On Artificial War
(May 2, 1997)Andrey Georgieff
I. The Metaphysical Cleanliness of War"I go to extremes"
(Billy Joel)
"Nothing compares 2 u"
(Prince)
"This is an historic moment. (...) We are facing the opportunity of creating a new world order for ourselves and for the future generations, a world in which the rules of law and not the rules of the jungle determine the conduct of nations towards each other."
(...)
"Sergeant Major J.P. Kendall of the 82nd Airborne Division:
'We are not here simply because of the price of a gallon of petrol. What we are doing is laying the foundation for the future of the world for the next hundred years. It is better to sort this guy out now rather than in five years' time.'"
(...)
"Tonight, whilst our armed forces are in battle, they and their families are in our prayers. May God bless every one of them and of the allied armed forces on our side in the Gulf. And may he continue to bless our nation, the United States of America."
(George Bush, January 17, 1991)
With the vision of the explosive force of a petrol bomb, America opened up the flaming inferno of Baghdad on January 17, 1991 at 3.40 hours a.m. (Local Time). CNN television transmitted this hellish firework display live all over the world and illuminated in bright colours the next hundred years of our universe. The era of the new order took its course.
The language of this new order was bloodless, in both senses of the word. The military issued its mottos. In these mottos there were no bombs which exploded beween people. There were no mutilated bodies, no screams from the wounded. The talk was of "missions" which were carried out in "sorties". If they did not succeed at the first attempt "to service the target", the bombers returned "for second visit". The purpose of the operation was "to attrit the enemy" 1 to grind the enemy down. This most perverse use of the verb "to attrit" was used twenty years ago by an unnamed man in the Pentagon who was explaining to a reporter that the Americans wanted to wear away the grassroots support for the Vietcong amongst the population: that this meant killing the people went without saying. This does not happen now, at least not intentionally. The evil intentions of Saddam Hussein were shot out of the sky by the "Patriots", whilst the Americans had no bad intentions, at the most they made bad mistakes!
After clean fuels and clean nuclear bombs, High Tech now brought the clean war for friendly, family household use. Intelligent bombs on the television screen fell silently on grey bunkers and turned them into broken ruins. The picture was exactly right: detailed enough to demonstrate the explosion, too indistinct to show up the flying limbs. The language which made light of the war was joined by the innocent image: more valuable than a thousand words. The reverse was also the case, as we know, since the drama in the Baghdad bunker first brought the reality of the war into our living rooms. For the bomber pilots this was "collateral damage", militarily inconsiderable minor damages. Cruel words, but progress.
The well-known "surgical" bombardment legitimised the war orgy of
fortune. Its carousel accelerated the complete fraud from which noone could any longer escape should he not want to be a loser: both militarily as well as politically.
The Gulf War was a pure ars electronica, computer aesthetics with real peripherals and peripheral turbulance, still only perceived as the periphery of the (simulacra) simulated world of the (board and mainframe) computer. It was a war machine without désir, without desire. Every dream economy was destroyed, for the sham no longer offered any promise of fulfilment. Enter the total mechanisation of the machine!
The 1991 Gulf War has apparently been completely forgotten. Other wars have imposed themselves upon our global public awareness, at the latest since the last burning oil fields in the deserts of Kuwait were quenched and the effects of the war disappeared from our television screens. Nobody takes any interest anymore in the secret and bureaucratised doings of the UN inspectors implementing the disarmament of Iraq.
The Gulf War has vanished from our sight with the speed of a meteorite just grazing the Earth before shooting off into the voids of our collective consciousness. It was a war of brief duration, just a few weeks long, the first television war in history, subject to the immutable laws of the genre: no sooner present on our news screens did it disappear from sight again.
A forgotten war, a "lost" war and yet it was a brutal experiment for the war of the future. It has brought one alarming truth home: in the Gulf War the running of the war was for the first time ever taken over by a gigantic electronic system. It was a small scale Third World War which demonstrated the frightening range of a technology of destruction which humanity must now learn to acknowledge and control for its own future survival.
II. The Second Death of God
The Gulf War was a complete metaphysical simulation of the Second World War: a regionally contained world war, universally inconsequential. It devoured no power or money because the world money markets in Tokyo and New York had accumulated ecstatic sums of simulation capital. The Gulf War was nothing more than a simulated reversal of World War II. It began with the end of that Second World War and proceeded through the carpet bombing raids of 1944. The year 2000 will not take place because the universe began retracing its development sometime back in the 1980s and is now rushing headlong back to its origins.
With the end of the Cold War the standstill of time was overcome and has changed at a terrific speed into the total lasciviousness of catastrophe. The Gulf War no longer possessed any point of origin, it was destroyed in the eerie time-lapse. The pitilessness of the Gulf War lay in its metaphysics, in a metaphysics of cybernetics and electronic traps: the codes cannot be conquered.
The Gulf War was simulated on the basis of the end of World War II regressively and recursively. Regressively, because no more victims were to be "produced" (with due regard for one's own troops); recursively, because, in its retrogressive imitation of World War II, the Gulf War refracted opposing attitudes and opinions: it broke them down and destroyed them. In this way the metaphysical cleanliness of the war could be guaranteed by a return to purely military illusions. Israel appeared in this scenario only as an inadvertently muddled living jigsaw, the pieces of which could no longer be put together. And only the heart and brain of Iraq underwent surgery. In this way the total hospitalisation of the war met with the total agreement of the Americans with their allies.
In the war between Iraq and its deadly enemy Iran America built up Saddam Hussein to a terrorist of Pharaonic stature and, under George Bush, proceeded to supply the hostages. Like a Sun King of terror Saddam Hussein seized America as a hostage, with the result that for George Bush only God remained to be taken as the hostage of his purposes to enthrone the "just" war. The room for terrorism was not distinguished from that of orbital control. The abstract nature of orbital control did not conceal the fact that that balance of terror was also present at low and individual levels: Saddam Hussein and George Bush were made responsible for the order which governed each of them. Should this order be seriously threatened they were psychologically pre-programmed to annihilate each other.
In the same way as there is a space for terrorism, so there is a circulation of hostages. All takings of hostages, every terrorist action is a reaction to an other such action, whereby on a world scale the impression evolves of a chain, a linkage of transpolitical terrorist actions (whilst the political scene in no way gives the impression of a chain reaction), as if a continuous orbital circulation transports the victims like pieces of information from one point on the planet to another.
So the terrorist chain reaction of the Iraqi-American conflict began already with the Iran-Iraq war, in which Khomeini took the Iranian people hostage in order to trigger a war against the American representatives in the Gulf: Iraq. This gave America the idea of taking Saddam Hussein hostage in order to destroy the Iranian order, thereby destroying Islamic fundamentalism. After Iran had been successfully put down, Saddam Hussein then took Kuwait hostage in order to defy his hated America. America's order was by this time so lastingly disturbed that it took the western industrial nations hostage in order to castigate the Iraqi people in the name of the allies, in the hope of causing an uprising against Saddam Hussein. After the failure of this plan only one way out remained for George Bush: to take God personally hostage in order to save his own personal order and to depersonalise the war in the Gulf with the name of "Desert Storm", thereby making it anonymous. The second death of God was thus made perfect.
Neither dead nor alive the hostage is given an incalculable time limit. He is threatened neither by destiny nor by his own death, but by anonymous chance, which can only seem to him to be absolutely arbitrary. No rules remain in the game of his life and death. The hostage is therefore beyond all alienation, beyond alienation and exchange.
Events are nothing more than exchange deals. The taking of hostages is intended to facilitate or open a certain exchange deal! An equivalent is supposed to be traded in exchange for a hostage. Should the hostage refuse to be traded in this way, however, nothing happens. The taking of hostages is devoid both of effect and consequences. All takings of hostages are therefore a taking hostage of history. If, however, hostages/history are no longer exchangeable, the story of exchange deals, and therefore events themselves, come to an end. The end of history is trumps!
The constellation of extortion has entered everything, not only the arena of the "political". That absurd proliferation of responsibility as a deterrent has made its mark at all levels. Even at a religious level. Thus the American President tried to rescue his own personal order by taking God hostage at the cost of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Beyond. His was a transpolitical order supported by the false priests of the military and a Beyond of the pure, just war. For, one thing is certain: even after the formal armistice the weapons did not lie silent under the pseudonym of the new order. They were employed at any moment of a "political" action as a means of extortion.
The whole sphere of manipulation falls under this category. Manipulation is a gentle technology of violent extortion. And extortion is always applied by taking hostage a part of another's being: a secret, an emotion, a desire, a wish, his suffering, his death. Nothing else is part of the game where manipulation is concerned, and manipulation is covered by the whole field of psychology; this is why we always pressurise others until their wishes are of equal value to our own. In this way, however, George Bush's metaphysics, accompanied by the sound of weapons, destroyed the secret that God has masked his heavenly kingdom, that God hides his naked visage beneath the mask of death: a final piece of the life of God. The simulation of God is tarnished: realists for a kingdom of heaven. "Humanity" withdrew, unable to bear the secret presence of God any longer. The second death of God is mercilessly perfect: irresistible and irreversible. The death systems put an end to death as chance: that is our situation, monstrous and logical. It is through this logic that terrorism dispairingly attempts to break by replacing systematic death (terror) with a death which is both anonymous and elitist: the death of the hostage, the death of God.
III. The End of History
The specifics of the pure war are found in the total harshness of its simulation. The speed with which it operates is the ecstatic violence of terror. The ecstasy of modernity is absolute. For the pure speed war corresponds to the dromocratic model of revolution which marks the absolute form of ecstasy. The second modernity is made perfect. The pure war is no longer exchangeable against the Political, since democracy and discussion need time. Time, however, is totally annihilated by pure war.
Holy war uses the masses, grouped and organised into troops and units, simply as troops of extras who have lined up to join the dead majority. In holy war death is used as a weapon. It, death, is the ultimate weapon in Islam. Absolute faith has brought millions of people to voluntarily sign up for death, because they they are secure in their belief in an eternal life. Nothing stands in the way of war, the "extreme intensification" as Clausewitz called it. This is the basis of holy war. The believers of Islam can accept this extreme intensification because they are religious. They are relligious in a way that is convinced of victory. Since they do not believe in death, that is, since life does not end with death for them, they can dismiss the Political. This marks the end of all classical, political war.
The end of the Political does not only mean that the antagonistic ideologies disappear, it also means that, in the short or the long term, our civilization will die. On the one hand the state dies and history comes to an end; on the other hand a state of emergency reigns giving the passing moment absolute legal force. History as extended time, as time which is continuous, which is divided and organised, which unfolds disappears in favour of the moment, as if the end of history consisted in the end of duration. It disappears in favour of an immediate and sudden ubiquitousness. Its end is the basis of both the holy and the pure, technological war.
Hitherto, the sword of Damocles, the nuclear bomb, that absolute weapon of global dimensions which governs the centre of the world, has wavered above both extremes of total war. But with the simulacrum of high-tech precision war, 2 which is intended, to legitimise pure war in order to save the threadbare ideology of justice and freedom, the nuclear deterrrent farce comes into play. America conducted the Gulf War like a nuclear war, tactically and strategically, by shifting the explosive power of "conventional" weapons into nuclear spheres. It was a war like a nuclear war. The deterrent force of the nuclear bomb has become a farce. The nuclear bugbear has upset the belief in the pointlessness of resistance against the nuclear bomb. With each future war the (third) world is left no other choice but to make the nuclear first strike. The power of simulation of pure war has rocked the deterrent theory in its foundations. The conduct of a nuclear war is not far away. The nuclear deterrent is still only separated by the threshold of simulation: simulation nullifies nuclear deterrent. The horror of a nuclear war has become deceptive. The total fraud of the war orgy in the Gulf has destroyed the nuclear illusion of the invincibility of this weapon: a heavenly kingdom for the nuclear bomb!
The extreme intensification: 3 this has become reality since the Gulf War. In this very conflict politics lost its conflict-controlling function. The end of the Political, therefore, does not only mean the dissolution of antagonistic ideologies but the demise of our (western) civilization. The consequence of this, however, is not only the end of the Political, the end of all discussion about the development of society, but also the end of all ethics. The result is nothing more than a new "humanism" of justice and freedom based solely on annihilation.
We are all hostages, we are all terrorists. This circulation has replaced the circulation of master and servant, ruling and ruled, exploiter and exploited. The constellation of slave and proletarian is at an end. Today the constellation is of hostages and terrorists; no longer that of alienation, but of terror. The era of the transpolitical is beginning.
IV. In Cyberspace's Heaven
Cyberspace represents the scenario of space stations and satellites in outer space. During the Gulf War the world was governed from the no-man's-land of this virtual universe: a place from which the world, in a certain, extra-territorial and extra-planetary sense, was literally taken hostage. Nothing distinguished the space of terrorism from the outer space of control. This (outer) space was occupied by America in the Gulf War. By way of civilian and military satellites and space flights the Earth's planetary space was plunged into an abyss. It was delivered up unto an uncertain future, literally brought into a state of ec-stasy in order then to be destroyed. The United States' rulership of cyberspace was made complete.
The balance of terror implies that the world is made collectively responsible for the ruling order if something happens to threaten that order, then the world must be destroyed. In the Gulf War it was the worlds of Baghdad, Hillah and Basra which were razed to the ground.
From which other place could the world be more effectively destroyed than from those places outside the world which consist of satellites and fighter-bombers circling above the Earth (compare, for instance, the use of B-52 long range bombers from British soil!)? From the place where territory definitely no longer exists and, since it cannot be attacked, US soil assumed the extra-territorial function during the Gulf War as America took on the role of an extra-planetary cyberspace all territories were ideally covered with "killing-boxes", neutralised and taken hostage. We have become the satellites of our own satellites.
The order of satellites, spacecraft (space shuttles) and robots makes each person unlimitedly responsible for everything even for those things over which he has no control. Traditional society is a society with limited resposibility, and for that reason alone it can function. In a society with unlimited resposibility, on the other hand, in which the poles of exchange no longer exchange anything but themselves, the whole bipolar system revolves around itself and produces nothing but fraudulance and bewitching effects.
Nothing happens any more because neither trade nor negotiations exist to be exchanged. It is this circulation of hostages, this absolute form of human convertibility, that strives for pure exchange and thus renders it impossible like the circulation of the Euro-Petro-Dollar and other floating currencies which are de-territorialised and are in circulation somewhere beyond gold and national currencies in such a way that in reality they can no lnger be exchanged, but only follow their earthly orbit amongst themselves, embodying the abstract and never-realised illusion of total exchange just as the artificial satellites of the Earth embody the abstract illusion of transcendence and control. And the outer space bombs are an embodiment of the pure and impossible form of war.
CNN was the orbital television station in cyberspace! Its own station satellite was the orbital eye of the earthly universe: the metaphysical face of war utterly dominated the twenty-four hour live programme of CNN in which the lacerated and bleeding bodies were totally submerged. Every day was an ultimatum for the end of survival. Never before had so much television been made with so little information. The number of set television images grew inversely proportional to the dwindling and sparse content of the information.
CNN was the orbital eye of the blue planet: with its own satellite, with its own pool and its own enlightenment. Alert during the first two nights of fireworks in Baghdad, it slowly lost its sight which it only sporadically regained for instance on the night of the attack on the civilian air-raid shelter in the Iraqi capital. Even at CNN the television stills and videoclips multiplied at an inflationary rate inversely proportional to the meagre message of metastising information. The broadcasting intervals became increasingly shorter, the ultimata made nonsense of the information. The public remained in total unconsciousness, the information was totally devoid of content. The distance of the satellites could no longer supply an overall perspective. The events dazzled every viewing, however objectively distant it tried to be. The viewing eye was no longer consumed, absorbed, rather was it repelled, reflected, returned to its own seat of vision. It died cruelly, entrapped in its own origins. Cyberspace is a feigned heaven.
V. Recollection will not take place
But all of this has been forgotten today. The public turbulance which the Gulf War gave rise to in January and February of 1991 is almost inconceivable. It can be traced back to the changed perception of war realities: to the ostentatious rationality behind the decisions of military command and the unprecedented presence of the media. The war traditionally experienced as stroke of destiny and source of contingency was reduced to a dissembled reality, employed for the demonstration of a low risk, technically highly efficient, "clean" commando enterprise waged with speed, precision and low "blood-toll" for one's own side. Everything was under control, including the war-reports. They were part and parcel of the war being waged and becoming identical with its simulation on the television screens.
It has often been said: screening off the reality of suffering gave the whole war an artificial character. The dissembled war has been compared to the playing of video-games, to the unsettlingly unresisting unwinding of an electronic programme. Contrary to what was expected
the reality of the war did not show its head even after the curtain of censorship had been lifted. The number of victims has been withheld to this day; it remains a subject of speculation whether they number a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand or more.
There are good grounds for thinking that the situation is as it is for the same reasons that make recollection of the war so difficult. One is almost tempted to say that recollection will not take place. Most people seem to go along with the attitude of a fictitious reporter who appeared in an advert shortly after the end of the war to praise the newest model of an automobile manufacturer:
"The atmosphere here is indescribable. The crowds are pushing forwards. Everyone wants to get the best view. Yes, and here they
come: the stars of the festival of shape and color. There they come rushing up. Right at the front the new Mazdas 121 in brilliant red, charming, charming. The sunroof right down, decolleté, oh la la! Four wide-swinging doors. And what a rear: what a shape you can hear the roar of the crowds what a shape: indescribable. And, to top it all, what a happy, cheeky grin! There are sure to be some broken hearts here today because of the new 121.
Well, and here comes the second wave right now: the Mazdas 323. Right out in front the F: that seductive look. A large back, smooth and passionate in shape. It whizzes past, it's pure delight.
And now: full of confidence they rush forward. Spotlight on the Mazdas 626! This star of stars has already collected forty distinctions. That's something special, even at this première of the very best. Here at the festival of shape and color. A festival which has written the history of automobiles."
And in the credits, the thought-provoking words:
"The festival of shape and color. Coming to you too. From March 8 at your local Mazda Dealer." 4
Footnotes1. To "attrit" is relatively new as a verb, created specially for war reporting. It comes from the Latin "atterere" (at-tero, trivi, tritus).
2 . The "surgical" operation of the bombers over the silhouette of Baghdad provides the background for the precision rituals of transparency on the video screen.
3 . Clausewitz put forward a basic theory: politics prevents war as "the extreme which relieves its tension in a single discharge". Because war is political, there is no total discharge. Once the war is no longer political, total discharge will attain total annihilation.
4. Advertisement on SDR 1, February 27, 1991.
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