In the name of freedom comes a totalizing war-machine.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 2002
• Author: Warburg, James Paul

Photographs of dead children regularly appear in the world press. The killing of Anas bin Nazir, shot in the back by the Indonesian military as he ran through a rice paddy in Aceh, is a recent example (23 May 2003). However, there is a one syndicated photograph that I cannot get out of my mind. Taken in 2001 after an exchange of gunfire at a checkpoint near Jerusalem, the photo stands out as carrying something beyond the usual image of simple tragic death. It is poised at a moment of contradictory truth. It depicts a Palestinian youth lying prone and half-naked in the middle of a dusty street. A dog-sized robot--camera-eyed and remote-controlled--checks to see whether or not the boy terrorist is dead or still dangerous. To one side of the photograph a woman carrying a shopping bag begins to cross the street. The human moment is frozen at the point of a technical question. The woman, and the body politic of an imposed nation, waits as the necroscopic machine checks on a technicality: 'Is the potential risk neutralized, or does it still present a threat?'

Certainly this act of technological mediation ameliorates risk for the unseen soldiers. However, at the same time it also dehumanizes the threat and safely objectifies the 'enemy'. No one mourns the dead person--not even the bystander. There is no rite of passage to mark the passing of life from his body. The emotional power of the photograph works off that very contradictory abstraction, contrasting the post-human intervention with the banal humanity of an old woman engaged in one of the necessary transactions of everyday life. It just so happens that she wants to cross a street where someone has been killed. The photograph thus subjectively counterposes instrumental mediation, human mortality and quotidian necessity, even as it carries this condensed moment of tragedy to us, the newspaper readers thousands of kilometres away--mediated tragedy, breakfast toast and momentary effect. To the extent that the photograph still works emotionally, we do not live in a post-human world. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the lines between the human and the means of technical mediation are being blurred. Every time that instruments of the abstract war-machine are used--even if ostensibly to protect us--or every time we glance at yet another image of violence and the emotional effect is diminished by even a shade, we are allowing our world to be overlaid by a strengthening level of the post-human.

Just as the image invokes a tension between the technologized post-human and the mortal human, this article works across the same field of concern. It addresses, in particular, the tension between the rationalized deployment of technologies of death and the putative motivation of their use to project the 'humanitarian' values of liberty and security. I will argue three main points. First, I suggest that the hope of 'freedom from fear', defined in its broadest sense, has been drawn into a tragic association with a new kind of war-machine. (1) Second, I suggest that the techniques and technologies of the war-machine are built upon a generalizing practice of increasingly abstract engagement, both physically, in terms of the nature of the delivery of force, and emotionally, in terms of how we relate to those against whom the force is being directed. The widening war on terrorism threatens to carry us towards a condition where we are dangerously abstracted from those defined as 'Other'--terrorists, warlords, mullahs, and children overboard. This process of abstracting the Other has long been with us ideologically, but it has become qualitatively more dangerous as the processes of technical mediation have compounded the possibilities of controlling, killing and knowing from a distance. This is further compounded by the way in which we vacillate between active paranoid fear of the Other and passive acceptance of the machine that promises to moderate that fear.

In the third main thrust of the discussion I suggest that in the context of the War on Terror the abstract war-machine is being developed with the intention of projecting a totalizing effect. While total control is by definition impossible, and the unwieldy machines of 'totalizing effect' have a tendency to generate chaos rather than calm, the resources of the war-machine are being generalized across both the international and the domestic spheres with the goal of total control. This is the other side of the promise to win the War on Terror.

The Multiplier Effect of Terror and the Face of the 'Other'

We now fear potentially threatening strangers in ways that lead us to consent compliantly to the deployment of a permanent war-machine across an undefined theatre of war. We now countenance technologies of violence that kill from high in the sky, and special forces that operate secretly across the ground, forces from above and below especially trained to operate in those undefined zones where no war has been declared and civilians and social infrastructure are targeted as often as are combatants. Although this process has historical roots in the twentieth century going back to Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under the cover of this War on Terror a new stage of 'humanitarian' state terror has been extended, with a devastating multiplier effect. How has this consent taken hold? Alongside the image of the necrosopic robotic, let me present another image, an image that we are supposed to recognize as dehumanized evil: the pudgy face of the Serbian politician, Slobodan Milosevic. Along with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, he is presented as one of the reasons that the new totalizing military machine is necessary.

I recently sat in the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and watched the section of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic pertaining to a little village in Kosovo called Racak. (2) In that village a massacre of forty-five persons occurred, and, as I will discuss later, part of its importance lies in the fact that NATO seized upon the massacre as a turning point in its decision to bomb Serbia and Kosovo. (3)

Slobodan Milosevic sits to one side of the Court Room No. 1, acting as his own defence. He sits alone, except...