The War of Images

Baudrillard, as would be expected, addresses the concept of image in the War of Terror in the article War Porn.

“The worst is that it all becomes a parody of violence, a parody of the war itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of the abjection of war which is unable to be simply war, to be simply about killing, and instead turns itself into a grotesque infantile reality-show, in a desperate simulacrum of power.”

Brilliantly, he addresses the Abu Ghraib images:

“Truth but not veracity: it does not help to know whether the images are true or false. From now on and forever we will be uncertain about these images. Only their impact counts in the way in which they are immersed in the war. There is no longer the need for “embedded” journalists because soldiers themselves are immersed in the image – thanks to digital technology, the images are definitively integrated into the war. They don¹t represent it anymore; they involve neither distance, nor perception, nor judgment. They no longer belong to the order of representation, nor of information in a strict sense. And, suddenly, the question whether it is necessary to produce, reproduce, broadcast, or prohibit them, or even the “essential” question of how to know if they are true or false, is “irrelevant”.

Of the infamous photo of the hooded prisoner with electrodes on his outstretched arms, Baudrillard comments:

This masquerade crowns the ignominy of the war – until this travesty, it was present in this most ferocious image (the most ferocious for America), because it was most ghostly and most “reversible”: the prisoner threatened with electrocution and, completely hooded, like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, crucified by its ilk. It is really America that has electrocuted itself. (War Porn)

 AbuGhraib

 It is worth considering this image in greater depth.

Baudrillard notes that the man is hooded like the KKK, and then crucified by them.

If the image evokes the KKK, is it the horror of them – the violence and racism – or some sense of justice? For the hood is not just the KKK – it is also the burka. The repeated rhetoric, used to justify the war on the Taliban in Afghanistan, is that the Muslim man imprisons the woman. Here, therefore, the liberators pull the burka over the brutalising man. Are the KKK hood and the burka now somehow interrelated in racial tones of supposed justice? And what of the crucifiction? Unlike Christ on the cross, this man is faceless and dressed in black. His crucifiction is thus a mockery, a travesty. He cannot look to the heavens or cast his light on his followers. He is darkness swallowed up by darkness.

My feeling, therefore, in tune with Baudrillard’s, is that these images provided more than simple moral outrage – they provided a degree of titillation shot through with a sense, somehow, of justice. The US soldiers or MPs at Abu Ghraib, in addition to venting their own (homoerotic) sexual fantasies upon the male prisoners, and in addition to constructing very carefully the precise form of sexual humiliation that would most disgust the prisoners, in this particular image, they have created their own particular, culturally and religiously-bound form of punishment. A dark-skinned non-Christian wife-beater is ironically hooded in a KKK mask that doubles as a burka, placed in public view on a soap-box, and is then crucified.

Millions of Iraqi children starved during the US embargo. Thousands of Iraqis dead in bombardment. The only news that really was any news were the images of Abu Ghraib. Is it because these images embodied greater meaning than simple photos of dead children?

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