October
2001
The
End of Video Game Wars
By Naomi Klein
|
|
|
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 that day 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 saw in September. 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 had, until that 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: through the engine
of globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward
looking, less worldly.
No wonder the attack on September 11th, 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 reporter 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 U.S.—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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador), a comprehensive
look at the anti-globalization movement. This article originally appeared
on www.AlterNet.org, September
13, 2001. Reprinted with kind permission from AlterNet.
