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Sep. 14th, 2001 12:55 pmI posted yesterday, but it never showed up. Hmmmm. Anyway, who knows if this will go through either....
The End of Video Game Wars
Naomi Klein, AlterNet
September 13, 2001
Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies.
They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their motivations
senseless. They are "madmen" and their states are "rogue." Now is not the
time for more understanding -- just better intelligence.
These are the rules of the war game.
Feeling people will no doubt object to this characterization: war is not a
game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters, mothers, and
fathers, each with a dignified story. Tuesday's act of terror was reality of the
harshest kind, an act that makes all other acts seem suddenly frivolous,
game-like.
It's true: war is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps after Tuesday, it
will never again be treated as one. Perhaps September 11, 2001 will mark
the end of the shameful era of the video game war.
Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I sat
glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space
Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with what
we have seen this week. Back then, instead of real buildings exploding over
and over again, we saw only sterile bomb's-eye-views of concrete targets --
there and then gone. Who was in these abstract polygons? We never found
out.
Since the Gulf War, American foreign policy has been based on a single
brutal fiction: that the U.S. military can intervene in conflicts around the
world -- in Iraq, Kosovo, Israel -- without suffering any U.S. casualties.
This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe
war.
The safe war logic is, of course, based on the technological ability to wage a
war exclusively from the air. But it also relies on the deep conviction that no
one would dare mess with the U.S. -- the one remaining superpower -- on
its own soil.
This conviction has, until Tuesday, allowed Americans to remain blithely
unaffected by -- even uninterested in -- international conflicts in which they
are key protagonists. Americans don't get daily coverage on CNN of the
ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human-interest stories on
the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country's children.
After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for
a chemical weapons facility), there weren't too many follow up reports
about what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the
region.
And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo -- including markets,
hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station -- NBC
didn't do "streeter" interviews with survivors about how shocked they were
by the indiscriminate destruction.
The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and
dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no
longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely out-sourced to
experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes: though the engine of
globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward
looking, less worldly.
No wonder Tuesday's attack, in addition to being horrifying beyond
description, has the added horror of seeming, to many Americans, to have
arrived entirely out of the blue. Wars rarely come as a complete shock to
the country under attack but it's fair to say that this one did. On CNN, USA
Today reported Mike Walter was asked to sum up the reaction on the
street. What he said was: "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I just can't
believe it."
The idea that one could ever be prepared for such inhuman terror is absurd.
However, viewed through the U.S. television networks, Tuesday's attack
seemed to come less from another country than another planet. The events
were reported not so much by journalists as by the new breed of
brand-name celebrity anchors who have made countless cameos in
TimeWarner movies about apocalyptic terrorist attacks on the United States
-- now, incongruously reporting on the real thing. And for a bizarre split
second on Tuesday night, CNN's logo "America Under Attack"
disappeared and in its place flashed a logo that said "Fighting Fat" -- an
eerie ghost graphic that yesterday passed as news.
The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace but
war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to most
Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the U.S. has woken
up in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on for years.
Did the United States deserve to be attacked? Of course not. That
argument is ugly and dangerous. But here's a different question that must be
asked: did U.S. foreign policy create the conditions in which such twisted
logic could flourish, a war not so much on U.S. imperialism but on perceived
U.S. imperviousness?
The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the controls
has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the
persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted
revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share
their pain.
Since the attack, U.S. politicians and commentators have repeated the
mantra that the country will go on with business as usual. The American way
of life, they insist, will not be interrupted. It seems an odd claim to make
when all evidence points to the contrary. War, to butcher a phrase from the
old Gulf War days, is the mother of all interruptions. As well it should be.
The illusion of war without casualties has been forever shattered.
A blinking message is up on our collective video game console: Game Over.
The End of Video Game Wars
Naomi Klein, AlterNet
September 13, 2001
Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies.
They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their motivations
senseless. They are "madmen" and their states are "rogue." Now is not the
time for more understanding -- just better intelligence.
These are the rules of the war game.
Feeling people will no doubt object to this characterization: war is not a
game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters, mothers, and
fathers, each with a dignified story. Tuesday's act of terror was reality of the
harshest kind, an act that makes all other acts seem suddenly frivolous,
game-like.
It's true: war is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps after Tuesday, it
will never again be treated as one. Perhaps September 11, 2001 will mark
the end of the shameful era of the video game war.
Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I sat
glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space
Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with what
we have seen this week. Back then, instead of real buildings exploding over
and over again, we saw only sterile bomb's-eye-views of concrete targets --
there and then gone. Who was in these abstract polygons? We never found
out.
Since the Gulf War, American foreign policy has been based on a single
brutal fiction: that the U.S. military can intervene in conflicts around the
world -- in Iraq, Kosovo, Israel -- without suffering any U.S. casualties.
This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe
war.
The safe war logic is, of course, based on the technological ability to wage a
war exclusively from the air. But it also relies on the deep conviction that no
one would dare mess with the U.S. -- the one remaining superpower -- on
its own soil.
This conviction has, until Tuesday, allowed Americans to remain blithely
unaffected by -- even uninterested in -- international conflicts in which they
are key protagonists. Americans don't get daily coverage on CNN of the
ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human-interest stories on
the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country's children.
After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for
a chemical weapons facility), there weren't too many follow up reports
about what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the
region.
And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo -- including markets,
hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station -- NBC
didn't do "streeter" interviews with survivors about how shocked they were
by the indiscriminate destruction.
The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and
dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no
longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely out-sourced to
experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes: though the engine of
globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward
looking, less worldly.
No wonder Tuesday's attack, in addition to being horrifying beyond
description, has the added horror of seeming, to many Americans, to have
arrived entirely out of the blue. Wars rarely come as a complete shock to
the country under attack but it's fair to say that this one did. On CNN, USA
Today reported Mike Walter was asked to sum up the reaction on the
street. What he said was: "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I just can't
believe it."
The idea that one could ever be prepared for such inhuman terror is absurd.
However, viewed through the U.S. television networks, Tuesday's attack
seemed to come less from another country than another planet. The events
were reported not so much by journalists as by the new breed of
brand-name celebrity anchors who have made countless cameos in
TimeWarner movies about apocalyptic terrorist attacks on the United States
-- now, incongruously reporting on the real thing. And for a bizarre split
second on Tuesday night, CNN's logo "America Under Attack"
disappeared and in its place flashed a logo that said "Fighting Fat" -- an
eerie ghost graphic that yesterday passed as news.
The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace but
war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to most
Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the U.S. has woken
up in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on for years.
Did the United States deserve to be attacked? Of course not. That
argument is ugly and dangerous. But here's a different question that must be
asked: did U.S. foreign policy create the conditions in which such twisted
logic could flourish, a war not so much on U.S. imperialism but on perceived
U.S. imperviousness?
The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the controls
has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the
persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted
revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share
their pain.
Since the attack, U.S. politicians and commentators have repeated the
mantra that the country will go on with business as usual. The American way
of life, they insist, will not be interrupted. It seems an odd claim to make
when all evidence points to the contrary. War, to butcher a phrase from the
old Gulf War days, is the mother of all interruptions. As well it should be.
The illusion of war without casualties has been forever shattered.
A blinking message is up on our collective video game console: Game Over.
