RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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malala and the 'Feminist' justification for war

11/10/2014

 
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WAR IS PEACE
The conferral of the Nobel Peace Prize is always a source of grim amusement at this time of year. Only 5 years ago, the award went to Barack Obama, who, displaying commendable insight, said he had not deserved it. This year the recipient is Malala Yousafzai, a young woman from the Swat Valley in Pakistan who was shot by the Taliban on her way to school in 2012. Following her recovery, Yousafzai has gone on to be lauded in the West as a champion of women's rights, even giving a speech on the subject at the UN and meeting with the British royal family. Indeed, while there is no doubt that Yousafzai has suffered bravely, she is now an establishment figure who is being used in the Western media as a poster girl for 'humanitarian' intervention. Earlier this year, for example, her name was attached to a Twitter campaign, supported by Michelle Obama, to 'Bring Back Our Girls' - an ostensibly progressive movement whose real intent was clearly to increase the US military presence in Nigeria against the challenge to its hegemony posed by China. Media figures such as Piers Morgan have also invoked the Malala story as a retrospective justification for the allied invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001. In short, Yousafzai's story is being exploited to provide a bogus 'feminist' justification for imperialism.

Had Yousafzai been a victim of a US drone attack, she would hardly have received such a warm welcome in Washington, as this Al Jazeera article points out. To invoke Herman and Chomsky's distinction, Yousafzai is a 'worthy victim', because she was injured by the enemy. By contrast, victims of US aggression are by definition 'unworthy' and are therefore ignored by politicians and mainstream media. And while she is still only a teenager, Yousafzai herself cannot be entirely exempted from blame for this state of affairs. Although she has criticised the US use of drones in Pakistan, she seems to have actively participated in the 'Bring Back Our Girls' campaign and has thanked Barack Obama for the United States' work in supporting female education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, despite the worsening situation of women in Afghanistan since the US invasion (and let us not forget that US support for the so-called
mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s was a major contributor to the oppression of Afghan women!). 

WHITE WOMAN'S BURDEN
I am reminded of all of this watching Our Girl, a current BBC drama series about the experience of a young female medic working in the British army in Afghanistan. Written by Tony Grounds and starring former EastEnders actress Lacey Turner as Cockney Private Molly Dawes, Our Girl is an extrapolation of last year's one-off drama, which I had a good old moan about at the time. While not quite as tasteless as BBC Three's ongoing comedy Bluestone 42, in which young British soldiers in 'Afghan' crack bare jokes while under fire from faceless Taliban, Our Girl is a deeply problematic drama. The acting and the gentle soldierly 'banter' are unconvincing - Bluestone 42, actually, does much better in this respect - and the drama is deeply racist: Afghan men are presented as patriarchal brutes.
Noting a certain lack of narrative definition in cultural images of the Afghanistan war, Brian Castner has described the Afghanistan war as 'a stage without a play' - but these productions do contain common elements and a remarkably similar cast of characters, including young, working-class and happy-go-lucky soldiers doing their best in a profoundly reactionary country whose backward citizens require civilizing.

Indeed, the real scandal of Our Girl is its unalloyed pro-imperialism. In an echo of the Yousafzai story - and a travesty of history - we are repeatedly reminded that Western soldiers are in Afghanistan to help the local children get to school and to provide medical assistance to the locals. One of these is a young girl, Bashira, who is beaten by her father and already promised in marriage... unless Molly can save the day. This focus on women and women's issues serves to obscure the workings of imperialism, serving as a 'sexual decoy', in Zillah Eisenstein's phrase. While mention is made of British soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan (worthy victims), massacres of the Afghan population are not acknowledged and no serious criticism of the occupation is voiced. On the contrary, the third episode, which follows Dawes's period of leave in England, has introduced a new character: a manipulative and neurotic 'middle class' anti-war campaigner who ought to be, according to Dawes's grandmother, 'rolled into a carpet and lobbed off a bridge onto the M25’. The sinister message of the drama is the one shared by many of the supporters of Yousafzai; namely, that Western imperialism is making the world a safer place - for women, for men, for everybody; and those who do not agree should be silenced.
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Doing whatever it takes: 'Complicit', 'Our Girl' and the 'war on terror' in TV drama

31/3/2013

 
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Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. No Child of Mine - his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky - was one of the most disturbing and moving British television productions of the 1990s. So I had high hopes for his recent Channel 4 one-off drama Complicit, which follows MI5 agent Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo) in hot pursuit of a suspected terrorist, Waleed Achmed (Arsher Ali), from Britain to Egypt in order to foil a suspected ricin attack on the United Kingdom. Slow and stylistically unostentatious, Complicit marks a welcome departure from the high octane formula of US 'war on terror' dramas such as 24, Threat Matrix and Homeland; but its take on the relationship between terrorism and the British state nevertheless reproduces some of the conservative elements of those shows.

It is curious that some television reviewers have praised the moral complexity of Complicit on the grounds that the drama gives us no 'goodie' to root for and no 'baddie' to condemn. In fact, Ekubo and Achmed are clearly identifiable as the hero and villain of the piece, respectively. The latter is a shady, sneering figure whom Ekubo observes on surveillance tapes bellowing 'British troops burn in hell!' at an anti-war demonstration (this chanting is heard in sinister extradiegetic overdub when Achmed appears later in the film). Achmed is also a malicious racist. Ekubo, on the other hand, is a decent, hardworking and competent agent who nevertheless remains something of an outsider at MI5, under-promoted and alienated from his Establishment colleagues. There are strong implications that racism has played a part in his marginalisation. Frustrated by these workplace problems and his lack of progress in the case - and horrified by Achmed's apparent disregard for human life - Ekubo allows his suspect to be tortured by the Egyptian police.
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This turns out to be a big mistake, for the twist in the tale is that Achmed has played Ekubo like a fiddle. There is no ricin attack and Ekubo realises too late that he has been cleverly manipulated by his quarry so that the latter can gain a propaganda advantage. Drawing attention to his torture in the media, Achmed subsequently presents himself to the world as a victim of anti-Islamic prejudice. The disgraced Ekubo, meanwhile, is indefinitely suspended from his post for breaking the rules. For Ekubo, torture - in this case, at least - not only fails to bear fruit, but proves to be counter-productive.

The producers of Complicit certainly deserve credit for problematizing the use of torture; yet viewers are hardly encouraged to adopt a critical stance towards either Ekubo or the 'war on terror'. The film's crucial scene is a tense interrogation-room confrontation in which Ekubo and Achmed exchange their conflicting views of the world. Formally, this is an equally balanced battle of wits between a jihadist and state 'spook'; yet even when Achmed advances some reasonable arguments, the viewer is left in little doubt where her sympathies ought to lie. When Achmed condemns the British invasion of Iraq and other countries, he is ridiculed by Ekubo, who counters by enumerating the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by British people, including 'free schools', 'state handouts' and the 'freedom to say and do what you want'. And any lingering sympathy the viewer may have with Achmed's arguments about the brutality of British imperialism dissipates when Achmed calls Ekubo a 'fucking kaffir' and a 'nigger'. How can the viewer take seriously any point of view articulated by such a monstrous bigot - or, for that matter, object to his torture?

The ending of the drama is equally problematic. In his exit interview with his boss at MI5, Ekubo is taken to task for allowing Achmed's torture; but he protests:

"What else could I have done? Weighing up the illegality against the consequences of doing nothing? I've always understood that we work with politically unacceptable regimes if it means we are safeguarding our people from attack at home [...] Everything I've done has been for my country, for the people of my country"


The patriotic message here is clear enough: the security of 'our people' can only be achieved through the suspension of human rights and the illegal but necessary use of force by agents of 'our' state (an 'acceptable' regime, no doubt). This is in essence the perspective of Kathryn Bigelow's recent film Zero Dark Thirty, whose 'normalisation' of torture has been challenged by Slavoj Žižek in terms that are highly relevant here: 'Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen'.

Ekubo is certainly a troubled figure at the conclusion of the film, as he stands on the banks of the Thames watching the world go by and presumably reflecting on the wisdom of his actions (a reprise, strangely enough, of Oyelowo's pose in the final scene of the 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger). Indeed, we end on a rather questioning note: in the final shot, Ekubo looks directly into the camera, as if to ask viewers what they would have done in his position. But this 'open' gesture is hardly sufficient to override Ekubo's explicit, patriotic justification for torture. Moreover, the preceding shots of Londoners happily going about their daily business seem to confirm that Edward has indeed done the right thing and that only similarly decisive actions in the future can safeguard the 'British way of life'. In the drama's conservative framework, people like Achmed simply hate 'us' for who we are and are hell-bent on destroying Western society and its supposedly liberal values.

Defenders of Complicit may point to the the production's unglamorous style, as well as its troubled hero and the supposed moral complexity of the situation he finds himself in. Indeed, the film is pervaded by a sense of indeterminacy: Ekubo often seems to be distracted, homing in on seemingly irrelevant details (for example, during a visit to his superior's office, a point of view shot reveals that he is focusing on a box of antacids) and he is often shot in shallow focus, creating blurred backgrounds that seem to reflect his uncertain state of mind. Yet despite these markers of uncertainty, complexity, 'seriousness ' and, indeed, 'quality', the production tends to foreclose criticism of the state's anti-terrorism methods or the relationship between jihadist terrorism and imperialist aggression. Complicit, like so much 'terrorism TV' (I borrow the phrase from Stacy Takacs's superb book on the subject), contributes to the naturalisation of the 'state of exception' along with its disciplinary apparatuses of surveillance, detention and torture.

For anybody with a critical perspective on these topics, however, the one-off in-house BBC drama Our Girl, written by veteran Tony Grounds and starring EastEnders actress Lacey Turner, is even more troubling.
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Molly Dawes (Turner) is a working class girl from East London who joins the British army in order to escape from her obnoxious Albanian boyfriend Artan (Dan Black) and her selfish and racist father (Sean Gallagher), who spends his days smoking, drinking and playing violent video games. Commencing her training programme, Molly soon adapts to the rigours of military discipline and the army becomes her surrogate family.

Our Girl reproduces many of the generic scripts of military-themed 'human interest' documentaries, such as BBC3's Girls on the Frontline (2010): an emphasis on personal sacrifice, an unquestioning acceptance of the necessity for military intervention overseas, and a focus on its subject's transition from a restricting working class milieu to the excitement and challenge of army life. As several television critics have noted, the rather idealised depiction of Molly's military training resembles an army recruitment video. Indeed, the drama offers a highly affirmative view of the army and its mandate, counterposing Molly's desire to 'do something' with her slobbish father's goal of securing long-term incapacity benefit (at a moment when benefit claimants are under attack in the mainstream media, this portrait of a 'benefit scrounger', like Ekubo's reference to 'state handouts' in Complicit, is problematic). At the end of the drama, Molly proudly 'passes out' as a soldier and goes to Afghanistan, while her father lounges at home watching news reports about Al Qaeda bombings. The implication of this parallel editing is clear: Molly is about to play her part in tackling terrorism, while her feckless father rots on the sofa.

Our Girl's sympathetic representation of an army woman fighting prejudice at home is not the only narrative of its type. A similar transference of regressive attitudes from the 'serving' female soldier onto an unpleasant male relative is apparent in the British director Brian Welsh's 2010 film In Our Name, in which Joanne Frogatt plays Suzy, a female soldier returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq. Suzy is traumatized, not after killing children herself, but after witnessing Iraqis killing children and feeling 'powerless to protect those we were sent to help'. On returning to her Middlesborough home, she is applauded by her father for 'making this country safe for us all', but viciously abused by her racist, psychopathic husband. As in Complicit, any potential critique of British imperialism is displaced into the text's anti-racist and anti-sexist politics.

Yet the drama's most direct pro-war statement comes earlier in the film, when Molly returns to London on leave with her meek training colleague Katy (Katherine Pearce). Here Molly must cope with the incomprehension of her friends, who cannot understand why she has 'joined up', and her father's insistence that she stay in England and get married. It is at this point that Katy finds her voice for the first time, drawing a parallel between Molly's father and boyfriend and the patriarchal control of women in Afghanistan: 'You know, that's exactly what we're fighting for in Afghanistan', she tells Molly's father, 'So that women can have a say in who they marry or if they get married at all'. Since Molly's father can only respond with a racist rant, Katy's 'feminist' argument prevails.
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But here the drama is on very thin ice. Certainly, the argument that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken for the benefit of Afghan women was widely touted in the news media in the run-up to the war, and, as Wikileaks has revealed, was promoted by the CIA in order to boost flagging public support for the occupation. Yet it is difficult to believe that this was ever anything more than a flimsy pretext for imperialist intervention. In a devastating critique of the 'progressive' argument for the invasion of Afghanistan, Carole Stabile and Deepa Kumar note that the liberation of women was neither the aim of the war nor its result. Pointing to the Orientalist dimensions of the supposed drive to 'save' Muslim women, they argue that 'the rhetoric of women's liberation' was 'a cynical ploy' and even 'a lie as monumental as the claims about WMD'. It is therefore unfortunate that the producers of Our Girl are content to give such rhetoric a free pass.

All too often in British television dramas about the 'war on terror', criticisms of Western imperialism are either absent or articulated by such unpleasant characters that they cannot be taken seriously, while the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are justified by appeals to the feminist discourse of 'liberation'. In the three-part Occupation (2009), for example - the BBC's only drama about the Iraq war - the most trenchant criticism of the coalition invasion is placed in the mouth of a corrupt Iraqi policeman-turned-terrorist, while the drama as a whole casts the British forces in Iraq as liberators rather than invaders, victims rather than perpetrators of violence.

Yet British television audiences have been offered more critical perspectives on the war on terror over the last decade. Peter Kosminsky's The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for instance, questioned the role of the Labour government in taking Britain to war in Iraq, while his later Britz (Channel 4, 2007) was equally critical of the effects of domestic 'anti-terror' laws on British Muslims following 9/11. Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2006), meanwhile, remains the only television drama to have seriously engaged with the issue of prisoner abuse by the British army. These dramas interrogate the conduct of 'our' state in the war on terror; dramas such as Complicit and Our Girl, on the other hand, emphasize - one implicitly, the other explicitly - the threat posed by the terrorist 'other'.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin warns that 'in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism, the contemporary citizen, far from being invited into a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated by "managed care" and by the managers of fear'. We need television fictions that challenge rather than reinforce this state of affairs, that 'invite discussion' about terrorism and imperialism and their interrelationship. Controversial as they may be, the dramas of Kosminsky and Marchant certainly do this. They show the way forward for writers and producers who are prepared to criticise the 'home team', to cut through the bias and distortion that has so often characterised the treatment of the war on terror in both journalism and screen fiction.

Bigelow's Back

19/1/2013

 
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The massacre of Osama bin Laden and some of his household in 2011 is only one of the more prominent and recent episodes in what Paul Virilio once called the 'world-wide police chase, a fearsome blend of military and judicial violence'. The event has attracted the attentions of film propagandists before (I wrote here about the disgraceful Channel 4 documentary Osama bin Laden: Shoot to Kill in 2011). But anyway, props to Deepa Kumar for this blistering take-down of Zero Dark Thirty, the latest, much-hyped film about the murder of America's favourite homo sacer. The film is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who is fast becoming America's answer to Leni Riefenstahl. In many ways, it is the sequel to Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009), which, following a long tradition of imperialist propaganda film, depicted the hazards faced by a US bomb disposal team in Iraq as though the Americans themselves were the victims of the war, while Iraqis remain faceless, terroristic ragheads lurking in the shadows.

The new film keeps this racist theme alive, but it goes further still, legitimising both torture and extra judicial killing - in line, of course, with the Obama administration's foreign policy preferences. It also includes references to a range of terror attacks, including the July 2005 bombings in London, that had nothing to do with bin Laden (but everything to do with violent reaction against the depredations of Western imperialism). It is, in short, a mendacious apologia for what Henry Giroux has called 'dirty democracy'. The enormous amount of publicity the film has received across all of the media - for several weeks advertisements for the film have dominated public billboards in the UK - indicates just what dark times we are living in.

Another notable aspect of the film is the decision to make the central character a female CIA officer, a choice that legitimizes the involvement of Western women in the torture of Arab men. This is a theme familiar enough from the Abu Ghraib photographs (although Jessica Chastain's Maya, unlike the working class 'grunt' Lynddie England, is an 'educated' woman, which perhaps gives her rather more caché among liberal audiences) and shows that feminism, far from constituting any form of resistance to imperialism, serves as a crucial part of its ideological defence. Indeed, war has long been justified in terms of the defence of women: to take just one recent example, the CIA attempted to make 'women's rights' central to its justification for the war in Afghanistan. Today, meanwhile, women are assured that they can play as important a part as men in the prosecution of imperialist violence and US President Barack Obama recently praised the opening of combat units to women as yet another step toward the achievement of America's founding ideals of fairness and equality: 'Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger, with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love'.

Most disturbing of all, for US workers at least, is Kumar's suggestion that Zero Dark Thirty 'is a harbinger of things to come. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama earlier this month includes an amendment, passed in the House last May, that legalizes the dissemination of propaganda to US citizens'. Hollywood war films have always, of course, served as propaganda vehicles, and many of them - like Zero Dark Thirty - have been produced with financial support or practical input from the Pentagon; but this move legitimises the state's war on the American public. The amendment to the NDAA invalidates the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which had proscribed the domestic use of psychological operations by the state. As Kumar advises: 'Be ready to be propagandized to all the time, everywhere'.

Rihanna is a Satanist!

19/8/2012

 
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"Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naïvely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naïvely believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible: “Where have you been? Don’t you know that Mossad and the CIA did it?” (Latour, 'Why has critique run out of steam?') 


These days, as Bruno Latour implies, 'conspiracy theory' has gone mainstream. I've recently spoken to several students who have become interested in supposedly 'subliminal' occult imagery in television advertisements or music videos.

To give you some idea of what I'm talking about, the peculiar Baphomet-like pose above is a frame - barely perceptible on casual viewing - from Rihanna's 'Umbrella' video. Those interested in discussing these weird images in Rihanna's oeuvre can enjoy a myriad of breathlessly inventive websites linking the pop diva to witchcraft, devil worship or the Illuminati. The creators of these occult conspiracy websites (e.g. Vigilant Citizen) often present themselves as concerned 'netizens' providing a vital public service by raising awareness about the celebrity demons in our midst. Many, too, seem to share conservative Christian values and their analyses are often grossly misogynistic where female celebrities are concerned; Rihanna, for example, is an 'Illuminati Whore of Death', according to one rather unforgiving website. Indeed, these elite-hating 'truthers' typically assume that the celebrity stars of these videos are 'pulling the strings' and are responsible for the 'subliminal' images in their videos; but weirdly, these inquisitive souls almost never discuss how this process might actually work, how contemporary music videos are produced or circulated, or who gains from the incorporation of occult iconography. To my mind, these are the more interesting questions to ask about occult imagery: what is the significance of these images for contemporary media audiences? Who is responsible for producing them - and why (even if the answer is that they serve simply to generate some profitable ersatz controversy)?

In attempting to answer such questions, it's necessary to get beyond the widespread academic mockery of the belief in 'subliminal' messages. Charles Acland's book Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence argues that we ought to take seriously the widespread popular belief in the existence and power of subliminal media messages. Acland proposes that while there is precious little evidence that subliminal messages, in the strict sense of the term, have actually been much used in film or media production, it is nonetheless interesting to consider why the subliminal thesis holds popular appeal. (Acland also notes that this thesis 'curiously exists side by side with the view that the media have little or no impact upon an individual’s thinking', a paradox that puts me in mind of Mike Wayne's contention, in Marxism and Media Studies, that contemporary capitalist subjectivity is typically 'split', manifesting both credulity and cynicism about the world at one and the same time).

Psychoanalysis perhaps offers some answers here. Psychotic delusion is characterized not so much by incoherence as by a kind of crazy, 'excessive' coherence and certainty: here we might think of David Icke, who often makes some solid points about real conspiracies - more on that below - but who also asserts the truth of highly speculative and downright irrational ideas with fascistic conviction. Lacan reads the paranoid position as one of total certainty in which the subject experiences an unbearable proximity to a malevolent other that exercises a total grip over the subject's inner life but which nevertheless remains opaque and enigmatic. This explains the frustrating refusal in many conspiracy websites to name the producers, directors, technicians or other creative personnel involved in producing the symbols and images with which they are concerned; they are fixated solely on the text. Writing about conspiracy theories and paranoia in her 2009 book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Jodie Dean writes:

"Lacan refers to a 'captivating image'. The psychotic fastens on this image, positioning himself in relation to it. Insofar as this relation remains at the level of the imaginary, it is not a symbolic relation capable of anchoring meaning or offering a clear degree of separation between the subject and the other. On the contrary, precisely because the relationship is on the imaginary plane, it is characterized by fear, rivalry and aggression"

But what, in political terms, does the fascination with Satanist and Illuminati-related symbolism betoken? Acland's book suggests that public interest in subliminal messages presupposes a basic critical orientation towards media communications that is at least potentially progressive. This is consistent with Jodi Dean's work on contemporary conspiracy theories (Aliens in America), which argues that conspiracism and political consciousness are intimately related. From this point of view, we can speculate that the interest in occult messages and symbols is a placeholder for class consciousness. Most poor and working-class people are well aware of their own powerlessness; but for those without a materialist, class analysis of capitalism, this powerlessness can be explained as an effect of manipulation by the aliens, lizard people or Jews who are supposedly pulling our strings. Perhaps, in all their naivety, such irrational explanations are an expression of a repressed desire for world-historical meaning at a time when, we are told, all of the ideological battles have been fought and there is no longer anything in which to believe beyond work, money and markets. If Alain Badiou is correct, contemporary capitalism is 'worldless', that is, it fails to provide us with any 'cognitive mapping' of our reality. Irrational conspiracy theories seem to offer a form of escape from this disorientation into meaning and significance - or what Jameson calls 'the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age'. However one theorizes this phenomenon, I'd be interested to know more - from people who are not actual lunatics and misogynists - about how and why certain artists and producers are flirting with occult imagery.

And finally, we should add that the tout court rejection of all so-called 'conspiracy theories' is just as wrong-headed as the wide-eyed belief in hollow moons, little green men or shape-shifting reptilian overlords. While some conspiracies are clearly irrational, we do nevertheless live in a world shaped by the plotting of the capitalist class, which is, after all, Machiavellian to the core. The list of known ruling class 'false flag' operations, for example - Gleiwitz, Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, Gladio, to mention just a few high-profile cases - is extensive. And it is a matter of record that governments conduct secret experiments on their populations (the Tuskegee study), covertly sell arms (Irangate), or lie about the threat posed by their enemies (Iraq's WMDs). The self-satisfied politicians and journalists who proudly proclaim that they do not 'believe' in conspiracies are simply parading their historical ignorance; what do they imagine the secret services do all day? We should not let our justifiable scepticism about outlandish and irrational conspiracy theories blind us to the reality of ruling class deception.


Rape, trauma and propaganda: Juanita Wilson's As If I Am Not There

6/2/2012

 
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During the 1992-95 Bosnian war, rape of women (and men) was one of the most horrific and widely-reported of crimes. Tonight I watched Juanita Wilson's As If I Am Not There (2010), a film set during the outbreak of the war. Based on evidence submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague as related in the work of Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić, the film depicts the sexual abuse of Samira (Nataša Petrović), a Muslim schoolteacher from Sarajevo who moves to a country village shortly before it is overrun by Serb forces. Samira is evacuated from the village to a hut in a desolate location, where, along with other female villagers, she is subjected to repeated gang rape by the soldiers. We mostly 'see' the events of the film through Samira's eyes - a highly restricted mode of narration that strengthens our identification with the heroine.

With the exception of regular and unsparing depictions of sexual violence, the film's action is sparse and dialogue is minimal. This seems appropriate to the film's subject matter; after all, as Judith Lewis Herman argues in her book Trauma and Recovery, traumatic memories are concerned with corporeal and visual sensation rather than verbal narrative. Perhaps this is why the camera lingers so long, so often on Samira's enormous, fear-filled eyes. Landscape is important, too: the barren flatlands on which Samira's hut has been built contrast starkly with the verdant beauty of the hillsides surrounding the compound, linking Samira with her environment and creating a distinctly gendered topography.
Yet neither the film's undoubted impressionistic power nor the seriousness and horror of its subject matter should prevent us from asking searching questions about its historical accuracy or political orientation. The film's depiction of Serbian aggressors and Muslim victims is not, in itself, problematic; or rather, it would not be if the almost exclusive emphasis on Serb criminality and Muslim victimhood were not depressingly familiar from the many Western books, media reports, television dramas and films about the Bosnian war over the last two decades. Along with the mainstream media, liberal pundits and academics - including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Jürgen Habermas and Todd Gitlin - have relentlessly insisted that the Bosnian war was a one-sided war of aggression waged by Milošević's Serbia against its neighbours and that Western military 'intervention' was therefore justified. The author of the film's source, Slavenka Drakulić, has done little to correct this impression: her 2004 book They Would Never Hurt A Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague predictably drew attention to Serb (and two Croat) war criminals - but not to Muslim perpetrators.

Particularly problematic is the film's depiction of something like a rape camp. Some of the claims made about Serb-run rape camps have been challenged by historians such as Diana Johnstone and David Gibbs. As I discussed in greater detail here, the evidence that Serb forces used rape systematically (that is, on orders 'from above') during the war has been hotly disputed. As Johnstone writes, ‘the accusation that the Serbs initiated a deliberate policy of mass rape has never been substantiated. But the belief that this happened is widespread and persistent'. Moreover, while stories about the rape of Muslim women were used to construct a 'feminist' argument in favour of military intervention in Bosnia, Serb rape victims have tended to be ignored in the dominant Western narrative of the war, even though - as Peter Brock shows in his book Media Cleansing, Dirty Reporting: Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia - the documentation of Serb rape victims was more extensive than that relating to Muslim victims. No matter: according to the dominant narrative of the Western journalists, the only rapists were Serbs, the only victims Muslims. Yet one seriously has to wonder whether those who take such a one-sided view of conflicts really care about the victims on either side. As the comedian Mark Steel suggests in his book What's Going On?, 'anyone who is deeply moved by one set of tragedies while ignoring, and even justifying, those on the other side, in reality is not genuinely touched by either'.

Rape, as we know, is used by men as a weapon of terror and, indeed, as a weapon of war. But as the history of imperialist propaganda shows - from the allied propaganda around the so-called 'Rape of Belgium' in World War I to the 'rape rooms' of Saddam Hussein's Iraq - claims of systematic rape are all too readily wielded in the service of political propaganda. It is impossible not to feel disgusted by the events depicted in As If I Am Not There; but our disgust ought not to blind us to the film's reinforcement of dubious historical assumptions and stereotypical patterns of representation.

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