“War Is Beautiful” - “The Horror Makes
The Thrill”
Why the New York Times’ “beautiful” war images of
death and destruction won’t change many minds. With the
transformations in digital media, we're living in an age of
“pump-you-up-to-kill-the-bad-guys videos”
By John Pettegrew
November 13, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Salon"
- The great Harvard philosopher and psychologist William
James said it best. Speaking during the first decade of the last
century, he warned that turning away from massive-scale industrial
warfare “is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.” War
has evolved into something “absurd and impossible from its own
monstrosity,” James counseled, but don’t assume that documenting its
“expensiveness and horror” will change many minds: “The horror makes
the thrill.”
James’ intuition covers all too much of the
human condition, including the early-21st century American inability
to see war for what it is. This base incapacity comes into clear
view in the book “War
Is Beautiful,” a decade-long compendium of front-page war
photographs from the New York Times along with author David Shields’
commentary on how the newspaper has been complicit in selling the
Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts via its “pretty, heroic, and lavishly
aesthetic image selection.” The Times’ photo-editing process is a
manipulative act, Shields charges: It’s taken military conflict’s
massive death and destruction and “filtered” that “reality” into the
stuff of art, images for the eye to behold rather than take in as
abject lessons in historic catastrophe.
Shields makes a powerful case, but he doesn’t go
far enough. Individual blindness to war has evolved into a master
cultural complex, a cross-institutional block on the civilian
populous overseeing its nation’s prolific projection of military
power.
More particularly, with the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars, we can point to a new digitized “eye for battle” in the U.S.
military and American culture overall. Springing from the
intersection of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, wars with the digital
revolution, the eye for battle couples high-tech sensors for killing
from ever-greater distances with a visual culture of motion pictures
and video simulations that eroticized and modeled the action and
violence of ground war.
U.S. military research and development after the
Cold War brought huge advances in digital communications, satellite
global positioning, laser-guided munitions and a host of related
technologies. The promise was network-centric warfare, clean and
immaculate force projection via all-seeing and all-knowing sensors
and information systems, and on ever-more-remote weapons platforms
safely separating shooter from target.
That this promise hasn’t been realized in the War
on Terror is widely recognized, while the twin impulses of
omniscience and risk-free war-fighting behind it continue to drive
U.S. military development and doctrine. To be sure, predator drones
spark protest and debate, but few if any officials responsible for
such decision-making expect or want their use to be stopped. On the
heels of drones are fully automated weapons systems, including the
combat robot, replete with day and night video cameras and thermal
imaging that feed into its artificial intelligence uploaded with
rules of engagement and moral code. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars
have made up a bridge to post-human war-fighting. They may be the
last major conflicts in which the United States relies primarily on
human ground troops.
Alongside the technological enterprise of seeing
everything and separating the killers from the killed, the digitized
eye for battle has also closed in on the action of war, capturing
its violence, and eroticizing its destructiveness and passions. The
transformations in digital media over the past 20 years include
rapid advances in the synchronic capturing and sharing of moving
pictures with affordable video cameras and smartphones and through
the Internet. U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, armed with
digital cameras, some on their helmets, shot footage of their
fighting and its results, while editing software allowed them to
piece together films from camp, often overlaid with heavy metal
soundtracks. So began digital “war pornography” for American
soldiers and Marines–and the tens of millions of the genre’s YouTube
viewers.
The pornography label sticks to these combat videos
because, like sexual pornography, they motivate the same behavior
seen on-screen. An equally descriptive label for war porn, coined
by Marines in Iraq in 2004, is “pump-you-up-to-kill-the-bad-guys
videos.” YouTube viewer comments document war porn’s influence. “I
used to watch this before patrol in Fallujah, now I watch before I
take an exam in college,” a retired Marine exclaimed in 2011. War
porn is also illicit. A “war hornyness” pervades viewer discourse,
as a critic of indiscriminate American killing in Iraq charged on
YouTube. Sex is regularly used to verbalize how viewers “get off” on
watching war: “Ooooooofuckinrahhhhhhh!!!,” a retired Marine
uttered, figuratively or literally, in 2006: “Makes m[e] hard each
time I watch this video. Semper Fi.”An
equally powerful component of the eye for battle has been
first-person shooter combat video games–played, used and enjoyed by
recreational gamers and military recruits alike. In partnering with
the armed forces, video game producers turned to newly minted combat
veterans in the early-2000s for uploading into their works the
official tactics and the real look and feel of fighting in Middle
Eastern streets. The Pentagon wanted the games to achieve “virtual
presence”—the subjective sense of physical immersion in a foreign
“combat environment”—which, in turn, would produce “virtual
veterans”—freshly deployed troops with memories in mind and body of
having already “been there,” in combat operations.
On Veterans Day, we’d do well to think about the
vast limitations of the eye for battle. Instrumental in motivating
young Americans to enlist, fight and kill, the eye for battle is
woefully incapable of mediating the destruction that’s always at the
center of war’s making. The dissonance between the excitement of
combat in the mind’s eye and the physical, psychological and moral
degradation in fighting helps explain the titanic psychic struggle
that many U.S. military veterans experience once they come home.
Perhaps the best way to honor their service is to look critically at
“the eye for battle” in modern warfare and culture and make a
concerted effort to take less thrill out of the horror.
John Pettegrew is an associate professor of
history at Lehigh University and the author of
“Light It Up: The Marine Eye for Battle in the War
for Iraq.”
Copyright © 2015 Salon Media Group, Inc.