[Reader-list] the nihilism of war!

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CTHEORY          THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE       VOL 26, NOS 1-2
         *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***

  Event Scene 122   03/04/02     Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
  _____________________________________________________________________


  The Nihilism of War
  ==========================================================


  ~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~


       Green screens
       & mismatched tongues
       tickertape slogans of disinformation
       8000 bombs with no bleeding bodies
       History will not die at the Tigris and Euphrates

       Mesopotamia and the origin of writing
       America and the triumph of virtuality
       The circle of mythology is complete
       A graveyard of American empire
       in the desert sands
       Time and Space
       Earth and Sky
       Memory and Disappearance
       History will not die at the Tigris and Euphrates


  Now we are all citizens of Baghdad

  Not so much a fatal "clash of civilizations," but now something much
  more fateful: a global clash between the hegemonic spirit of the
  war-machine of American empire and the spirit of peace of a resisting
  humanity. Like a replay of Picasso's ~Guernica~ where a courageous
  human, and then artistic, refusal was brought to bear on the sight of
  fascist warplanes experimenting on a civilian population, the skin of
  humanity has taken to the streets in protest, all the more admirable
  for its political impossibility, against the illegal invasion of
  Iraq. From the Middle East to the cities of North America, from
  Indonesia to Latin and Central America, from Europe to  San
  Francisco, a resurgent humanity pushes itself onto the screen of
  history, speaking always in the name of international law, protesting
  in the name of global human rights.

  Today for those opposed to the war, we are all citizens of
  Baghdad: all in solidarity with the suffering civilians of Iraq, all
  opposed to war crimes, all  experimental subjects of American power,
  all waiting to be harvested by the war machine, all threatened with
  the use of "shock and awe," all positioned by the media as either
  "embedded" cheerleaders of the logic of war or disappeared as
  ethically surplus to the requirements of power.

  Against the framework of understanding provided by the liquid
  propaganda of the media with its technologically driven visions of
  hyper-war, with its nihilistic proclamations of the "coming battle
  for the prize of Baghdad," resisting humanity speaks in the more
  enduring ethical terms of 'crimes against humanity.' Which is why, of
  course, the hegemonic logic of war struggles so cynically to control
  the frame, to stay 'on-message,' to resist any moral disturbances of
  the war codes of CENTCOM, to redouble the physical destruction of
  Iraq with the moral pacification of the citizens of the globe.

  So then, the cynical rhetoric: "liberators" not invaders, disarmament
  of "weapons of mass destruction" not oil,  "triumph" not terror. The
  complete invisibility of a one-sided war with, for example, the city
  of Basra with its one million citizens now targeted as a military
  site. The war-machine counts on the ethical fatigue of the
  television audience. It depends on its ability to carry out a secret
  war of human rights violation in the midst of a seemingly transparent
  global village. Those hooded, humiliated images of prisoners in
  Guatanamo are perhaps representative images of what awaits those who
  refuse the new American hegemon. We are speaking now of a critical
  moral divide that has been transgressed by the United States and
  Britain, of the contempt of the militarily powerful for the limits of
  international law.

  Or something more troubling. Consider these images: A hooded Iraqi
  POW cradles his child behind a barbed wire fence. An American soldier
  says: "We didn't think they would want to be separated." Or the
  morning briefer for CENTCOM who, when questioned about the killing of
  ten Iraqi women and children at a military checkpoint,  replies that
  the army "accepts  no moral responsibility." The ethical expediency
  of the war-machine.

  Could it be that we are witnessing the unmasking of the sustaining
  spirit of empire consciousness: an ability of the American Government
  not only to be ethically indifferent towards the suffering of others,
  but to market that suffering in an agit-prop image matrix that is a
  visual paean to power-- Nietzsche's 'last man' as the moral 'right
  stuff' for the invasion of Iraq.  And, if this is so, are we not
  compelled to conclude that the United States as the spearhead of
  technological liberalism is itself the avatar of nihilism: a society
  driven forward by the spirit of exterminism, all comfortably
  camouflaged in the propaganda slogans of "liberty" and "democracy."
  As the sustaining rhetoric of hyper-colonialism flashes across the
  media screen, we finally know something of what it means to live in a
  culture of cynicism that thrives  by inflicting cruelties on the
  victimized bodies of 'alien' scapegoats.

  There is also the 'question of technology.' Heidegger went to his
  death convinced that the question of technology was coeval with the
  ascendancy of the will to nihilation. His meditations on technology
  actually facialized the dominant movements of contemporary
  technoculture in the political language of "standing reserve",
  "harvesting", "objectification," "the culture of boredom." Yet even
  Heidegger missed Nietzsche's insight concerning the culture of
  nihilism that is so bitterly expressed by the invasion of Iraq.
  Namely that there can be such a pornography of media images of
  violence, such a clinical obscenity of night-time scenes of missile
  strikes on Baghdad cut with laconic reportage by suburban voiced
  commentators, such an emphasis on the hyper-language of war games to
  the exclusion of the disappeared victims because we are finally in
  the charismatic presence of technologies of death. When technology is
  invested with the war spirit then it is only in scenes of devastated
  cities and fiery explosions and cluster-bombed children that the
  scent of the pleasure of cruelty is to be found. The Anglo-American
  invasion of Iraq, then, as also about the triumph of death-head
  technology: an armature of technologies of war invested with such
  extremes of ethnic hatred and religious animosity and capitalist
  self-interest and  political jingoism and  technical neutrality of
  terms that it has itself become the historical spearhead of the will
  to nihilism. The pornography of war is  nourishing psychic food for
  the culture of boredom.

  A new dark age will begin with the fall of Baghdad.

  _____________________________________________________________________

  * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
  *   culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
  *   contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
  *   theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
  *
  * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
  *
  * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris),
  *   Bruce Sterling (Austin), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried
  *   Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San
  *   Francisco), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray
  *   (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen
  *   Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), David Cook (Toronto), Ralph
  *   Melcher (Sante Fe), Shannon Bell (Toronto), Gad Horowitz
  *   (Toronto), Deena Weinstein (Chicago), Michael Weinstein
  *   (Chicago), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough).
  *
  * In Memory: Kathy Acker
  *
  * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK),
  *   Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Canada/Sweden).
  *
  * Editorial Associate: Ted Hiebert
  * WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
  * WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman




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