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Category Archives: Art
Saturday Matinee: Wing Chun
“Wing Chun” (1994) is a martial arts comedy directed by Yuen Woo-Ping (True Legend, Iron Monkey) starring Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen. Loosely based on a true story, the film tells the story of Wing Chun (Yeoh), a talented kung fu master who lives in a mountain village with her father, sister and aunt. After rescuing a widow from bandits, she must defend herself and her village while dealing with drama related to a childhood friend Leung (Yen), who returns after many years of studying kung fu.
Watch the full film here.
We Still Want Everything: The Politicisation of Anti-work
By Hans Rollman
Source: PopMatters
If there is such a thing as a ‘revolutionary novel,’ Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything is as good an example as any. The novel, first published in Italy in 1971, recounts in dramatic narrative form actual events that occurred in late 1969 in Italy: a massive mobilization and strike against Italian auto-maker Fiat that erupted into civil violence and came close to political revolution.
Balestrini—a poet, visual artist and writer—was himself personally involved in these struggles. In 1979, explains Rachel Kushner in an introductory essay, he had to flee the country on skis through the Alps in order to avoid arrest on charges of insurrection and terrorism, later dropped. But more than offering a dramatic recount of the events of 1969, the book offers a potent political analysis of today’s ‘mass worker’ and the struggles they face, couched in everyday language and dramatic action.
The novel offers a fast-paced first-person narrative. The language is blunt, unadorned and honest; the action sticks to key points and races along without detours from the main theme. The narrator comes from southern Italy, and like others from the region, he is lured north by the promise of easy quick cash in the newly modernising factory towns.
The context of this historical moment of capitalist development in Italy is important. For centuries Italians, particularly in the south, had lived an essentially feudal subsistence lifestyle. They eked out a living working the fields and farms of petty landlords, meeting their needs with relative ease but living in a constant state of abject poverty. They could gather food from the forests and fields around them; they could live in fairly basic housing and even sleep comfortably outdoors for much of the year. They wore simple clothing, handed down and patched up.
But then the factories arrived, luring young people off the land with the promise of cash and all that it offered: things their families had never even dreamed of. Stylish clothes, cars, modern homes of their own. At first the lure seemed attractive. But once they left their traditional lifestyles, they discovered they had new needs as well that they had never had before: the need to pay for housing, for food, for clothes for their families. To meet these needs, they had to work, and work hard; they no longer had the right to take a day off whenever they wanted to sit at the beach. To obtain the consumer goods they wanted and needed, they had to surrender to the tyranny of bosses and to the tyranny of work itself.
But they didn’t go without a fight, and that fight is the subject of Balestrini’s classic novel.
Kushner makes an important point in her introduction: the struggle depicted in the novel is predominantly depicted as a masculinist struggle. Women have very little presence in the novel and are objectified when they are. This is an ironic oversight, as Kushner notes, because women more than anyone had call to demand everything. It’s an unfortunate oversight too, she observes, since “it’s accurate to say that feminism had the most lasting and successful impact among the demands made in the revolts of 1970s Italy.”
The narrator—based loosely on a real figure, Alfonso Natella, to whom the author dedicates his work—is a happy-go-lucky southerner who comes north looking for easy cash. He gets it, drifting through a series of jobs, filling his wallet and then quitting jobs just as quickly as he gets them in order to enjoy the cash he’s earned. Then he finds new jobs, and becomes quite adept at scamming employers, as well.
The point of his continuous lies and scams is this: work is not something to be respected. He wants to have a good time, a natural human inclination, and so wants money, but sees no reason to respect the principle of work. At first his hatred of work is primal and intuitive; he has no real political analysis, just knows he wants to enjoy life and is happy to take the quickest route to get there. He’s willing to work for money—and only as long and as hard as it takes to get some—but understands there is nothing intrinsically worthy or noble about work. His views crystallize after he obtains one of the coveted jobs at Fiat, the Italian automaker. There, he eagerly joins in with students, union organizers and other activists who are vying with each other to gain adherents among the Fiat workers.
So I started stirring things up at the gates. Comrades, today we must stop work. Because we’ve fucking had it up to here with work. You’ve seen how tough work is. You’ve seen how heavy it is. You’ve seen that it’s bad for you. They’d made you believe that Fiat was the promised land, California, that we’re saved.
I’ve done all kinds of work, bricklayer, dishwasher, loading and unloading. I’ve done it all, but the most disgusting is Fiat. When I came to Fiat I believed I’d be saved. This myth of Fiat, of work at Fiat. In reality it’s shit, like all work, in fact it’s worse. Every day here they speed up the line. A lot of work and not much money. Here, little by little, you die without noticing. Which means that it is work that is shit, all jobs are shit. There’s no work that is OK, it is work itself that is shit. Here, today, if we want to get ahead, we can’t get ahead by working more. Only by the struggle, not by working more, that’s the only way we can make things better. Kick back, today we’re having a holiday.
The Politicisation of Anti-work
Gradually he comes to develop a political analysis as well. It’s not just that work is bad and pointless: it’s hypocritical as well, with arbitrary determinations of whose work is valued over others, and who gets paid what.
But organizing the workers and inciting them to go on strike is challenging at first. One of the barriers is what the narrator refers to as workers’ ‘neurosis’.
What is this neurosis? Every Fiat worker has a gate number, a corridor number, a locker room number, a locker number, a workshop number, a line number, a number for the tasks they have to do, a number for the parts of the car they have to make. In other words, it’s all numbers, your day at Fiat is divided up, organised by this series of numbers that you see and by others that you don’t see. By a series of numbered and obligatory things. Being inside there means that as you enter the gate you have to go like this with a numbered ID card, then you have to take that numbered staircase turning to the right, then that numbered corridor. And so on.
In the cafeteria for example. The workers automatically choose a place to sit, and those remain their places for ever. It’s not as if the cafeteria is organised so that everyone has to sit in the same place all the time. But in fact you always end up sitting in the same place. It’s like, this is a scientific fact, it’s strange. I always ate in the same seat, at the same table, with the same people, without anyone ever having put us together. Well this signifies neurosis, according to me. I don’t know if you can say neurosis for this, if that is the exact word. But to be inside there you have to do this, because if you don’t you can’t stay.
The narrator’s point is clear: the regimentation and routinization of work tasks generates a tendency to accept the routinization of daily life—a hesitation to question or challenge norms; an inclination toward accepting the status quo, even when there is no rule saying they have to.
We Challenge Everything
Two aspects of the workers’ struggle are impressively articulated and conveyed in We Want Everything. The first is an abject hatred of work—a clear indictment of the pointlessness and myth of work. Work is not noble, work does not contribute to the self or society; it is oppression and exploitation, pure and simple.
“Workers don’t like work, workers are forced to work. I’m not here at Fiat because I like Fiat, because there isn’t a single fucking thing about Fiat that I like, I don’t like the cars that we make, I don’t like the foremen, I don’t like you. I’m here at Fiat because I need money.”
The narrator is careful to emphasize that it’s not just manual labour, it’s not just certain kinds of work that are useless and disgusting—it’s all work. The narrator knows from the beginning, with an instinctive honesty, that he doesn’t like work, but it’s only as the novel progresses that he understands the oppressive and exploitative nature of all work, realizes the political and social nature of the demand—“Less work!”
The other refreshing dimension of We Want Everything is the perceptive critique of unions. Yes, this is a workers’ struggle, but it’s not a union struggle. The unions are portrayed as the enemy of the working class. They’re exposed as serving a mediating role for the company bosses; it’s a critique that is still appropriate to level at many unions today. The unions, in their efforts to retain their control over the workers’ movement, to ensure that they control the workers and members, connive and conspire to undermine autonomous and spontaneous workers’ struggles. They fear loss of control as much as the company bosses do. The bosses want to control the factory, and the union leaders want to control the movement.
What both fear is a spontaneous, grassroots, autonomous and democratic movement self-organized by workers themselves. Example: when the struggle starts, there are various categories of workers, each of which earns different salaries. Because the workers are demanding more money, the union and bosses negotiate the creation of new categories, to provide more pay scales. The workers reject this: they want the elimination of all the different pay scales, so that all the workers earn the same amount, and that it’s an acceptable amount for all. The narrator’s lesson is this: the unions want tangible victories to wave in the air; but the workers want a powerful united movement capable of taking on the bosses.
The Outcome of the Struggle Has Yet to Be Written
“The unions try to start the struggles one at a time, one finishing and another starting, to avoid the struggle widening and to stop the workers organising themselves in the factories from expressing their will autonomously. But the working-class struggle won’t be controlled this way. Almost every day a new struggle starts, and it’s the workers who start it. This is a big test of the working class’s strength… If workers end up divided and disorganised after the struggle, this is a defeat, even if something has been gained. If workers come out of the struggle more united and organised, this is a victory, even if some demands remain unmet.”
The narrator does a superb job of chronicling the gradual evolution of the unions’ role in the struggle: at first encouraging strikes and actions, but as the workers start organizing autonomously and making their own—often more radical—decisions, the unions begin to panic and escalate their own efforts to suppress the autonomous workers’ struggle. Eventually, they even cooperate with the bosses in this effort, each of them terrified that a system which benefits them both might actually be overthrown.
“Unionists, PCI bureaucrats, fake Marxist-Leninists, cops and fascists all have one characteristic in common. They have a total fear of the workers’ struggle, of the workers’ ability to tell the bosses and the bosses’ servants to go to hell and to organise their struggle autonomously, in the factory and outside the factory. We made them a leaflet that finished like this: Someone once said that even whales have lice. The class struggle is a whale, and cops, Party and union bureaucrats, fascists and fake revolutionaries are its lice.”
The Assembly
The varied themes come together in a workers’ assembly that takes place toward the end of the novel. Workers denounce the fact that the union, instead of fighting for equal wages for everyone, has settled for an even more convoluted hierarchy of pay. Workers point out that even though the bosses have conceded a pay increase, the price of consumer goods and housing is rising accordingly. What good is a pay increase, then? Others demand a guaranteed wage for all, regardless of whether they’re employed or unemployed.
The unions warn them against radical demands, since they could upset the country’s economic system. But the workers counter that’s precisely what they want: the destruction of an economic system that perpetually exploits them. Union reforms only strengthen that system. “We say no to the reforms that the unions and the party want us to fight for. Because we understand that those reforms only improve the system that the bosses exploit us with. Why should we care about being exploited more, with a few more apartments, a few more medicines and a few more kids at school. All of this only advances the State…”
But communism is no solution either, observe other workers—the communists are just as obsessed as the capitalists with making people work hard for no reward. What the workers want is an end to work. “Comrades, I’m from Salerno, and I have done every kind of work in the south as well as the north and I have learned one thing. That a worker has only two choices: a grueling job when things are going well or unemployment and hunger when they go badly. I don’t know which of the two is worse.”
“We started this great struggle by demanding more money and less work. Now we know that this is a call that turns everything upside-down, that sends all the bosses’ projects, capital’s entire plan, up in smoke. And now we must move from the struggle for wages to the struggle for power. Comrades, let us refuse work. We want all the power, we want all the wealth.”
The Struggle Continues
The struggle against work portrayed in the novel was sparked by a particular type of worker. Earlier in the century, Italian workers’ struggles (like elsewhere) were defined by skilled workers who could more effectively demand more wealth because of their highly specialised skills. And it was that type of worker around which left-leaning political parties and labour unions organised their strategies. But in the ‘60s a new type of worker appeared: “adept at a thousand trades because he has no trade, without a single professional quality even when he possesses a diploma, lacking a steady job and often unemployed or forced into casual service, who can’t find work and so seeks it in Turin, in Milan, in Switzerland, in Germany, anywhere in Europe. Who finds the hardest, most exhausting, most inhuman jobs, those that no one else is prepared to do.” It is on this worker, Balestrini points out, that the postwar economies of the West were built.
What is significantly different about this worker is that unlike the skilled worker of the past, who could often take pride in their sought-after technical skills, the new worker is defined by “his ideological estrangement from work and from any professional ethic, the inability to present himself as the bearer of a trade and to identify himself in it. His single obsession is the search for a source of income to be able to consume and survive… For him work and development are understood solely as money, immediately transformable into goods to consume.”
As Balestrini notes in his afterword, this worker is in many ways still the worker of today. In the ‘60s and ‘70s the state and the capitalist system hastily responded to the workers’ challenge with a series of measures which suppressed that struggle for a time—automation and robotisation of factories, outsourcing of production to the third world, co-optation of unions and where none of these strategies worked, brutal police repression. But the workers, the issues, and the struggle continues today.
It was because of this new and unpredictable type of worker—who wasn’t fooled by the notion of a ‘work ethic’ and was uninterested in the elitist machinations of unions and political parties—that unprecedented revolts broke out across Italy (and elsewhere) during this period. The novel ends with a dramatic street battle between workers and police, the end of which is left hanging. Throughout that dramatically depicted battle, which rages throughout the city, it becomes clear that the workers’ strength comes from the self-empowered, self-organised movement they have been building in the weeks and months previous.
These weren’t workers following union instructions, or students playing at textbook revolutionary. These were workers who had challenged their bosses face-to-face in the factory; who had walked off the assembly lines in solidarity when one of their fellows was fired. It was their unity that was their strength—not their union or their political ideology. And as the battle rages, they realize that this unity can bring them real power.
“People kept coming from all around. You could hear a hollow noise, continuous, the drumbeat of stones rhythmically striking the electricity pylons. They made this sound, hollow, striking, continuous. The police couldn’t surround and search the whole area, full of building sites, workshops, public housing, fields. People kept attacking, the whole population was fighting. Groups reorganised themselves, attacked at one point, came back to attack somewhere else. But now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy. The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.”
The aftermath of the battle is left hanging, uncertain. Balestrini’s message is clear: the outcome of the struggle has yet to be written. “Capital only appeared to have won a victory; it has triggered a process that leads unavoidably to a confrontation with the underlying issue, expressed clearly 30 years ago in the struggles of the mass worker with the slogan ‘refusal of work’,” writes Balestrini in his afterword.
More and more the automation of production, and also the possibility in general of trusting almost every type of work and activity to machines and computers, requires a laughably small quantity of human labour power. Therefore why shouldn’t everyone profit from the wealth produced by machines and from the time freed from labour? Today, absurdly, work that is no longer necessary continues to be imposed because only through this is it possible to conceive of the distribution of money, allowing the continuation of the cycle of production and consumption and the accumulation of capital.
It’s surely no coincidence that Balestrini’s novel is undergoing a renewed popularity, at a time of mass mobilizations by a public whose ideological estrangement from work echoes so strongly with that of the characters in his 45-year old book. As demands arise again that echo the demands of the period—less work, more pay, more leisure, guaranteed income—We Want Everything sends a stirring reminder that these are not new demands, and that although it is a new generation rising to the challenge, it is the same fundamental struggle that continues.
“A new era is waiting for humanity, when it will be freed from the blackmail and the suffering of a forced labour that is already unnecessary and the enslavement to money, which prevent the free conduct of activity according to the aptitudes and desires of each and steal and degrade from the rhythm of life, at the same time that there is the real possibility of widespread and general wellbeing. This was the meaning, and could again be the meaning today and in the future, of that old rallying cry: Vogliamo tutto!” We want everything!
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Technocalypse
“Technocalyps” (2006) is a documentary by Frank Theys examining the transhumanist movement and development of the sciences of interest to them including genetics, robotics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Features interviews with philosophers, writers and researchers including Raymond Kurzweil, Kirkpatrick Sale, Natasha Vita More, Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna among others.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Buffalo Soldiers
“Buffalo Soldiers” (2001) is a dark satire directed by Gregor Jordan based on the 1993 novel by Robert O’Conner. The story centers on U.S. Army soldier Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix), whose drug and black market schemes are disrupted when his company gets assigned a new First Sergeant, Robert E. Lee (Scott Glenn). The battle between Elwood and Lee rapidly escalates leading to a fiery showdown. The film’s original theatrical run was delayed by two years due to fears that its unflattering depiction of the military would offend the sensibilities of the culture which was still caught up in a (partly real, partly media-induced) post-9/11 patriotic fervor.
Watch the full film here.
We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us
By William Astore
Source: TomDispatch.com
We Are The Empire
Of U.S. Military Interventions, Alien Disaster Movies, and Star Wars
By William J. Astore
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s famed possum, Pogo, first uttered that cry. In light of alien disaster movies like the recent sequel Independence Day: Resurgence and America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, I’d like to suggest a slight change in that classic phrase: we have met the alien and he is us.
Allow me to explain. I grew up reading and watching science fiction with a fascination that bordered on passion. In my youth, I also felt great admiration for the high-tech, futuristic nature of the U.S. military. When it came time for college, I majored in mechanical engineering and joined the U.S. Air Force. On graduating, I would immediately be assigned to one of the more high-tech, sci-fi-like (not to say apocalyptic) military settings possible: Air Force Space Command’s Cheyenne Mountain.
For those of you who don’t remember the looming, end-of-everything atmosphere of the Cold War era, Cheyenne Mountain was a nuclear missile command center tunneled out of solid granite inside an actual mountain in Colorado. In those days, I saw myself as one of the good guys, protecting America from “alien” invasions and the potential nuclear obliteration of the country at the hands of godless communists from the Soviet Union. The year was 1985 and back then my idea of an “alien” invasion movie was Red Dawn, a film in which the Soviets and their Cuban allies invade the U.S., only to be turned back by a group of wolverine-like all-American teen rebels. (Think: the Vietcong, American-style, since the Vietnam War was then just a decade past.)
Strange to say, though, as I progressed through the military, I found myself growing increasingly uneasy about my good-guy stature and about who exactly was doing what to whom. Why, for example, did we invade Iraq in 2003 when that country had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11? Why were we so focused on dominating the Earth’s resources, especially its oil? Why, after declaring total victory over the “alien” commies in 1991 and putting the Cold War to bed for forever (or so it seemed then), did our military continue to strive for “global reach, global power” and what, with no sense of overreach or irony, it liked to call “full-spectrum dominance”?
Still, whatever was simmering away inside me, only when I retired from the Air Force in 2005 did I fully face what had been staring back at me all those years: I had met the alien, and he was me.
The Alien Nature of U.S. Military Interventions
The latest Independence Day movie, despite earning disastrous reviews, is probably still rumbling its way through a multiplex near you. The basic plot hasn’t changed: ruthless aliens from afar (yet again) invade, seeking to exploit our precious planet while annihilating humanity (something that, to the best of our knowledge, only we are actually capable of). But we humans, in such movies as in reality, are a resilient lot. Enough of the plucky and the lucky emerge from the rubble to organize a counterattack. Despite being outclassed by the aliens’ shockingly superior technology and awe-inspiring arsenal of firepower, humanity finds a way to save the Earth while — you won’t be surprised to know — thoroughly thrashing said aliens.
Remember the original Independence Day from two decades ago? Derivative and predictable it may have been, but it was also a campy spectacle — with Will Smith’s cigar-chomping military pilot, Bill Pullman’s kickass president in a cockpit, and the White House being blown to smithereens by those aliens. That was 1996. The Soviet Union was half-a-decade gone and the U.S. was the planet’s “sole superpower.” Still, who knew that seven years later, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, an all-too-real American president would climb out of a similar cockpit in a flight suit, having essentially just blown part of the Middle East to smithereens, and declare his very own “mission accomplished” moment?
In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and the “shock and awe” assault on Iraq, the never-ending destructiveness of the wars that followed, coupled with the U.S. government’s deployment of deadly robotic drones and special ops units across the globe, alien invasion movies aren’t — at least for me — the campy fun they once were, and not just because the latest of them is louder, dumber, and more cliché-ridden than ever. I suspect that there’s something else at work as well, something that’s barely risen to consciousness here: in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.
Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the Terminator films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets, and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers!
In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.) Even as American leaders offer reassuring words to the natives (and to the public in “the homeland”) about the U.S. military being a force for human liberation, the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries: the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.
Other U.S. military officers have noticed this dynamic. In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.” Parmeter noted, “You have a bunch of epiphanies over the course of your experience here [in Iraq], and it made me think: How are we perceived, who are we to them?”
Americans may see themselves as liberators, but to the Iraqis and so many other peoples Washington has targeted with its drones, jets, and high-tech weaponry, we are the invaders.
Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first Independence Day movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life? That’s what the Carter Doctrine of 1980 was about: it defined the Persian Gulf as a U.S. “vital interest” precisely because, to quote former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt description of Iraq, it “floats on a sea of oil.”
Of Cold War Memories and Imperial Storm Troopers
Whether anyone notices or not, alien invasion flicks offer a telling analogy when it comes to the destructive reality of Washington’s global ambitions; so, too, do “space operas” like Star Wars. I’m a fan of George Lucas’s original trilogy, which appeared in my formative years. When I saw them in the midst of the Cold War, I never doubted that Darth Vader’s authoritarian Empire in a galaxy far, far away was the Soviet Union. Weren’t the Soviets, whom President Ronald Reagan would dub “the evil empire,” bent on imperial domination? Didn’t they have the equivalent of storm troopers, and wasn’t it our job to “contain” that threat?
Like most young Americans then, I saw myself as a plucky rebel, a mixture of the free-wheeling, wisecracking Han Solo and the fresh-faced, idealistic Luke Skywalker. Of course, George Lucas had a darker, more complex vision in mind, one in which President Richard Nixon, not some sclerotic Soviet premier, provided a model for the power-mad emperor, while the lovable Ewoks in The Return of the Jedi — with their simple if effective weaponry and their anti-imperial insurgent tactics — were clearly meant to evoke Vietnamese resistance forces in an American war that Lucas had loathed. But few enough Americans of the Cold War-era thought in such terms. (I didn’t.) It went without question that we weren’t the heartless evil empire. We were the Jedi! And metaphorically speaking, weren’t we the ones who, in the end, blew up the Soviet Death Star and won the Cold War?
How, then, did an increasingly gargantuan Pentagon become the Death Star of our moment? We even had our own Darth Vader in Dick Cheney, a vice president who actually took pride in the comparison.
Think for a moment, dear reader, about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.
I’m hardly the first person to notice this. As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in the New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.
American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in Star Wars. Such vehicles, my battalion commander friend noted drolly, were “not conducive to social engagements with Iraqis.”
It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a Star Wars storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries, and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.
Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue? Of course, in Star Wars terms, it went both ways in Iraq. A colleague told me that during her time there, she heard American troops refer to Iraqis as “sand people,” the vicious desert raiders and scavengers of Star Wars. If “they” seem like vicious aliens to us, should we be surprised that we just might seem that way to them?
Meanwhile, consider the American enemy, whether the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or any of our other opponents of this era. Typically unburdened by heavy armor and loads of equipment, they move around in small bands, improvising as they go. Such “terrorists” — or “freedom fighters,” take your pick — more closely resemble (optically, at least) the plucky human survivors of Independence Day or the ragtag yet determined rebels of Star Wars than heavy patrols of U.S. troops do.
Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The U.S. has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of Star Wars “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).
To navigate and negotiate the complex “human terrain” (actual U.S. Army term) of “planets” like Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops call on a range of space-age technologies, including direction-finding equipment, signal intercept, terrain modeling, and satellite navigation using GPS. The enemy, being part of that “human terrain,” has little need for such technology to “master” it. Since understanding alien cultures and their peculiar “human terrains” is not its forte, the U.S. military has been known to hire anthropologists to help it try to grasp the strange behaviors of the peoples of Planet Iraq and Planet Afghanistan.
Yet unlike the evil empire of Star Wars or the ruthless aliens of Independence Day, the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft, and motherships with it.
After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Consider it an irony of alien disaster movies that they manage to critique U.S. military ambitions vis-à-vis the “primitive” natives of far-off lands (even if none of us and few of the filmmakers know it). Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.
We Americans, proud denizens of the land of the gun and of the only superpower left standing, don’t, of course, want to think of ourselves as aliens. Who does? We go to movies like Independence Day or Star Wars to identify with the outgunned rebels. Evidence to the contrary, we still think of ourselves as the underdogs, the rebels, the liberators. And so — I still believe — we once were, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
We need to get back to that time and that galaxy. But we don’t need a high-tech time machine or sci-fi wormhole to do so. Instead, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves. Like Pogo, we need to be willing to see the evidence of our own invasive nature. Only then can we begin to become the kind of land we say we want to be.
A TomDispatch regular, William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. He blogs at Bracing Views.
After the Crash 