without exposing the mutilated body. It is by
zooming on the ag that the lifeless body of a
soldier becomes an immortal entity. This occurs
while the decomposed body is recomposed back
to the deathless body of the nation in the colorful
imagery of the ag as CNN, MSNBC or Fox provides
‘live’ coverage of the ceremonies. It is, in fact, in
the ‘live’ aspect of the coverage that transforms
the horror of death and bereavement into a
triumphantly joyful event for the collective body,
the nation. Death is conquered when rebirth of
the deceased occurs in death rites displayed on
television. But, more importantly, regeneration is
brought about by reports on “sacrice” that occurs
at the battleelds and is reproduced through
the television screen.
A statement that the killed soldier has given up
his or her life as an “ultimate sacrice for our
freedom” implies the notion of death as a form
of endowment. Death in the form of sacrice
becomes a gift to ‘us,’ to Americans, as a collective
body of individuals that transcends the transience
of life. It becomes a special form of ritual
enactment that allows the deceased soldier to
participate in the immortality of a transcendent
entity, namely, the nation. But, more importantly,
the sacrice of a killed soldier is something that can
be identied, shared and, as some anthropologists
would term, “internalized” by audiences watching
the program on television. This is crucial since
it is at this moment, the moment in which the
audiences identify themselves with the gloried
act of sacrice, that death becomes a matter of
victory for the nation in the form of a collective
body of individuals as Americans. What remains
signicant in this victory is the element of memory.
“We shall not forget!” CNN, CBS or ABC display
the phrase in a colorfully designed and glorifying
show of words following pictures of killed soldiers,
regardless of the loss suffered at the hands of
friendly forces. Thus, once again, a moment
of rebirth occurs, a new shining nativity of a
new soul, not as a physical entity vulnerable
to decomposition, but a living memory to the
immortal and indestructible nation. The sacriced
solider is not eliminated but resurrected in form of
memorial on the television screen.
It risks obviousness, therefore, to suggest that
television segments covering the war with Iraq are
hardly about ‘educating’ audiences with ‘unbiased
information.’ There is something more complicated
in the making here. Representations of life and
death of oneself and the other, of ‘hero’ and
‘enemy,’ of US and Iraqi soldiers, are a matter
of inventing truths rather than reporting facts.
In the realm of television reality shows — here
mainly referring to the war — facts become ction
as images represent a reality that is intertwined
with the collective experiences of an imagined
nation in contrast to an enemy world. It is through
the decaying body of an Iraqi soldier that the
dead body of an American soldier achieves life,
allowing the dead American soldier to participate in
the transcendental reality of the nation; it is in the
violent conquest of the enemy through death that
the conquering forces attain immortality.
Babak Rahimi is a
doctoral student at the
European University
Institute,
Florence,
Italy, where he is
currently working on
historical anthropology
of the Iranian public
sphere.
Bomb Me I Bleed by Melissa
Usher.
War as a Sporting Event
Michael Hoffman
The current war is the rst one that has been fully
presented as live, along with hidden microphones,
“embedded” reporters, and instant replays. It is
an audience-participation war in the fullest sense.
Briengs by actual generals abound, as well as
television interviews with retired ones. There is,
in fact, more analysis than direct war footage,
because exploding bombs, machine gun bursts,
and rolling tanks make little sense without
explanation. It is possible to watch a football or
basketball game with the sound muted and still
know what is going on; but bombs exploding over
Baghdad do not explain themselves, and those
images of red and orange re clouds would give
April 2003
In the years since then we have gotten used
to following a particular type of ritual during
moments of heightened national consciousness
and crisis. At such moments we turn on our
television sets so that we can participate personally
and intensely in the mediated events of those
days. Recall, for instance, the rst war in Iraq, the
saga of Desert Storm, directed by President Bush
the Elder. By this time television had morphed
into a fully technicolor medium and was available
to us not only on the major networks but on
CNN, a cable station totally “devoted” to “the
news.” We watched the development of such
media personalities as announcers Bernard Shaw
and Wolf Blitzer as well as generals Colin Powell
(Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Norman
Schwartzkopf (director of the ground war). We
How much are we captives of the media that
we watch so obsessively during times of crisis?
Through how many repetitions did each of us
watch the twin towers of the World Trade Center
collapse into piles of dust and rubble after being
struck by jet airliners on September 11, 2001?
For this viewer those moving images will forever
be the ones I retain of an event that has, in
effect, changed the way many Americans have
come to see the world. Those falling towers
have also provided the rationale for sending
our troops to Iraq.
At that time television had already become the
major conduit for our absorption of public events.
I recall my then-wife and me taking turns typing
my Ph.D. thesis in late November 1963 while
sitting in front of our black-and-white television
set during the days following John Kennedy’s
assassination. We watched Jack Ruby shoot a
startled Lee Harvey Oswald live on screen, saw the
caisson with the Presidential cofn rolling down
Pennsylvania Avenue, and saw little John-John
Kennedy salute as it rolled by, with his elegant
mother standing next to him, symbolizing the
end of Camelot. These are some of the iconic
images we all retain from that particular historical
moment, even those who were not alive then.
In the following decade we got used to watching
the war in Vietnam being projected into our living
rooms via taped transmissions of live action.
The war came home to us with all the power
of a feature lm or television documentary, and
the moon shot occurred during the middle of
that experience.
Nonetheless, watching a simulated war was
satisfying, because it gave us a strong sense of
American superiority, and that made it easy to
support the action. It’s always easier, after all, to
support a winning team. That’s why the Yankees
and Braves ll their stadiums year after year.
Desert Storm (the mediated version) was a
carefully managed war game. It created a setting
in which the good troops from the then-coalition
battled an evil dictator whom we had previously
supported during the Cold War when he attacked
Iran — our previous enemy that had kidnapped
Americans, held them for ransom, and were
being supported by our Cold War rival, the
Soviet Union.
Bad Subjects
In 1970 I published an article on the Apollo
moon shot in which I compared the television
presentation of that occasion to the airing of a
sporting event. I called the essay “The Moral
Equivalent of War?”, adding a question mark to the
title of one of William James’s essays from the turn
of the twentieth century. In my article I explored
the issue of how the mediated presentation of
such events as Neil Armstrong’s rst steps on the
moon gave Americans the satisfaction that used
to come with winning battles or wars, or at the
slightly lower level, backing a World Series winner
or a Wimbledon champion.
watched some live action but also much computer
simulation, including “smart bombs” that could
enter the windows of buildings on direction.
We found out later that the actual bombs (as
opposed to the simulated ones) never did have
such accuracy and that many of them went astray
and killed civilians. We saw the simulated disabling
of huge numbers of Iraqi tanks — well over half
of them, as a matter of mediated fact — but later,
we learned that the conrmed number was closer
to twenty than to fty per cent.
39
April 2003
Bad Subjects
40
us little more than an aesthetic frisson without the
mediation of announcers and analysts.
This kind of war coverage has relied increasingly
on the ways that television has learned to cover
sporting events. Roone Arledge, the late guru
behind Monday Night Football, is more the
inspiration behind this war than Clausewitz or
Wolfowitz. Football games and tennis matches
both have play-by-play announcers and “color”
announcers, or analysts. The analysts are primarily
former players, similar in background and function
to the retired generals and colonels who tell us
how to watch the war. The “embedded” reporters
of the war are like the announcers who are placed
on the eld, or by the tennis court, or in the
crowd, giving us a sense of the experience “from
the inside” by talking to the military men and
women; by taking us inside the war rooms,
the tanks, the armored personnel carriers; and
by interviewing nervous soldiers on the eve
of action or injured survivors. Does all this
sound familiar?
Certain well-known public gures have emerged
as media personalities — for instance, former
NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, who is
now running for President, and Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, who is visibly running the war. It is
nonetheless comforting to have reporters we are
used to from earlier major television events, men
like the familiar, but grayer, Wolf Blitzer, who
has become the Al Michaels of mediated wars, or
Aaron Brown, whose soothing voice (reminiscent
of Vin Scully) helped us get through the trauma
of 9/11. We have women announcers in the
studio balancing out the military women who are
serving at or near the front lines, women like
Judy Woodruff of
CNN or Andrea
Mitchell
on
MSNBC, who,
like Pam Shriver
in
tennis
or
B o n n i e
Bernstein
of
Monday Night
Football, serve
to remind us
that the media
are committed
to
gender
diversity.
There is also
money to be
made
by
televising the
war. For the rst
few days the three major cable news networks
eschewed advertising, giving us the appearance
that they were donating their public services
gratis. The war, we thought, might be over in just
a week, given what our “shock-and-awe” tactics
were designed to do; so a few days would not be
much of a commercial sacrice for the networks
to make. By the time we realized that the war
might last longer than we expected, the networks
were showing commercials once again, and the
war had moved from being something of a lark —
a bit like reworks on the Fourth of July — to being
like a nagging toothache that could be soothed
only by watching it constantly. The networks
could hardly mind, however, because televised
war creates a massive audience, and massive
audiences raise the rates that can be charged to
sponsors. It isn’t just the construction companies
chosen to rebuild Iraq that will prot from the war.
The media will as well. Even the New York Times
has established a new section called “A Nation at
War” that will increase the paper’s circulation and
therefore its advertising revenues. It has recently
been reported, by the way, that attendance at the
movies has dropped by around twenty per cent
when compared to this time last year. Those lost
viewers are no doubt sitting before their television
sets, representing a gain for the networks and
their commercial sponsors.
The popular justication for putting the war on
television in such a comprehensive way is no
doubt that it is done in the democratic service
of a better-informed citizenry. And it is no doubt
true that we do know more about the war on
a day-to-day basis than we have ever known
before. But for many people whom I have talked
to the saturated
presentation of
Operation
E n d u r i n g
Freedom has
a c t u a l l y
increased their
sense
of
helplessness. If
that outcome
creates
a
generation of
people who hate
the very idea of
war, the current
experience
might turn out
to be a good
thing. But for the
government,
which is the
As Herbert Marcuse pointed out long ago in
One-Dimensional Man, we are all implicated in
the actions of an organized society, capitalist or
otherwise. How, short of becoming expatriates or
hermits, can we manage to live in such a mediated
environment and behave responsibly? I have no
easy answers to these questions. But early in my
recent obsessive war-watching I tried to face this
issue, when like many people I started to lose
sleep and began feeling disoriented and confused.
I started to limit myself to thirty minutes a day
of television war coverage and turned to reading
about the war in the Times. This retreat into an
older medium and away from the metaphor of
sport has distanced me to some extent from the
kind of saturation that deadens the mind. While
the Times is still a product of our society and
reects the ideology of power, I feel that I am
no longer living at the mercy of information so
overwhelming that it threatens to turn me into an
automaton. It may be that we can do nothing to
change the policies that lie behind this juggernaut,
but at least we can refuse to legitimate the game.
It may be that the media have turned war into
a spectator sport, but that doesn’t mean we
have to watch it.
Michael Hoffman recently retired from
the English Department of University of
California-Davis.
"War! Blog! Good Gawd,
Y'all! What Are They Good
For?"
Steven Rubio
What blogging does offer are easy tools for
producing voluminous text without much specialized
knowledge in webpage creation, tools that, if not
new, are at least usefully user-friendly. Blogs
produced using one of the many popular boilerplate
creators like Blogger look “professional”; a blog
April 2003
In “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful
Head” [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/
jmoore/secondsuperpower.html] Jim Moore notes
that “The current enthusiasm for blogging is
changing the way that people relate to publication,
as it allows realtime dialogue about world events
as bloggers log in daily to share their insights.”
This kind of dialogue, whether or not it’s actually
“real time,” is indeed valuable, and potentially
global. What is not clear is if blogging is something
new to the online world. “Blogs” are new; real
time dialogue amongst the online community has
been going on for quite awhile, preceding blogging
by many years. One might argue that email lists,
for instance, are not “real time,” but they are
as real time as blogging, and if real time is the
only standard for revolutionary change, than
instant messaging time, not only online, but on cell
phones, is far more “real.” Usenet newsgroups have
been around, hosting fevered “real time” dialogue,
almost since the beginning of the net.
41
These matters aside, however, are we better
informed than we were before? Is massive
information and analysis a means to better
understanding and responsible civic action?
Or is it really a more efcient way to become
indoctrinated, turning us more passive in the face
of governmental actions undertaken on the basis
of an ideology for which a majority of Americans
public did not vote?
Bad Subjects
war’s largest corporate sponsor, this mediated
presentation actually creates a rare opportunity
for it to manipulate public opinion. The networks
give our national leaders constant air time to
defend their policies, appeal to patriotic instincts,
and reassure everyone that not only is the war
going well but that our country’s intentions are
honorable and that we will prevail over Evil.
Announcers toe the party line, and those who don’t
— like Peter Arnett — quickly nd employment
elsewhere. The American public is being presented
with an evangelical civics lesson, not only daily but
hourly. All the principal gures are accumulating
greater clout. Granted, the administration is taking
a big political risk. If the war goes badly, Bush
the Younger might well become, like his father, a
one-term president. But what if the war goes well?
Not only will he win a second term (by election
this time), but most of his colleagues will return
with him, stronger and more recognized than ever,
and a Republican agenda that includes excessive
tax cuts, environmental irresponsibility, and bans
on abortions will be adopted by Congress in
a mood of patriotic fervor. Think about what
Compassionate Conservatism will look like from
2005 to 2009.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
42
is more appealing, and more accessible in every
sense of the word, than the average Usenet post.
And blogs more frequently now include comment
sections that allow readers to add to discussions
growing out of the original blogger’s post. This
ease of use is the new thing, for sure, but it doesn’t
mark the beginning of real time net dialogue, any
more than Mosaic marked the beginning of the
World Wide Web. Blogs (like Mosaic) mark a new
step in accessibility, no more (and no less).
Neither does the explosion of war blogs negate
existing critique of the value of blogging. As I argued
recently [http://eserver.org/bs/62/rubio.html],
blogging tools give more people more chances
to blather about more stuff, but blogging is not
inherently left-wing, not inherently communitybuilding, not inherently revolutionary.
Part of the reason war blogs are having such an
impact right now is precisely because they are
being noticed by the mainstream news media.
Some critics of modern journalism will argue
that the mainstream has proven itself
irrelevant, with the proof lying in those
very blogs that are the topic of this
discussion. But everyone who wishes
to have an impact with their writing
needs an audience. There are a few
blogging “superstars” with a relatively
large audience, and there are new, budding
blogstars arising during this time of
war. None of them have as large an
audience, none of them are as inuential,
as Dan Rather. For many, probably
most, Americans, the primary source of
information about blogs is what they
read, see, and hear in the mainstream
media.
Which isn’t to argue that blogs are useless,
or that only mainstream media counts. But even
if Jim Moore is right, that a second superpower of
global-oriented net activists is arising, and that
blogs (among other tools) are an essential marker
of this emerging power, it’s unclear why blogs
are assumed to be the innovative new beginning
of net activism. As I suggested above, online
communal activism existed long before blogs.
And war blogs may make “stars” of some, but
stardom is the antithesis of community. Blogging
isn’t creating a new underground movement as
much as it’s creating a new batch of Norman
Mailers.
Kevin Sites is a reporter for CNN. On March 9, he
started up a blog [http://www.kevinsites.net/].
The rst couple of posts look to be material that
had already appeared on CNN.com, but soon he
was posting like any other blogger, explaining
about cell-phone ring tones and screen savers,
and the technological changes surrounding war
reporting in the 21st century. He throws in the
occasional audio le, a picture here and there. He
includes links to diaries he wrote covering other
wars in other places in other times. By March 17,
Sites is really getting the blogger’s rush: “This
experience has really made me rethink my rather
orthodox views of reaching folks via mass media.
Blogging is an incredible tool, with amazing
potential. The feedback readers are posting
motivates me to provide as much as I can for all of
these folks hungry for rst-hand info.”
Unfortunately for readers of Sites’ blog, someone
didn’t approve. On March 21, after an absence of
a few days, Sites posted a message titled “Pausing
the warblog, for now” in which he informed his
audience, “I’ve been asked to suspend my war
blogging for awhile.” It wasn’t clear who was doing
the asking, although the assumption was CNN.
Sites didn’t quit reporting; you can nd his work
on CNN and their website to this day. The
blog and the “pause” have inspired plenty
of fervent discussion about the role of
blogging in contemporary journalism;
CNN has been reported (in the Online
Journalism Review [http://www.ojr.org/
ojr/workplace/1049381758.php] among
other places) as stating through a
spokesperson that “We do not blog.”
Meanwhile, despite Sites’ absence from
his own blog, kevinsites.net continues to
gather an impressive crowd: as I type
these words, the discussion thread in
response to Sites’ “pause” announcement
has grown to more than 1500 replies,
and while the earliest messages were
about the Pause, weeks later it has mostly
become another place to discuss the
war online.
While the Sites blog is paused, Sites himself has
not been silenced. Salam Pax is apparently not so
lucky. His blog [http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/],
which detailed the daily life of people in Baghdad,
was noteworthy in part for the way it brought to
the surface the fears of many who mistrust the
Internet: no one seemed able to establish whether
or not “Salam Pax” was “real.” Sara Rimensnyder,
assistant editor for Reason, suggested why it
mattered so much to know that Salam Pax was legit
[http://reason.com/links/links032503.shtml]. “If
our bullshit detectors can’t help us judge the
truth of one voice, how can we hope to get an
accurate reading about the state of an entire
nation, or indeed a region, forecasted twenty
years into the future?”
But even these ne efforts are
more blogstar than community.
Ultimately, the best examples
of online community revolving
around political issues remain
places like Doug Henwood’s LBOList archive [http://squawk.ca/
lbo-talk/], which is, of course, an
email list, not a blog. Sometimes
the old ways are better. And the
proof can be found in one of the most notorious of
blogs, the aforementioned kevinsites.net: while
Sites hasn’t posted there for some time, his
readers continue to post their own takes on
war at kevinsites.net, creating and sustaining a
community that the individual blogger whose name
adorns the site could never do on his own.
Steven
Rubio
lectures
in
mass
communications at University of CaliforniaBerkeley, is a former member of the Bad
Subjects Collective, and is a much-loved
friend of the Collective’s editors. His 1999
article “Linguica and Me” remains one of the
most popular articles BS ever published. The
present essay’s title honors the just-deceased
Edwin Starr.
April 2003
Some folks seem to be hoping that the emerging
popularity of war blogs marks the beginning of
a new era of journalism. In this scenario, CNN
is assumed to be inescapably behind the times
because they do not blog; blogging becomes
the proper place for non-mainstream reporting
and analysis, unencumbered by institutional
connections or moneyed influence. Anti-war
activists seem especially heartened by this utopian
internet potential, forgetting in their excitement
that blogging is for everyone, not just left-wingers.
To the extent blogging does allow for a multiplicity
of voices, it exists as a tool for all people and all
Having said all of this, it’s worth noting some of
the more absorbing bloggers out there, because
there’s nothing wrong with learning from the
writing of others ... such an education might even
lead to the community involvement that
blogging utopians hope already exists.
Nathan Newman, an old friend of Bad Subjects,
does a terric job on his blog/website/archive
[http://www.nathannewman.org/log/], offering
the perspective of a leftist who hasn’t given up
entirely on the Democratic Party. Dr. Frank, among
other things the leader of the venerable punk
band the Mr. T Experience, writes an extremely
intelligent blog [http://blogsofwar.blogspot.com/]
that is nonetheless to the right of the typical Bad
Subjectian, and will in all likelihood piss them off.
(In an ironic note Dr. Frank surely appreciates,
he called his blog “The Blogs of War” from
its beginnings in 2001; this
made things a bit difcult for
the creator of the subsequent
blogsofwar.com
[http://
www.blogsofwar.com/], a site
summarized by the message
appearing on an ad featured on
the site that encourages you to
buy blogsofwar gear: “Give War
a Chance”.)
43
Blogs expose their readers to different worlds ...
different from the world of our own daily lives,
different as well from the world presented to us
by the mainstream media. The world of anti-war
protests, anti-imperialism, and challenges to
cultural hegemonies is at least partly my own
world, and likely a part of the world of most Bad
Subjects readers as well. For this reason, one
of the most useful and illuminating war blogs
for anyone reading these words would be “Live
from the Sandbox,” the blog
of L.T. Smash [http://www.ltsmash.us/], a reservist called
into active duty in the current
war. Smash presents a different
world to Bad Readers. He is
not anti-war, he is certainly
not anti-American, he’s just a
guy in a war, with a blog and
something to say. He offers a
subjective, personal narrative,
and blogs are nothing if they
are not subjective and personal
(one of the primary reasons
blogs are seen as a potentially
revolutionary
change
in
journalistic practices is their
insistence on subjectivity over
objectivity). To read Smash is
to experience the life of one
of those people who would
seem to be on the opposite side from anti-war
workers. His blog humanizes him. Sadly, it’s not
always apparent that anti-war activists are much
interested in humanizing American soldiers.
schools of thought, perhaps even especially the
extreme and/or marginalized.
Bad Subjects
Meanwhile, on March 21, the same day that Kevin
Sites quit blogging, Salam Pax wrote on his own
blog, “please stop sending emails asking if I were
for real, don’t belive [sic] it? then don’t read it.
I am not anybody’s propaganda ploy, well except
my own. 2 more hours untill [sic] the B52’s get
to Iraq.” On March 24, Salam Pax posted a note
that his internet access had been temporarily
out ... he hasn’t posted since, leading to worry
about his fate.
Operation Iraqi Freedom:
Misdirection in Action
Bad Subjects
44
Jo Rittenhouse and Elisabeth Hurst
Today’s (April 3, 2003) New York Times headlines
are all about Iraq, except for two small remarks:
that the Supreme Court ruled this week to uphold
a law that allows states to require managed health
care plans to accept any qualied doctor who
wants to participate, potentially giving consumers
more choices in their healthcare. Second, the
Catholic Church is now eating itself: ‘Boston
Archdiocese Is Sued by San Bernardino Diocese’
— A California diocese has sued the Archdiocese
of Boston for damages resulting from the latter’s
failure to disclose a transferred priest’s record
of sexual abuse.
Either of these two have the potential to be lead
stories. In fact, six months ago, anything regarding
dioceses in the Catholic Church suing each other
over sexual abuses would be front-page news.
Were it not for Iraq, no doubt the story would be
today. In fact, it is arguable even now that just
knowing these two things is more important to
our daily lives than knowing that a POW has been
released or that another bomb fell on Baghdad.
Where are the reports?
Unfortunately, there’s no relation between these
stories and the Persian Gulf. The mainstream
media connects almost every piece of news
that we do get to see to the war in Iraq. Even
apparently unrelated events, or only partially
related events, are told against a backdrop of
events in the Persian Gulf. The stories that don’t
t this paradigm fade into the background. If
all the news that’s t to print never arrives on
your doorstep, would you know what you were
missing? Would you care?
April 2003
Disappeared News
During late March and early
April, 2003, the following
barely reported events,
unrelated to the invasion of
Iraq, happened. Do any of
these events impact your
life?
•
The State of Texas
defends its antisodomy laws in front
of the US Supreme
Court, potentially leading to the Court
overturning its own 1986 decision in Bowers
v. Hardwick. Given how infrequently the
Court is willing to overturn itself, its
willingness to do so here could foreshadow
its willingness to do so in future cases. Most
important of those: Roe v. Wade.
•
In other Court news, the University of
Michigan defends afrmative action in cases
argued before Supreme Court, potentially
affecting thousands of students’ access to
higher education.
•
New York City is possibly on the verge of
bankruptcy in the wake of personal injury
suits following the attack on the World
Trade Center. Never mind all the money
we all sent to New York two years ago to
help take care of people, the City is still
defending against suits.
•
The State of California successfully defends
its “no drilling offshore” policy against
the Bush administration, or, more to the
point, the administration has decided to
discontinue the ght in the face of a recent
court decision which went against them.
The same, however, is not true of drilling
in Alaska. The House is already working on
new energy legislation, including drilling in
the Alaska wildlife refuge.
•
The great American pastime: Baseball
season begins and the only question seems
to be whether it’s appropriate for it to
have done so.
•
In the esoteric les, Egypt nds oldest
evidence of mummication
in the world when a 5000
year-old cofn is opened,
and the bones inside are
mostly intact. What are
the ramifications of this
discovery? We do not know
because the article is
hidden.
•
In New Mexico, two
high school teachers are
suspended for refusing to
remove war-related artwork
Don’t forget that mass layoffs are still
happening. The unemployment rate for
March 2003 is expected to increase to
5.9%, and companies are expected to lay
off another 29,000 people.
•
Then there’s that pesky overtime pay that
you were hoping to use to cover some of
the bills. The Labor
Department wants
to cut off even more
professionals from
the right to get
compensation for
overtime, and the
US government is
acceding to the
pressure of business
groups and plans to
allow companies to
“offer” paid time off
instead of money.
Any bets on how
optional that offer
becomes?
•
The state of Oregon wants to limit your
right to free speech. Take part in a war
protest or exercise your right to free speech
in any way that someone can interpret as
an act that is intended to disrupt business,
transportation, schools, government, or
free assembly, and Oregon wants to treat
you as a terrorist with an automatic
sentence of 25 years in prison.
After all, we must ght terrorism in all of
its guises. Even nuns who “deface” missile
silos with crosses and who sing hymns
and recite bible verses are threats to
US national security. They could go to
trial with a potential prison sentence of
up to 30 years.
•
In another time, Elizabeth Smart’s return
to her family would be celebrated as a
miracle. The events leading up to her
kidnapping, and the backgrounds of her
kidnappers would be investigated and
described, and rehashed over and over
again. However, the war gave Elizabeth and
her family a measure of relief after their
15 minutes of fame. The media feeding
Politicians and the mainstream news media
use the invasion of Iraq in the same way that
magicians use misdirection. They use the invasion
to distract the observations and therefore control
the perceptions of the public. To direct the public
away from certain realities, they misdirect them
to perceive and believe one or more things are
true when in reality they are false.
With some issues, such
as the stock market, they
point to the war and direct
the public’s attention away
from the problems in the
economy. For other issues,
they use the war to actively
deceive the public. George
Bush brings the war into
every speech, whether the
topic is related or not. In the
middle of an announcement
of his plan to “strengthen
Medicare”, given by the
President on March 4, 2003,
he started by talking about
terrorism and the war. Reading the speech,
the economy doesn’t appear until the ninth
paragraph. The message is clear: everything
takes a back seat to the most important issue,
the invasion of Iraq.
The mainstream news media follows the President’s
lead. News programs begin with war coverage
under a snappy title that imitates the names of
reality TV shows or documentaries on the History
Channel: “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Showdown
with Saddam,” or “America at War.” All those other
stories we mentioned slide to the back pages
of newspapers and websites, or get only a brief
mention, if anything at all, on the television
news. After all, there are only so many pages in
newspapers that can be lled, only so much space
on the front page of a website, and only so much
time in a news program, even with the expanded
time set aside for war coverage.
So, don’t worry about the environment. Work
against or for the war instead. The environmental
problems will still be there when the war is
over. Maybe a bit worse, but who notices the
changes that the government made to the energy
legislation while we weren’t looking? A little drilling
April 2003
•
Misdirection by War
45
•
frenzy was cut short, and the miracle of
Elizabeth Smart has been superceded by
the miracle of Jessica Lynch.
Bad Subjects
from their classroom walls (both pro and
anti) after having taught their students
about Iraq and the conict over there.
What, exactly, are teachers supposed to be
doing in their classrooms anyway?
April 2003
Bad Subjects
46
in Alaska. A little liability protection and some
benefits to the energy companies. What do
they matter when we need all that oil and
gas to help ght the war in Iraq? Or is that
terrorism? Never mind. We’re sure they’re all
related somehow.
We need to see past the overwhelming presence
of the invasion of Iraq. We can’t afford to allow
the government and mainstream news media to
use this misdirection to distract us away from
other events in the United States. If we ignore
these events now, then we will have to work
Nathan Snaza
that much harder to undo the damage when
the government and news media nally move
the war to the periphery of our vision, and let
us see what they’ve been doing while we’ve
been distracted.
Maybe that fault line running underneath downtown
Los Angeles can wait a couple thousand years;
it’s doubtful that much else can.
Jo Rittenhouse and Elisabeth Hurst watch
television and read newspapers together,
whether they’re in the same house or in
different cities.
Reections Toward
Visibility
1.
Already in 1985 it was possible to perceive a
punitive system operating on our smallest physical
and psychic acts, a system that infused our
actions with an aura of uncertainty with regard to
criminality and immorality. In Between Men, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote:
Not only must homosexual men be unable to
ascertain whether they are to be the objects
of “random” homophobic violence, but no man
must be able to ascertain that he is not (that
his bonds are not) homosexual. In this way,
a relatively small exertion of physical or legal
compulsion potentially rules great reaches of
behavior and liation.
This apparatus of surveillance and punishment,
which for Foucault had a normative function,
would soon overreach itself and place normalcy
itself in constant question. We entered a system
where we allowed violence against an “unseemly”
minority even while we became less and less
certain if that minority could include each of us.
When President Clinton initiated the “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell” plan, the being-in-language of humans
was transformed from a communicative being to a
being-open-to-interrogation where linguistic acts
are inseparable from criminal acts. Judith Butler
in Excitable Speech explains:
The utterance is understood not merely to offend
a sense of sensibilities, but to constitute an injury,
as if the word performed the act . . . The ascription
of such magical efcacy to words emerges in
the context of the US military in which the
declaration that one is a homosexual is understood
to communicate something of homosexuality and,
hence, to be a homosexual act of some kind.
In this milieu we are, all of us — homosexual
or not — are always already guilty and only
wait for the correct moment to be betrayed. We
can’t help ourselves.
2.
We learn that the United States government, under
the auspices of protecting domestic security from
acts of terrorism, proposes the following:
under Section 501 of the…Domestic Security
Enhancement Act of 2003, an American citizen
can be stripped of citizenship if he or she
“becomes a member of, or provides material
support to, a group that the United
States has designated as a ‘terrorist
organization,’ if that group is engaged
in hostilities against the United States.
- Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice February
28, 2003
It is entirely without precedent for the government
to revoke citizenship without a linguistic statement
of the déclassé demanding such a status. According
to Hentoff, such statements, for the current
administration, are irrelevant: “’the intent to
relinquish nationality need not be manifested
in words, but can be inferred from conduct.’ “
(emphasis added)
3.
Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the state of
exception in Means Without End is instructive:
The state of exception is the reduction of humanity
to the homo sacer, the life that can be killed but
not sacriced. The person stripped of citizenship,
held at undisclosed locations, possibly subject
to torture, unable to make any claim whatever
to human rights (in as much as those rights are
predicated on the power of a nation-state to
recognize them) can be killed or disappeared but
nothing more. This “recognition” of human rights,
the power of the State to see in us a humanity
deserving of such rights, is failing under a system
Even as our guilt is becoming ever-more-glaringly
visible, the violence of the State is disappearing.
Not that it ceases to function: the bombings,
the relocations, the interrogations continue;
they may even be expanding. Rather, they are
becoming invisible.
What awaits us is something much more
uncanny [than the September 11th attack]:
the spectre of an ‘immaterial’ war where the
attack is invisible — viruses, poisons which
can be anywhere and nowhere. On the
level of visible material reality, nothing
happens, no big explosions; yet the known
universe starts to collapse, life disintegrates.
- Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the
Real. Verso, 2002
As Zizek continues in Welcome to the Desert of
the Real, the greatest task for the new warfare
will be to “identify the enemy and his weapons.”
These weapons are hidden, yet omnipresent: in
hotel rooms, car trunks, computer hard drives,
shoes, the mail. We are all potential victims
and perpetrators in a game where nothing is
as it seems.
Hence the rush to displays of patriotism, ags
and “Liberate Iraq” signs. Preemptive defense
of loyalty, we may call it. We hear again the
cries of “we have nothing to hide,” as the State
Intelligence apparatus demands wiretaps, library
records, receipts of charitable donations. The
unwillingness to make visible all evidence is
irreparable proof of guilt.
This is the lesson that we should be learning
from the Administration’s
denouncements of Saddam
Hussein: the lack of
spectacular innocence is
read as the demonic stigma
of abjection. Iraq’s repeated
statements that they
cannot produce weapons
of mass destruction that
they don’t have cease
to mean anything once
we recognize that the
administration doesn’ t
April 2003
(How could we not think that a system that can
no longer function at all except on the basis
of emergency would not also be interested in
preserving such an emergency at any price?)
This is that case also and above all because
naked life, which was the hidden foundation
of sovereignty, has meanwhile become the
dominant form of life everywhere. Life — in its
state of exception that has now become the
norm — is the naked life that in every context
separates the forms of life from their cohering
into a form-of-life. The Marxian scission
between man and citizen is thus superceded
by the division between naked life (ultimate
and opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the
multifarious forms of life abstractly recodied
as social-juridical identities (the voter, the
worker, the journalist, the student, but also
the HIV-positive, the transvestite, the porno
star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) that
all rest on naked life.
4.
47
The immediate justication for the current state
of exception in the United States and possibly
elsewhere, is the terror attack of September
11, 2001. The color-coded alerts, prompting
media-frenzied Americans to stockpile duct tape
and plastic cloth to protect against chemical
weapon attacks, are the visible interpellation
into the state of exception. Not that we have
a choice.
where proof of our guilt has become always
already visible. Identity papers are no longer
visible evidence of rights inasmuch as a piece
of clothing, a gesture, an utterance is enough
to supercede our citizenship and banish us to
naked life.
Bad Subjects
Once again, it is impossible to know if we are in
“material breach” of the law, if our actions, linguistic
or otherwise, are proof of some unknowable
complicity with evil, some terrorist tendency in
each of us. This visibility of guilt will not be met
with juridical process but with removal from the
systems of justice entirely. Citizenship, along with
the rights inhering in that status, is revocable.
“Inalienable” no longer has any meaning in the
state of exception in which we live.
48
require proof of anything anymore; a certain
look is enough.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
5.
The question of resistance is a peculiar one now,
even as it immanently affects our survival. What
means of resistance are available to a citizenry
whose claim to “citizenship” may be annulled at
any moment? Zizek explains that “The excluded
are not only terrorists, but those who are on the
receiving end of the humanitarian help (Rwandans,
Bosnians, Afghanis . . .): today’s homo sacer is
the privileged object of humanitarian biopolitics:
the one who is deprived of his or her full humanity
being taken care of in a patronizing way.”
Humanitarian help is itself beset by problems
of the visible. On the one hand, the costs of
war are the justication for cutting aid to the
most vulnerable in the United States and abroad,
leaving them openly hungry, lost and — at times
— secured in encampments. On the other, it has
become possible to dene any military action
precisely as “humanitarian,” especially when we
can watch the bombing on television without the
spectacle of death even ickering on our screens.
In a curious move, bombing Iraq is coded as
a greater humanitarian good than feeding or
educating people.
We should pause a moment when “humanitarian”
begins to signify in such a way. The very question
of “humanity,” when life is everywhere revealed to
be naked life and not form-of-life (in Agamben’s
terms) seems suspect. The naked life, as Agamben
tells us in The Coming Community, is related to
the greek zoe, while the form-of-life is related to
bio. Politics is the proper manner-of-being for bio,
but the enactment of State power on bodies is the
realm of zoe. If zoe is that which “expresse[s]
the simple fact of living common to all living
beings (animals, humans, or gods),” then what
does it mean to even speak of the “human”
in this context?
For a long time, the condition of being human has
been within the purview of the nation-state. Even
while lip service has been paid to being “human”
above being American, Greek, Muslim, Lutheran,
Gay, Conservative, etc., all of the “inalienable”
rights of man were possible only where the
condition of being this or that nationality preceded
one’s entrance into protection as human. Identity
becomes, and especially national identity, the only
possible means of claiming human being.
What is required of us then is a thinking of what it
means to inhabit human being without identity, or
in Agamben’s terms, as whatever being.
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate
belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and
thus rejects all identity and every condition
of belonging, is the principal enemy of the
State. Wherever these singularities peacefully
demonstrate their being in common there will be
a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will
appear. (Means Without End)
The whatever, which is neither generic nor specic,
neither universal nor particular, is for Agamben
the “loveable.” What Agamben recognizes in
Tiananmen as the insistence of the whatever in the
face of State violence, we may recognize in the New
York peace protest in February of 2003.
David Roediger, in a recent talk, suggested that
something happened at this protest in New York
that was qualitatively different from what he’d
seen at other protests. The marchers all carried
hand-made signs proclaiming this or that reason
for opposition to the Administration’s “preemptive
strikes.” The un-organized presence, the common
presence with no common denominator, was
thus asserted. It was met with police violence
and tear gas.
Where does this resistance spring from? At least
in part, we can propose: love.
And the New Yorkers themselves? For months
after September 11 2001, it was possible to smell
in downtown Manhattan up to 20th Street the
scent of the burning WTC towers — people became
attached to this smell, it started to function as
what Lacan called the ‘sinthome’ of New York,
a conditioned cipher of the subject’s libidinal
attachment to the city, so that when it disappears
it will be missed. It is such details that
bear witness to a true love of the city.
- Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the
Real
Agamben links the idea of love to the idea of a
“whatever singularity.” We do not, he notes, love
a person for being this or that identity. We love
them such as they are. The question for us at this
moment, then, is can we, perhaps as did New York
City, forge a visibility of love/a loveable visibility?
A being visible without immediate disclosure of
identity, a “whatever visibility?” Can we imagine
Nathan Snaza is a graduate student in
Curriculum and Instruction at University of
Minnesota - Minneapolis. His current research
projects include studies of white masculine
identity and how “human” is constructed in
relation to its Others.
Riddles of Disarmament:
Saddam and the
Washington Sniper
Binoy Kampmark
1.
Their tactics are different: in the American
imagination the oriental despot prides himself on
hiding his purported crimes — here accumulating
weapons of mass destruction. The news
constantly reverberates with the ruses of the
2.
The mythic relationship that both “terrorists” share
with American society is powerful. Saddam was
armed as an anti-fundamentalist deterrent with
Washington cash reserves, with his technologies
for mass destruction a predictable by-product. The
main Washington sniper comes from a landscape
mushroomed with militia and dilettante gun
specialists. The sniper status has been extolled
above and beyond the realm of a mere activity:
April 2003
The snipers received extensive coverage. Terror
is the most highly valued currency: it is golden
in the exchange system called the ‘war on terror.’
NBC Morning News provides media space to
the spectral murderers, then moves on to a
State Department warning with global reach: all
Americans are to be “vigilant” for their safety
after Al Qaeda threats (October 11, 2002). There
is no similar warning about the sniper — he is one
of us, John Muhammad, a Gulf war veteran, with
his protégé John Lee Malvo in tow. The snipers
and Saddam are presented as mutually exclusive
objects of terror, occupying different areas of the
American psyche. But their semiotic resonance
with Americans makes their differences articial.
Ultimately, their symbolic worth ts the same
equation — terror.
This duality of terror between Saddam, the snipers
and disarmament has yet to be examined. It is
ironic; it is vicious. In the seat of power, Congress
and Bush deliberate on overthrowing a foreign
leader who is labelled, packaged and marked for
distribution as an armed “terrorist”, an “enemy
of freedom”. The language of the congressional
resolution on Iraq is that of an arrest warrant,
with the intent to “disarm” Saddam. The language
of the State of the Union address on January
28, 2003 was similar, reiterating the common
theme that, if the UN did not disarm Saddam,
then Saddam would have to “disarm” himself. Yet
in Washington, and indeed most American states,
citizens are armed to the teeth and have no desire
of being disarmed. Weapons are stockpiled in the
land of freedom; gun laws are not enforced.
These are strange times for philosophies of
disarmament in the United States. A resolution
passed by Congress will pave the way for the
“disarming” of Iraq, with the United States
playing its police card role in the Middle East.
President George W. Bush has elevated the concept
of disarmament to the level of state dogma.
International conict has been personalized:
Saddam has become the criminal before the
interrogation. As Congress was paving the way for
war in the Middle East, two snipers were working
in the more afuent suburbs of Washington.
They were productive: ten dead, and sixteen
casualties in all.
orientalized bandit: Saddam
cannot be trusted, he hides, he
conceals, he flees. In Bush’s
State of the Union address, “The
dictator of Iraq is not disarming
... he is deceiving.” By contrast,
the Washington snipers prided
themselves on revealing their
crimes: death at the petrol pump and shopping
trolley — death inicted while conducting banal
activities.
49
Bad Subjects
and construct a world-wide community, or
even smaller communities wherever we nd
ourselves, where we come together and afrm
our togetherness such as we are? This may be
our only hope.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
50
it is a station, the mark of dignity. Within this
new secular church of guns, there are apparently
apostates: the Washington sniper is one of them.
Noam Chandler, a former marine lieutenant
colonel, described to the New York Times a sniper
aesthetic, and the Washington sniper does not
met the grade, a “bad shot”, probably civilian. He
is a “fringe puppy, a sniper wannabe.” Another,
a director of a sniper-training centre at Elk
Garden, West Virginia, absolves the gun-state
of responsibility: “This guy is not a sniper.”
Washington residents seem to accept this: there
has been no increase in gun sales, but there is no
need. Arms sales were blossoming even before
the murders. The experts can only admire: the
sniper wishes no harm to his victims according
to criminologist James A. Fox of Northeastern
University, only “terror.” He is an equal opportunity
killer, the great leveller of
death.
Other theories about the sniper
owered. “I picture him as a
25-year-old to 45-year-old gun
enthusiast type,” suggested a
person the LA Times named
Caroline. “The sort of fellow that
would hang out at gun shows”
(Oct 15, 2002). For a tourist
from Arkansas, Jim Boyer, the
sniper was a “terrorist”; for court reporter Harlyn
Bloom, “a nut that’s a sharpshooter” (LA Times,
Oct 15, 2002). Vicious bacilli, an infection from
the outside — not one of ‘us.’ The sniper was merely
a rupture in the domestic idyll of Virginian life:
everything around was peaceful. Novelist Jonathan
Kellerman described this Edenic tranquillity
punctured by the nightmare from the outside:
“This is the essence of fear: You are weeding
the lawn, walking your beautiful child to school,
strolling with your recalcitrant dog, lling your car
up with gas. It’s a day like any other until the shot
rings out, and someone who was here a second
ago isn’t” (LA Times, Oct 15, 2002). The gun and
weapons culture take their place alongside the
obstinate canine and the green-ngered suburban
resident. Only Kellerman prefers to exorcise it
from the vision. The sniper is aberrant; the gun
is aberrant. So Kellerman weds the fantasies of
the sniper with the visions of terrorism, although
Osama bin Laden occupies the wedding bed, not
Saddam: “The Washington-area sniper would have
merited plenty of newsprint and TV time in any
age, but in the post-Sept. 11 era, his crimes have
acquired additional emotional valence.”
The language of 9-11 is wide-ranging and available
in any social comparison of terror: residents in
Virginia habitually reached for the inclusive word
of ‘terrorist.’ “They’re terrorists,” came the thesis
of grocer Vartz Ozbenian working in Virginia. “It
seems like they’re very smart. If it were just one
crazy man, he’d do something wrong. He’d kill too
many people in one day, and he’d get caught. But
these people are good at their killing.” American
popular culture invites the murderer into various
niches. As Megan K. Stack of the LA Times
observed, “In an age punctuated by the macabre
drama of killing sprees, murderers take their place
in popular culture as almost allegorical gures,
incarnations of various strains of American fear.”
(Oct 15, 2002) But the snipers are denied the
ultimate beatication: the mark of true Americans,
equipped by the habits of the gun culture. The
snipers cannot share in the patriotic zest or an
organic connection with the social body they
terrorized.
Saddam offers another exercise
of denial. Iraq’s leader was the
Machiavellian operator the West had
entertained for decades. Saddam
becomes a statesman in the eyes of
American foreign policy during the
1980s, and a bandit in the 1990s.
Either way, he was feted, kept
like preservative in a bottle, to
be unleashed against Islamic
fundamentalism. It is thus curious
to nd weapons of mass destruction as the bone
of contention with the leader from Baghdad:
there are few criticisms by Washington of other
regimes specializing in smallpox and other vicious
contaminants. There is no discussion that much
of Saddam’s arsenal has the imprint of ‘made
in America’ on it.
Then there are the issues of American-made
weapons of mass destruction being deployed against
Americans. Anthrax miraculously disappeared
as a point of discussion in domestic American
politics, where it dominated for several weeks as
people feared opening envelopes or packages. An
attempt was made to suggest that the anthrax
attacks in the US had a tenuous line to Baghdad,
a line that dissolved as soon as it was drawn.
One such article noting this was Peter J. Boyer in
the New Yorker: “Early analyses suggested that
Iraq could be the source of the anthrax.” (Nov 12,
2001) Now the anthrax problem has again been
exported. Journalist Wyatt Andrews of CBS was
puzzled: where had “the weapons Iraq got caught
holding in the ‘90s, the enriched uranium, the VX
nerve gas, the weaponized anthrax” disappeared?
(CBS Morning News, Dec 9, 2002). Again a problem
of disarmament, where American weapons, from
guns to anthrax, exist freely in for anyone with
a bulging bank balance. In the Middle East,
3.
The White House, Congress and Baghdad made
a pact in the blood of both Iranian and Iraqi
soldiers, then effaced the agreement of memory.
The gun-state, the National Rie Association
lobby, and an alleged right to bear arms constitute
a pact that spilled the blood of casualties who
stood over cars and at petrol stations. But no
one is guilty except the very few — the snipers
and Saddam. They both become singular and
isolated, one domestically (“crazed”) and the
other internationally (“fanatic”). Worst of all,
they are both rendered gratuitous in a conceptual
There is only one solution to the arms question, and
it is not in America. It is Iraq. In the cost-benet
analysis, the Bush administration nds solutions
ready-made in overseas theatres, bringing the
disarmament argument full circle. Weapons of mass
destruction, with its American representatives
at Fort Dietrich in Maryland, are less important
than a petty dictator in the Middle East. Anthrax
spores rampant in the land of freedom are less
dangerous than similar weapons in the hands of
a secular dictator. Having a war is far easier that
solving domestic riddles, gun control being among
the more complex issues. Another message of the
puried rings out from the Bush administration
today as Colin Powell — a revivied Teddy Roosevelt
— delivers his address to the United Nations: peace
is not worth half the gains of war.
Binoy Kampmark is a Hampton Scholar at St.
John’s College, University of Queensland.
51
An attribute common to both Saddam and the
snipers lies in that in neither case is America
considered responsible for them. Shiva Naipaul’s
highly integrated work on the origins and what
might have inspired Jim Jones’ People’s Temple
offers an apt parallel. In Journey to Nowhere
(1982), Naipaul nds fundamentalism rampant,
especially on the Western seaboard, where
Berkeley adds a sophisticated lustre to the
gatherings of Buckminster Fuller, alternative
movements, fads. None are responsible for the
fundamentalist mass-suicide nale that transpired
in the Guyana jungle. There were condemnations,
accusations, a rapid washing of hands.
framework that has no cause and effect. Society is
not responsible, gun cultures are not responsible:
in short, political cultures are not responsible.
There is only the dreadful binary: the sinful
“them” and the well-washed, puried “us.” John
Muhammad, another of Walt Whitman’s athletes
of freedom, the other side of the Timothy McVeigh
coin, becomes merely another “extremist” who
served in the Gulf and turned freedom’s project
on itself, arbitrary and beyond the interrogation
of society. The Gulf bears its poisoned legacy,
its contaminated soldiers, its carcinogenic tactics
(uranium depleted shells being the evident culprit),
its oil, its McVeighs and John Muhammads. But
Washington wants more.
Bad Subjects
Saddam is unable to possess this American soma,
which in the 1980s was easily obtainable on the
international supermarket of chemical agents. In
Virginia, John Muhammed may freely seek his
murderous weapons along his fellow countrymen,
but few would deny the vicissitudes of the gun
state. Saddam, once offered exile by Mr. Rumsfeld,
knows where to re-arm.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
52
Marines versus Fedayeen:
Interpretive Naming and
Constructing the Other
Claire Norton
“We have intelligence information saying that
the Fedayeen Saddam people — I’m not going
to call them troops, because they’re travelling in
civilian clothes and they’re essentially terrorists...”
US
Defence
Secretary
D.
Rumsfeld
(The Washington Times, 26 March 2003)
Throughout history the enemy, gured as the
ultimate ‘other’, have been named in derogatory
terms, especially in narratives of propaganda.
However, contemporary discourses of history and
news reporting have positioned themselves as
neutral and impartial, transparent lenses through
which events and the enemy can be viewed
objectively without distortion. Does this mean
therefore that there is nothing to be said about
the naming of the enemy in the present conict?
Does this policy of disinterested and unbiased
reporting fully explain why it is now offensive
for news reports and politicians to describe a
crusade against the vile indel but it is acceptable
to invade and destroy the murderous militia? Are
the forces hostile to the American and British
led invasion of Iraq really described as they
are, in neutral and transparent language, by the
American and British mass media? Or are they
named in more subtle ways so as to position them
for the role they are to play in the American and
British administrations’ narrative of events?
April 2003
Interpretive Naming
The naming of the enemy in the 2003 Gulf War is
not isomorphic with reality, but rather provides an
instance of interpretative naming. In other words,
the nouns used to signify the enemy represent
more than is initially obvious and include an
element of covert interpretation. By labelling
and thus characterizing the recipient, texts are
framed and narratives constructed. Naming
also conditions the expectations of audiences
and guides their subsequent interpretation. An
analysis of naming practices can therefore help
to foreground the interpretative frameworks,
viewpoints and moral judgments implicit in
particular narrations. Consequently, I will explore
in more detail the American and British media
naming of the Iraqi combatants and in particular
will focus on the role these naming practices
have in constructing narratives which ultimately
try to explain and legitimize the American and
British invasion of Iraq.
American and British combatants are named and
described in the media as soldiers and more
specically, as marines, artillery, infantry and
special forces. Such a naming positions them in a
narrative where they are viewed as members or
representatives of a legitimate state institution;
the army. Thus their violence is authorized and
legitimized, they are not armed thugs, criminals
or terrorists, but soldiers licensed to carry out
limited acts of aggression in the interests of the
state. In sharp contrast, Iraqi combatants are
rarely described by the American and British media
as soldiers but are rather, irregulars, paramilitary,
militias, terrorists, armed members of the Ba’ath
party, criminals and tribesmen loyal to Saddam
Hussein. Even when a journalist or newspaper
attempts to temper the “critical vocabulary”
used to describe and name Iraqi combatants by
American and British generals they are ultimately
framed within a discourse of de-legitimization;
not terrorist death squads but still paramilitaries,
as in the Guardian Unlimited article (02/02/03)
by Rory McCarthy, “The ofcer also appeared to
distance himself from the increasingly critical
vocabulary used by generals giving the daily
briengs at Central Command, who have begun
to label Iraqi paramilitaries as “terrorist death
squads”.
What is the explanation for this naming practice
- are the Iraqi combatants really not soldiers in
an army but instead only exclusively composed
of irregulars and armed members of the Ba’athist
party? These naming strategies do not transparently
reect the actual status of the Iraqi combatants.
On the contrary, their purpose is designed in effect
to de-legitimize them together with the Iraqi state
and military apparatus. By characterizing them in
the language of non-state armed groups such as
militias, terrorists, irregulars and paramilitaries
it removes the moral and political authority
traditionally bestowed upon nation-state armed
institutions. The combatants are no longer soldiers
ghting battles or engaging in armed resistance
according to the norms and conventions of modern
warfare rather they are irregulars employing
terrorist and guerrilla tactics.
April 2003
Both
of
these
invasions have been
framed as instances
of
pre-emptive
defence; if we don’t
stop them now they
will sooner or later
attack
us
and
penetrate
our
national territory.
However, it is the
positioning of these
attacks within the
greater narrative of
the war on terror
combined with the
narrative of liberation that is most pertinent when
considering the naming of Iraqi combatants. A war
on terror, is ostensibly not a war against another
sovereign nation state but a war on terrorists. The
American legitimizing narrative for the invasion of
Afghanistan argued that it was not the state that
was being attacked but rather terrorist, al-Qaida,
elements within it. Similarly, the narrative of
liberation argued that the American invasion
was designed to free the people and the rightful
guarantors of the state from those who had
illegitimately taken control of the state apparatus,
the Taliban. Therefore, the territorial and political
integrity of the nation state was not violated
but was in fact being defended. Key to the
success of such narratives is the existence of
a disenfranchised population who want to be
liberated and can be re-imagined as legitimate
wielders of state power. In Afghanistan the
Coexistent with
the nation-state
geo-political
mapping are moral
and
juridicop o l i t i c a l
imaginaries that
assert
the
legitimacy of the
state
to
hold
dominion over a
delimited
and
universally
r e c o g n i z e d
territory. In other
words, such a
mapping implies an accompanying moral
cartography that emphasizes the inviolable
integrity of the sovereign nation state. In turn
this affects the legitimate praxis of violence;
unauthorized military crossing of boundaries
are deemed illegitimate and are considered as
providing a globally recognized causus belli for
war. The defensive is thus foregrounded. This
moral framework that guarantees the territorial
integrity of the nation state and prohibits the use
of force against other nation states is recognized
universally and acts as a foundational principle
of international law with only two exceptions: in
cases of self-defence and when authorized by
the Security Council acting under chapter VII of the
UN Charter. In fact, this shift in juridico-political
cartographies is so pervasive that it affects
not only contemporary political decisions and
narratives but also historical narratives and
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Bad Subjects
It is this de-legitimization that is the key to
clarifying both the naming practices of this war
and the narratives behind them. The naming of
Iraqi combatants is a key feature of the American
and British administrations’ attempt to construct
and disseminate legitimizing narratives of the
invasion. However, these narratives themselves
are constrained and determined to some extent by
our contemporary cartographies or strategies for
mapping and interpreting our experience of the
world. These interpretative frameworks imagine
geo-political space in terms of discrete territorial
units under the control of a sovereign state;
a nation-state dominated cartography. This
contrasts with alternative supra-local imagined
communities predicated upon religion and empire
or constructed on
the basis of shared
kinship, language,
or culture.
memories. The exaltation of previous victories
by national ‘ancestors’ outside the boundaries
of the current nation-state is generally viewed
as being problematic and avoided in favor of the
celebration of the capture of territory which is
within contemporary national borders. Thus, the
invasions of axis nation states in the Second
World War were and are framed within the greater
narrative of the defence of Europe and Asia
against Nazi and Japanese invasions. Similarly,
the rst Gulf War is interpreted defensively as
a counter-measure to Iraq’s violation of the
territorial sovereignty of Kuwait. Moreover, this
war itself stopped short of an incursion into Iraqi
sovereign territory. Military penetrations of other
nation-states therefore, especially those that
are not defensive or are not sanctioned by the
UN, require specic authorizing and legitimizing
discourses. The recent Anglo-American invasions
of Afghanistan and
Iraq provide excellent
examples of such
narratives.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
54
administrative and military organizations within
the Northern Alliance were easily re-imagined in
the authorizing narrative as the legitimate state
army and government. In contrast the Taliban
were framed not as bureaucrats and soldiers in
a state army but were ultimately conated with
al-Qaida and depicted as terrorists. A consequence
of this re-framing is that Taliban combatants
are now held in Guantanamo Bay as unlawful
combatants and not as prisoners of war.
Similarly, the Anglo-American administrations’
legitimizing narrative of the invasion of Iraq is
predicated on the illegitimacy of the current Iraqi
government and its lack of authority to govern.
To name the Iraqi combatants as soldiers implies
that they constitute the legitimate armed forces of
a nation-state and this consequently implies that
the American and British are engaged in an
act of invasion and war against a
nation state and its army. However,
to name them as irregulars and
militias reinforces a narrative that
foregrounds the illegitimacy of the
Iraqi government. If Iraqi combatants
are not the legitimate soldiers of a
nation-state army, then like terrorists
and criminals they are not authorized
to engage in acts of violence or
aggression. This framing of Iraqi
combatants permits a narrative in
which the Anglo-American combatants
can be positioned as the police.
A view reinforced by the frequent
guring of America as the policeman
of the world. The description of AngloAmerican combatants as policemen
removing criminals and restoring
order reframes the invasion narrative
as one concerned with removing and
replacing a brutal criminal regime with a legitimate
government. It is to reinforce this sense of
illegitimacy that Iraqi combatants are frequently
associated not to the army of the Iraqi state but
to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party through
their description as “his private army,” “Ba’athist
militias” and “those loyal to Saddam Hussein”.
By linking them in this manner a narrative is
constructed whereby the Iraqi combatants are
presented not as soldiers in the legitimate Iraqi
state army but rather as the armed thugs of a
particular political party and individual. While the
American and British have legitimate governments
commanding armies the military administrative
structures in Iraq are delegitimized through their
portrayal as the personal regime of Saddam
Hussein and his private militia.
Regulars and Irregulars
The employment of the vocabulary of
de-legitimization in the naming of Iraqi combatants
also has an ontological role in that it is through
such stark encounters with an oppositional ‘other’
that the construction of self occurs. If they are the
illegitimate ‘other’ then we must be the legitimate
self. By contrasting our soldiers with their militias
a distinction between the illegitimacy of Saddam
Hussein and his irregulars and the legitimacy of
the Anglo-American soldiers is implied.
Some Iraqi combatants, however, are named
as soldiers. Although those that offer armed
resistance to the British and Americans are named
as irregulars and militias, those who surrender,
ee, are coerced into ghting by Ba’athist militias
or who potentially rebel, are described as soldiers.
What signicance does this naming
pattern have for the legitimizing
narratives? By depicting the Iraqi
combatants who offer no resistance
as soldiers, the narrative implies that
the legitimate army of Iraq is, if not
allied with the American and British,
then at least acquiescent with their
goal of the liberation of Iraq. It
thus creates a division between the
compliant legitimate army of Iraq and
the resisting irregulars and militia,
the illegal combatants. The legitimate
Iraqi state army composed of soldiers,
has fled, surrendered or rebelled
thereby again providing a contrast to
the illegitimacy of Saddam Hussein
and his personal militias. Moreover,
potential public sympathy for the
enemy is controlled and constrained
through this naming practice. The
poorly trained, half-starved, badly equipped,
conscript soldiers elicit sympathy whereas the mad,
fanatical, torturing, brutal terrorist militias do not.
Thus our feelings of concern are limited to those
who surrender and not to those who ght.
An example of this linguistic uidity is apparent in
the reporting of the incident surrounding the Iraqi
51st regular army division. According to General
Myers the members of this division, named as
soldiers, “ran away” from American and British
combatants. Subsequently when their tanks and
armoured vehicles were deployed in a battle
with the British, General Myers argued that the
soldiers of the 51st division had not re-grouped
and returned to attack but rather the fedayeen or
Republican Guard had appropriated their tanks and
vehicles and themselves instigated the assault.
Ordinary soldiers only ever surrender or run away,
those who resist are part of Saddam Hussein’s
special killer militia.
Etymological Contests
It is in more recent re-denitions that the emphasis
has shifted to the concept of sacrice inherent
in the Arabic root. In modern Israeli discourse
the Palestinian fedayeen of the 1950s have been
April 2003
The
second
use
originated in the 1948-9
Israeli-Arab war where
the fedayeen emerged
as an Arab Palestinian
military unit engaged in
the hostilities and the
term continued to be
used by combatants in
the Palestinian resistance
movement throughout
the 1950s. Fedayeen
were also operative in
Jordan in the late 1960s and early 1970 where
they constituted a non-state organization and
military force engaged, in effect, in a civil war
against King Hussein. After trying to organize a
general strike and at times controlling a number of
strategic places they signed a cease re agreement
with the Jordanian government in Cairo in
1970. The term has also been adopted by many
groups in Iran in a similar manner. The secular
Marxist, Organization of Iranian People’s Fedayeen
Guerrillas were founded in 1968 in opposition to
the Shah’s dictatorship but following his overthrow
split into two groups, the People’s Fedaiyan
and the Organization of Fedaian, both of which
seek to promote a secular, socialist democratic
society in Iran.
Although many of these references were
accompanied by a translation none of these
originated from the denitions given for fedayeen
and fida’i in English and Arabic dictionaries
respectively. While the Collins English dictionary
provides the denition, “a commando, esp. one
ghting against Israel” and the dictionary of
Modern Written Arabic “one who sacrices himself
for his country, soldiers prepared to sacrice
their lives, commandos, shock troops,” the media
preferred “those ready to sacrice themselves
for Saddam — literally” and “Saddam’s men of
sacrice.” In recent days particularly since the
suicide bomb attack on American forces, the
denition has changed in many media reports to
“martyr”. While the Arabic tri-literal root does
literally contain the concept of sacrice, the Arabic
In fact, the actual use of the word fedayeen in
the previous four centuries suggests that the
element of martyrdom and suicide was not at all
predominant. It is possible to determine three
separate denitions for this word from usage —
commando, non-state afliated military forces,
and suicide bomber/attacker. The rst use is clear
from English and Arabic dictionary denitions
and is also that commonly employed in Arabic or
Ottoman accounts of military engagements. For
example, Ottoman manuscripts describing military
encounters from between the seventeenth and
nineteenth century use the term to describe
experienced, SAS-type commandos who undertook
dangerous military missions for additional
remuneration and who
almost always returned
alive.
55
Bad Subjects
The recent prevalence of the term fedayeen or
fedayeen Saddam offers a paradigmatic example
of interpretative naming and its role in the
creation of narratives. The sudden emergence
and widespread use of the term combined with
journalists’ keenness to translate and thus
interpret it for their audience suggests that it
signies much more that the name of an Iraqi
military unit. An analysis of the use of this term by
the Anglo-American media will illustrate that it is
far from transparent and furthermore that it plays
a specic role in the Anglo-American legitimizing
narrative of the war. The term was rst used in
the Iraqi context in the mid-1990s to describe
a military unit created by Saddam Hussein. In
the few references to the fedayeen Saddam in
the years before 2003 it
was described variously
as, special forces, an
all-volunteer unit, a
commando unit and as a
paramilitary force. Even
in the few months before
the Anglo-American
invasion there were very
few, if any, references to
it in the many detailed
media discussions and
analyses of Saddam
Hussein’s
potential
military
capability.
However, on 22 March
2003 there occurred an
explosion of references to the fedayeen or
fedayeen Saddam which escalated exponentially
on 26 March 2003.
denition does not necessarily connote suicide
troops but may instead describe brave heroic
troops prepared to do their bit and make the
ultimate sacrice, as many allied troops did in
the Second World War.
April 2003
Bad Subjects
56
re-described as suicide ghters. The emphasis
of the media’s translation of fedayeen Saddam
on sacrice and martyrdom, despite the other
potential meanings available, suggest that these
particular denitions have been selected not
because this is what the phrase means but rather
because it is this interpretation which accords
with the dominant narrative of the war. By naming
these combatants as martyrs or those ready to
sacrice themselves a link is made to the terrorist
tactics of suicide bombers in Israel and Palestine
and ultimately to the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Through these intertextual references audiences
are encouraged to place these combatants within
a frame of Islamic fundamentalism, to provide
legitimization for this campaign as part of the
greater war on terror and more particularly to
implicitly associate Saddam Hussein with the 11
September 2001 attacks.
Furthermore, references to the fedayeen are
frequently accompanied by a re-description of
their status. They are no longer depicted as special
forces or commando units, but are instead killer
militia, guerrilla factions, paramilitary extremists,
“the worst of the worst” and “essentially terrorists”.
According to Donald Rumsfeld they and the
Special Republican Guard are emphatically not
to be viewed in the same category as the
military because “they are more fanatical.” The
de-legitimization of resisting Iraqi combatants is
continued in accompanying descriptions of the
activities of the fedayeen and other militias. Unlike
the American and British who abide by the Geneva
Convention and act appropriately for soldiers,
the Iraqi combatants “commit acts of treachery,”
“represent a terrorist-type threat” and engage in
sabotage and deception. While their black-hooded
criminal militia thugs masquerade as civilians,
employ hit-and-run attacks on troops and supply
convoys, use and endanger the lives of civilians,
destroy oil wells and mine ports, our special
forces undertake special ops and covert actions.
In particular, although Iraqi combatants in civilian
clothes are named as militias and, it is claimed,
will be tried for war crimes or held as unlawful
combatants, American combatants in civilian
clothes retain their status as soldiers and will
be protected from such prosecution. This is
illustrated by the incident in early March when UN
peacekeepers in the demilitarized zone between
Iraq and Kuwait encountered a group of armed
men in civilian dress illegally cutting through the
border fence. In media reports of this incident,
these men were universally described as marines
and not as irregulars or militias.
The popularity of the term, the denitions accorded
to it by American and British journalists, and the
associative phrases and descriptions all suggest
that it is not a neutral description but is rather
a key component in the dominant legitimizing
narrative of the war. The Iraqi fedayeen, dened
in the language of terrorism and fundamentalism,
are in effect interpretatively named and positioned
as Islamic terrorists and consequently not viewed
as representing the legitimate government of
Iraq.
The naming of the enemy in journalistic narratives
of the invasion of Iraq is thus far from neutral and
transparent. Instead, through its interpretative
naming of Iraqi combatants, it not only attempts
to position them as the ‘other’ by employing
oppositional rhetorics and the vocabulary of
vilification and fundamentalism, but it also
simultaneously situates them in a narrative
constructed ultimately in order to legitimize the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
Claire Norton is a doctoral candidate
at Birmingham University completing a
dissertation in 17th-18th century Ottoman
history.
tobias c. van Veen
Massumi on Media Politics
Massumi analyses Bush’s lack of discursive
reasoning and the blatant tautological structures
of White House statements as working on a
register that is not of discourse (and thus, “facts
and truth”) but of affect. It is a direct experience
with television. In such perceptual experience,
there is no “ideology” — ideology in the sense
that the public has been “tricked” into “believing”
a dominant discourse. Discourse and affect are
of different registers. If it can be said to exist,
ideology is constrained to a specic regime of
signs and not of the totality. Analyses that claim
the structure of the signier as encompassing
the totality of the real have been delimited to
a specic, constructed register. The armchair
viewer’s response is “authentic” as it is a gut feeling:
an affect of the
body, an experience
of the body. We
need to analyze
this experience for
its actuality as an
actualization
of
perception, as an
affect of media upon
the body. Where
this affect is being
steered by the state,
argues Massumi, is
toward a structure of
faciality — where the
face of the Leader
(Bush), becomes
April 2003
At the R/Évolutions conference held at Concordia
University, Montréal, Brian Massumi argued for
an engagement with affect by the Left. I’d like
to summarize and expand upon a few aspects of
his argument here so we can get to the heart of
the matter concerning a tactics of affect. We can
begin by noting that the Left has traditionally set to
debunking dominant
epistemologies with
alternative factual
reportage
and
negative critique.
While this critique
remains necessary
in constructing an
account of state
violence
and
in
undermining
hegemonic “truths”
in media capitalism,
such
a
critique
generally fails to grab
the attention of the
public — to move the
Why is this? One reason, according to Massumi,
is the materiality of the televisual medium —
television being the dominant media. Television’s
visual affect, already coded through sound-bites,
is constructed visually through heart-and-gut
wrenching imagery. The burning Twin Towers are
used again and again to retrieve an emotional
response from the US public that, although there
are exceptions, is overwhelmingly of two types:
1. shock (if not awe) and 2. revenge. With shock
there is no speech: the mouth hangs open. What
follows next is not discourse, but the reactionary
urge to strike back: revenge.
At the present juncture of US imperialism and
global capitalism, the Left faces the necessity of
deploying an immediate global critique on the one
hand, and attempting to afrm a global alternative
on the other. Although “Another World Is Possible,”
the Left is increasingly entangled in the defense
of its diverse characteristics and strategies
of protest, attempting to dene and explain
“itself” against charges of incoherence from the
polyvocally-challenged press and critics of the
Right. Meanwhile, the factual and clear arguments
of radical historians such as Noam Chomsky go
unheeded. While human rights-based liberalism
is espoused as the catch-all solution, the violent
histories of rogue imperial powers remains buried
under the glossy headlines of minor anarchist
property damage or the technology fetishisms
of the state war machine. At the same time,
on the home front, the very foundations of
Enlightenment, rights-based discourse are quietly
eroded worldwide.
public and sway opinion. It fails to set resistance
into motion.
57
Bad Subjects
Affective Tactics:
Intensifying a Politics of
Perception
April 2003
Bad Subjects
58
directly attuned as the ‘face of America’, where
the ag and the nation become one with the face
of the despot. Such a structure is a signicant
step toward fascism.
Affect, Right and Left
The Right has been cultivating such affective
techniques for years. For example, bloody babies
and scenes from the Holocaust grace the massive
posters of the Genocide Awareness Project, a
militant anti-abortion group that equates abortion
with genocide. Massumi’s suggestion is that the
Left open itself to a politics of affect. Affect
is neither negative nor positive in itself: it is
perception, but also a politics of perception. To
negate affect because of its use by the Right
and the state is to negate the experience of the
body. Coursing through affect is life itself — the
afrmative desire of the body, to touch, to feel
loved, to be at peace. The Right embraces affect
as its inverse: a hate politics of the foreign other
(the immigrant, a race, etc.), of the non-believer,
of sexuality (hatred of the other’s body, of one’s
own body). The state embraces affect through
discipline, conformity, and work. Tied to both the
state and the Right are the economic realities of
who owns affective media: television, publications,
the Internet, radio. Clear Channel ousts a peacelovin’ Dixie Chicks. Or Thing.net is shut down by
Verio for hosting a Dow Chemical spoof site.
[for] we shouldn’t underestimate the function
of rallying the troops and raising morale.” As
lmmaker and writer Richard Fung notes, “To me
art is like food and sex: a basic and persistent
human need. Attempts to justify art by citing
a social or redemptive function are not just
unnecessary, but usually end up trivializing its
signicance. Still, what better tonic for a sickly
planet than good art with good politics?” An
afrmative art requires neither justication nor, in
the inverse, a politics that serves as justication
for art: the two go hand-in-hand, parallel streams
that cross and overlap the other, interpenetrate.
We could say they work not through a discourse
of justication (of “truth and fact”), but through
a register of affect. By touching each other, they
touch us when we watch, we are touched, we feel
for the other...provoked by watching these moving
lms. A documentary detailing the inhumane
conditions of Australia’s privately-run “prison
camps for immigrants,” produced by the Desert
Storm Collective, touched me with such a force
that I was moved, not in the sense of preached-to
or converted (the rhetoric of salvation), but
moved to action.
Access to Affect
The strategies of the multitudes in summit protests
have already embraced an immediacy of the body
and of movement. The ability to walk side-by-side
with the multiplicity of others, to accept the risk
of the other — being open to hospitality of and
toward the other — is what marks protests and
walks as memorable, lived experiences that give
us the energy, that tingling sensation of the
body, to keep trying, to not give up hope, to strike a
spark in any direction. It is also what makes “antiglobalization” protest — a perpetual misnomer
— unrepresentable in the mono-statement press.
“Summit” protests, protests of the multitudes,
exceed a politics of representation.
As a second question, how can the Left touch the
public? True, this is the most difcult question. In
the formation of this problematic as distinct from
the rst, there is already created the question
of difference and referentiality. The videos of the
Blah Blah Blah project seem too “self-referential”
to be used as a public tactic. But is this really the
case? Should we not begin focusing on what the
multitudes offer — namely, a place for everyone
who will risk that openness, rather than attempting
to “spell out” a specic, and thus delimited if not
unilateral position? Are “they,” those television
viewers complacently fed by a continuous stream
of mediatized state and corporate imagery, all
that different from “us”? The question broached
is one of access. Short of occupying Fox and CNN
headquarters and hijacking the airwaves, how can
we disseminate dissent?
The tactical aspect of affect resonates in two
directions. First, how can we touch and reach out
to each other, support each other, and energize
our movement(s)? An example can be found in the
videos of the “Blah Blah Blah” project: “Fourteen
lm and video-makers from Toronto responded to
the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Québec
City [by producing] a short video anchored in
footage taken at the April summit.” The point
was neither to engage in pedagogy or a politics
of representation, but to produce “artistic home
movies for the anti-globalization movement...
Perhaps various answers lie in several places —
and in as many places as possible. The “public” is
a multitude just as the “movement” is a multitude.
The Internet and print publications offer the easiest
openings and the farthest latitude. War.time, a
coalition of net.artists against the war, has already
achieved signicant press and Netizen attention
(see http://ofine.area3.net/wartime). Full-page
ads in the New York Times have had their
effect, including those of Vote to Impeach Bush.
Celebrities — including but not limited to Michael
Moore — used Oscar airtime to protest against Gulf
What can we offer as examples? We’ve already
explored a few, and there are many, some even of
the tried-and-true variation, such as AgitProp —
although the tactics must be updated, the rhetoric
dropped. The Internet is a wealth of
opportunity and inspiration for campaigns
as well as a way to tap into existing
networks. Iraqbodycount.net, Votetoimpeach.org,
Riceforpeace.org,
Adbusters.org
and
Baringwitness.org — these are a sampling of
websites that offer strategies and forums for
the adaptation of techniques to
localized situations as well as
acting as hyperlink nodes to a wide
network of online domains. But we
must also think of affect as a tactic
of moving the body, and at the core
of affect are the senses.
We might consider the use of
sound: the sound of bombs falling
is rarely broadcasted, for it is
terrifying; the same can be said
for the joyous sound of protest,
for it is potentially revolutionary.
A “dissonance CD” is included with Counter
Productive, a pocket-sized text of narratives
and reports from the Québec City convergence
at the 2001 Summit of the Americas. As well
as alternative media reports, the CD contains
“There’s A Risk of Arrest If You Turn Right,” a
provocative “audioart” piece by Anna Friz and
Richard Williams edited from eld recordings of the
protest. Eight minutes and fty-eight seconds of
audio confrontation between police and protesters
conveys a body of resistance. An underlying heavy
breathing increases during the piece — as you
listen, your own breathing falls in tune: it’s a
direct political perception.
We must seek (to) touch. On the agenda of an
open affect of hospitality and of the multitudes
is an engagement with afrmative desire. A
consideration of the writings of Hakim Bey on
the Temporary Autonomous Zone might teach
us to dance and play again in the production of
times and spaces of autonomy. From Reclaim the
April 2003
In framing the dilemma in this way, we have
perhaps already negated its potential. Affect is
not necessarily art. Affect is a direct perceptual
experience. Art tends to be a way of affecting
an-other, and thus often comes into play — but
we need no rules over art. In proposing a tactical
engagement with affect, which is an engagement
with our own bodies — those bodies we put on
the line during protest and (direct) action — we
are not inscribing a schema of “political art,” a
justication or judgment of art and aesthetics,
nor a call for all “political artists” to only make
“political art.” In afrming affect, as an afrmation
of the body and of perceptual experience, we are
rst of all afrming the experience of the other
— of the television viewer that feels what CNN
shows. We are realizing that we cannot judge
such a person. We can only strive to offer not
only a discursive argument and an alternative
history: we must reach the other through the
Potential Perceptive Tactics
59
Certainly in the negotiation of affect the Left should
not turn to either the negative determinants of
the Right (hate against the other), nor the empty
rallying cries and jingoistic slogans that dominated
“Red propaganda” at the beginning of the
last century. This is a ne line
to be walked — as always, in
attempting to afrm life, to afrm
lived experience, to afrm the body
in action and its engagement with
its movement(s). The problematic
of affect raises the question of
the relation between art and
politics that has concerned the
Left throughout its history. Is a
politicized art not a step toward
social realism? What of the links
between art and fascism? The
question of a pure and a priori
non-political art?
media topology we nd ourselves in today. A
world of the screen arrives through and with the
materiality of the medium, or in nding ways
to surpass and subvert its affect. It becomes a
careful dance to afrm a positive politics of affect
and nd ways of assembling what Massumi calls
a “politics of perception” in order to elaborate a
critique of the utilization and abuse of affect by
the state and the Right.
Bad Subjects
War II. Independent and campus-community radio
carries alternative press and political radio-art.
Throughout these various mediums, the nature
of the affect of the medium must be taken into
consideration. Bombarding radio listeners with
censored facts, while a necessary part of an
alternative newscast, should be backgrounded to
focus on the presentation of calls for involvement,
celebrations of multiple ways of resistance,
productive encounters with the other that will
engage the listener and propel her or him as an
active participant. Authoritarian pedagogy risks
losing the audience, ipping stations as doomsday
scenarios perpetually replay. The primary place
of affect will perhaps always be the encounter,
“on the street,” or what the Sufis call the
“breast-to-breast.”
April 2003
Bad Subjects
60
Streets to inducing intensities — we
might also take a cue from Spain’s
La Société Anonyme, who argue for
the artist as producer in Parachute
109: “The artist as producer
is a generator of narratives of
mutual recognition, an inducer of
intensied situations of encounter
and socialization of experience, and
a producer of mediations for their
exchange in the public sphere.”
And of course we see — and sight
remains the privileged and much
dissected sensory realm in both
theory and practice. At the same
time that we strive for alternative
visual media to (and on) television,
we need to embrace the other senses
as alternatives often neglected by
the state and the Right: touch,
sound, taste, smell. The senses of
intimacy, of friendship, of hospitality,
of sexuality. At the same time, we
need to afrm sight — to look each
other in the eye, and to make eye
contact with the other. We may
nd that sight is the gesture of
visual touch.
These are speculations and ideas.
They may appear overtly — or
even overly — simplistic. In a
way, these tactics are, although
their elaboration requires constant
experimentation and the labor of
intensive actuality. Such a politics
can never remain still, and its work
is never nished. Like affect, a
politics of perception is always in
movement, always seeking new
ways to catalyze and intensify. It
remains to examine critically the potential affect
offers and to trace new possibilities; to produce
and follow through the situations we can only
speak of here. We need to switch to an affective
writing that jumps the register from language to
the senses. From writing to action: this essay
is such a tactic.
tobias c. van Veen is a turntablist, writer, and
sonic net.artist. He is currently embedded in
the Department of Communications at McGill
University, Montréal and can be found at
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org.
Images courtesy Independent Media Center.
Second image credit Heidi Werntz. All rights
reserved.

BS 63a - Bad Subjects

Transcription

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