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Making
a Spectacle of Ourselves
July
26, 2003
By The Plaid Adder
When I heard that our army had assassinated Uday and Qusai
Hussein, I found myself unable to muster much outrage. After
all, so many entirely innocent people have been killed by
us throughout this war that the deaths of these particular
not-so-innocent people seemed like the least of the crimes
that will be laid at our door when we all come up for our
final judgment. Then I started seeing the headlines about
Rumsfeld's decision to publish photos of their dead bodies,
in order to convince the "once-frightened Iraqi people" that
the two of them were really dead.
The "once-frightened" Iraqi people?
Yes, I'm sure they will all sleep easier in their beds tonight
knowing that their country is being occupied by barbarians
who are not only quite comfortable with assassination, but
happy to proudly display the gruesome evidence of their kills
to the world at large.
In the interests of time, I will skip over the part where
I bring up Bush's insistence that the Iraqi government and
world media follow the Geneva Convention and not display photos
or video of our captured, brutalized, and executed
soldiers, and point out how hypocrisy has become such an integral
element of this government's modus operandi that people don't
even notice it any more. Instead, how about we talk about
why our government is really publishing those photos.
First of all, let us dispense with the idea that the sole
and only motivation of publishing these photos is to convince
the "once-frightened Iraqi people" that the two of them are
really most sincerely dead. If that's true, then why are these
photos and videotapes also being shown ad nauseam (literally)
in the U.S. media? Anyway, if reports from Baghdad are any
indication, the average Iraqi appears to view these photos
in the same light in which they were used to looking upon
the pronouncements of their old friend the Information Minister.
Since they are used to disbelieving their own government,
why should they put any more stock in a 'government' of alien
invaders? No, there's something else going on here, and it
doesn't really take much to figure out what it is.
For reasons not interesting to anyone here, I was recently
forced to re-read the opening half of Michel Foucault's classic
Discipline and Punish. Foucault, alas, is long dead,
and therefore not around to marvel at the return of something
that he appears to have thought disappeared from the Western
world for good after the eighteenth century: execution as
a public spectacle. As history buffs will recall, people all
over Europe used to attend executions regularly as a form
of entertainment; in France, at least according to Foucault,
these executions were often preceded by public torture of
a fairly gruesome kind. As he reads it, the point of the public
execution was not simply retribution or deterrence; the execution
functioned as a demonstration and confirmation of the state's
power not only over the bodies of its subjects, but over justice
and the truth itself. It was through the spectacle of the
execution that the condemned man "proved" that he really was
guilty, that the state really had determined the truth about
his crimes, and that his death really was just. The display
of the executed criminal's body proved not only that the state
can kill whoever it identifies, but that it controls the definition
and production of truth and justice.
What was it Bush said about the deaths of Uday and Qusai
Hussein? That their lives had "ended in justice"? And wasn't
the publication of these photographs supposed to be just one
more illustration of the "American justice" that we're bringing
to Iraq?
But of course the "justice" that's on display in the public
execution is not what we normally consider justice. Foucault's
explication of the seventeenth-century French criminal code
stresses the fact that it fails almost every test we normally
use to determine whether such a system is fair and impartial:
the process was totally opaque, almost any amount of information
(including the nature of the charges against him) could be
concealed from the defendant, the prosecution was to a large
extent allowed to define the rules of the game, and it was
pretty much impossible for the accused to mount an effective
defense. Since, during the actual trial, the deck was clearly
stacked in favor of the prosecution, it became all the more
important to "prove" that the result was actually just by
publicly transforming the victim into a penitent criminal
and displaying his death to all and sundry.
Modernity is supposed to have rendered this process obsolete;
now that the injustices of state power are better-camouflaged,
punishment has also moved out of sight, and been refined into
ever more "civilized" systems which produce the same results
but do it through more sophisticated methods.
Until now.
The Bush administration kissed modernity goodbye the moment
it set out on this war of conquest. Bush may or may not have
known what he was doing when he called the war against terrorism
a "crusade," but subsequent events have proved him right.
We are back in ye olde tymes now: our wars are being fought
by professional mercenaries (Mother Jones has a great article
on how the military is farming a lot of the business of war
out to private contractors); our troops are heavily dependent
on armor; looting, pillaging, fire and the sword are all the
rage, and there is nothing considered too barbaric or demeaning
to be done to a conquered enemy. So why not? Take out the
king, kill the whole royal family, and then put the heads
of the two princes on spikes in the town square, just to prove
that the line is dead.
What we've just done amounts more or less to the same thing;
but of course the great advantage of the photos is that they
are reproducible, something that cannot be said of a head
on a pike. We are trying to produce truth, justice and power
not just for the "once-frightened Iraqi people," but for the
newly-disgruntled American people, and for the court of world
opinion. The fact that almost everyone who looks at these
pictures, at least outside of America, is going to turn away
in disgust is something that the crew in charge is willing
to put up with. Disgusting or not, these pictures are our
proof that we rule in Iraq now; that justice is what we say
it is, and that we make the truth there.
So. The "once-frightened Iraqi people" can stop being afraid
of the Hussein family, and start being afraid of the Bush
family. That's what those photos really mean. Well, that,
and, you know, the fact that human life and human dignity
have been so devalued by this administration that the bottom
has now fallen right out of the market. But of course, we
knew that already.
The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting an
equally demented online audience since 1996. More of the same
can be found at the Adder's Lair at http://www.plaidder.com.
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