Are Flagan on Sat, 29 Mar 2003 07:10:23 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Why war means peace |
Why war means peace In scattered pieces... I have spent a lot of time in front of the TV lately. It all started a week ago with the boy emperor proudly proclaiming his intent to militarily enforce an agenda that has in terms of its underlying reasons constantly shifted over the last months. The bewildered pauses that usually punctuate his stuttering rhetoric had taken another, not unexpected, turn toward war. Those privy to the BBC (and later the Internet) picked up the feed 90 seconds or so earlier than the rest of us and got a preview of a man squirming in his seat and sending shifty glances left and right. An assistant was combing the Presidential hair and spraying it into a suitably rigid style. When the red light flicked on, we got the usual mix of John Wayne snarls and biblical phrasings to announce that judgment day had arrived at the 48-hour mark of high noon. There was unmistakably a swaggering anticipation of superior "shock and awe" in his demeanor, like he had already triumphantly entered Baghdad to execute the (overheard in Rice's office) remark he so eloquently proffered back in March 2002: "Fuck Saddam. We'll take him out." With us or against us had entered its most decisive and predictable phase. A few days and thousands upon thousands of dead later, the quiver in his voice is arguably slight but certainly audible. It is positively there in the preposterous and feverishly repeated pretext of liberation that means absolutely nothing and stands in for deliverance only in his embarrassing delivery. Instead of flowers, there were bullets greeting his doctrinal presumptions, and the immense tragedy of his reckless action is starting to assert itself with visceral force. For a week, the lip-service media has been trying to capture the entry of the savior, but this Biblical scene among the palms, announced long before arrival, jumped straight to the orange glow of Armageddon instead. All we have seen so far is a man taking off his shoe and demonstratively banging the head of Saddam in a painted mural being torn down by a US Marine. The action was symbolically rich and ideologically rewarding -- yet left a lot to be desired in terms of the actual popularity of an uprising. Still, one is better than none of course. (Footage of soldiers hoisting the Old Glory in place of Iraqi colors was quickly suppressed.) People have even been lured before the cameras with food to capture some liberated excitement; yet all we got was a starved riot and shouts of "Down Bush" followed by "America Go Away." Maybe the outbursts stem, as the media blandly speculates, from the previous betrayal in 1991, but it is perhaps equally due to the long decade of birth defects and cancers that have plagued this part of the world since the depleted uranium (used in American armor-penetrating shells) blew in across the desert after the last visit. Regardless, the obvious introductory scenario of good, the ludicrous "coalition," versus evil, the tyranny of Hussein, has turned into a violently imposed rule of the lesser evil for now and clearly a wish for none of the above. What now liberation? The decisive battle for the "hearts and minds" of the people is ongoing, and the term has become somewhat of a revived catchphrase for the cable giants Fox, MSNBC and CNN, with frequent feel-good stories about totally absurd victories. Just an hour ago CNN ran a story entitled "Easing the Pain" that showed a compassionate army doctor putting a "band-aid" on the leg of a man who had just lost his entire family due to allied shrapnel. Likewise, I am quite sure the brain splattered across the Baghdad pavement yesterday after two missiles hit a marketplace are, along with the thousands of broken hearts that have so far stopped beating, glorious triumphs of this fracas. These scenes along with the accompanying commentary epitomize the blind idiocy of what is going on: the downright repression of affairs, coupled with the deliberate manufacture of clean presumptions that are very obviously nowhere to be found amidst the grotesque rubble of war. Instead of listening to Saddam's televised speeches that urgently appeal to Iraq's anti-colonial past to make sense of what those fighting hearts and minds may feel and think about liberation, we delve into nonsensical speculations about his whereabouts and dead-or-alive authenticity, as if the voice of history depends solely on the tangibility of its specter. (It does not: the Russians joined Stalin to fight the Germans in 1941; the Iranians joined their fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries to ward off the American-sponsored Hussein in the 1980s, and so on.) But let us leave this particular charade and join the parade of commentary that explains why all this will be a calamity in peace, as it is in war. It is not hard to notice the explicit lack of a broader human empathy in this conflict. A reporter at the Q & A at the Pentagon asked if we would get another _show_ like "shock and awe." Later an embedded CNN press warrior, Walter Rodgers, likened the blitz in Baghdad to the fireworks of Independence Day -- a stunning celebration of liberation indeed, the grand pyrotechnic orgasm of the military-industrial complex. Tell me: was it good for you, too? Enemy dead and captured are triumphantly announced as welcome hits and points are added on a news ticker scorecard. The ragtag and ill-equipped army of "thugs" and "death squads" and, of course, "terrorists" are anonymously falling like flies under the technologically superior might of the US, ironically because they allegedly and most likely harbor antiquated yet potent "weapons of mass destruction" that were state of the art back in World War I. Coverage of this mismatch actually laments that Iraqis do not line up for the shoot and practice unfair tactics to prolong the inevitable. Come on people, be nice, line up neatly for the massacre. Supporters of the troops across America then bring home this Superbowl mentality with cheerleading, spelling out the familiar national acronym of U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A repeatedly. Each number added to mounting tally of destruction and death has thus become an uplifting integer for a superiority about to break the high score with the most impressive military campaign ever conducted. Check out, while you wait for the final quarter, the really cool 3D models of weaponry at cnn.com. Victory is thus considered a ratio, where the lightest losses weigh heaviest, and war terminally tips the scales of with us or against us in favor of a misleadingly conclusive without you. Take, briefly, the recent POW controversy. America is up in propaganda arms about the Geneva Convention when five US servicemen and women are paraded on TV. Here even the image of the citizen is profaned when it is mistreated. Contrast this with the 660 anonymous people that have slipped away at Camp X-Ray, 19 of which have committed suicide. Add, if you are American and obviously like to keep scores, the two people beaten to death under interrogation at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Or read Alan Dershowitz's or Pat Buchanan's recent advocacies for torture. No comparison there the media mouthpieces lull, implying of course that these people are fundamentally different, so called "enemy combatants," due to the sole circumstance of them being against us on other terms than we prescribe. Please play by the rules we define to defeat you, accept the double standard to allow your demise as destiny, and abide by the conditions that work in our favor to crush you. This troubling litany of the same exclusion/inclusion principle saturates not only the sickening massacre that presently seeks to fulfill the twofaced Bush doctrine; it is arguably the modus operandi of a distribution scheme that has beset most facets of the US. It is getting late here; let me finish this quickly. What will become of the proposed peace after the war? On the very simple grounds that the US will perpetuate this familiar logic through its program of liberation under military rule and retired US diplomats, it will inevitably serve to breed further disenchantment and conflict. The US, as we have so tragically seen, is unable to empathically and humanely account for the consequences of its own actions, to judiciously bring its unchecked arrogance into line with the mere possibility of any wrongdoing against others. There is no acceptable or comparative standard of judgment in its mindset -- like an International Criminal Court or a United Nations -- that may, if nothing else, suggest that there is possibly another best interest of compromise and cooperation, a share and share alike consideration to balance this all or nothing, this with us or against us. Any doubt, any questioning, is simply replaced by the hollow and hypocritical arrogance that tells self-serving lies -- or fixes accounts -- until they are common enough to reiterate with conviction (seen daily in the coverage, addresses and press conferences of this war). The attitude that brought on the war is thus sadly the very same approach, the very same line of attack, that works to secure the peace. Hence the strange equivalence of war and peace that Bush keeps stumbling over actually makes perverse sense, but it leads immediately to fighting, and only secures deeply isolated pockets of prosperity constantly threatened by even more violence. Why? What is almost entirely missing here is an understanding of why the world has effectively erupted into a plethora of smaller and larger battlefields. One shorthand rationale is very broadly that this "with us or against us" way of life perpetuated by the US, and others, has deprived too many of too much and desperation has set in almost everywhere. Societies are deeply pent up with anger, and racial, ethnical and national divides used to exclude and include groups via this logic are more frequently striking a violent spark across their polarities. People across the globe move away from environmentally degraded rural areas to seek a livelihood in the urban settlements, and often they are, in large numbers, unable to sustain themselves, creating slums, ghettos and derelict estates without any hope. As a result of such and many similar changes, the tensions that breed violence are growing stronger to carve a dignified and sustainable living for more and more oppressed people. Liberation and its struggle is thus, as always, an argument for the just division of land and property, plus the control over various regulatory social, economical and political entities; it is never the imposition of dominant divides for a largely one-sided benefit, which is on the contrary the conquest associated with colonialism. This raises some very real questions, which differ fundamentally from the incestuous siding with good or evil haunting this conflict, that must urgently be asked and answered, as the absolutely terrible and, in my view, totally inexcusable massacre in Iraq continues. Taking responsibility for this senseless murder, the US must, like the terrorized Iraqis spared when the fog of war has lifted no doubt will do, openly and vehemently reject Bush and start a new project that may actually lead toward sustainable peace. -af PS: The rhetorical identification with "us" above is a deeply troublesome convenience. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net