RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
  • blog
  • about
  • Writing

shame and the soldier of conscience

30/4/2017

 
Picture
The new Netflix film Sand Castle (2017), directed by Fernando Coimbra, deserves better, I think, than the lukewarm reception it has generally received among critics. The film stars Nicholas Hoult as Private Matt Ocre, an army volunteer who finds himself in Iraq at the start of the 2003 war. Its writer, Iraq veteran Chris Roessner, claims that his film is 'apolitical'. Now, of course, they all say that. Many US reviewers described Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) as 'non-political', even though the film depicts Americans as heroes and Iraqis as murderous hajis lurking in the shadows. And Bigelow herself, in interviews, elided her own film's political import by asserting that 'there's no politics in the trenches' - a sophisticated way of telling critics to shut up and support our boys. Bradley Cooper, to take another example, asserted that American Sniper (2015), a film of almost parodic patriotism, is not political. And so on. Sand Castle, however, is a more searching production than the films mentioned above; in fact, it has even been described by some - and denounced by others - as an anti-war film.

Sand Castle certainly has some anti-war credentials, although this has not impressed everybody. Bemoaning the film's lack of originality, Brian Tallerico complains: 'we’ve seen this story before, at least a dozen times. Sure, the particulars are different, but the futility of war, especially in the 21st century, has been well documented'. Tallerico is right that the futility of war is a hoary, perhaps even conservative theme; but Sand Castle goes beyond this banality, mounting some trenchant criticisms of the allied presence in Iraq after the invasion of 2003.

The film's title implies the unsustainability of the American adventure in Mesopotamia and an anti-war sensibility is also communicated via a number brief, mostly silent scenes. Travelling through Iraq, Ocre sees, through the window of his Humvee, US troops ushering a family out of their home at gunpoint and an Iraqi boy pointing a 'gun finger' at him. Perhaps the film's most gruesome atrocity image is of a headmaster who has been hanged upside down outside his school and burned for collaboration with the Americans. Ocre's horrified gaze at the headmaster's charred corpse, seen in the shot above, is aligned with that of several local women, suggesting that he shares in their horror and disgust. Ocre thus comes to perceive the truth about US imperial oppression and the hatred and resentment it generates among locals. In another silent scene towards the end of the film, the soon-to-be-discharged Ocre hesitates to wash himself in the shower, suddenly conscious, it seems, of a deep injustice: he has access to water in abundance, but the Iraqi villagers he has encountered do not - a consequence, as Ocre is painfully aware throughout the film, of the US invasion.

As the shower scene suggests, this is a film about the sense of shame experienced by the soldier of conscience. The theme of shame is announced at the start of the film in Ocre's voiceover ('A war story can't be true unless it's got some shame attached to it'). It also arises, obliquely, in another short scene at the film's halfway point when the soldiers seem to be playing some kind of guessing game as they drive in the Humvee: 'Is it a thing?', 'Do we all carry it?', the soldiers ask. 'We all carry it', comes the definitive answer. The game ends abruptly when the men's vehicle is attacked by insurgents; but the answer to the riddle is clear enough.

And while much of the soldiers' behaviour here is certainly the standard, clichéd fare of the grunt film - the high jinks during downtime, the 'faggot' and 'I fucked your mother' quips, the ignorant comments about towel-heads - this behaviour does not go uncriticized. Ocre often challenges some of his colleagues' prejudiced remarks about the locals and some of the soldiers come across as idiotic (in a rare comedy moment, one of them is unable to understand his translator's word 'apothecary').

Perhaps the film's progressive credentials should not be overstated. The rationale for the war is never seriously questioned in Sand Castle and Iraqi insurgents are responsible for all of the film's outbreaks of fighting. Yet while not quite as bold as Stone's Platoon or De Palma's Casualties of War, the film is characterized by the same kind of critical retrospection that animated the post-Vietnam war films of the 1980s.

-----

Watching Sand Castle I couldn't help thinking about the similarities between Ocre and the real-life anti-government terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the subject of another film recently added to Netflix UK, Barak Goodman's documentary Oklahoma City (2017). Goodman's film focuses on the build-up to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995, which claimed 168 lives, including those of 19 children in a daycare centre, and injured many hundreds more. The film combines interviews with victims' families and first-responders with extensive footage and analyzes the experiences that turned McVeigh towards mass murder - notably his sense of outrage and horror at the government's violent raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the early 1990s.

The documentary also mentions - all too briefly - McVeigh's time in the army during the first Gulf War and its influence on McVeigh's state of mind. An interviewee notes that McVeigh, by all accounts a highly regarded sharpshooter, felt ashamed when he shot an Iraqi soldier in the head from range, realizing that the Iraqis he had been trained to hate were 'human beings no different than myself'. McVeigh was clearly appalled at the meaninglessness of his own action and at the depravity of the military machine that instructed him to kill.

Yet Goodman's film, perhaps out of a desire not to rationalize or mitigate McVeigh's crime, does not make clear that McVeigh, according to his authorized biography American Terrorist, was present when US forces massacred Iraqis (and unknown others) fleeing from Kuwait towards Basra on Highway 80, the so-called 'Highway of Death', and was himself forced to execute surrendering prisoners. This attack - one of the greatest US war crimes of the twentieth century and one that McVeigh and colleagues saw repeated a few days later on Highway 8 - is glossed very briefly in a subordinate clause of the voice-over. And, extraordinarily, in this voice-over, US responsibility for the killings is disavowed and allocated solely to McVeigh: 'When he [McVeigh] killed Iraqis...'. Corresponding with this phrase, some dead bodies on the Basra road are shown, but a context for these images is not supplied either by subtitle or voice-over and the US responsibility for the massacre is elided. In fact, the argument being made in this section of the documentary is opaque - an aporia, if you will. What we do hear is an interviewee's description of McVeigh's response to the massacre: 'He sees the American government as a bully'. By focusing on McVeigh's subjective interpretation of the Gulf War, Goodman avoids taking any position on the state-sanctioned violence of Desert Storm, just as he elsewhere underplays and rationalizes the extreme, surplus violence used by the federal authorities at Waco, opting once again to foreground McVeigh's personal perceptions ('He felt it was murder').

To fill in some of the historical context that has been elided in Goodman's film, we must turn to other tellings of the McVeigh story. In her book Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh (2016), Wendy Painting provides a less sanitized view of the US army in which McVeigh served and thus helps us to understand McVeigh's feelings of anger and frustration as a serviceman. Painting shows that while he felt at home in the army and sometimes seemed to take great pride in his achievements, McVeigh at was other times deeply ashamed of what US forces were doing in Iraq. This was a deep ambivalence. In letters he wrote home, he described his fury at being ordered not to feed starving Iraqi children (McVeigh and another soldier would later defy this order by leaving fruit cocktails at the roadside for the locals). And after his arrest, McVeigh also spoke of his dismay at the 'intrusiveness' of fellow soldiers who would secretly watch Iraqi women going to the bathroom at night using their thermal imaging cameras. While he was ultimately responsible for staggering brutality and callous disregard for the lives of others, there is no doubt that he was also capable - during his time in the army, at least - of generosity and humanity. Like Ocre in Sand Castle, he was a soldier of conscience.

McVeigh described the Oklahoma bomb as a 'counterattack' on the US government. It was, of course, nothing of the sort: those slaughtered by McVeigh were ordinary folks and young children. But the vocabulary of war was deeply ingrained in McVeigh, as can be seen from his subsequent, queasy acknowledgement that the deaths of the children in the Murrah daycare centre constituted 'too much collateral damage'. In jail, McVeigh had his Marquis de Sade moment, railing against the double standards of the US political establishment in his post-arrest tract 'Essay on Hypocrisy' and arguing that his act of individual terrorism was merely the corollary of US imperial violence abroad. Why, he protested, should his crime should be condemned while US terror overseas is legitimized?

In his 1916 essay 'Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work', Sigmund Freud identified the character type of the 'Exception' - one who uses his early experiences of suffering to justify his disregard for the moral scruples of his community. Freud discussed this character type as a defensive reaction to the shame of disability and deformity, taking Shakespeare's Richard III as his illustration. McVeigh seems to fit the profile of the Exception well: after all, he was bullied at school on account of his lankiness and failed his physical for the Army Rangers. But while McVeigh can certainly be understood as having a disordered personality, we must also acknowledge the pressures that he was placed under throughout his life and the evils he witnessed during his time in the army. As W. H. Auden had it, 'Those to whom evil is done do evil in return' and, to borrow Slavoj Žižek's terms, we can only properly understand the 'subjective violence' of the individual in the context of the 'objective violence' of capitalism - with imperialist warfare as its highest expression. This context is elided in Oklahoma City, as are all of the troubling questions surrounding the bombing itself (such as the not-inconsiderable evidence that McVeigh did not act alone and that the FBI had foreknowledge of the attack). By downplaying the traumatizing military madness to which McVeigh was exposed as a young man, Goodman's documentary inadequately accounts for the act of savagery he went on to commit.

did somebody say 'radicalisation'?

29/6/2014

 
Picture
The Sunni rebel group Isis (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) is currently enjoying spectacular military success in Iraq and some young British Muslim men, often emboldened by online propaganda, are heeding the group's call to join its holy war against the Infidel. Unlike the anarchist or nationalist terrorists of a previous era, who at least directed their attacks against heads of state or the emblems and infrastructure of an oppressor, these young men are joining a league of out-and-out nihilists for whom non-Muslim is innocent and almost everybody is a legitimate target. Isis represents a totally regressive and self-destructive retreat from the confusions and compromises of modernity.

British politicians refer to Isis as 'extremists' and deplore the 'radicalization' of young people and the mainstream media, from the liberal Guardian and BBC to the more conservative Express and Sun, largely follow suit. Yet the layers of hypocrisy here are many. For one thing, many of the politicians currently decrying the 'extremism' of Isis supported the British state's own bloody adventure in Iraq - the 2003 invasion that destabilized the Middle East and contributed to the vortex of violence now sweeping the region. The mainstream media, meanwhile, were mostly supportive of the deadly invasion of Iraq, reporting the attack and occupation in decidedly neutral tones. The title of a Panorama documentary forthcoming on the BBC - Isis: Terror in Iraq - reminds us that for the mainstream Western media, 'they' are always the extremists. The democratic state, by contrast, is the epitome of moderation, however monstrous its atrocities (let's not forget that Obama's drone strikes have killed more people in the Middle East than Isis - and Western politicians show little concern about Saudi Arabia, which outdoes Isis on the head-chopping front). We are dealing here with what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls 'violent innocence', a self-idealizing projection of terrorism onto the Other. As David Hume put it nearly three hundred years ago in his Treatise on Human Nature, 'When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: But always esteem ourselves and our allies equitable, moderate, and merciful.'

From the genuinely radical perspective of the working class, any group that slaughters working class people in pursuit of its political and economic objectives - whether it be the caliphate-craving jihadi cell that detonates explosive devices in the market place or the 'democratic' state that bombs and tortures civilians - is 'extremist'. Indeed, both jihadists and imperialist nation states - 'religious fundamentalists' and 'market fundamentalists' - display a callous disregard for human life. In this sense, it should not surprise anybody that the British jihadist Nasser Muthana (above, right), currently in Iraq fighting with Isis, once expressed an ambition to be the British Prime Minister.

But if all bourgeois groups are extremists, who or what is 'radical'? The adjective is overused these days. Politicians and journalists often talk of 'radical' reforms to the system that are precisely the opposite (a few years ago, for example, David Cameron announced that the Conservative party in Britain would introduce 'radical reform' to the welfare state - reform that is resulting in more and more working class people losing their so-called 'benefits' and falling into poverty). Alternatively, the word is used to describe violent expressions of Islamism ('radical Islam'). But those who want to make the world a better place ought to have a very different understanding of 'radicalism'.

As Marx said, to be radical is to 'grasp things by the root'. This means understanding that capitalist society is premised on the struggle between the ruling class, with its multiplicity of competing nations, 'races' and sects, and the working class, which, as the only 'universal class', struggles for the liberation of all humanity. Nationalism and its mirror image, 'anti-imperialist' terrorism, foster only division and hostility: nation against nation, Shia against Sunni, etc. True radicals reject the poisonous ideologies of both the nation state and its terrorist adversary. The class struggle is the only really radical struggle, because the abolition of capitalism will utterly transform the structure of society, paving the way for the creation of a society based on solidarity and co-operation.

Back to iraq: on the bbc's 'the iraq war'

17/6/2013

 
'No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture' (Amadeo Bordiga)
Picture
Ten years after the 'coalition' invasion of Iraq, the gap between the public perception of the war and the realities of the conflict remains staggeringly wide. A recent poll conducted by the research consultancy ComRes, for example, showed that the British public massively under-estimates the number of casualties during the Iraq war. As Channel 4 journalist Alex Thomson notes, this in turn raises questions about the accuracy and efficacy of the British news media's reporting of the war. The BBC's journalistic record during the Iraq War has been called into question many times and its presentation of the conflict continues to be a source of anger for many.

A new three-part series, titled simply The Iraq War, sets out to document the deliberations of high-profile political decision-makers both before and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, drawing upon an impressive array of archive and original interview material. Produced by documentary supremos Brook Lapping for BBC2, the Series Producer is Norma Percy. Percy, a former parliamentary researcher, has acquired a formidable reputation for gaining access to high-profile figures, although I have found her previous work hugely problematic. Her take on Balkan wars of the 1990s in The Death of Yugoslavia and The Fall of Milošević, for example, demonises Slobodan Milošević and presents the Serbs as the sole aggressors in the conflicts - an appealingly simple Manichean narrative that is fully consistent with the mainstream Western script, but which will not do as a serious account of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, The Iraq War adopts the same techniques - and displays the same geopolitical biases - as Percy's earlier work.

Television critics have generally applauded the production. In a blog post for the Telegraph, for example, David Blair writes that: 'As with all the best documentaries, there was no attempt to exaggerate: episode one covered the build-up to war and the programme-makers allowed the drama to speak for itself'. But there are good grounds for questioning whether documentary producers can ever really adopt a 'hands-off' approach to their material, as Blair implies they can. Every documentary tells a story that is the result of innumerable choices, including the selection of interviewees and archive material, the style and content of the narration and editing. So what kind of story is told in The Iraq War? What points of view does the documentary, to use Blair's word, 'allow' - and by the same token, what perspectives does it disallow?

The series' use of a 'Voice of God' style of narration, its tendency to concentrate on testimony rather than voiceover, and its stately mis-en-scene (which largely consists of elite politicians - mostly men - talking dispassionately to camera in elegantly furnished rooms), all construct the production as authoritative. But The Iraq War has a clear pro-coalition bias. For one thing, the majority of the interviewees are key British and US politicians, along with members of the Iraqi interim government they installed. And these politicians are not interrogated; rather, they are given the opportunity to talk to camera uninterrupted by the interviewers' questions, which are edited out.

As one might expect, then, the documentary's take on the Iraq war reflects the point of view of the US and British ruling classes. The first episode, for example, ends with US Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's comment that the US's attempt to kill Saddam Hussein before the invasion constituted a 'last ditch effort to head off a war' that 'regrettably failed', as though the US had been reluctantly drawn into the invasion. Throughout the documentary, meanwhile, violence and disorder are linked to Iraqi insurgents, while the coalition partners are constructed as harbingers of peace. At the end of the first episode, for instance, the narrator, Alex Jennings, asserts that 'America and Britain quickly won the war, but lost the peace'. In the second episode, he comments that in Fallujah in 2004, US forces 'hit back' after the killing of four contractors by insurgents - an extraordinary description of a devastating assault by the US Marines that left much of the city in ruins. According to The Iraq War, then, coalition forces fought reluctantly and defensively for the good of the Iraqi people. Indeed, for the politicians and advisers interviewed here, there is no doubt that the invasion was well-intentioned and benign, if not always successful. As Paul Bremer recalls saying to George W. Bush, apparently without irony, 'fixing a country is not something you do overnight'.

Often what is most revealing about a documentary is not so much what is said, but what is missed out. Significantly, there is no mention in any of the production's three episodes of Western oil and other industrial interests in Iraq, which arguably constituted a major part of the rationale for invasion; rather, the attack on Iraq is presented as a bid for 'régime change' (the title of the first episode). Hussein, we are reminded by several of the interviewees, was a brutal villain whose 'régime' had to be brought to an end; yet the violent history of the Western powers is predictably ignored. Ignored, too, are the lies told to justify the invasion of Iraq: namely, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, posed a deadly threat to the world, and had links to Al Qaeda. And what of the longer history of Iraq's relationship with the US - in particular the 12 years of inhuman sanctions that preceded the 2003 invasion and which surely undermine any claim that the Iraq war was fought out of a concern for the wellbeing of Iraqi people?

The Iraq War is certainly not without interest: it does provides some insights into the often murky relationships between politicians and journalists and into the differences of opinion among members of the British and US governments as the war drums began to beat (indeed, there can be little doubt that many sceptical politicians were forced to bite their tongues as the war began and many are likely to have been practising a sort of political Ketman ever since). Some moments in the documentary are even open to a critical reading. As John Crace notes in The Guardian, one of these comes in episode 3 when Jack Straw openly admits that he and Condoleeza Rice talked Ibrahim al-Jaafari into stepping down as Iraq's first Prime Minister - an action that indicates the extent of neo-colonial manipulation in post-invasion Iraq. What is missing, however - despite the occasional reference to the public opposition to the war - is the perspective of the working class, who were, in large number, the victims of the war and who had no interest in its prosecution.

Doing whatever it takes: 'Complicit', 'Our Girl' and the 'war on terror' in TV drama

31/3/2013

 
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
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.

‘Terrible things happen’: Peter Bowker’s Occupation and the representation of the Iraq war in British TV drama

30/4/2012

 
Below is a highly edited draft of a textual analysis of Peter Bowker's Iraq war drama Occupation that I wrote recently (I cannot reproduce anything like the full-length version, as this will be published in due course). But, for what they are worth, here are some key points...
Picture
Given the hugely controversial nature of the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq, Western film and television representations of the conflict have generated less public enthusiasm – and less revenue – than might have been expected. In the United States, for example – at least until the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker in 2009 – Iraq war films have fared poorly at the box office (Tofoletti and Grace 2010, 64-65; Barker, 2011: 1) and television depictions of the war have been relatively few and far between, notwithstanding Steven Bochco’s short-lived series Over There (FX, 2005) and David Simon and Ed Burns’ Generation Kill (HBO, 2008). On British television, as Tom Sutcliffe (2009a: 6) remarked in The Independent newspaper early in 2009,

Iraq is the dog that didn’t bark. And when you think about that it seems more than odd. Here’s a hugely significant event – one which continues to engage British citizens in all sorts of ways (some of them fatal) and yet it barely registers on the most significant storytelling medium we have.

A small number of British television dramas have included storylines relating – tangentially, at least – to the war. Peter Kosminsky’s docudrama The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for example, investigated the life and death of the British government weapons expert David Kelly and indicted the British government’s decision to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq, while The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2007), set in Iraq during the war, explored the problem of bullying in the British army. It was not until 2009, however, that the subject of the Iraq war itself was given significant treatment on British television. Written over five years by Peter Bowker, directed by Nick Murphy and produced by Laurie Borg for the production company Kudos, the three-part BBC television drama Occupation chronicles the involvement of three British soldiers from Manchester in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Broadcast in the summer of 2009, when the occupation of Iraq was stuttering to a drawn-out close, the mini-serial reflects upon the rationale for the Iraq invasion, the consequences of the war for those who fought in it, and the effects of the occupation on the population of Iraq.

[...]

In light of the BBC’s savaging by Hutton and what some have seen as the BBC’s post-Hutton pusillanimity, the BBC might have been expected to deliver a politically emollient, uncontroversial treatment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On the other hand, the significant level of public opposition to the war made it unlikely that the drama would present an entirely one-sided view of the Iraq war. In 2003, public opposition to British military involvement in Iraq was far more widespread than it had been to Western military action in the Balkans during the previous decade. One month before the aerial bombardment of Baghdad in February 2003 and the subsequent coalition invasion of Iraq, millions of people worldwide demonstrated against the war. Meanwhile, claims that the justification for the Iraq war was supported by faulty and false information disseminated in the Western media (Miller 2003; Kellner 2004 and 2007; Allan and Zeliger 2004: 8; Kramer and Michalowski 2005; Chomsky, 2006: 24-27; Kumar 2006) circulated widely in the public sphere in the years following the invasion. Thus, while almost all Western intellectual commentary and media opinion supported the invasion of Iraq as a ‘noble and generous’ endeavour (Chomsky, cited in Edwards and Cromwell 2005: 75), public scepticism about the official justification for the war was significant. Given the strength of the anti-war movement in 2003, the widespread public disapproval of the occupation of Iraq, and a somewhat heightened public suspicion of media propaganda, there was little likelihood that Occupation’s perspective on the war would be simplistically pro-interventionist or openly jingoistic.

[...]

Occupation focuses on the experiences of three friends – Sergeant Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Corporal Danny Peterson (Stephen Graham) and the younger Lance Corporal Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) – who are first dispatched to Basra in 2003. On their return home after their first tour, each of the men fails to adjust to civilian life in Manchester and is inspired to return to Iraq: one for love, one for money, and one out of a fervent belief in the supposed mission to ‘rebuild’ Iraq.

[...]
Picture
Occupation begins in medias res, as the soldiers prepare for a dangerous mission. The opening scenes cast the British soldiers in a distinctly heroic role, especially Mike Swift [...] Having first evacuated civilians from the building, the soldiers enter an apartment block in which some ‘insurgents’ are holed up. After a tense stand-off with the militants, Mike saves an injured child from the midst of the fray and carries her, through enemy fire, from the apartment block to a hospital that is full of badly injured people. There the British soldiers manage to prevent looters from stealing hospital equipment. Mike, meanwhile, meets a married Iraqi doctor, Aliya Nabil (Lubna Azabal), with whom he begins to fall in love. Later in the episode, Mike returns to his wife and children in England and the injured young girl is also brought back to Britain for specialist treatment. Mike’s return home is, however, far from glorious: although he has become a hero in the eyes of his family and the news media, his guilt over his affection for Aliya vitiates any sense of accomplishment.

[...]

When Mike attends a fund-raising press conference for the injured Iraqi girl with the visiting Aliya, a reporter questions whether the child’s injuries were inflicted by coalition forces, to which Aliya rather tetchily replies: ‘Iraqi people are grateful for the British forces. I mean, terrible things happen in the war. Everyone is trying to do something to help’. Aliya here expresses a heroising view of the British role in Iraq; but her optimism comes at the expense of any explanation of the causes of the war, an elision marked by her use of the de-agentifying passive construction ‘terrible things happen’.

[...]

In the second episode, all of the men return to Iraq, a country now disintegrating in a vortex of religious fundamentalism. When Mike meets Aliya again, his first conversation with her takes places through a wrought iron window grille. This is the first of several images of confinement – a similar framing device is used in episode three, when the pair gaze at each other through the slats of some window blinds – that signify not only the personal obstacles preventing the pair’s romantic relationship (Aliya now reveals that she, too, is married), but also the lack of freedom experienced by women in the fundamentalist and patriarchal environment of post-invasion Iraq. Aliya, now wearing a headscarf, is regarded with deep suspicion for talking to Mike, who offers to take her out of Iraq. ‘I’ve seen the way things are going here’, says Mike, ‘with the religion and the bombings’. Aliya’s sharp reply – ‘And whose fault is that?’ – provides a counter-hegemonic riposte, even if its critique of the impact of the Western invasion remains implicit.

[...]

Hibbs [...] is kidnapped. Held prisoner in a darkened cell and expecting to be executed, he is interrogated by the ruthless police officer who killed Yunis (and who, ironically, had been trained by Hibbs). The encounter between the two men constitutes one of the drama’s most overtly political and antagonistic exchanges:

Policeman: All you had to do was go home. You got rid of Saddam. But then you should have let us get on with running our own country.

Hibbs: Kill each other, you mean? Like you killed my mate?

Policeman: You know how many Iraqis your bombs kill? Huh? Half a million. So don’t talk to me about killing. Don’t try and [sic] tell me you’re better.

Like Aliya’s earlier riposte to Mike (‘And whose fault is that?’), the policeman’s exposure of Western hypocrisy here raises the prospect of a subaltern perspective on the rights and wrongs of the war. Yet the force of this anti-imperialist critique is somewhat compromised by its being placed in the mouth of the drama’s most unsympathetic character. Furthermore, while the policeman alludes to the massive violence perpetrated by the Western coalition against Iraqis, none of this violence is shown in Occupation and the only acts of deadly force depicted in the drama are committed by Iraqis.

[...]
The New York Times television reviewer Alessandra Stanley (2009: 1) suggests that ‘Occupation does take a long, disturbing look at the chaos, corruption and mayhem that choked the American-led reconstruction effort’; however, the drama would be considerably more disturbing to conventional narratives about the Iraq war if it clearly identified the forces responsible for initiating the chaos. As in news media accounts of ‘the conflict’ in Iraq – a problematically de-agentifying phrase, as Noam Chomsky (2006: 48) points out – the worsening social conditions registered in the drama are not attributed to the coalition invasion; rather, Iraq appears as a place where, in Aliya’s phrase, ‘terrible things happen’ and where Western forces are ‘trying to do something to help’. At the same time, by analogy with standard journalistic practice in Iraq, Occupation ‘embeds’, as it were, the audience with ‘our’ troops, foregrounding the soldiers’ personal struggles and tragedies. The British soldiers’ arguments and perspectives are pre-eminent in the drama and popular songs express the soldiers’ unvoiced fears and aspirations (The Libertines’ ‘Road to Ruin’ plays when Mike’s son Richard joins the army, while Pink Floyd’s ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ accompanies Hibbs’ preparation to be executed at the end of the first episode). Embedding, as Slavoj Žižek (2004: 3) notes, tends to lend representations of war a ‘human touch’, ‘generating an instant identification of the spectator’s perspective with that of the soldier’. But this in turn can be seen as a means of avoiding awkward questions about political agency, so that, watching the drama, ‘we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place’ (Žižek 2010: 30).

Christopher Hitchens: a nationalist, imperialist bully

16/12/2011

 
Picture
Picture
So, the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died aged 62. All day the mainstream media have been broadcasting glowing tributes to Hitchens. One Channel 4 News reporter even claimed that Hitchens had consistently taken a 'stand against abusers of power'. But at least one dissenting view made it through the airwaves. In an interview for BBC News, Hitchens's erstwhile fellow traveller Tariq Ali talked of Hitchens's shameful support for Western imperialism. The interviewer's unease was palpable, and predictably enough, the interview was terminated rather abruptly when Ali began to discuss Hitchens's narcissism.

Hitchens's hard-drinking, tough-talking image made him the poster-boy of the liberal intelligentsia in the UK and US. Although he appeared increasingly blimpish and ranine in his final years, Hitchens could certainly be a lot of fun. He delighted in pointing out the hypocrisy and mendacity of certain powerful individuals - such as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (so-called 'Mother' Teresa)
, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton - and he did so with aplomb. Indeed, there is no denying that 'the Hitch' was a consummate prose stylist and a seductively sonorous public speaker. But, as Richard Seymour notes, Hitchens, for all his suave polemics, was a rather conventional sort of thinker who had 'difficulty in handling complex arguments' and who often contradicted himself. And like his champion, the British writer and comedian Stephen Fry (for who can forget Fry's attempts to reassure the British public, following the MP's expenses scandal in 2009, that all is well with liberal democracy), Hitchens abused his persuasive powers in support of the status quo.

It is often said that Hitchens drifted rightwards during his li
fetime, particularly following 9/11. Yet Hitchens was always on the side of capital, starting out as a Trotskyist and ending up, only slightly more conventionally, as a liberal. He was also a consistent pro-imperialist, supporting the British invasion of the Falklands in the 1980s, the military assaults on Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the savage invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the following decade. Indeed, Hitchens always supported US and/or British national interests at times of war, making a mockery of his claim to be an internationalist.

Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald reminds us, Hitchens's viciousness and bellicosity were remarkable. Writing about Iraq, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate the Korans carried by Muslims, and he admitted to being exhilarated by the 9/11 attacks, on the grounds that they provided him with an opportunity to launch his literary war against 'Islamofascism' (like a querulous teenager, Hitchens saw evidence of 'fascism' everywhere - or, to be more precise, everywhere that Western interests are threatened). He even called the Dixie Chicks 'sluts' and 'fucking fat slags' for mildly criticising the US president over his decision to attack Iraq. These are all reasons why Hitchens should be remembered, despite his literary prowess, as a rather unpleasant propagandist for the rich and powerful.

'The only honourable course': the media and 'humanitarian' war

11/5/2011

 
Picture
And the best at war finally are those who preach peace – Charles Bukowski, ‘The Genius of the Crowd’

In the summer of 2009, Harry Patch died. Patch had been one of the last surviving British soldiers to have fought in the First World War, the experience of which, quite understandably, he refused to discuss for many decades afterwards. In Patch’s view, the First World War was ‘organised murder’ in which both Germans and British soldiers needlessly died serving the interests of their rulers. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in 2005, Patch averred that ‘It wasn’t worth it. If two governments can’t agree, give them a rifle each and let them fight it out. Don’t lose twenty thousand men. It isn’t worth it’. Asked by the interviewer if ‘the world’ had learned anything from World War I, Patch starkly replied, presumably with reference to world leaders: ‘No. They never learn’. Patch’s comments reflect the working class principle of internationalist solidarity; they rightly imply that workers had no class interest in fighting in – and every reason to oppose – the twentieth-century’s world wars. Patch’s intransigent opposition to imperialist war has been applauded by some: the rock group Radiohead, for example, penned an anti-war song based on Patch’s Today interview. Yet following Patch’s death, all of the British news channels broadcast comments from, inter alia, the Queen, Prince Charles and the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who – ignoring Patch’s view of war – lost no time in claiming Patch as a symbol of noble ‘sacrifice’ for the nation.

A few months later, in a BBC News at Ten broadcast (3 March 2010), a variety of dignitaries registered their respect for the recently deceased left-wing Labour politician Michael Foot. The Prime Minister Gordon Brown noted Foot’s ‘commitment to justice’ and praised the politician as ‘good, compassionate, and dedicated to his country’. The last of these three accolades, at least, was beyond doubt. Amongst his many patriotic gestures, Foot, as co-author of the 1940 book Guilty Men, criticised the so-called ‘appeasement’ of German imperialism in the lead-up to the Second World War and supported Britain’s entry into the war. Four decades later, Foot was a key player in the decision to send the British Task Force to the Falkland Islands in 1982, congratulating the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on her subsequent ‘victory’ (one that resulted in the deaths of large numbers of Argentine conscripts, many of them only teenagers). Foot was also an early advocate of the bombing of Serbia in the 1990s.

The media reports of each of these two men’s lives and beliefs involved a staggering inversion of reality: the working class internationalist who had repeatedly stated his horror at the inhumanity of war and expressed international solidarity with ‘enemy’ combatants was posthumously claimed as a patriot who sacrificed his life for ‘his’ country. A nationalist, war-mongering politician, on the other hand, was honoured as a ‘man of peace’. Taken together, these reports demonstrate the capitalist media’s awesome capacity to recuperate working class political perspectives and to camouflage support for imperialist violence with the liberal language of ‘peace’ and humanitarianism.

Imperialist conflict has characterised capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, every aspect of social life was subsumed under the ‘national interest’ and every combatant state justified its entry into the war as a matter of national defence, demonising the enemy population. Writing about anti-German propaganda at the time, the British social critic Norman Angell, in his essay ‘The Commercialization of Demagogy’, noted with dismay that ‘every story about the wickedness of Germans, [...] every cartoon revealing the Hun as a sly and fraudulent debtor, means crystallizing certain opinions, thestiffening of a certain attitude on social questions’.During both world wars, indeed, the press and later radio and newsreel films played an important role in justifying imperialist aggression. Indeed, the media continue to justify these world wars retrospectively, asserting the moral preeminence of ‘our’ nation state. Every schoolchild knows, for instance, that Britain and its allies fought on the side of ‘good’ against the ‘evil’ Nazis in the Second World War. Innumerable television documentaries about Hitler and the Schutzstaffel regularly remind us of the horrors of the Nazi genocide – and rightly so. Yet the British terror in colonial India, or the British-engineered Bengal famine, which killed many millions of people during the Second World War (and possibly 30 million over the entire period of British rule, since the British, in India as in Ireland, used famine as a disciplinary tool) are not generally considered suitable topics for television documentaries; nor, for that matter, are the allied nuclear attacks on Japan or the terror bombings of German cities. To draw a more contemporary comparison: the six million slaughtered by the Nazis in the 1940s must ‘never be forgotten’; but the six million slaughtered since the mid-1990s by armies supported by the Western powers in the Democratic Republic of Congo do not even register on the news agenda. Genocide is endemic to capitalism – but only ‘their’ genocides are recognised and memorialized by the media.

As the lionisation of Michael Foot shows, left-wing defences of imperialism often garner support more effectively than crude jingoism. In the post-Cold War era, imperialist wars have increasingly been justified as ‘humanitarian interventions’, not just by conservative commentators, but also – and perhaps even more vociferously – by liberal journalists and academics. The inter-imperialist nature of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, for example, has been buried underneath what Edward Herman and David Peterson have called the Western media’s ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’ as the conflict came to be framed as a Manichean struggle between the forces of good (‘the West’) and evil (the Serbs). The Western media’s perspective on the Bosnian war is highly instructive, in fact, as it set the precedent for the media coverage of NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslavia and the US’s more recent military assaults – also launched under the sacred banner of ‘human rights’ – upon Afghanistan and Iraq.

Accounts of the Bosnian war often omit any discussion of the conflict’s origins in imperialist confrontation. As the Yugoslav regime disintegrated at the end of the Cold War, Muslim, Croat and Serb political parties competed in multi-party elections, fracturing the country along ethnic lines. Yet Yugoslavia’s disintegration was also promoted by the Western powers. The German government rushed to extend full recognition to Croatia and as ethnic violence broke out between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, the US ultimately identified its own client through which to exert its influence in the region, aggressively promoting the ‘independence’ of Bosnia and backing the Muslims led by Alija Izetbegović (a Muslim fundamentalist and a member of a group that collaborated with the Nazi Schutzstaffel during the Second World War, committing atrocities against Jews and the resistance movement). As the Yugoslav region that had shown the greatest resistance both to an IMF-led austerity programmes imposed on Yugoslavia in the 1980s – and to the war when it began – Serbia was to be punished.

All sides involved in the Bosnian conflict committed appalling atrocities, burning villages, slaughtering and raping their populations. Yet the US media effectively recognised only one aggressor, instituting a relentless anti-Serb propaganda campaign. As the No War But the Class War group claims in its article ‘Notes Towards a Text on the 1999 Balkan War and the Media’:

"An article from a former soldier in Bosnia said that when an American TV crew turned up at his base they asked to see a burnt-out village previously inhabited by Bosnian Muslims – which they were duly shown. When the UN soldiers asked if they wanted to take photos of a burnt-out village previously inhabited by Bosnian Serbs, the journalists refused, saying it would confuse the issue: their viewers wanted clear ideas about what was going on."


Liberal journalists and intellectuals clamouring for military ‘intervention’ advanced their own ‘clear ideas’ about what to do with the Serbs. Anthony Lewis wrote New York Times columns demanding military action. Susan Sontag – mother of one of the chief journalist-apologists for the US invasion, David Rieff – and the actress Vanessa Redgrave made pilgrimages to Sarajevo to support imperialist violence. Indeed, the ‘Bosnian question’ flushed out numerous liberal academics and high-profile pundits as apologists for imperialism, most notably Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Todd Gitlin and Vaclav Havel. The nationalist frenzy that gripped liberals during the 1990s is epitomized by Richard Rorty’s angry call, in Achieving our Country, for a left version of American patriotism. Not for nothing has Noam Chomsky identified the 1990s as the ‘nadir’ of recent Western intellectual history.

Britain, like most of the European states, had relatively little economic interest in the Balkans and its ruling class was divided over whether to orient itself towards Serbia or Croatia and over whether, during a recession, to undertake a costly military action. Ultimately, however, Britain accepted the position of the US as the latter developed a more aggressive policy towards Bosnia and the British media, like its US counterpart, began to adopt an anti-Serb position. One of the most hard-line interventionist newspapers throughout the 1990s was the liberal newspaper The Independent, whose journalists wrote of Serbian genocide and rape camps – accusations with no credible evidential basis, as Diana Johnson’s book Fools’ Crusade and Edward Herman and David Peterson’s Monthly Review article ‘The Dismantling of Yugoslavia’ point out. The death camps rumour was circulated by a Croat public relations agency Ruder Finn in order to galvanise the support of Jewish pressure groups, which might otherwise have been less than enthusiastic to back the cause of Muslim fundamentalists with historical connections to the Nazis. Michael Parenti records in his book To Kill A Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia that Ruder Finn’s director, when challenged on the evidential basis of the company’s claims, stated: ‘Our work is not to verify information […] Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favourable to us […] We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize’. Meanwhile, from left to right, the British press, includingThe Independent, The Telegraph, New Statesman, The Guardian and The Sun, mobilised a range of racist stereotypes which demonised Serbs as tribal, primitive, evil, bloodthirsty and bestial, as the work of Philip Hammond has shown.

Adding insult to injury, the bias of Western journalists was justified by an appeal to a set of professional practices that collectively became known as the ‘journalism of attachment’: an allegedly new mode of affective reportage intended to cut through the suffocating ‘neutrality’ of existing journalism with a proper sense of moral outrage. The concept of the ‘journalism of attachment’ allowed liberal journalists such as Ed Vulliamy to present themselves as mavericks unafraid of ‘speaking out’ bravely and passionately about the horrors of war, while in practice doing so only on behalf of Muslim victims. In reality, these ‘mavericks’ constituted the journalistic mainstream and those who questioned their distortions, as Tariq Ali notes in the introduction to his collection Masters of the Universe: NATO’s Balkan Crusade, ‘were denounced as traitors, appeasers and worse’. Indeed, contra those journalists and academics who argued that media coverage of Bosnia was ineffectually neutral, British media coverage of the war was in fact savagely partisan. 

Advocates of Western ‘intervention’ in Bosnia (in fact, Western powers were heavily involved in Bosnia from the outset) were spectacularly rewarded in the autumn of 1995 when US warplanes attacked Bosnian Serb positions in Operation Storm. Towns and villages throughout Bosnia were targeted and many hundreds of civilians were killed and wounded. The US president Bill Clinton invoked Serbian human rights violations – comparing them to those committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust – to justify the operation. The bombings allowed the regular army of Croatia, together with Bosnian Moslem and Croat forces, to overrun Serb regions in northwest Bosnia in a ground offensive that killed and wounded thousands and turned another 125,000 people into refugees. They joined the quarter of a million Serb civilians driven out of Krajina by the Croatian army in what was, as Herman and Peterson point out, probably the war’s largest single act of ethnic expulsion. Yet the suffering of the Serb population elicited no sympathy from those demanding ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Bosnia, since Operation Storm was what Herman and Peterson acerbically describe as ‘benign’ ethnic cleansing – that is, ethnic cleansing conducted by the US and its allies.

The media coverage of the notorious massacre of Muslims at the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a UN ‘safe haven’, further demonstrates the bias of the Western media reporting of the Bosnian war. Serb forces in and around Srebrenica committed appalling atrocities. Yet Western journalists took care to detach the massacre from its surrounding context. In 1992, the Serbs had been driven out of Srebrenica and the years leading up to the massacre saw many attacks on nearby Serb towns. Indeed, Srebrenica was not simply a ‘safe haven’ for civilians; it also functioned as a UN cover for Bosnian Muslim military operations. Yet this context was not supplied in media references to Srebrenica. In his review essay ‘Diana Johnstone on the Balkan Wars’, Edward Herman notes that

"it has been an absolute rule of Rieff et al./media reporting on the Bosnian conflict to present evidence of Serb violence in vacuo, suppressing evidence of prior violence against Serbs, thereby falsely suggesting that Serbs were never responding but only initiated violence (this applies to Vukovar, Mostar, Tuzla, Goražde, and many other towns)."

It is likely that more civilians were killed during the US’s Operation Storm than died at Srebrenica; yet only Srebrenica has entered historical myth as a ‘genocide’. Herman and Peterson’s wider observation about the hypocrisy of US and British war reporting is relevant here:

"We find it interesting that in the West, the millions or more deaths from the ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths that have followed the 2003 invasion are never presented as ‘genocide’ or events that we ‘must never forget’. These deaths did not merit the indignation of Ed Vulliamy, David Rieff, Samantha Power, and the mainstream media. The driving out of 250,000 Serbs from Croatia, and killing several thousand of them, doesn’t even rate the designation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, let alone genocide. […] The 16,000 Serb civilians killed in Bosnia in 1992–95 are effectively disappeared, while the 31,000 Muslim civilians killed in the latter years are elevated to world class status as victims of genocide."


As this passage suggests, the bias of Western media coverage of the Bosnian war was obscured by appeals to the universalist notion of humanitarianism – a keyword in the lexicon of Western imperialism in the 1990s. The hypocrisy of these appeals was most notable in the liberal media of the period: NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was announced by such forthright headlines as The Sun’s ‘Clobba Slobba: Our Boys Batter Butcher of Serbia’ and the Daily Star’s ‘Serbs You Right’; yet the same attack was sanctioned with a decidedly chivalrous flourish in a Guardianleader article (23 March 1999) as ‘the only honourable course for Europe and America’.

The more recent invasion of Iraq in 2003 was characterised by significant strategic disagreement within the ruling classes of the ‘coalition’ countries and by greater public opposition to the war than had been mounted against the Bosnian war. Nonetheless, the mainstream media mostly supported the Iraq war – a war in which one million Iraqis died and perhaps 4.5 million were displaced. In America, newscasters and embedded reporters at both Fox News and the more liberal CNN referred to US forces as ‘liberators’ and ‘heroes’. In the UK, where the ruling class itself was more divided over whether to invade, The Guardian, no doubt mindful of the significant public opposition to the war, was circumspect about the invasion, but nonetheless accepted (6 February 2003) that must Iraq be made to ‘disarm’ itself of its ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – weapons now conceded not to have existed. On the eve of the invasion, Bill Neely noted in ITV’s News at Ten (19 March 2003) that ‘the marines are prepared for one of the first and most daring operations’. The BBC was also robust in its support for the invasion. As David Edwards and David Cromwell document in their book Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media, BBC journalists including Matt Frei, Andrew Marr, Rageh Omaar and John Simpson breathlessly endorsed the invasion – an invasion still seen by the BBC as, in the words of a Radio 4 lunchtime news broadcast (22 August 2010), ‘the battle for a better Iraq’. In fact, despite the criticisms levelled at the BBC in the Hutton Report and inevitable allegations from the BBC’s rivals in the conservative press that the organisation was ‘anti-war’, a Cardiff University study showed that the BBC was actually the least anti-war of the British news networks during the conflict, quoting more coalition sources and fewer Iraqi sources than the other networks and placing the least emphasis on Iraqi casualties. The BBC’s support for the invasion was echoed by a roll call of elite liberal print journalists – the ‘herd of independent minds’, in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase – including Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Johann Hari. It would be churlish not to applaud the decency of those journalists – notably Omaar and Hari – who have had the grace to rescind their support for the war in recent years; yet here again we must be wary of the potential of such apologetics to humanise – and thereby restore public trust in – the capitalist media apparatuses and, by extension, the political institutions whose values they reflect.

The British media was also overwhelmingly supportive of the coalition’s ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, often on humanitarian grounds. For example, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – another journalist who later withdrew her support for war – voiced the widespread liberal opinion that the invasion was necessary to protect the rights of women. In reality, however, the invasion of Afghanistan has led to appalling civilian suffering through drone attacks, bombing and other forms of terrorism. This misery has attracted little media interest at home. According to the news media watchdog Medialens, for example, the British media downplayed a report from Afghan government investigators that special forces executed ten Afghan civilians, eight of them children, in Kunar province during a joint US-Afghan operation on 27 December 2009. Stephen White of The Mirror (‘Base Blast Kills Eight US civilians’, 31 December 2009) ignored the story, reporting instead on the deaths of American civilians in a suicide bombing at an Afghan military base, while The Sunday Telegraph (3 January 2010) described the incident as ‘a raid in which US forces shot dead 10 people at a suspected bomb factory’. The Guardian (2 January 2010) relegated the story to a few lines at the end of a report on the death of a British bomb disposal expert, while BBC, ITN and Channel 4 television news made no mention of the incident. In fact, only Jerome Starkey of The Times (31 December 2009) reported the story. As Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick suggest in ‘How to improve war reporting in Afghanistan’, ‘the human cost of war in Afghanistan is being systematically downplayed’, while ‘the voices of Afghan people themselves are nearly always excluded’. Not only has the liberal media effectively condoned the devastation of Afghanistan, but the country’s appallingly high rates of maternal deaths, violence against and enslavement of girls and women serve as a shocking refutation of the liberal myth that the war, which has now spilled over into Pakistan, was fought for women’s liberation.

The news media’s complicity with the coalition’s recent wars has been complemented by sympathetic television documentaries about the experiences of the armed forces. The Ministry of Defence-approved Sky1 documentary Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (2008) and its sequel follow the daily lives of British troops in Afghanistan from the perspective of the soldiers. The youth channel BBC3, meanwhile, has done its bit for army recruitment and pro-war propaganda with Girls on the Frontline (25 March 2010). Girls on the Frontline offers a gendered reworking of the reality documentary series about US soldiers in Afghanistan, Profiles from the Front Line (ABC, 2003), which was based on a concept pitched by Jerry Bruckheimer to the US Pentagon. Over a pounding musical soundtrack, the programme tracks a group of female British soldiers training to be despatched to Afghanistan’s Helmand province and frequently mentions the ‘risks’ that they face. Like liberal feature films from The Deer Hunter to The Hurt Locker, these programmes reverently catalogue the privations suffered by ‘our’ troops, eliding both the geopolitical manoeuvres that underpin capitalist wars and the suffering of the majority of their victims. Such soft propaganda helps to manufacture public consent for imperialist terror far more insidiously than the gung-ho patriotism of the right-wing media.

During World War I, the German communist Karl Liebknecht famously reminded workers that ‘the main enemy is at home’. The precept is also well understood by the ruling class. As John Pilger has written in New Statesman (29 March 2010), ‘Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens’. In the battle to overcome these instincts, the patriotic cheerleading of the news media certainly plays a key role; Erich Fromm’s remark inThe Sane Society that ‘nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity’ remains accurate more than fifty years later. But at least as influential as today’s right-wing media jingoists are the liberal journalists and commentators who – dripping with soulfulness, in Ralph Miliband’s phrase – justify imperialist wars in the name feminism, liberation and humanitarianism and who, when civilian blood flows too conspicuously, can always repent their ‘errors of judgement’.

    Archives

    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010

    Categories

    All
    5G
    9/11
    Adam Curtis
    Advertising
    Afghanistan
    Alastair Campbell
    Angelina Jolie
    Anti-fascism
    Ashley Madison (hack)
    Aung San Suu Kyi
    Barack Obama
    Bbc
    Black Lives Matter
    Bnp
    Bosnia
    Brexit
    Burma
    Cancel Culture
    Censorship
    Channel 4
    Charlie Hebdo
    China
    Christopher Hitchens
    Christopher Nolan
    Class
    CNN
    Conspiracies
    Cornelius Cardew
    Covid-19
    Czech Republic
    Daily Mail
    Dalai Lama
    David Berman
    Donald Trump
    Economics
    Egypt
    Environment
    European Union
    Extinction Rebellion
    Facebook
    Falklands
    Fascism
    Feminism
    Film
    Free Speech
    Gaza
    Google
    Greece
    Greta Thunberg
    Guy Hibbert
    Hillary Clinton
    Hong Kong
    Immigration
    Internet
    Iran
    Iraq
    Isis
    Israel
    Itn
    Japan
    Jeremy Clarkson
    Jeremy Corbyn
    Jia Zhangke
    Johann Hari
    John Molyneux
    Jordan Peterson
    Katie Hopkins
    Ken Loach
    Kony 2012
    Labour Party
    Lawrence Hayward
    Libya
    Malala Yousafzai
    Marcuse
    Margaret Thatcher
    Marxism
    Mental Illness
    Music
    Myanmar
    Neoliberalism
    News International
    New Statesman
    New Zealand
    Niall Ferguson
    Noam Chomsky
    Norway
    Ofcom
    Osama Bin Laden
    Owen Jones
    Pakistan
    Palestine
    Paul Mattick Jnr
    Peter Bowker
    Peter Kosminsky
    Populism
    Press Tv
    Quentin Tarantino
    Racism
    Reality Tv
    Red Poppy
    Reith Lectures
    Rihanna
    Riots
    Robin Williams
    Russell Brand
    Russell T. Davies
    Scotland
    Silver Jews
    Single Mothers
    Sky Tv
    Slavoj Zizek
    Stephen Fry
    Stephen Poliakoff
    Stereotypes
    Strikes
    Suicide
    Syria
    Television
    Terrorism
    Terry Eagleton
    The Express
    The Guardian
    The Mirror
    The Sun
    Thomas Piketty
    Tony Grounds
    Tunisia
    Vaclav Havel
    War
    Washington Post
    Winston Churchill
    Wire
    Yugoslavia

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.