RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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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'.

The Deaths of Others

22/9/2011

 
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Bruce Goodison's Channel 4 documentary film Osama bin Laden: Shoot to Kill has received fawning reviews from many critics; but it must surely rank among the most shameless propaganda films ever made. Based on interviews with the US president Barack Obama and a variety of puffy advisers and military personnel - who spend much of their interview time praising the strategic insight and derring-do of other advisers and military personnel - the film combines interview clips with Mission Impossible-style handheld aesthetics to document the unfolding of Operation Geronimo, in which US forces attacked Osama's house in Abbotabad, Pakistan, killing its inhabitants.

The documentary avoid tedious moral questions, such as whether it is acceptable to murder others at will, and focuses on the details of the raid. The killers didn't want to make any mistakes. After all, as one of them notes in an interview in the film, everybody remembers Mogadishu (although it seems some remember it better than others: the film's reference to the battle of Mogadishu consisted of a reconstruction of US soldiers being dragged through the streets; but no mention was made of the thousands of starving Somalians massacred by US forces at the time).

Not only bin Laden, but several of his household, including one of his sons, were killed at Abbotabad and three women and thirteen children were supposedly left tied up in the compound. They must have been deeply traumatised; but the human consequences of the raid are of no concern to the film-makers. This, let us remember, has been widely hailed by journalists as a great victory for the US president and in the film Obama himself seemed rather pleased with the way things turned out (no wonder, as the 'success' of the raid may well have ensured his re-election). But what if the situation had been reversed? Noam Chomsky invites us to imagine what the public and media reaction would have been if Iraqi commandos had entered the US covertly, assassinated George W. Bush - whose crimes far exceed those committed by bin Laden - and dumped his body in the Atlantic...

'Very clear, very simple, very clean': killing Bin Laden

6/5/2011

 
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Few sensible people will lament the news that the mass murderer Osama Bin Laden has been killed by US special forces (in an operation that must surely have been sanctioned by the Pakistani ISI). Although most journalists are referring somewhat coyly to the 'death' of Bin Laden, this was clearly an assassination; this guy did not pass away peacefully watching re-runs of Two and a Half Men. Dumping OBL's body at sea, meanwhile, is an inspired method of dispatch, ensuring that not too many questions can be asked about how the terrorist died. Nor can there now be a trial, which might have raised awkward questions about Osama's links with the CIA and the US state. It's all history now. The bogeyman has gone.

There has been much self-congratulation and back-slapping among Western politicians. In the USA, there has even been dancing in the streets. An American friend informs me that on the night when the news broke, his college campus erupted into a frenzy of chest-bumping and high-fiving, with brave cries of 'U-S-A!' echoing through the night - infantile citizenship at its most regressive. Wrestling with a formidable combination of syllables, WWE musclehead John Cena even broke into valuable fighting time to crow that Bin Laden had been 'caught and compromised to a permanent end', prompting patriotic whooping from his crowd (Mark Twain defined the patriot as 'the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about').

Nor have the British media missed this opportunity to fan the flames of nationalism. On BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight (2 May 2011), the BBC's North America correspondent Mark Mardell noted with barely disguised relish that in contrast to the uncertainties over the rights and wrongs of recent military interventions, the assassination of Bin Laden provides a much longed-for clarity. 'Killing a bad person', asserted Mardell (conveniently ignoring the others killed in the firefight), 'is very clear, very simple and very clean' and would prove 'cathartic' among 'patriotic Americans' after ten years during which the US state had been unable (according to Mardell) to 'get 'im'. This was a virtual replay of Mardell's televised assertion that the 2003 invasion of Iraq constituted a 'vindication' of Blair and his military strategy.

But what is clear, simple or clean about the assassination of OBL? Certainly not the details of the murder, which have changed almost by the hour. Nor is the moral case for the killing very transparent: like OBL, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for premeditated mass murder, but it seems unlikely that Mardell would approve quite so breezily of any plan to 'terminate' US presidents.

Even if the US state were not the world's chief exporter of terrorism, the US president's assurance that we live in a safer world as a result of this killing would be preposterous. Al-Qaida has already vowed to carry out revenge attacks against the US. The death of bin Laden may give a temporary boost to Obama's domestic approval ratings, just as the death sentence passed on Saddam Hussein two days before the 2006 mid-terms was surely calculated to revive George Bush's flagging popularity ratings. But it can only - as the International Communist Current argues - exacerbate the tensions between the US ruling class and their jihadist antagonists, making the world an even more dangerous place for us all.

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