Long Sunday

America is at Risk

Women as Weapons of War

"Exclusive" to Long Sunday - an excerpt (courtesy of the publishers) from Kelly Oliver's recent book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia UP, 2007).

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

Read an interview with Kelly Oliver here. A PDF version of the excerpt can be found on Columbia UP's site for the book here. The publicity page for the book can be found here.

Culture and politics, as Nietzsche said...

Or at least parrhesia, that is. A fourth unavowable film joins The Power of Nightmares, Inconvenient Truth and Sicko, then (via here).

No End in Sight is apparently the first film by millionaire Charles Ferguson, and an essential one. (As the saying goes, aristocracy often do some interesting things because they have the time. The rest of us just watch. I recently watched the Guerilla News Network's docudrama, Battleground, a bit more in your face than My Country, My Country, though both significant collections of testimony on their own.)

If one thing seems abundantly clear, it is that a politically splintered, sectarian Iraq looms on the horizon, and for a while now has been actively anticipated and even "planned for" by a host of powers. For what the blogosphere has had to say on this disastrous "development," still as yet barely noted in the MSM (barring some miracle, as an all-but-inevitable, long-planned-for military consequence), I refer you to Juan Cole (any others?).

al qaeda in the subdivisions; or, AP american history

(x-posted from adswithoutproducts)

It is worth remembering that, however things look on the surface, we Americans will always be the insurgents, never the occupiers. The IEDs will always be ours, the sniping - we invented that.

Whatever it looks like on the screen, we will always be irregulars, we will always land on the asymmetrical side of things. Our torture rooms are never those of the prison-bricked Central Intelligence office or the PVC camp - they are always in the back room, upstairs and to the back, with the rough hewn chair and the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

We will always be "just kids," and the wars will always be fought between one backyard and the drainage pond at the corner. Someone's golden retriever will always run across the field of battle at the critical moment. We will lock and load and empty our magazines before our mothers call us in for microwaved dinners.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud fabulates the origination of the incest taboo in a story that is also (of course) a story of the origins of civilization and the social contract that initiates it. There is a big bad father, and then there are sons. The sons - they can't get what they want sexually or in any other way - dad has a monopoly over the women. So the sons kill dad (Freud wonders if it was "some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon," that allowed the sons to win - I think we can all agree that it wasn't so much a "weapon" as a set of tactics, namely guerrilla warfare, the sort of thing that would later manifest itself, as we all learn in school, at Lexington and Concord against the Redcoats...) But once dad is dead, there is a problem - a problem whose solution takes the shape of the incest prohibition and, well, civilization itself:

[T]he incest prohibition had [...] a strong practical foundation. Sexual need does not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition – perhaps after many difficult experiences – through which they all equally renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the first place. Thus they saved the organization which had made them strong and which could be based upon the homo-sexual feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves among them during the time of their banishment.

What can we say? If only this were true when it comes to us. The happy - if only ever moderately happy - structuralization of dad's brutality, the construction upon the solid foundation of a repressed but ever present fraterphilia as well as the (sure!) very dark joke that deaddad gets to play on them in the end as far as access to women goes ("You thought you'd have all, but instead you'll have none, because you are too many...") The revolution ends in a socialism of castration - the only consolation arrives via the fact that it you (pl.) that deny yourself the women, rather than that fat bastard of a father, in our case, King George III, later aka LeninoStalin, et al.

No. What happened here is something entirely other. We killed dad, yes, but rather than simply constructing a totem and going on our self-chastening way, we decided (is that the word?) to reenact differently, more viscerally - for real. With our own sons, or especially the sons of others - even as we strike them down, we imagine, time and again, that it is the hand of filial revolt that we raise when we raise to strike. We will always be the bad son, the prodigal returned to fuck dad up right good when we asks what we've done with the money, even if there is no beard on those we strike, even if they still are on mom's tit as we decapitate and worse, in our eyes, fucked up with the drug of repetition without difference, they are bearded and old, they have stolen our mom-sisters from the tent bed, they are sandy with their mature denial of our rights even as infants. We are Issac as Abraham striking down Issac - the call to hold off never comes, because you need a father's ear to hear it, and we are only sons...

The Child is the father of the Man. Yes, but the natural piety in question, the binding of now to back then, incessantly takes the shape of sprinting in surplus stuff across the backyard, carrying the guns borrowed from our fathers' (father's) collection, a children's crusade, an insurgency of kids, shooting blanks, catching ourselves on film, all in the end for AP credit.

Piracy and Liberty

An excerpt from my ongoings readings on the history of piracy. Marcus Rediker compares the frontispiece of Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers to Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People.

first person (plural) shooter

I'm sure soldiers, ever since there have been soldiers, have hooted adolescently in the throes of combat. What would we expect, that they'd go about their work gravely, constantly reminding themselves of the seriousness - the mortal seriousness - of the things that they do, the weapons that they discharge? That is undoubtedly too much to expect. The stupid talk and yells undoubtedly represent a release from the psychosis inspiring and inspired actions that they are committing.

It is not new, it is not groundbreaking, to think: "They sound like the subset of students that you see hooting and unawarely spewing stuff they heard in a movie somewhere. They always talk like this, yell like this. They likely feel most themselves when they most completely give themselves over to the canned material they have been served, night after night, for their entire lives."

What we hear is not the organic, the militaristically gnomic, the earthy - it is the sitcomedic. MTV trashtalk, some Full Metal Jacketisms (Kubrick would have loved this, at least in a way) thrown in.

And, because you too have seen the same movies, at least a lot of them, you are able to try to reconstruct any possible reason, any scenario at all, in which the cars that speed in, crash, disgorge their occupants, who then are blown away by the Americans. The sniper was in a car? The insurgents, after a lengthy pause, get into their little cars and attempt, as an act of insane bravery perhaps, to speed past the marines' position? Why?

Unlike the talk, no, the actions of the "insurgents" don't fit into any plausible script, especially not the one posted at the end of the video.

A (Not So) Startling Accusation

President Carter's old National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not someone known for his dovish inclinations regarding foreign policy.  In fact, he has publicly admitted that he advocated for CIA support of the mujaheddin before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and that such a policy was designed to prompt an invasion.  It was hoped that this would lead the Soviets into a Vietnam style quagmire, overstretch their military and ultimately lead to a humiliating defeat. 

So when Brezinski recently testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee one might be curious as to what he thinks the Bush administration is preparing for Iran:

800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist To Fight In Iraq

'We've Been So Selfish'

January 10, 2007 | Issue 43•02

WASHINGTON, DC—Citing a desire to finally make a difference in Iraq, in the past two weeks, more than 800,000 young people from upper-middle- and upper-class families have put aside their education, careers, and physical well-being to enlist in the military, new data from the Department Of Defense shows.

"I don't know if it was the safety and comfort of the holidays or what, but I realized that my affluence and ease of living comes at a cost," said Private Jonathan Grace, 18, who was to commence studies at Dartmouth College next fall, but will instead attend 12 weeks of basic training before being deployed to Fallujah with the 1st Army Battalion. "I just looked at my parents in their cashmere sweaters and thought, 'Who am I to go to an elite liberal arts college and spend all my time reading while, in the real world, thousands of kids my age are sacrificing their lives for our country?' It's not right."

lessons from the Iraq War

One of the primary lessons of the Iraq war is the correctness of political correctness. A cornerstone of Bush's whole effort was the assumption or belief that a key contention of the 'political correctness' movement -- that we need to understand and accomodate world views that clash, partly or wholly, with our own -- should be rejected. This is one reason the whole chorus of right-wing propagandists was so enthusiastic about the war: it provided room for the reassertion of American cultural, moral, and political superiority -- and not just in foreign affairs, where it's been much less successful anyway. The Bush administration worked itself up into the belief (they could not have reasoned their way to this idea) that American democratic ideals are the only ones that make any sense. The working out of those ideals into specific institutions should occur naturally once any artificial restraints are removed. Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was one such distorting influence on the people who happened to live in Iraq. Remove him, make it possible for a democratic culture to emerge -- which shouldn't be hard because it's so natural to humans -- and America will have lots of new friends in the region. (An article I read recently made an argument along these lines about Bush's adventure in Iraq. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I saw it so I can't link to it.)

The depth of this belief about human nature and the political institutions natural to it helps explain some of the most puzzling features of this invasion. For instance, the assumption that it really wasn't necessary for anyone involved in the invasion to know Arabic. You don't need to actually talk to people about how to think and act in a democratic way. All of that is already written on their hearts, so don't worry. Nor is it necessary to know much about the country itself. Sunnis, Shias, Kurds -- these are so many commas on the way to 'one nation under God with freedom and justice for all.'

But it turns out that they were wrong and those who promote the need to understand difference, in both its philosophic and cultural versions, were right. The willful and arrogant refusal to learn this lesson from (what is called) political correctness is the source of much of the disaster around us.

The year was 1965

From today's NY Times:

Johnson’s advisers put it to him straight: Saigon was going to lose, Hanoi was going to win, and there wasn’t much time to waste. The choice was clear: lose the war or expand the war, find a formula of words to mask failure or send more troops and increase the bet on the table. Johnson chose to expand the war.