Note: This was originally published in August of 2006. I noticed interesting parallels between the writing here and my recent series exploring revolution and economics. Enjoy!
The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo is a powerful testament to the human Will to Freedom in the the face of the brutal dehumanizing violence of colonial oppression. Using cinematic devices borrowed from documentary film making, we are presented with a detached yet immediate realism. The dirt and the grit of warfare feels right on top of us. Surely far more powerful than anything presented on Faux News yet somehow resonant of the truth of the situation in Iraq that we are not given.
We see repeated instances in the film of Edward Said‘s notion of Orientalism. The Otherization of the oppressed that must occur for the colonial powers to feel secure in their occupation. The dehumanization of the enemy that must manifest for war to continue. For sympathy can not exist in war. Care and concern can not exist in war. Only duty. The duty in this case for the blond people to oppress the brown people.
Theatre provides a possible escape vector for the totalitarian control that political language places upon the individual. The political realm, far from being one of individualism, is itself a totalitarian product. One can not be Self. Large and contradictory. Rather one must be of a party. Of an ideology. The ideology itself providing discursive paths upon which one may walk but not diverge.
The language of colonialism creates the body politic necessary for mass revolution. By “otherizing” the mass of humanity that once existed as a multifaceted and contradictory heterogeneous thing, they become a single unit. Revolutionary conditions are created by the very linguistic structure used to justify the presence of totalitarian regimes. In fact, the threats that these new groups pose are constructed from a necessary reaction to the language used to engage them by the otherizing self.
At the end of World War II the “Threat” of Nazi Germany ceased to exist, and with it the justification for the military industrial complex that had brought the American, and world, economy back from collapse. Just as that threat was ready to go away, Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain Speech and the threat was continued. American politics-as-usual were saved for another fifty years, but then The USSR disappeared. Almost overnight. We were left limping along for nearly ten years trying out various threats, but none would quite suit our needs. China was too big an economic necessity, North Korea too small, even Iraq on its own was not quite enough.
But, as with the shift from the physical Nationalist threat of Nazi Germany to the Internationalist ideological threat of Communism, we suddenly got our chance for a new shift. Moving further into the realm of ideological conflict in a post-nationalist approach, the War on Terror was born. The human Self is no longer of concern as that can only be inviolate in service of the Nation State. But with the end of Nation based warfare all tactics are allowed. This is not an American war, it is an economic war. The great symbol of the west is not the Statue of Liberty, but rather the financial center of transnational corporations. And corporations do not like war at home.
Mother Courage would certainly be able to tell you that war is good for business. But if that war gets too close, even the most tenacious of entrepreneurs can not survive. And I am reminded of the lesson Joshua learns in War Games that, “the only way to win is not to play.”
