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Jason Ralph, ‘The Laws of War and the State of the American Exception’, Review of International Studies 35 (3): 631 – 649. Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in. This paper looked at one particular text of Baudrillard – War Porn – and aimed to in turn discuss aspects of war simulation as depicted in the two images, the image of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and 9/11. Instead of looking at the content of these images the paper aimed to tease out the underlying ideologies and logics driving war simulations: those that in the first instance make such images possible (law and war), but also those that the two images reproduce (desire and perversion). Thus scene one looked at the simulative power of war and law in the context of the war on terror and laws concerning the detention at Guantanamo Bay, whereas scene two focused on the intriguing relationship between desire, perversion and image. In doing so the paper aimed to show how the two images have a capacity to reveal the simulative power of the war on terror. War Porn shows that any power – when it no longer knows what to do with itself – turns on the side of the pornographic and the obscene. When power is no longer accountable, when it sees itself as serving its own purpose, at that moment a strategy of overpowering, defeating, subjugating the enemy is no longer enough, the enemy has to be humiliated, exposed and symbolically exterminated. Or as Baudrillard (2005a: 209) put it by drawing upon Elias Canetti: “the goal [of such] war is to abolish the enemy, extinguish the light of his sky”. Pornography of war: violence for the sake of violence, virtuality for the sake of seduction.
John Muller and William Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Écrits (International Universities Press, 1994). To the British forces, anti-American leaflets attempted to drive a wedge between the allied forces, playing on the ‘over-sexed, overpaid and over here’ reputation of the American troops. One example of this type of leaflet shows an American sergeant in bed with a British girl, and the words ‘You Americans are so different’. On the reverse is a brief message stating ‘The Yanks are putting up their tents in merry old England. They've got lots of money and loads of time to chase after your women’. Belgian women who had collaborated with the Germans are shaved, tarred and feathered and forced to give a Nazi salute. In due course, Douthat has been joined by the folks at the Christian journal First Things, who have taken up the anti-pornography banner as part of their peculiar subvariant of a resurgent interest in nationalism among traditionalist conservatives. In last year's manifesto, "Against the Dead Consensus," a clutch of First Things friends and familiars reject "economic libertarianism" and "the soulless society of individual affluence" and add that they "respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism." Which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn around and immediately kneel before the scolding ghost of Ed Meese.When does an image of war become pornographic? British journalist James Harkin wrote, "War porn is designed not to titillate, but to humiliate its victims and horrify its audience. Like pornography, its producers heighten their sense of reality by videoing themselves in the act, while its audience does the same by ogling the videos." Most people who commented on his article were offended by his definition. One poster wrote, "We have to see [to] understand." What do you think? Resources
Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Members of the French resistance in Cherbourg shear the hair of women who collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. French girl engaged to German soldier follows him into prison compound after his capture near Orleans by U.S. forces. This would have been around August 1944. She undoubtedly was safer in there with him than on the streets, subject to abuse by the partisans. The effort was, in some sense, successful. By 1990, the Department of Justice had managed to use obscenity statutes to force seven national porn distributors out of business. But the decades that followed were boom times for porn as the industry moved into new forms of distribution, so the success was far from permanent. tomorrow there will be nothing but the virtual violence of consensus, the simultaneity in real time of the global consensus: this will happen tomorrow and it will be the beginning of a world with no tomorrow (Baudrillard 1995: 84).The Japanese were dropping propaganda leaflets… And for the friendliest of friendly persuasion, pictures of a beautiful blonde stripper, private parts and all: ‘You too can enjoy this if you surrender.’ The propaganda bombers came droning over every day. It was like having the paper delivered. Some of the troops started trading the leaflets like baseball cards. In the wake of Ukraine being declared a war zone, a sizable portion of the global population — enough to push “Ukrainian girls” to the top of the trending search list — reacted by seeking out videos of the inhabitants of said war zone engaging in sexual activity. This is, disturbingly, nothing new. Since at least 2015 there has been a dramatic increase in searches for “refugee porn”, linked to the ongoing humanitarian crises in the Middle East. The very first stages of the COVID outbreak in China were coupled with the creation of “ Coronavirus-themed porn”. Attitudes towards sex among boys are also dangerously skewed, the 2017 National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) found. Child victims of rape are not like adult victims of rape,” says Sarnat. “They think it must be a punishment for what they have done.” The Charter of the United Nations (1945). Available on: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pdf; accessed: April 20 2014.
Wendy Kozol, ‘Battlefield souvenirs and the Affective Politics of recoil’, Photography and Culture, 5(1): 21-36. It seems that that which cannot be represented (or is excluded from the realm of the visible) simply does not exist. Such an attitude to war and to the space of war, I argue, poses an interesting question about the relationship between not only war and the media, but most importantly between war and ‘reality’. What war in fact is: is it real, virtual or is it a simulation?; and is the state of war at all a worthy research question? Video games or simulations of war on the one hand and real-time broadcasting and TV images of ‘real war’ suffering on the other hand both mediated directly into the living room of an every day person constitute what James Der Derian (2003) calls the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment (MIME) complex. As the question of whether war is a game or a reality loses its edge this paper aims to interrogate the simulative power of war. With the focus on Baudrillard’s short text War Porn the paper explores the intricacies of war, law, desire and their excess(es) through the logic of simulation, which permeates modern production of war. In the eye of danger, where there might be nothing more or new to see, the desire to see is taken to its extreme; the spectre of visibility no longer uncovers, but begins to create. It ‘creates’ reality, it creates that which can later be exposed. Child safety advocates slammed the government’s decision to ignore the eSafety Commissioner’s age verification plan. In the streets of Brignoles, angry French citizens publicly rebuke a woman who is suspected of having collaborated with the Germans. Women often were the most upset with other women who collaborated.Clive Stafford Smith, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prison (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). All the major combatants involved in World War II used pornography as a small part of their psychological operations (PSYOP) strategy. Mostly this involved dropping propaganda leaflets using sexual themes from the air, in an attempt to demoralise enemy soldiers at the front. These materials are now collected avidly by historians, and they are also an important source for those of us interested in the role of psychology in crucial parts of human history. Why were they used? Did they work? Dr Andreja Zevnik is lecturer in international politics at The University of Manchester; she is working on psychoanalytic and aesthetic politics, political violence and critical legal studies. She’s a convener of Poststructural and Critical Thought Cluster (Political Horizons) at Manchester. Her book (with Samo Tomsic) entitled Jacques Lacan: between politics and psychoanalysis is forthcoming with Routledge in 2015. In German Psychological Warfare (Arno Press, New York, 1972) Ladislas Farago states ‘Since young soldiers are in a state of hyperactive bodily development, their immediate problems are related to appetite and sex.’ He adds that ‘sexual deprivation may be a motive for a soldier’s suicide attempt’.
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