First we take Damascus
by Sam Kriss
Donald Trump ordered his attack on Syria because of something he saw on TV. The world is full of people like him: old, shabby, pompous; people who know everything because they learned it all from somewhere, people who function as exit nodes for the vast extraorganic network of information that chatters across oceans and ping-pongs through outer space, people who form the anuses of the system of images, excreting their content back into the world of things, people who repeat everything they see on TV. Every suburban bus stop shelters a Donald Trump, some smugly witless man of the world who knows what he knows and knows it better than you, some tyrant-in-waiting ready at any moment to vomit up the whole of the received wisdom in one splattering stream, and then act like they’re in possession of some special knowledge because they’re able to do so. The only difference is that when Donald Trump blathers from the TV, the TV takes notice: he repeats what it says, it repeats what he says. Donald Trump is the network whorling in on itself; the system of careful mediation finally splayed out in the mud, legs out, back twisted, licking its own arsehole.
The media was kind to Trump’s attack on Syria. Every pompous outlet that has spent the last five months screaming incessantly about the threat to democracy, the inevitable deaths and the terror of wars, had nothing but applause as soon as the wars and the deaths actually got going. A fleshy and dangerous idiot, a vulgarian, an imbecile – until those first perfect screaming shots of Tomahawk missiles being fired were broadcast – that’s our guy, you show them Donny! This is when, as Fareed Zakaria put it on CNN, Trump ‘became the president.’ And he really is presidential now, because the president is a totemic war-chief, the bloated repository of every male fantasy that had to be repressed, someone whose only job is to look like they could kill a hundred people in the morning and pose for a photoshoot with their dogs in the afternoon. Never mind the deaths or the uncertain repercussions; Trump’s strike was utterly squalid and utterly ignoble, some fattened toddler idly shitting out molten steel into the parched graveyard that used to be Syria, saving nobody, helping nobody, thoughtless and obscene. Kill a few of their guys, teach them a lesson, it’s common sense. And all the sophisticates and strategists applaud – stricken by half-hearted guilt, of course; after all, you still wouldn’t want to have the man round for dinner. They write their long justificatory exegeses on the timeliness of the act, bringing out every little rhetorical trick of the educated ruling classes, because all their moral angst is also from comic books, and cinema, and TV.
On NBC, Brian Williamss, ranting himself into ecstasy, quoted Leonard Cohen: I am guided by the beauty of our weapons. What weapons guide? Cohen wasn’t singing about clubs or spears or missiles, but ideology, culture, and fame. Mediation. Whether he knew it or not, what Brian Williams was saying had nothing to do with the spotlit plumes of white smoke rising from the US Navy vessels in the Mediterranean. The beautiful weapon was himself. the beautiful weapon was TV.
Beyond the fiddly cloisters of the media intellectuals, why do Americans love their wars so much? Because war is the only workable substitute for being able to turn off the TV. Wars happen for the same grim and venal reasons that have always made the rich massacre the poor, but every other weapon is now subordinated to the screens, the nightly news and the outrage on Twitter. The media transmits the relentless horror of the world, sliced up into edible segments: here’s a problem, here’s a tragedy, here’s an atrocity, here’s something else. Chemical weapons, starvation, murder, war. All of it is shrink-wrapped and isolated; you can never really find out why this is happening, no more than you could really learn the long sad stories behind every neatly packaged item on the supermarket shelves. They don’t even need to lie, although they do that too; the propaganda is in the medium itself. And the ethical response to all this diffuse suffering, charging at your face out of nowhere, is no longer why is this happening? but we have to make it stop. Anything is permissible if it’ll just make this go away. There’s no better example than the 2000 film Rules of Engagement: our heroic Marines are called in to defend the US Embassy in Yemen from an angry crowd outside, and all the time they’re there we can constantly hear their endless and repetitive chants, and the camera flashes between shots to glimpses of furious mouths with terrible third-world teeth, furious, inhuman, a slow torture, until the good patriotic viewer is begging our heroes to just shut them up. After the Marines fire into the crowd, there’s a moment of perfect silence. Bliss.
The attack on Syria will not make its war go away. Every primly disgusted apologia for the attack is a travesty. So Assad should be able to use chemical weapons with impunity? So we should do nothing? See how that we slips in there, almost unnoticed. Is this the same we that killed 56 Syrian civilians in Manbij last year, and then 46 in rural Aleppo, and then nearly 300 innocent Iraqis in Mosul? The we that turned the Korean peninsula into rubble and carnage because the people there wanted a better life, and then Indochina, and then the Middle East; the one that’s currently engaged in starving millions in Yemen? What happened to Libya, after we were told we had a responsibility to save the civilians there too? This isn’t ‘whataboutery,’ but a simple question: when judgement and punishment are carried out by the same people, who gets to judge? If the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun then it is monstrous, cynical, and murderous – but the ability to punish monstrous states seems to belong only to the most powerful; in other words, the most monstrous, the most cynical, and the most violent. But all it needs is a we – a word reaching through the screen to swaddle you up in it – for the great roving predator of the world, dripping with blood from every pore, to become something else: the international community, the ones who must intervene, to protect the children.
The next attack won’t stop the war in Syria either, or the next one. That’s not what these things are for. The response from the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges was instructive. Bomb Assad, he said, and then bomb Isis. And when that leaves what was once a functioning society in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham? ‘Then we go and get them too.’ After all, if every Syrian is dead, then the war is finally over. Their suffering is immense, but it’s not their suffering that matters: it’s the suffering of the viewer, at home, heartbroken as they watch the carnage playing out onscreen. It doesn’t matter who does it, and it doesn’t matter how it’s done, but we need to turn it off forever.
Because it is not an American or America. The greed of a human mind and need ot itself that human can swipe any thing comes in his way. Wickedness has taken the faith of innocent people and display wrong ideas to prove that
Hey look I am right. This right or wrong game never ends.i hope I put dos and dons are important then greed can take us so far one day wicked one will wait and cry on his own grave.. India is suffering from same injury that has been done by ghandi and his generation ,still,new prime minster is another wicked one who is playing under the faith Hinduism then people in a stage fight each other. This is just a over view of faithful and wicked can do
Very good read. Can you recommend some literature on this topic of humanitarian interventionism vs. flat out imperialism?
He’s somewhat unpopular among communists, but Chomsky is always good on that distinction (there isn’t really one).
https://chomsky.info/199401__02/
Richard Seymour – The Liberal Defence of Murder – addresses humanitarian intervention as a smokescreen for imperialism
Sadly, beyond everything you say above, I think, real estate mogul Trump’s decision to bomb the airbase was, in the end, simply a distraction to get the reality TV viewers minds off the Russia investigation. A tap on the shoulder to get everyone to look the other way. It’s vile. He’s reprehensible. There really are no words. Although yours covered quite a bit. Thanks.
Wow, such a great read.
Wow. An excellent read.
The essay suggests that television constitutes for the viewer a “we”, which is to say an audience. But the function of TV is to monitor events, like a security camera in a hallway or the monitor attached to a cardiogram as you lay in a hospital bed. The alternative to watching is not turning it off but switching channels, and the nature of the medium is exactly to deny the possibility of an audience (as there once was an audience for drama in a theater). Instead of a “we” TV constitutes the “I” – removed, silent and in the dark, each viewer shut in his or her living room or bedroom, alone. TV provides the assurance that there is a world out there, which assurance is provided by the fact that something is happening, although it has nothing to do with me. Anyway, thoughtful writing.
Very well written, it was only a matter of time before Trump made military matters worse. A manipulative bully and clever liar, thinks he’s God. I’m no pessimist, but within several weeks of administration he’s already meddling and manipulating where he shouldn’t be.
Whatever happened to “making America great again?” I got the impression he was supposed to be focusing on the American people… The people he represents, the people who have no choice but to tolerate him and watch his ego try to rule the world…
Britain is already “onside” playing the role of lap dog. “Yes sir, No sir.” Here we go again…
Pessimism doesn´t come into it, realism does.
Trump was forced to do it. Deep state is way too deep.
All these media “Hail Caesars” for Trumps “macho” Syrian airstrikes are sick That he’s now “Presidential” One media pundit said he was glad we now had John Wayne in WH No thought for civilians killed In fact-no thought full stop No thought for consequences Just blind triumphalism Mu guess is that Trump wanted to distract from domestic troubles and his increasingly low ratings t To appear “strong leader” & “fearless” Tragically – it has worked for the majority Heartening there are also many who see this for what it is-
I think Nietzsche’s outrage against the (Christian) ‘democratic prejudice’ of ressentiment, from the Genealogy, gives an apposite take on the ethical status of the aforementioned ‘we’.
Thanks for another great piece, another bit of rare sensibility…
SC
Speculation is fun, but I do like the writing. (Lots of big words.)
Premise is unprovable.
Main point is speculative.
Conclusion is somewhat correct.
Excellent. The fury is palpable. More cynical airstrikes to no purpose for poorly informed political right wing supporters at home to suck on. Sigh. It may be that Assad ordered this attack, but really? Is he really so stupid as to do something with close to zero military advantage?
Might have been better to try to figure out what happened first, but as someone has commented here, it’s about rousing the dumbo supporters with more costly fireworks which verge on the useless in a military context anyway. But what do the dumbos in the Stetson and pick-up bars care?
I sense either a) the cold dead hands of Wahhabist-Salafist extremism or b) A dreadful “Moscow Central” arrangement here, as no doubt will some other cynics on different sides of the political divide. In fact the very perceptive Scott Adams of Dilbert fame (no lefter he!!) has already said as much.
The Salafs are like 17th Century Christian religious extremists only worse by a factor of about 10 and with modern technology and Saudi oil cash. They “did” 9/11 and will continue. Vlad the gangster thinks he needs a war with them to survive and for HIS home popularity.
Russia has a missile defence system in place that can stop tomahawks. Why did they turn it off? Because Syria is not supposed to have WMDs. Because Russia is in bed with Tehran.
This bloodiest of proxy holy hydrocarbon wars between Arab Saudi Sunni & Persian Shia is just absolute hellfire to become involved in. With both so-called completely amoral “strongman” authoritarians Vlad (assistance and closer link to Persian southern oilfields) and Erdogan (take as much of Kurdistan and northern Iraqi oilfields on pretext) looking to profit from the fallout and not giving one tiny single piece of crap about “dead children”, it’s just not worth it. You might as well bomb parts of Riyadh and Jeddah. Now that Vlad has the US doing some pointless bombing of 1 airfield in 26 he has some sort of high ground he thinks and pretexts and cover for Ukraine.
Even Rex-The-Tex has had to come out and appear to mildly and reluctantly criticise his Russian friends for the sake of decent form! After all, his deals for Exxon et al on Arctic oil reserves have got to hold if the desperate oilmen in their failing industry are to survive long term. Environmentally hideous high-risk Arctic hydrocarbons are required for the tanking Russian economy and Exxon-Mobil’s future survival and profits. Once Assad is under control via Russia and Tehran, there will be a “resolution” on whether Europe can have Qatari North Field or Persian Gulf natural gas via the eventual pipeline planned through Syria. two options. A Tehran Shia version or a Qatari Sunni one. Take your pick! If Qatar beds down with Vlad and distances from Saudi, maybe both! Recent deals between Qatar and Russia suggest this may be happening. Check out “Glencore”. Old BP player Tony Hayward at play.
And still we have people saying “arms” should be sold in large quantities to the sweet and lovely regime in Riyadh for profit and still we have people insisting that their oil be bought. Sigh. It really is time to disengage from Saudi Arabia as should have been done long ago. It is time to see Russia for what it has become and time to accelerate the transition to clean, green energy. Then these bleeding oil proxy wars can stop and we can all get a bit of fucking peace.
War is profitable, that’s why. Incredible your writing skills. Thanks for sharing and all the best
Yep, it’s all about the profit. Maybe a bit about the good publicity – 45 is desperate for it. Great read!
There is some truth in what you are saying, but what is your end goal for people when they read you blog? To become more angry at our president? But think. We are not united when we hate or dislike something. So again, what is your goal? To create unity or separation? Because everyone, no matter what they post, has some effect on that question. I applaud you on your ability to express your own beliefs, but do you want unity, or just more disagreement and separation? Thank you.
of course i want more disagreement and separation, why on earth would i want unity within the abstract, antagonistic collective of the nation-state?
[…] writer Sam Kriss wrote about the insipid media response to a recent US military strike on Syria: “War is the only workable substitute for being able to turn off the TV.” The visceral human response to suffering is how do we make this stop?, but for the media-glutted […]