Terrorist Transgressions: Gender and the Visual Culture of the Terrorist 9780755621491, 9781780767017

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List of Illustrations

1.1 Still from a video sent by an American fighter jet to a German tactical operations centre at Mazar-i-Sharif in the night of 4 September 2009, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 November 2009 18 1.2 Still from a video filmed inside the compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan shortly after Osama Bin Laden was killed on 2 May 2011, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 May 2011 19 1.3 Official White House photo by Pete Souza showing US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, as they receive an update on Operation Geronimo in the Situation Room of the White House on 1 May 2011. Source: The White House flickr 20 1.4 Hostage photograph of Claude Fly seen reading in a cell near Montevideo, Uruguay, released by the Tupamaros to the press in October 1970, republished in Claude Fly, No Hope But God, New York, 1973 23 1.5 Hostage photograph of Hanns Martin Schleyer, released by the German RAF to news agencies on 6 September 1977 24 1.6 Hostage photograph of Idalgo Macchiarini, released by the Italian Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) to the news agency ANSA on 3 April 1972 25 1.7 Hostage photograph of Hanns Martin Schleyer, released by the German RAF to news agencies on 26 September 1977 26 1.8 Video showing Osama Bin Laden inside the compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan, released to news agencies by the US government on 13 May 2011 31 vii

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1.9 Still from a propaganda video released by the German Interior Ministry and shown in the German news report Tagesschau on 28 March 2012 32 2.1 Women in the Armed Forces during World War I: Russia, 1917. Photographer: David Miller, Imperial War Museum, Q 106252 44 5a Xenofon Kavvadias 4 images 100–103 5b Carolina Caycedo 4 images 106–109 8.1 Anders Behring Breivik 142 8.2 Anders Behring Breivik 143 8.3 Anders Behring Breivik 145 8.4 Anders Behring Breivik 149 8.5 Anders Behring Breivik 150 9.1 Gunman among gravestones. Source: Rex Features 165 9.2 Commemorative mural to Michael Stone Source: Bill Rolston 167 9.3 Michael Stone photographed during the press conference 168

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Contributors’ Biographies

Alex Adams is a PhD candidate currently completing his doctorate at Newcastle University. His thesis, “What Can Be Infinitely Destroyed is What Can Infinitely Survive”: Literary and Filmic Representations of Political Torture from Algiers to Guantánamo, examines the continuing presence in the post9/11 period of colonial political discourses, representations and justifications regarding political torture. He has a particular interest, for example, in the cultural genealogy of the ticking bomb scenario. The thesis is a materialist analysis, placing emphasis on the concrete effects of the representation of political torture and working towards the framing of politically effective, conceptually compelling and aesthetically interesting anti-torture representations. He has presented his research widely in the UK and internationally, and recently co-organized an international event examining the representation of under-theorized disciplining subjects such as torturers and prison guards. His broader research interests include political and critical theory, masculinities, popular culture and film. Andreas Behnke is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Reading. His research interests include international political theory, critical security studies, critical war studies, and the role of aesthetics and fashion in global politics. His recent publications focus on the relationship between liberalism and war. Carolina Caycedo engages with issues and contexts that affect a broad public on an everyday level. In her work, art functions as a pretext for offering up utopian models to inhabit a world in which individuals and communities are increasingly subject to commodification, exploitation and discrimination. For Caycedo, the site of artistic experience extends beyond the studio or the exhibition space into the wider world in which the artist lives and moves. The result is an art that consists in the creation not of objects for passive aesthetic contemplation, but of opportunities for cooperation and conversation among a broad array of individuals and communities. She received a 2012 DAAD ix

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artist residency in Berlin; in 2009 a cultural exchange international grant from Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; in 2002 a cultural diversity award from London Arts; and in 2001 a Year of the Artist residency from the UK Arts Council. Graham Dawson is Professor of Historical Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton, England. He is the author of Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994) and Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (2007), as well as numerous articles. He is also co-editor of Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors (1999/2004), Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory (2000/2004) and Contested Spaces: Sites, Representations and Histories of Conflict (2007). Alongside continuing his work on the Irish peace process and the Troubles in Ireland and Britain, his current interests lie in the cultural dimensions of dealing with the past within conflict transformation processes, involving questions of memory, representation, imaginative geography, historical justice and human rights. Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and a visiting research fellow in the Centre for Research in the Social Sciences at the University of Huddersfield. He holds an MA and PhD from Queen’s University Belfast and has written extensively about terrorism and insurgency. His recent books include Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945 (Manchester University Press, 2012) and Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Mainstream/Random House, 2014). Dominique Grisard is a Swiss National Science Foundation fellow at Columbia University and City University of New York Graduate Center. Grisard teaches Gender Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She has published on the pink triangle and the use of pink in prisons, princess boys and the pinkification and sexualization of girl culture, on female terrorists’ and political prisoners in 1970s Switzerland, and on gender theory more generally. She is the author of Gendering Terror (2011), a history of (counter)terrorism in 1970s Switzerland and Germany, and the editor of three anthologies on gender theory: Verschieden Sein (2013), Gender in Motion (2007), and Gender and Knowledge (2004). Grisard is presently working on a book-length project: Pink weaves a history of gender and sexuality through and around the colour pink.

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c o n t r i b u t o r ’s b i o g r a p h i e s

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Xenofon Kavvadias graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fine Art and regularly shows in England and Greece. He currently lives in the UK. Charlotte Klonk is Professor of Art History and New Media at the Institute of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Previously, she was a research fellow at Christ Church Oxford and Lecturer at the History of Art department at the University of Warwick. She has received several prizes and fellowships, for example at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown MA. Her publications include, among others, Science and the Perception of Nature (Yale University Press, 1998), Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000 (Yale University Press, 2009) and, with Michael Hatt, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester University Press, 2005). She currently researches the history, role and dynamic of images in acts of terror. Gabriel Koureas is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. His research and publications concentrate on issues of memory, conflict and masculinity. He is the author of Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930 (Ashgate, 2007) and recent publications on terrorism include: ‘Masculinities, Ethnicities, the Terrorist in Cyprus (1950–9) and the War on Terror (2001-)’, in A. Carden-Coyne (ed.), Gender and Conflict Since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp.124–137 and ‘Visualising the Invisible. Constructing and Remembering the Image of the Terrorist during the War of Independence in Cyprus 1955–1959’, in S. Shraud and C. Hikel (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht (Campus Verlag, 2012), pp.257–278. He was the co-convenor of the AHRC-funded network Terrorist Transgressions. Sue Malvern is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Reading. She has published Modern Art, Britain and the Great War. Witnessing, testimony and remembrance (2004) alongside numerous articles on art and war, museums, feminism and contemporary art. Recent publications include ‘Femininity, feminism and the representation of torture’ (Liberal Democracies at War. Conflict and Representation, ed. Knapp and Footitt, 2013) and ‘Zum schwierigen Verhältnis zwischen Feminismus und Terrorismus: Die Darstellung der Terroristen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst’ (Terrorismus und Geschlecht. Politische Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Schraut

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and Hikel, 2012). She was the co-convenor of the AHRC-funded network Terrorist Transgressions. Stephen Morton is Professor in English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Southampton. His publications include States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature, and Law (Liverpool University Press, 2013); Terror and the Postcolonial, co-edited with Elleke Boehmer (Blackwell, 2009); Foucault in an Age of Terror (Palgrave, 2008) co-edited with Stephen Bygrave; Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Palgrave, 2007); Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Polity, 2006); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge, 2003); as well as articles in Textual Practice, Public Culture, New Formations, Parallax, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Interventions: An International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Sylvia Schraut is Acting Professor at the University of the Bundeswehr, Munich. She teaches modern German and European History. Her research interests include social history, the history of elites, the history of cartography, political violence and gender. Recent publications on the last topic include: ‘Terrorismus and Geschichtswissenschaft’, in Alexander Spencer, Alexander Kocks and Kai Harbrich (eds), Terrorismusforschung in Deutschland (= ZFAS Sonderheft 1, 2011), S. 99–122 and with Christine Hikel Terrorismus und Geschlecht. Politische Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (2012), ‘Charlotte Corday and Karl Ludwig Sand, Populäre Repräsentation von Geschlecht und politischer Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Elisabeth Cheauré, Sylvia Paletschek and Nina Reusch (eds) Geschlecht und Geschichte in populären Medien (Bielefeld, 2013).

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Introduction Sue Malvern and Gabriel Koureas

In 2006 the US Army released its first counterinsurgency manual for 20 years. Field Manual 3–24 was in part a response to the failure of the 2003 Iraq invasion to secure stability in the region and a recognition of the limitations of ‘shock and awe’ tactics. It also followed the shame of disclosures about abuses carried out by the US army at Abu Ghraib prison and attempted to project a more humanitarian image of US military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Declaring that cultural knowledge was an essential component in military occupation, the manual also established what Derek Gregory terms a rudimentary ‘hermeneutics of counterinsurgency’ when it stated that ‘American ideas of what is “normal” or “rational” are not universal’.1 Its opening chapter was headed with an epigraph attributed to a Special Forces Officer in Iraq: ‘Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare – it is the graduate level of war’.2 Accordingly, FM 3–24 was peppered with cultural references including T. E. Lawrence’s role in orchestrating the Arab Revolt in the First World War and his 1917 ‘27 Articles’, annotated in the bibliography in the manner of an undergraduate reading list: ‘Much of the best of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in easily digestible bullet points’.3 Patrick Porter counts 88 mentions of ‘culture’ and 90 of ‘cultural’ in the manual’s 282 pages.4 It also flags up its academic credentials particularly citing anthropology, sociology and political science; after the manual was downloaded 2 million times within two months of being posted on the internet, the University of Chicago Press published an edition with a new introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr 1

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Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. She claimed the manual aimed to allay American popular anxieties about the ethics and costs of American actions in Iraq for a nation that was attempting to heal wounds caused by its failings and abuses in combat, comparable to domestic unease about the Vietnam War. Given that it was widely assumed that the US lost the Vietnam War because popular support for the conflict had collapsed, FM 3–24 was as important for securing consent for the US’s continuing engagements in the Middle East as it was for revising military doctrine.5 The 1990s had been dominated by what is sometimes termed the Revolution in Military Affairs, or RMA, when the advent of new information technologies generated the means to conduct war at a distance and gave rise to terms such as ‘surgical strikes’, ‘smart bombs’, ‘drones’ and ‘networkcentric warfare’. New technologies detached the deployment of weaponry from their violent and destructive effects. The visual systems this gave rise to and their ethical implications are discussed here in Charlotte Klonk’s essay ‘Image Terror’. When Sarah Sewall subtitled her introduction to FM 3–24 ‘A Radical Field Manual’ she was echoing a claim made by numerous military advisers and commentators that the cultural turn in warfare was a counterrevolution in military affairs. FM 3–24 was a culture-centric complement to the RMA and it also provoked protest against a new militarization of the humanities, for example, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual edited by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.6 Culture-centric warfare was also described as armed social work, a term coined by David Kilcullen, senior adviser to General Petraeus, commander of the coalition forces in Iraq. Kilcullen devised an update to T. E. Lawrence titled ‘Twenty-eight Articles, the fundamentals of company-level counterinsurgency’ addressed to the junior officer preparing for deployment by reading classic texts in counterinsurgency by British and French colonial experts including Lawrence and watching Black Hawk Down and The Battle of Algiers.7 Gregory terms the cultural turn in late modern warfare a ‘military dispositif or ‘a heterogeneous assemblage of discourses and objects, practices and powers distributed across different but networked sites’.8 If FM 3–24 represents a revisionist strategy for military affairs then its cultural turn is belated compared to the revisions in academic disciplines in the humanities it seeks to recruit. Culture-centric warfare however is distinguished by its dependence on visuality. FM 3–24 addresses a crisis in the legitimacy of military intervention which culture-centric warfare aims to remedy. As Nicolas Mirzoeff puts it, legitimacy must be made literally and metaphorically visible.

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Legitimacy is projected particularly through a militarization of visualized media. Mirzoeff exemplifies this by citing the widespread distribution of video footage and photographs of Saddam Hussein’s medical examination after his discovery and capture by US troops. Such images were a means to visualize a counterinsurgency strategy described in the field manual in medicalized terms: ‘With good intelligence, counterinsurgents are like surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping other vital organs intact’.9 For Mirzoeff the obscene counterpart to this imagery was the illicit camera phone footage of Hussein’s execution demonstrating that the former dictator had been reduced to bare life.10 In 1994 W. J. T. Mitchell described a transformation in the arts and humanities as ‘the pictorial turn’ or the emergence of a generalized anxiety about visual representation which discomforted intellectual enquiry. The pictorial turn followed up Richard Rorty’s claim for new forms of critical reflection in the arts and humanities known as the linguistic turn. Writing in the aftermath of the First Gulf War 1990–91, which was a paradigm for a conflict conducted under the emerging conditions of the RMA, Mitchell named his pictorial turn as an ancient fear of images, including iconoclasm, idolatry and iconophilia, coming into play with new visual technologies in video, digital reproduction and a nascent internet that appeared to grant unprecedented power to the visual image. Textuality or visual competence in reading the image was unable to explain this new power.11 More recently Mitchell has warned against fetishizing the pictorial turn and argues for a dialectical concept of visual culture which needs to explore not the social construction of the visual field but ‘the visual construction of the social field’.12 Subsequently David Campbell picked up Mitchell’s observations to argue that visual economies might be more productively examined as performative. He describes the performativity of visual economies as a mechanism for examining how ‘the visual field is both made possible by and productive of relations of power’.13 Such visual economies describe the strategic role of visuality in modern war and they demonstrate the visual performance of the social world.14 Insurgencies operate in situations where the distribution of power between the insurgent and the authorities is unequal, and consequently insurgents frequently use acts of terror. The boundaries between definitions of the terrorist and the insurgent are imprecise and in particular contexts the terms may be interchangeable. ‘Terrorist’ is notoriously difficult to define and the literature on terrorism reflects anxieties and ambiguities about its boundaries.15 Modern discourses of the terrorist date from 1945, coinciding with the period

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of decolonization, as Aaron Edwards argues in this volume. Discourses about the terrorist were given greater urgency after 2001 following attacks on America, London, Madrid and elsewhere. The horror experienced in Western societies was the appearance of a new sense of the vulnerability of the body politic, and therefore of the modern self with its direct dependency on security and property. The terrorist has been constructed as the epitome of transgression against economic resources and moral, physical and political boundaries. As Jameson put it ‘the image of the “terrorist” ... is one of the privileged forms in which an ahistorical society imagines radical social change’, displacing older images of criminals, revolutionaries and even the veteran.16 Although terrorism and its contexts, histories and forms, has been the focus of intense academic activity in recent years, especially in the fields of politics and international relations (IR), cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. Yet terrorism is dependent on spectacle and the topic is subject to forceful exposure in popular media. Moreover, dissident organizations produce images of the terrorist, for example as martyr, hero or avenger. Agencies, including national authorities, involved in combating terrorism, need to visualize the terrorist in order to give identity to the threat. As well as neglecting the question of cultural representations, in general, literature on the terrorist is also blind to the question of gender, or more precisely it assumes a masculine subject. This blindness or indifference to gender also permeates the literature on visuality and war cited above by Mitchell, Mirzoeff, Gregory and others. Terrorist acts are seen as threatening Western masculinities because they are the ultimate manifestations of hypermasculinity, a willingness to give up one’s life in an act of powerful violence, to serve a perceived greater goal. As a result, in counterterrorist strategies the body of the male terrorist needs to be made invisible, discredited and de-masculinized. In Northern Ireland, hypermasculine figures in balaclavas pointing guns are painted on nationalist houses; in the UK press the face and body of Abu Hamza Al-Masri, called the ‘The Hook’, is made the emblem of terror’s ugliness in contrast to the normative appearance of terror’s victims; Osama Bin Laden has been demonized in popular culture as effeminate and sexually depraved. Gender theorist Judith Butler argues that gender is produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, and this ritual is socially compelled in part by the force of compulsory heterosexuality. Just as Campbell and others have described visuality as performative, gender identity also depends on performative acts

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that give the ‘illusion of naturalness’.17 Indeed, this illusion is used to establish what sociologist Robert Connell calls ‘hegemonic masculinity’, and is expressed within a web of power relations that are in a continual state of flux and transformation.18 Writing in relation to the French colonial wars of independence, Frantz Fanon demonstrated the ways in which political resistance was founded upon a reconstruction of masculinism and a restructuring of gender relations.19 Such restructuring has grave consequences for post-colonial and post-conflict nationalisms in countries that adopt masculinist discourses to restore what is perceived as a damaged masculinity and a loss of national honour, as well as to promote extreme political ideas. However restructuring masculinities also offers possibilities of reconciliation. As Graham Dawson argues in this collection, masculine identities in Northern Ireland underwent a re-assessment. This involved re-negotiating the gendered identities of the terrorist and the soldier hero which were internalized, negotiated and often contested in the formation of subjectivities during the conflict. For Dawson, these identities have an afterlife in the internal world of the psyche for both ex-combatants and victims and survivors of violence. While masculinities are fluid and variable, definitions of terrorism are equally malleable. Common principles nevertheless frame terrorism’s politics as pre-mediated, directed at civilians, and committed by non-governmental agencies or organizations. The goal of terrorism is regarded as inspiring fear and, most importantly, that terror precedes both rational calculation and emotion.20 However, as Stephen Morton has argued, this focus on the emotional and aesthetic connotation of terror is to the ‘detriment of the geopolitical context of its production’. Most importantly, for Morton, the relativist argument that ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’, ignores the fundamental point that terrorism is the ground upon which political sovereignty and freedom was and is defined in colonial history and in the present.21 Sylvia Schraut’s contribution to this collection demonstrates how gendered representations of the terrorist date from the French Revolution. She discusses how political violence is seen as transgressing accepted political and gender roles but most importantly, how even those who speak in favour of the terrorist usually follow the same gender conventions. Using terms such as heroes and martyrs both those who support and those who oppose the terrorist borrow their terms from a long Christian tradition. The images of the hero/ heroine and the martyr carry with them a historical legacy dating especially from an early modern tradition of gender concepts. As a result, according to

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Schraut, representations of the terrorist oscillate between gender-role transgressing and gender-role stabilizing because approval of politically motivated violence can only be formulated with reference to the representations and terms that accompany traditional gender perspectives. Issues of gender and terrorism are also closely linked with ideas of progress and civilization. Judith Butler has argued that hegemonic conceptions of progress are defined over and against a pre-modern temporality produced for the purposes of self-legitimation. Furthermore, ‘progressive’ politics relies on a conception of freedom that emerges through time and establishes a set of cultural norms. Debates around issues of terrorism and masculinity during the colonial wars of independence, and more recently the War on Terror, rely on such ideas of progress.22 Butler is referring to the images of torture that circulated from the Abu Ghraib prison in order to show the relationship between the hypermasculinity of the US army and that of the tortured populations of Iraqi prisoners. Sociologist Suki Ali argues that the signs of the barbarian become tools of the civilized, and the masculinities that are imagined are formed through conventional understandings of the ‘Orientalised Other’ in debates on terrorism.23 Alex Adams’ contribution in this collection discusses representations of torture on television (24) and literature (The Centurions) as a successful strategy for reasserting dominant codes of masculinity as white (colonial) heterosexuality coded through domesticity, the family unit and inviolable white women, and therefore for defusing the threat of terrorism. Forms of masculinity constructed within counterterrorist campaigns function as a guarantor of this privileged heterosexuality. Just as Schraut has demonstrated the persistence of Christian symbols in representations of the terrorist, one of the myths that Adams discusses is how ‘superior’ men are shown to suffer torture ‘well’, which depends on appropriating tropes from the tradition of religious martyrdom. The counterterrorist agent, when shown heroically enduring torture, establishes a superior masculinity to non-Western subjects through his ability to resist the dehumanizing power of torture. The representation of the terrorist is often associated with issues of spectacle, visibility and invisibility, as Mitchell investigated in his ‘The War of Images’ where images play a role in the perpetuation and ‘cloning’ of terror.24 However, as Andreas Behnke argues in this collection his viewpoint is limited to making terrorism an object of visualizations. A systematic analysis of visuality from within terrorism remains underdeveloped. Behnke’s in-depth iconographical analysis of Anders Behring Breivik’s self-promoting images

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demonstrates how his carefully orchestrated self-fashioning becomes the clo(w)ning of terror. Breivik’s self-images reveal the infinite possibilities that visuality can offer to both terrorist and counterterrorist campaigns for performing terror and more importantly for performing gender. Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, London (IWM), Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell’s art installation, entitled The House of Osama bin Laden (2003), is instructive in relation to the visibility of images in the war on terror and how terrorist transgressions can be made invisible. During 2002 the artists went to Afghanistan recording visits to, among other places, a murder trial in the Supreme Court of Kabul, the site of the statues of Buddha at Bamyan that were destroyed by the Taliban and, according to the IWM website, ‘after a long and dangerous journey, the former home of Osama bin Laden at Darurtah where he lived for a brief period in the late 1990s’.25 The images of the house are striking: empty rooms in semi-derelict houses, with some traces of the recent passing of human life. In both cases the body of the terrorist remains invisible, haunting the empty spaces with absent masculinity. The capture and death of Osama Bin Laden during a raid on his house in Pakistan presented some striking counter-visual representations which Klonk discusses in this volume. What was most striking, as Klonk argues, was the decision of US President Barack Obama not to allow the publication of postmortem images of Osama Bin Laden. The President justified his decision by arguing that graphic images of someone who was shot in the head could be used as propaganda tools or as incitement to further violence. Significantly, the President stated: ‘We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies’.26 Instead, the photographs and videos that the media were allowed to circulate were those of the empty house where Bin Laden was killed. Images demonstrated the force of the attack, with the walls of the house blown out, and the furniture and evidence of daily life scattered throughout the rooms. One photograph, however, captured the invisible terrorist through the eyes of the US administration: Peter Souza’s official photograph of President Obama with his staff watching ‘Operation Neptune Spear’ on-screen in the White House Situation Room, 1 May 2011. Whatever Obama and his colleagues were witnessing could not be seen by the audience of the photograph. Perhaps, those images will never be seen. Instead, the facial expressions, contractions and bodily postures of the US administration and military advisers acted as a mirror for the viewer. In a room full of men and just two women, it is the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who appears distressed, bringing her hand to her

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mouth as though silencing a scream. This silent scream appears like a haunting scream for the terrorist rendered invisible through the President’s decision not to publish the images. Interestingly, in the photograph President Obama appears small and withdrawn in the left corner, yet also surrounded by military men who signify the hegemony of American military masculinities over that of the first black American President. Thus the image also encapsulates an important instance of competing masculinities in American racial politics. The President ordered the attack, finally avenging 9/11 by killing Osama Bin Laden, which reinforced his masculinity within the United States during a period when his own image and popularity were deteriorating. However, the President was not presented as the main protagonist of the event. His masculinity needed to be contained, represented by his position in the corner of the image. Centre stage, however, was the military administration that executed the operation, appearing to reassert its authority and masculinity as the most important army in the world. In contrast to the President and to military masculinities, the depiction of Hillary Clinton – often regarded as a tough, masculinized woman – had to be played down. The gesture of shock she displays not only emphasizes the enormity of what is taking place on the screen, but also re-feminizes her image. Hence, this mass-distributed image orchestrates and performs both masculinities and femininities and, most indicatively, demonstrates their embodied gender performance through the invisible body of Osama Bin Laden, which was secreted away to be buried in the ocean, thus sealing its invisibility forever. Women have also always been active members of organizations classed as ‘terrorist’. If the term ‘terrorist’ is problematic, then the term ‘woman’ compounds the problem of definition. For Dorit Naaman writing about Palestinian women suicide bombers both terms represent ‘ideological expectations of performance’.27 When women commit acts of violence, for instance murder, discourse is paralysed. Belinda Morrissey investigated a set of case studies of women tried for murder and argued that female killers were only permitted their humanity if they could be represented as politically neutral and as victims.28 Women who commit acts of political violence are therefore paradoxical figures and cannot be accommodated to discourses about terrorism. Women terrorists are repeatedly discounted, assumed to lack agency or to be incapable of making political choices. They are described as acting from personal motives, to be hysterics or to be the dupes of their male lovers. For Robin Morgan, terrorist violence is inevitably patriarchal. She describes

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female members of the American Symbionese Liberation Front, famous for their kidnapping of the heiress Patty Hearst, as the ‘addicts of men who functioned as conductors of violence between men’.29 Dominique Grisard argues in this collection that generation also plays an important role in understanding the representation of female terrorists. By concentrating on the German Red Army Faction (RAF) she demonstrates that popular understanding of the Faction as a generation in revolt served to depict Meinhof, Ensslin and Mohnhaupt as neither unique nor novel but as part of a long history of violent women, thus deflecting analysis away from the specific circumstances of 1970s West Germany. Female terrorists were simultaneously given a history and written out of history. Sue Malvern’s contribution to this collection investigates this historically in order to argue for the double effect of being a female terrorist. She states that if terrorism is a transgressive act and terrorists transgress, then women involved in terrorism commit a double act of transgression, by also transgressing assumptions about gender. Women’s violence, because it contradicts the norms of gendered behaviour, is then perceived as more excessive than men’s, as a threat to masculinity; and it is frequently sexualized. The fear of women is repeatedly named as a fear of the female power to give life and to take it. The feminine is aligned with abjection because the permeability of the female body blurs the boundaries between self and other.30 The feminine abject produces myths of evil and dangerous women. Violent women are transformed into monsters expelled from society and compared to mythical monstrous women such as Medea. The psychoanalyst Karen Horney is often cited for her text ‘The Dread of Woman’, (1932). She lists, among others, as examples of male fear of women, Ulysses’ fear of the siren, the Sphinx who demands the forfeit of male lives, Kali dancing on the corpses of slain men, Samson robbed of his strength by Delilah, Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, Salome and the head of John the Baptist. Men attempt to free themselves from their dread of women by objectifying their fear. She writes: ‘It is not’, he says ‘that I dread her; it is that she herself is malignant, capable of any crime, a beast of prey, a vampire, a witch, insatiable in her desires. She is the very personification of what is sinister’.31 Carolina Caycedo’s series of drawings Criminal Women (2001– ongoing) portrays women who are criminals or who have been criminalized in stark graphic images on paper culled from photographs in popular media including newspapers, magazines, books and the net. The drawings, which are like a taxonomy of deviancy, are classified in five groups: Political Matters, Organized Crime and Common Delinquency, Out of this Century, Sexual

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Kicks and Killers. Grouped together the series offers contradictory readings. On the one hand they resemble police posters of ‘most wanted criminals’; on the other they look like assemblages of venerated heroines such as the groupings of photographs of Hollywood film stars in the foyers of cinemas or the portraits of distinguished company employees in the reception areas of corporations. Depicted in simple and clear lines with marker pens and coloured pencils, the images are instantly legible. Some portraits are drawn from mug-shots, for example Mary Cotton (Out of this Century), Britain’s first serial killer, or Judias Buenoano, an American con-woman executed in 1998 with her prison number: ‘Broward Correctional Institution Pembroke Pines, Fla 160663’ (Organized Crime and Common Deliquency). Others are taken from idealized self-portraits, such as Leila Khaled, member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian and famous for hijacking airlines in the 1960s and 70s (Political Matters). The viewer is provided with a key to identify individuals alongside a brief description of their acts. The portraits are often annotated with names and sometimes with hand-written descriptive details, for example: ‘Jihadist/Mujahid Suicide Bomber – British 7/7 bomb widow’ (Samantha Lewthwaite: Political Matters); ‘Gu Kalai- = suspended death sentence for murder of British business man. Her appearance in court raised suspicions about a body double’ (Killers); ‘SUSAN SMITH: murdered her two sons’. Sandra Avila Beltrán, a Mexican drug dealer, is portrayed in a drawing from a police photograph with marks indicating height on the wall behind her and annotated ‘SANDRA AVILA BELTRAN “La Reina del Pacífico” Reina de Reinas del Cartel de Sinaloa. the more beautiful the rose. the sharper the thorns’ (Organized Crime and Common Delinquency). All are single figures except one, a collective portrait of Pussy Riot, M. Alyokhina, N. Tolokonnikova and Y. Samutsevich (Political Matters). The series does not discriminate between women involved in acts of self-determination to challenge legal and political systems such as British Suffragettes and Dianne Pretty ‘terminally ill, wants her husband to assist her in her suicide’ (Political Matters) or women who have been convicted of crimes such as murder. All the portraits, including one of a masked Loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighter, emphasize the women’s eyes as seeing subjects. The section ‘Political Matters’ includes women who would be classed as terrorists, such as Sara Jane Olsen, member of the Symbionese Liberation Front, or Ulrike Meinhof, member of the Red Army Faction, but this section also includes right-wing women such as the Bosnian politician Biljana Plavšić, sentenced for genocide alongside feminist heroines such as militant Suffragettes. The artist describes the series

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as an exorcism of her own darkest feelings and perversions, acknowledging her own and the viewer’s fascination with monstrously evil women. The listing and display of an extensive catalogue of women vilified for criminal acts, for deviance and rebelliousness stretching back to the Greek mythological figure, Medea, also enables the viewer to identify with the women and to grant them agency, a feminist resistance to patriarchal constructions of these women as monsters. We have argued here for considering the terrorist, gender and the visual field as performative categories that are imbricated together in intricate ways. Sherif Waked’s video, Chic-Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, 2007, might be emblematic of these arguments. Chic-Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints is a seven-minute video where attractive male models on a catwalk approach the camera and demonstrate clothes with openings that reveal the torso, especially the midriff, or garments with zips and fastenings allowing clothes to be quickly removed to expose the body. The last section is a series of black and white stills taken at Israeli checkpoints showing Palestinian men lifting their clothes or stripping to demonstrate to Israeli soldiers that they are not carrying weapons. Gil Hochberg argues that the video shows how the practices of searching and stripping Palestinian men in order to protect Israeli citizens also ‘produce the Palestinian body both as a symbol of imminent danger (“the terrorist”) and as the object of complete subjugation lacking any political agency (“the occupied”)’.32 The video exposes Israeli checkpoints as sites for the performance of power that creates the terrorist suspect as a pretext for stripping the bodies of Palestinian men. But the way the video first recruits the spectator to view the male models performing their desirability and seductiveness and then places the spectator in the position of the soldier surveilling Palestinian men also exposes the perverse sexual charge in the encounter at the border crossing where Israeli soldiers ‘check out’ the Palestinian subject.33 In that sense, Waked’s video also exemplifies Jameson’s point that the ‘terrorist’ is a figure both feared and desired by the social order which produces it. The chapters gathered in this volume originated from a series of workshops and conferences held in 2011 and 2012, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to which we are grateful. Information about the network and workshops can be found on the project website: http://www.reading.ac.uk/art/research/ArtHistory/art-historyof-art-researchterrorism/art-history-of-art-researchterroristtransgressionshome.aspx

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N ote s 1. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual: U.S. Army field manual no. 3–24, 2006 (Chicago; London, 2007), paragraph 1–80, 1–15. Derek Gregory ‘‘‘The rush to the intimate” Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war’, Radical Philosophy, 150 (2008) pp. 8–23 2. Army Field Manual FM 3–24, 1–1 3. Army Field Manual FM 3–24, Annotated Bibliography – 2 4. Patrick Porter, ‘Good anthropology, bad history: the cultural turn in studying war,’ Parameters, 37/2 (2007), p. 48 5. Army Field Manual FM 3–24, p. xxii 6. Network of Concerned Anthropologists and Steering Committee, The Counter-counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society (Chicago, 2009) 7. Opening paragraph. Kilcullen’s ‘Twenty-eight Articles’ 2006 are widely reproduced on the net. See, for example, http://www.stabilisationunit.gov. uk/stabilisation-and-conf lict-resources/thematic/doc_details/14-twentyeight-articles-the-fundamentals-of-company-level-counterinsurgency.html (accessed 13 June 2013). They were first circulated as an email to the Army in Iraq and then published during 2006 in Military Review 8. Gregory, ‘The rush to the intimate’ 9. Army Field Manual FM 3–24, paragraph 1–126 10. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘War is culture: global counterinsurgency, visuality, and the Petraeus Doctrine’, PMLA, 124/5, (2009), p. 1739 11. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The pictorial turn’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), pp. 11–13 and 15 12. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1/1 (2002), p. 171 13. David Campbell, ‘Geopolitics and visuality: sighting the Darfur conflict’, Political Geography, 26/4 (2007), p. 361 14. Derek Gregory, ‘American military imaginaries and Iraqi cities: the visual economies of globalizing war’ cited in Nicholas Mirzoeff, (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London; New York, 2013) 15. See for example: A.L. Ferber and M.S. Kimmel, ‘The gendered face of terrorism’, Sociology Compass, 2/3 (2008), pp. 870–87; G. Chaliand and A. Blin, The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda (Berkeley, 2007); W. Laqueur, ‘Postmodern terrorism’, Foreign Affairs, 75/5 (1996), pp. 24–36; S.J. Brison, ‘Gender, terrorism, and war’, Signs, 28/1 (2002), pp. 435–7; M. Blain, The Sociology of Terrorism: Studies in Power, Subjection and Victimage Ritual (Florida, 2009); J. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC, 2007)

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16. Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text, 9/10 (1984), p. 203 17. Judith Butler, ‘Melancholy gender / refused identification’, in M. Berger et al. (eds), Constructing Masculinity (London, 1995), p. 31 18. Robert Connell, Masculinities (Oxford, 1995); M. Roper and J. Tosh, ‘Historians and the politics of masculinity’, in M. Roper and J. Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991); H. Brod and M. Kaufman (eds), Theorising Masculinities (London, 1994) 19. Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth (London, 2001 [1963]) 20. Chaliand and Blin: The History of Terrorism 21. Stephen Morton, ‘Terrorism, orientalism and imperialism’, Wasafiri, 22/2 (2007), pp. 36–42 22. Judith Butler, ‘Sexual politics, torture, and secular time’, British Journal of Sociology, 59/1 (2008), pp. 1–23, pp. 1–6 23. S. Ali, ‘Troubling times: a comment on Judith Butler’s “Sexual politics, torture and secular time”’ The British Journal of Sociology, 59/1 (2008), pp. 35–9, p. 37 24. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2011) 25. http://collections.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.913 (accessed 21 February 2012) 26. President Obama interviewed by Steve Kroft, CBS News, 04/05/2011, http:// www.cbsnews.com/8301–503544_162–20059739–503544.html (accessed 21 February 2012) 27. Dorit Naaman, ‘Brides of Palestine/angels of death: media, gender, and performance in the case of the Palestinian female suicide bombers’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32/4 (2007), pp. 933–55 28. Belinda Morrissey, When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity (London; New York, 2003), p. 16 29. Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: The Sexuality of Terrorism (London, 1990) p. 189 30. See Morrissey: When Women Kill, p. 2 31. Karen Horney, ‘The dread of woman. Observations on a specific difference in the dread felt by men and by women respectively for the opposite sex’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13 (1932), p. 349 32. G. Z. Hochberg, ‘“CHECK ME OUT”: queer encounters in Sharif Waked’s chic point: fashion for Israeli checkpoints’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16/4 (2010), p. 578 33. Hochberg: ‘CHECK ME OUT’, p. 580

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1

Image Terror Charlotte Klonk

The last decade has seen a flood of publications on the subject of terrorism. Although there is no agreement on the meaning of the term or even the usefulness of such a designation,1 one aspect in the discussion recurs: the impact of an act of terror depends on its spectacular communication in the press.2 The German political theorist and sociologist Herfried Münkler, for example, argues that ‘those who have no capacity to attack the conventional forces of states with any chance of success seek to disseminate images in which the consequences of acts of violence are made directly visible’. It constitutes a form of asymmetrical warfare, Münkler continues, ‘in which combat with weapons functions as a drive wheel for the real combat with images’.3 Although images are needed to be able to fathom the extent of a horror scenario, it is their circulation that ultimately generates the intended feeling of terror.4 This conundrum is at the heart of the struggle. Given the general agreement on the importance of images in modern asymmetrical warfare, it is striking that hardly any of the many books on terrorism contain any pictures, let alone analyse them.5 At best one might say that this is simply careless and perhaps a result of visual illiteracy among political theorists, sociologists and historians.6 At worst, however, it is an oversight that also misses a crucial point. If we are to break the tragic spiral of escalating violence, we first and foremost need to understand the logic of terror as effected through images.7 The tactical deployment of images in combat is not, as is assumed by Münkler and others, a unilateral act, adopted by insurgents only. No 15

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government has so far been able to resist the challenges posed to it by image terror and there has often been retaliation in kind. Constituting warfare by psychological means, a war of images is far less easy to control than its physical counterpart. Unintentional effects are the rule and not the exception. The lack of systematic historical investigations of images used in insurgent and counter-insurgent struggles has fatefully, I think, contributed to the obfuscation of this fact. Only a cursory glance at images and their use in recent history shows that the kind of visual manipulation launched by both battling sides has backfired more often than not. It even frequently jeopardized the aims of their originators sometimes with disastrous consequences. In June 2006, for example, the US Department of Defence proudly presented a framed photograph to the press of the bloodied face of the recently killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s alleged mastermind in Iraq.8 Zarqawi had been a declared target of the ‘war on terror’,9 and with no prospect of finding Osama Bin Laden, the primary target, the evidence of Zarqawi’s liquidation was urgently needed. This picture was the kind of proof the US government required to persuade people at home and abroad that the so-called ‘war on terror’ was an effective strategy. The way it was framed, however, presented a form of decapitation, the most violent strategy possible, used throughout history to shame one’s opponent. It is hard to imagine that the US government would have exhibited a picture of a female enemy in the same manner. Yet, as Julia Kristeva has shown, decapitations of women and by women have by no means been exceptions in the history of what she calls ‘capital visions’.10 The proof of Zarqawi´s visual decapitation was, however, presented within the context of the US military’s ‘rational realization of the capital act’ precisely in order to suppress fantasies of voyeurism and martyrdom that so often accompany images of female violence.11 But fantasies are always hard to contain: the same image soon appeared on radical jihadist internet sites as testimony to Zarqawi’s great heroism and martyrdom. It subsequently became a powerful recruitment tool for al-Qaeda’s propagandists. Previously Zarqawi’s own fiercely violent strategy of circulating videos on the web showing the beheading of American, Korean and British men, had turned out to be similarly counterproductive. Instead of recruiting the Iraqi population for the insurrectionary movement as had been intended, his drastic actions alienated even al-Qaeda’s closest sympathisers.12

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Yet Bruce Hoffmann insists that a fundamental qualitative difference between the two types of violence – launched by states during war on the one side and insurgents on the other – exists: Even in war there are rules and accepted norms of behavior that prohibit the use of certain types of weapons (for example, hollow-point or ‘dumdum’ bullets, CS ‘tear’ gas, chemical and biological warfare agents) and proscribe various tactics and outlaw attacks on specific categories. . ... The most cursory review of terrorist tactics and targets over the past quarter century reveals that terrorists have violated all these rules.13

It is a distinction that has, however, often been blurred by states themselves. Most recently we have been given reason to doubt that the US government actually observes the rules and accepted norms of behaviour as, for example, when it ordered the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, a foreign national in a foreign country, without the permission of that country,14 or when it authorised a cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear systems.15 As the history of insurgent and counter-insurgent battles shows, in fighting terror governments have often crossed the line and adopted the strategies of their enemies. This chapter considers a recent episode in the history of terror that is, I suggest, particularly revealing with regard to the ambiguity of images employed in modern asymmetric warfare. It focuses on the US government’s refusal, in May 2011, to publish a photograph of the dead Osama Bin Laden and places this event within the larger history of images of terror. First, I will question the still widespread assumption that in this context media images can constitute important proof. Second, I will look at the logic of shaming and vengeance in relation to images of terror, and, finally, I will consider in more general terms the use and abuse of images within insurgent and counter-insurgent media strategies.

w h a t p r o of ? On 27 November 2009 readers of the German daily newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung were led to believe that the picture reproduced on the front page presented them with crucial evidence. [Figure 1.1] It related to a highly controversial airstrike carried out in northern Afghanistan just

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1.1 Still from a video sent by an American fighter jet to a German tactical operations centre at Mazar-i-Sharif in the night of 4 September 2009, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 November 2009.

23 days earlier in which hundreds had been killed. The events leading up to this tragedy had involved the seizure of two NATO fuel tankers by Taliban fighters and the spotting of the convoy by two American bomber jets, followed by the transmission of video footage to the German forces in charge of the area. The commanding officer, Colonel Georg Klein, later declared that a source on the ground had informed him that the people around the vehicles seen in the video were all terrorists. It turned out, however, that this was not the case. The Taliban had handed over the tankers to civilian fuel looters from the surrounding area after they had become stuck in mud at a river crossing. Hundreds, following their call, had come to collect free fuel.16 The image on the front page of the German newspaper is a still from the video that the German commander saw shortly before he ordered two bombs to be dropped. On what basis, the still image seems to ask, did the colonel act? We see neither fuel tankers, nor Taliban fighters or looters. Instead a black target mark looms large in the centre of an otherwise highly blurred black and white snapshot. The grainy live video transmitted from the circling American F-15E fighter jet was projected onto a screen in a German tactical operations centre four miles north. It showed, just as we see in the still image, numerous black dots around larger structures – each of them is a thermal image of a human body, but does not provide enough detail to

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confirm whether or not they are armed. Based on this information and on the assessment of a sole informant on the ground, the commander ordered a 500 lb, satellite-guided bomb to be dropped on the site. If we are to go on the evidence of the image, we have no way to decide if the colonel’s decision was right or wrong. The picture shows no recognisable object or feature and it is unclear why it was released to the public in the first place. The same footage would again play an important role during the German public prosecution authorities’ investigation of the case. It was eventually found that there was not sufficient proof to initiate criminal proceedings against Colonel Klein. Similarly, readers scanning the papers the day after the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed on 2 May 2011, were made to do a double-take. On the cover of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other newspapers they were confronted with a rather out of focus and abstract orange-brown image. [Figure 1.2] Other than the heading, which read ‘News Exclusive’, there was nothing to be seen. The picture was a still from exclusive footage obtained by ABC News. Once again, it was only the legend that informed readers of what exactly was before their eyes. It said that the picture was of the room in which Osama Bin Laden had been found and shot by specially trained American

1.2 Still from a video filmed inside the compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan shortly after Osama Bin Laden was killed on 2 May 2011, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 May 2011.

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military forces. The legend also noted the gaping hole in the wall but who or what actually created the hole remains unclear to this day.17 Another by now famous photograph that appeared a few days later did not shed any further light on the events in this room. [Figure 1.3] The picture taken at an equally important location 11,000 km away from the scene of Bin Laden’s killing shows the tense faces of the American President Obama and his security advisors in the bug-proof ‘Situation Room’ at the White House. We see them, we were told, in the process of monitoring the Navy Seals’ seizure of the house in Abbottabad: Operation Geronimo, as it was called, was being filmed by a camera affixed to a soldier’s helmet and transmitted live to the USA. As is often the case, there is much speculation about what the image actually shows.18 Is the movement of Hillary Clinton’s hand towards her mouth an expression of fear, a sign of her femininity and lack of emotional control? What is shown in the pictures on the table in front of the group? Why is Obama not wearing a tie and who is the young woman in the background? What do the paper coffee cups tell us about catering practices at the White House? The bottom line is that we cannot see what it is that those

1.3 Official White House photo by Pete Souza showing US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, as they receive an update on Operation Geronimo in the Situation Room of the White House on 1 May 2011. Source: The White House flickr.

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present in the room see and thus we are neither in the position to comprehend what it is that they are observing nor to know what it is that they know.19 Although the world clamoured for details, neither the video transmitted from the American F-15E fighter jet, nor the images released after Bin Laden’s killing provide evidence of any sort. Moreover, those who believe that the founder of al-Qaeda had long since gone to ground elsewhere say that the secret action is no more than a lie and that no image of the dead body exists. Because no dead body exists, no photograph exists to be made public. Others, however, call for the publication of such a picture for this would illustrate Bin Laden’s true person: not a holy knight of war but a lowly mass murderer. According to the Washington Post of 4 May 2011, such a photograph would above all demonstrate that the terrorist had been justly dealt with. But just as no image will ever be able to provide us with evidence as to whether or not the German commander’s order to strike in Afghanistan was justified, no photo of a death scene could ever prove that Bin Laden is really dead. Everybody knows that in the age of digital editing photos can be manipulated swiftly, easily and almost without a trace. There were already faked images of the dead Bin Laden circulating on the net soon after the property in Pakistan had been stormed. In reality, it probably does not come down to the quest for proof at all for it is, after all, common knowledge that the camera can lie. Indeed, pictures released in the context of showing the truth have more often than not another, more irrational purpose: they satisfy basic needs for vengeance on the one hand and martyrdom on the other.

i m a g e ve n g e a n c e There is a long tradition of images being used both to take vengeance on the perpetrators (in the manner that the Washington Post called for) and to avenge the dead.20 In insurgent and counter-insurgent warfare it is usually in hostage-taking situations that this function becomes most visible. In contrast to kidnapping, hostage-taking is an ‘act of illegally holding one or more persons captive in order to make political demands’.21 Historically, the taking of hostages was largely a practice employed by a state in order to ensure that enemies did their bidding and that peace treaties were kept. 22 As Antokol and Nudell write, ‘a hostage found himself in his situation as a result of his official relationship to the rulers of his country’.23 This changed after World War II when Latin American rebels began to take private citizens as

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hostages. ‘The impact of terrorism was that kidnappings and hostage situations were now taking place with a wider audience in mind. Publicity and general intimidation were now the goals, and nearly everyone was considered fair game’.24 In 1958, during Fidel Castro’s struggle in Cuba, the racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio and 45 US citizens were captured in separate incidents for no other reason than publicity. When this had been achieved, the hostages were released without any demands having been made or met.25 In the late 1960s hostage-taking spread to other Latin American countries, now often in connection with demands for prisoner releases. In the early 1970s many of these actions were successful, particularly in Brazil and the Dominican Republic where the governments readily negotiated with the rebels. Meanwhile in other countries the hostage situations often rapidly spiralled out of control and began to claim lives. On 5 April 1970 the body of the West German ambassador to Guatemala, Count Karl von Spreti, was found dead in an abandoned house after the Guatemalan government had refused to release 17 political prisoners as demanded by the insurgents.26 Four months later the US Public Safety Adviser Daniel A. Mitrione was found shot dead in a car in Montevideo. Uruguay’s Movimeinto de Liberación Nacional, better known as the Tupamaros, claimed the latter deed, but laid the blame at the door of the government which had refused to negotiate.27 The murder would, however, prove to be a major setback for the rebels. Like most of their counterparts in other Latin American countries, they enjoyed great support among the population. The killing of an innocent man caused the public mood to instantly swing the other way. In subsequent months, the rebels were therefore at pains to release pictures of their hostages to the national press showing them in good health and living in humane conditions. Both the American agricultural adviser Claude Fly and the British ambassador Sir Geoffrey Jackson, for example, could be seen pursuing leisurely activities such as writing, reading, eating and card playing. However, as we now know from their accounts, these images were highly staged and hardly representative of the actual situation in which they found themselves.28 [Figure 1.4] The release of the photographs was intended to regain respect among the Uruguayan people for the rebels’ actions even if the means by which they sought to achieve their goals were violent. In the eyes of the nations and families of the victims, however, the pictures showed the respective hostage’s self-disciplined endurance and heroic suffering above all else.29 There is little control over the meaning of such images in circumstances like this. Each side has a particular aim in mind, although achieving this goal

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1.4 Hostage photograph of Claude Fly seen reading in a cell near Montevideo, Uruguay, released by the Tupamaros to the press in October 1970, republished in Claude Fly, No Hope But God, New York, 1973.

can quickly and rapidly backfire. Such a situation would arise only a few years after the Latin Americans set the example, when the Red Army Faction in Germany adopted the practice of hostage-taking. In 1977, when the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped the business executive and industry spokesman Hanns-Martin Schleyer, it initially issued pictures of him that were intended to take revenge on the German state. The German government had allegedly perpetrated the murder of some of their members and kept their leaders, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, JanCarl Raspe and others, in prison.30 For the hostage-takers Schleyer was no

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more than a smug representative of the state. He also embodied the seamless continuation of the National Socialist hierarchy in West Germany, for Schleyer had been an SS Officer in Prague during the War.31 In the first Polaroid picture taken in captivity they stripped him of all his outward signs of power and respectability – his cigar, his suit and tie – and photographed him frightened and sweating in his underwear in front of their very own symbol of power, the five-pointed star with rifle.32 [Figure 1.5] The aim was to take revenge and to humiliate a powerful representative of the state. This was an image strategy that had first been used by the Italian Red Brigades in 1972 when they kidnapped Idalgo Macchiarini.33 [Figure 1.6] However, in the strained atmosphere in Germany in the autumn of 1977 this particular strategy proved no longer effective. Instead of winning over the great many people on the Left who vaguely sympathised with the terrorists’ cause, the

1.5 Hostage photograph of Hanns Martin Schleyer, released by the German RAF to news agencies on 6 September 1977.

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1.6 Hostage photograph of Idalgo Macchiarini, released by the Italian Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) to the news agency ANSA on 3 April 1972.

image only served to alienate them. By ruthlessly disempowering an assumed figurehead of the State in front of the camera, the kidnappers had gone too far. Reducing Schleyer to a state of helplessness, the images feminized the victim, evoking feelings of protection and empathy rather than hatred and revenge. It is ‘a picture that makes you cry’ commented one tabloid newspaper and it seems that by and large the public shared this sentiment.34 RAF reacted swiftly with a change in strategy. In the second Polaroid image released to the press, Hanns-Martin Schleyer once again wore a suit, his hair was combed and his stance composed. The placard that he carried also moved away from simply showing the date to displaying a number of

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days that he had been imprisoned without the government coming to his aid. [Figure 1.7] The aim was now to gain sympathy for the prisoner and thus increase public pressure on the government. Yet this also failed and after a month and a half in captivity, The RAF killed Hanns-Martin Schleyer in woodland near the Belgian-French border. The unintended consequence of the terrorists’ change of image strategy was that it paved the way for the full rehabilitation of a man who had previously been controversial because he had been unrepentant about his Nazi past. Today in Germany there are several memorials to Hanns-Martin Schleyer and even a large and prominent sports arena that bears his name. In situations like these the meanings and functions of images can never be circumscribed. This is true for most images in general and it is especially striking in images of terror and those deployed in the fight against it, although the protagonists have a vested interest in controlling their significance. The stakes are high and as George Habash, the former leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has put it: ‘no one

1.7 Hostage photograph of Hanns Martin Schleyer, released by the German RAF to news agencies on 26 September 1977.

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is innocent, no one a neutral’ in struggles of this kind.35 Habash appears to have recognized something, which has otherwise not become common knowledge. Even today images are a prime means by which both terrorist groups and nation states seek to grow sympathy for their cause and to counter each other. The decision of the US administration not to release a photograph of the scene of Osama Bin Laden’s death was therefore all the more surprising. By withholding the image President Obama’s intention, according to his own statement, was to prevent its use as either a defamatory tool or as an image of martyrdom.36 This was, after all, precisely what had happened after the US Defence department’s triumphant release of Al-Zarqawi’s image in 2006. The Obama administration was clearly determined not to repeat the mistake of its predecessor. In a cautionary statement of 4 May Obama announced that images of this kind should neither become trophies nor be used to further incite violence. In light of the history of images of terror, it is hard not to agree with this decision. What looks like state censorship might, in this case, actually be a form of de-escalation in violence. While this is a step in the right direction, it must, however, be treated with caution, since the line between it and state censorship on a large scale is thin and easily crossed. Instead of relying on state regulation, we might ourselves consider taking charge. It is important to understand what and whose logic we are following when confronted with images in this context and to ask what ethical implications might be at stake. Recently a number of authors, including Ariella Azoulay, Stephen Eisenman and Nicholas Mirzoeff have made the point that it is both our right and duty to look at images emerging from zones of political conflict. What they have in mind, however, is a way of seeing that uncovers evidence capable of opposing dominant discourses of power: Israel’s framing of Palestinians in Azoulay’s case,37 the photographs leaked in 2003 from the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq in Eisenman’s case, 38 and the US government’s visual manipulations of the war on terror in Mirzoeff ’s case.39 My argument here takes a different route. The manipulations of images intended to instil terror, demand, I believe, a different response. They often show people in shocking circumstances whose humiliation is prolonged by our looking at the images and who themselves are unable to return our gaze and regain their dignity. To date, one of the subtlest considerations of this predicament has been Susan Sontag’s reflection on photography. In 1977 she wrote that photographs in the news excite our moral sentiments whilst simultaneously confirming our political paralysis.40 26 years later, Sontag revisited this

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assessment and granted photographs a slightly more constructive power: they induce us to pay attention to the pain of others and reflect on ‘the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers’.41 At the same time, however, she also remains alert to the dangers of visual consumerism. In contrast to Azoulay, Eisenman and Mirzoeff, she is convinced that photographs of violence do no more than mirror a certain narcissism in our desire to see and ultimately refuse to satisfy this need. If, however, they fail to make us aware of anything other than our own narcissistic desires, we urgently need to reconsider the claims which are made on us by images for the creation of which people are made to suffer. Images are not secondary to such acts of violence.42 Actions, like al-Zarqawi’s beheading, are carried out to enable the production of the images and it is these – not the prospect of beheading itself – that ultimately spread terror among the population. To the extent that photographs communicate the scenes to newspapers and broadcasters, acts of terror are staged exclusively for the camera and the camera image ultimately constitutes the reality of the action. To look at the released image is thus to reiterate the crime and to expose the victims to further violence. To put it bluntly, both in the making and in the viewing of the image then, the loss of dignity suffered by the victim is willingly accepted as part of the process. When people are debased, tortured and even killed as a means to an end – where the end is an image – it seems to me that it is ethically paramount that we avoid becoming complicit.43 Although we may recognise this Kantian imperative and the fact that the media are the handmaiden and primary weapon used by both sides in asymmetric warfare, there is little hope of the industry’s self-regulation. News editors have always claimed that they carefully consider what they publish,44 but history shows that the pressures of the market make sure that most of the sensational images launched in insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare eventually find their way into broadcasts and publications. Terry Anderson, bureau chief at the AP offices in Beirut in the early eighties, recounts that before he himself was taken hostage by Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1985, he was offered a tape of kidnapped Americans for money. When he refused the Lebanese couple ‘immediately went next door, to NBC, and sold the tape to them’.45 What is needed then, is perhaps nothing less than personal selfregulation that might turn into a collective self-regulation, similar to a consumer boycott. It might be naive to demand that we refuse to look, fail to buy and refrain from searching the internet for pictures of terror, but only such

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acts of highly discriminate resistance will make sure that we avoid becoming complicit with a tragic struggle that nobody can win. Thus we might have a chance to break the deadly cycle of images of terror. The task would seem to resist the demands of the acts when they happen, but to fully document and reconstruct the crimes and their disseminations after the event (in the way I have tried to do here), without, however, intensifying the ‘exposure’ of the victim and with careful attention to what visual or discursive evidence is really needed.

w hy we n eve r t h e l e s s n e e d i m a g e s While there are good reasons for not publishing the image of a dead Osama Bin Laden, not to mention other images of this kind, the discussion around this decision is revealing with regard to the problematic nature of images in such circumstances. That photographs, as I have argued here, are no proof in themselves and that their publication may even be unethical is not to say that we do not need images when events of this kind occur. It does not follow from the argument that images are unnecessary. On the contrary, the fact that a picture may lie does not distinguish the picture from the texts, for we all know that written reports are equally falsified and misused. Yet we would not consider foregoing the verbal portrayal of events such as that which took place in Abbottabad. To put it another way, those who attribute an uncritical belief in photographs as proof to others, seem themselves to assume that images have an overwhelming power. When they denounce the use of photographs because they are easily manipulated, they wrongly assume that viewers are also utterly gullible. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. The pictures of the moon landing in 1969, for example, certainly did not convince everyone that it had really taken place. Indeed, numerous conspiracy theories have sprung up on the basis of these images. The Science Museum in London has even allocated a dedicated exhibition space to the theory that the pictures were taken in a film studio. Obviously, the public’s belief in the credibility of photographs is no more profound than their belief in the veracity of written texts. Photos are a component of news coverage and acquire meaning beyond the fact that they may be manipulated. Yet this does not mean that we can be indiscriminate about the images we see. To be clear again: we certainly do not need gratuitous evidence of image acts in which people are victimized as a means to

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a senseless or base end. We do, however, need pictures in order to comprehend the norms that are enacted in them, to seek their fissures, and perhaps give us a better understanding of the lives of others. Images fulfil a purpose when they provide us with these insights, but not when we seek to derive a direct and immediate benefit from them, be it rationally founded (proof) or emotionally motivated (sensationalism, revenge, defamation, blackmail, etc.). To conclude, let us look once more at three images launched recently in the fight against terror. Each in its own way highlights one of the aspects for which I suggest we do need images: insight into the lives of others, understanding of the norms that regulate them, and a detection of the fissures that crack their intended meaning open. Instead of an image showing the dead Osama Bin Laden, the US government released photographs and videos that showed the circumstances of his existence before the deployment of the Navy Seals commando unit. If we had thought that the ‘most dangerous man in the world’ would be found living like a wild animal holed up in the caves of Tora Bora, we are now confronted with a more or less normal two-storey villa in Abbottabad in Pakistan. Instead of temporary camp-like conditions, we can look through the keyhole at a life that involved women and children, nights in a double bed and narcissistic evenings in an armchair watching his own video messages – a boringly normal existence with the exception that the house had neither a telephone nor an internet connection. [Fig.1.8] One realises that the monster was actually just despicable in an ultimately human kind of way. No less and no more. There are other rewards to be had when studying pictures in this context. Perhaps the most interesting aspect arising from the release of the image showing the gathering in the White House’s ‘Situation Room’ during Operation Geronimo is not the question of what the group is looking at, nor is it the question of whether the scene is staged or authentic, but rather it is the discussion that arose with regard to Hillary Clinton’s hand. Here a small gesture undercut the entire purpose of the release: to document the common, collective and responsible decision-making process in the White House. While many read Clinton’s gesture as a sign of anxiety in the face of an extremely risky situation, the Secretary of State herself has strongly denied this interpretation. Her covering of her mouth was not due to fear but to allergies, she has declared, as if to suggest that being the only one to show emotion in this situation would make her unsuitably feminine and irresponsibly irrational. The inconspicuous detail of an inadvertent hand gesture suddenly reveals the norms of gender biases that operate in the context of insurgency and

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1.8 Video showing Osama Bin Laden inside the compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan, released to news agencies by the US government on 13 May 2011.

counter-insurgency. It is for such insignificant, but telling details that we need photographs, not for their relation of the great events themselves.46 After all, does knowing that the group followed the events live from the White House really matter? More recently, the German Interior Ministry released an example of a video of a speech intended to incite hate. The intention was to warn the German public about the rise of fundamentalist agitation and recruitment in its midst. Yet, one tiny detail was missed in the Ministry’s discussion of the video. [Fig.1.9] On the right of the table, in front of the jihadist, who is in the process of railing against Western style capitalism, there stands a small can of Coca-Cola. It tells us nothing about the success of jihadist propaganda efforts or about the motivations that inspire them. Yet, it highlights a rupture in the propaganda and evidences familiarly common needs and experiences among groups that normally present themselves as worlds apart. It is because of insignificant details like these that we need images. To overlook them would be a mistake. To sum up: when it comes to images used in terror acts it is often important that we look carefully and sometimes imperative that we refuse to see. The refusal is, however, always a highly informed decision that applies to a certain category of image only – to image acts in which people are debased, tortured and killed as means to a manipulative end.47 In order to make this decision we

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1.9 Still from a propaganda video released by the German Interior Ministry and shown in the German news report Tagesschau on 28 March 2012.

do need to understand the circumstances of their production and circulation. This is what I have begun to do here and which continues to remain an urgent task. In doing so we must never, however, lose sight of the victims and their dignity. Their humanity is not extinguished with the ending of their life.

N ote s 1. For a good introduction to the changing meanings of the word ‘terrorism’ and the difficulties involved in reaching an agreement on a definition, see Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York, 2006), pp. 1–42. 2. See, for example, Peter Waldmann, Terrorismus: Provokation der Macht (Munich, 1998), pp. 48–9; Hoffman Inside Terrorism, p. 10; Herfried Münkler, The New Wars, trans. by Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 99–116. 3. Münkler: The New Wars, p. 111. 4. As the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ are far from neutral and have been applied variously to both state and non-state sponsored violence, I will avoid these terms. I will, however, use the word ‘terror’ as this is not a pejorative word applied to one’s enemy. It designates an effect of acts of violence that often results in paralysis and is the main aim of the kind of action that is the subject of this chapter. 5. An exception to the rule is the f lurry of interest in the Red Army Faction in Germany, and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on

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9/11. Two major films on the German RAF have recently been released, both claiming to be based on historical research: Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2007), and Andres Veiel, Wer, wenn nicht wir (2011). Several articles and collections of essays have also analysed aspects of the image manipulations that marked the fight in the seventies: H.-G. Haupt, J. Requate and K. Weinhauer (eds), Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik. Medien, Staat und Subkulturen in den 1970er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main, 2006); Andreas Elter, ‘Die RAF und die Medien. Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation’, in W. Kraushaar (ed.), Die R AF und der Linke Terrorismus, 2 vols (Hamburg, 2006), pp. 1060–74; Andreas Elter, Propaganda der Tat. Die R AF und die Medien (Frankfurt am Main, 2008); I. Stephan and A. Tacke (eds), Nach-Bilder der R AF (Köln/ Weimar/Wien, 2008); Martin Steinseifer, ‘Terrorismus’ zwischen Ereignis und Diskurs (Berlin, 2011); Cordia Baumann, Mythos R AF: Literarische und filmische Mytentradierung von Bölls ‘Katharina Blum’ bis zum Baader Meinhof Komplex (Paderborn, 2012). On 9/11 see Otto Karl Werckmeister, Der Medusa-Effekt. Politische Bildstrategien seit dem 11. September 2001 (Berlin, 2005); Stephen Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London, 2007); W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2011); Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Global counterinsurgency and the crisis of visuality’, in The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, 2011), pp. 277–331. These books, however, concentrate on images circulated intentionally (for example, the capture and humiliation of Saddam Hussein and his sons in 2003) or unintentionally (for example, the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures) as part of the Bush administrations so-called ‘war on terror’, rather than on the images circulated by their insurgent counterparts. In recent years there have also been a number of exhibitions, particularly in Germany, that have looked at the artistic reception of significant moments in the history of terrorism. The German Red Army Faction is the theme of Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Zur Vorstellung des Terrors. Die RAF-Ausstellung, 2 vols., exhibition catalogue, KW Institute of Contemporary Art Berlin, 20 January–16 May 2005 (Berlin, 2005); and the massacre at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972 as well as the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 the subject of Felix Hoffmann (ed.), The Uncanny Familiar. Images of Terror, exhibition catalogue, C/O Berlin, 10 September–4 December 2011 (Cologne, 2011). 6. In contrast to images of terror, the use and function of visual images in contemporary warfare has increasingly become a prominent subject of scholarly investigation. See, for example, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

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in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (London, 2005); Thomas Kneiper and Marion G. Müller, War Visions: Bildkommunikation und Krieg (Cologne, 2005); Milena Michalski and James Gow, War, Image and Legitimacy: Viewing Contemporary Conflict (London and New York, 2007); Scot Macdonald, Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-first Century: Altered Images and Deception Operations (New York, 2007); Liam Kennedy, ‘Securing vision: photography and US foreign policy’ Media, Culture & Society, 30/3 (2008), pp. 279–94; Liam Kennedy, ‘Soldier photography: visualising the war in Iraq’ Review of International Studies, 35 (2009), pp. 817–33; Mitchell: Cloning Terror. This article is part of a larger chapter in a forthcoming book on images of terror from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It is based on an article that first appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Charlotte Klonk, ‘Warum wir trotzdem Bilder brauchen’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 May 2011, p. 34). For an incisive analysis of this presentation, see Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s forthcoming ‘Framing Zarqawi: afterimages, headshots and body politics in a digital age’, in Olga Shevenchenko, (ed.), Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (Piscataway, 2013). I am grateful to Gürsel for making her paper available to me before publication. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York, the then President of the United States, George W. Bush delivered a televised speech to a joint session of Congress in which he declared the ‘war on terror’. For a cultural analysis of this highly problematic metaphor, see Mitchell: Cloning Terror, pp.1–15. Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York, 2012). Kristeva: The Severed Head, p. 91. Karen DeYoung, ‘Bin Laden Tape Calls Zarqawi “Brave Knight”’, The Washington Post, 30, June 2006. Hoffman: Inside Terrorism, pp. 26–7. On this question, see Kai Ambos, ‘What international law says about the killing of Bin Laden’, Spiegel Online, 13 May 2011: http://www.spiegel.de/ international/world/terrorists-have-rights-too-what-international-law-saysabout-the-killing-of-bin-laden-a-762417.html See David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York, 2012). For a discussion of this airstrike see Rajiv Chandrasekaran, ‘Sole informant guided decision on Afghan strike’, The Washington Post, 6 September 2009; Ulrike Demmer, et al., ‘Ein deutsches Verbrechen’, Der Spiegel, 1 February 2010, pp. 34–57. Kathryn Bigelow’s partly fictional, partly documentary film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) suggests that the U.S. Navy Seal team, charged with raiding Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, entered the house at ground

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

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level. According to the film no explosives were used on the upper-floor window to the room where Osama Bin Laden slept at the time. The published image, discussed here, seems to contradict this account. See, for example, the workshop ‘Ein Bild. Acht Interpretationen’ (‘One Image: Eight Interpretations’) at the University of Hildesheim, 18–19 November 2011. The journalist Mark Bowden has argued that eye witnesses told him that it was in fact not the liquidation of Osama Bin Laden that the assembled group in the White House saw when the photograph was taken, but a moment earlier when one of the helicopters appeared to crash as it was approaching the compound (Mark Bowden, The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden (New York, 2012)). See, for example Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching. Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, 2004); Christine Vogel (ed.), Bilder des Schreckens. Die mediale Inszenierung von Massakern seit dem 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2006); K. Harrasser and T. Macho (eds), Folter. Politik und Technik des Schmerzes (Munich, 2007). Norman Antokol, and Mayer Nudell, No One A Neutral: Political HostageTaking in the Modern World (Median, OH, 1990), p. 23. See, for example, Joel Allen, Hostages and Hostage-Taking in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006). Antokol and Nudell: No One A Neutral, p. 36. Antokol and Nudell: p. 36. Antokol and Nudell: p. 40. Antokol and Nudell: p. 42. Antokol and Nudell: pp. 46–7. Claude Fly, No Hope But God (New York, 1973), p. 60; Sir Geoffrey Jackson, Surviving the Long Night: An Autobiographical Account of a Political Kidnapping (New York, 1973), pp. 196–8. For this reason, both Fly and Jackson later republished the images in their autobiographies. Particularly in Jackson’s case, this is also the self-image that he wished to project and made sure to emphasize in his book (see, for example, Jackson: Surviving the Long Night, p. 196). For a more detailed discussion, see Charlotte Klonk, ‘Die Entführung Hanns Martin Schleyers oder die Entdeckung des Mediums Gesicht im terroristischen Bilderkampf ’, Kritische Berichte, 36/2 (June 2008), pp. 49–59; and Charlotte Klonk, ‘Bildterrorismus: Von Meins bis Schleyer’, in Stephan and Tacke: Nach-Bilder der R.A.F., pp. 197–215. Lutz Hachmeister, Schleyer. Eine deutsche Geschichte (München, 2004). Martin Steinseifer, ‘Fotos wie Brandwunden. Überlegungen zur deontischen Bedeutung von Pressefotografien am Beispiel Hanns Martin Schleyers als

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33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

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Opfer der Rogen Armee Fraktion’, in D. Busse, T. Nier and M. Wengeler (eds), Brisante Semantik: Neuere Konzepte und Forschungsergebnisse einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Linguistik (Tübingen, 2005), pp. 269–90. See Petra Terhoeven, ‘Opferbilder – Täterbilder. Die Fotografie als Medium linksterroristischer Selbstermächtigung in Deutschland und Italien während der 70er Jahre’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 7/8 (2007), pp. 380–99. Bild, 10 September 1977, p. 1. Quoted in Antokol and Nudell: No One A Neutral, p. 22. President Barack Obama in a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft conducted at the White House on Wednesday, 4 May 2011, and broadcast on CBS News on 8 May 2011 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York, 2008). Eisenman: The Abu Ghraib Effect. Mirzoeff: ‘Global counterinsurgency’, pp. 277–331. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1977). Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, 2003), p. 117. This is a point forcefully and convincingly made by Horst Bredekamp, ‘Wir sind befremdete Komplizen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 May 2004. This is not to say that we should refuse to look at all images that show torture and violence. On the contrary, their publication and discussion is often highly important in order to expose myths of warfare. For example, the publication and discussion of images showing the unlawful shooting of hostages in Serbia in 1941 led, 50 years after the end of the World War II, to a revision of the myth that Hitler’s Wehrmacht did not commit war crimes. The images that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 were equally important in order to expose the horrendous torture games that members of the US army practised in Iraq. They were not in the first place produced for media consumption, but the crimes would have continued had they not been published. It is worthwhile to ask, however, if every picture showing identifiable torture victims necessarily needs to be made public in order to achieve this aim. There is an important distinction, it seems to me, between the general public’s need to know and a court’s access to such material in the case of a trial. The most famous image of the hooded man would perhaps already have served the purpose of informing the broader public. The victim, however, did not remain anonymous and unrecognizable for long. Journalistic quest eventually led to the discovery of his identity. For a particular case history of this, see Peter Geimer, ‘Fotos, die man nicht zeigt’, in K. Sykora, L. Derenthal and E. Ruelfs (eds), Fotografische Leidenschaften (Marburg, 2006), pp. 245–57. For an analysis of wire services and the pressures exerted on picture editors, see Zeynep Devrim Gürsel,

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‘The politics of wire service photography’, American Ethnologist, 39/1 (2012), pp. 71–89. 45. Terry Anderson, Den of Lions: Memoirs of Seven Years (New York, 1993), p. 60. 46. I am borrowing the term ‘insignificant details’ from the nineteenth-century art historian Giovanni Morelli, who used it to designate unconscious, but to a particular interpreter nonetheless meaningful traits in a painting. See Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works, vol.1 (London, 1892), p. 47. 47. ‘Image act’ is a term coined and research project initiated by Horst Bredekamp to describe a particular power of images in the sense that is applicable here: Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin, 2010).

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2

Femininity, Feminism and the Terrorist Sue Malvern

Early in her article ‘Women as Agents of Political Violence: Gendering Security’ (2004) Miranda Alison makes the point that the repeated necessity to qualify the term ‘combatant’ with the descriptor ‘female’ draws attention to how women soldiers, female freedom fighters, female suicide bombers, female terrorists are exceptional figures: ‘the mere fact that it is necessary to specify ‘female combatants’ indicates their historical rarity and symbolic position as unconventional figures’. The qualifier is necessary because the terms ‘soldier’, ‘fighter’, ‘suicide bomber’ and ‘terrorist’ are assumed to be masculine.1 This is hardly unique to female agents active in political violence. It also applies in other cases; for example, woman doctor, woman artist. There is some degree of symmetry in how occupations are gendered; male nurse, male midwife for instance. That the female combatant or the female terrorist is an aberration or a deviation from a masculine norm is undermined, however, by the lengthy history of women as warriors, fighters and terrorists. For example, two recently published popular texts, Bernard Cook’s Women and War: a historical encyclopedia from antiquity to the present (2006) which runs to almost 700 pages, and Linda De Pauw’s Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in war from prehistory to the present (1998) both endeavour to date and name women warriors as a presence from the beginnings of human warfare. Joshua Goldstein’s more scholarly War and Gender: how gender shapes the war system and vice versa (2001) discusses at some length as an illustration, the female warriors of Dahomey, West Africa, formally established in 1727. A survey of women participating in conflict or political violence might include 39

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the Amazons; Charlotte Corday, Marat’s assassin; the Russian anarchists, Vera Zasulich and Vera Figner; and women fighting in the Irish republican or Palestinian causes. Moreover numerous women were active in dissenting organisations in the 1970s in the West such as Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades and the Weather Underground; women have been suicide bombers since the mid 1980s. Women have participated in military service in the West in increasing numbers since the 1990s. The largest deployment of women soldiers in the military history of the United States occurred in the first Gulf War 1990–91. In that sense it is not so much that fighting women are a ‘historical rarity’, as Alison suggests, but that there is an amnesia within cultural memories concerning the woman fighter. Ruth Seifert, examining female soldiers in the German Bundeswehr writes that while there is evidence of women fighting at the end of World War II: ‘As so often the female presence in war and combat has been excluded from cultural memory’.2 Second wave feminism, dating from the 1970s and to which all the texts cited above are indebted, was frequently preoccupied with recovering repressed, forgotten and invisible histories of women, including histories of women warriors, to the point where the term ‘woman’ itself was debated as problematic and paradoxical.3 A more nuanced discussion of the functions of historical amnesia in relation to warrior women appears in Alison’s study of women active in violent resistance in Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland where she argues that the postconflict erasure of women’s contributions to wars and revolutionary struggles is a result of problems with the model of martial citizenship on which such struggles are based: ‘Female combatants are often presented as a necessary but temporary heroic sacrifice on the part of these “exceptional” women, rather than as representing a fundamental shift in societal gender roles and relations.’4 Elsewhere she suggests that because the inclusion of women in armed struggle is seen as atypical, implying that the fight is so critical that even women have to be called on to participate, the presence of women can be used against organizations where they are active. Hence the Russian government can argue that Chechnyan women suicide bombers are indicative of desperation, and that this is evidence of the impossibility of negotiating with Chechen rebels.5 It has often been argued that asserting the right of women to bear arms on behalf of their nation makes it possible for women to achieve equal civil status with men. A position sometimes identified with liberal feminism, the claim is founded on the notion of the citizen-soldier or ‘armed civic virtue’;

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that is the mystique of the warrior willing to die in defence of the nationstate.6 D’Amico points out, however, that the myth of the woman-warrior promotes masculine martial values and fails to redefine the gendered nature of military institutions, and indeed that the inclusion of women in the armed services serves to legitimize the militarization of citizenship.7 Her views are characteristic of feminist arguments about women in the military. While mythologies of the citizen-warrior may persist in cultural representations, arguments about armed civic virtue and women’s increased participation in military service also need to understand shifts in the nature of modern warfare. Martin Shaw has noted the decline of mass armies in the West; new military technologies, which are capital rather than labour intensive, require fewer but more highly trained and specialist personnel. Alongside the West’s preference, post-Vietnam, for volunteer armed forces, military service has become an occupation with civilian conditions of service, which in the European Union, for example, means legal obligations concerning discrimination and equality.8 Advanced industrial nations are also understood as postheroic social orders that pursue military objectives while minimizing military losses; in part because highly specialized personnel are more expensive to train and less disposable than the civilian-soldiers of the twentieth century’s mass conscripted armies, and in part because of civil resistance to the cult of sacrifice through the deaths of soldiers on active service.9 Influenced by Mary Kaldor’s classic New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era, first published in 1998, Shaw argues for distinguishing between mode of warfare as a type of social power or ‘the general complex of social relations, processes and institutions through which wars are prepared, military power organized and wars fought’ and way of war as the particular method of organizing conflict as it is fought in specific instances.10 As well as needing to reconsider how shifts in contemporary modes of war affect women’s participation in the armed forces, there are other factors in Western feminism’s almost complete repudiation of women’s violence that have implications for why women’s participation in violent conflict lacks a developed feminist theorisation. As Patricia Melzer has observed ‘feminists have struggled to define women’s relationship to political violence’.11 Second wave feminism’s search for positive role models revived interest in the Amazons, for example Monique Wittig’s writings. Revisionist accounts of the Amazons built on and contested existing and extensive literary and artistic cults of the Amazons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example von Kleist’s Penthesilea, 1808 or various depictions of Amazons by

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Franz von Stuck. Mandy Merck argued for a critical rereading of the Amazon myth. She suggested that the vanquishment of the Amazons was emblematic of the need for patriarchy to found itself on the suppression of women. Uncritical appropriations of Amazons by feminist writers and artists risked reiterating the conditions of women’s oppression rather than undermining them. Merck’s text, originally published in 1978, was written as an endorsement of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s avant-garde film Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, 1974. Mulvey and Wollen argued that these mythical women warriors used men’s weapons and offered ‘a solution which is magical not political’.12 In effect, Mulvey and Wollen, along with Merck, propose to understand myth in Roland Barthes’ terms as an ideological suppression of political understanding.13 Their argument corresponds to D’Amico’s and Alison’s claim that warrior women merely mimic and therefore only endorse masculine martial values. Whilst feminist thinking has demanded critical consciousness it has also operated its own selective forms of remembering. Accounts of 1970s feminism almost always suppress evidence of the large numbers of women active in non-state organisations, usually termed terrorist, which used violence such as Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Weathermen in the United States. In part, this is a consequence of how Western second wave feminism was closely aligned with opposition to the Vietnam War and anti-war movements. Third World women have been differently positioned on the issue of armed insurrection; Alison points out that women in anticolonial struggles were often more active and more visible because colonized men are usually disabled from performing masculinity.14 In part, Western feminism has distanced itself from women active in political violence in the 1970s, in the context of Baader-Meinhof and the Weathermen, because the media frequently asserted that acts of terrorism by women were a consequence of an excess of emancipation. Feminism was effectively forced to disassociate itself from women terrorists or women who used political violence. The journalist and feminist Susanne von Paczensky edited a collection, Frauen und Terror: Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären [Women and Terror: attempts to explain women who participate in acts of violence], 1978, to counteract anti-feminist accounts of women terrorists circulating in the German media. She declared: I feel struck down. If the struggle against terrorism suddenly degenerates into a war against emancipation, if the female suspects are pursued

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and branded not only for their crimes but also as insubordinate women, then these persecutions are also directed against me and my efforts for change.15

In contrast to most feminist texts in the 1970s and 1980s, Julia Kristeva, in her highly influential and much discussed ‘Women’s Time’ (first published 1979) did note the large numbers of women in terrorist organisations and named Baader-Meinhof, the Italian Red Brigades and Palestine. However, Kristeva did so only in order to repudiate these women, arguing that this is the inevitable product of what we have called a denial of the sociosymbolic contract and its counter-investment as the only means of self-defense in the struggle to safeguard an identity. This paranoid-type mechanism is at the base of any political involvement.

She goes on to argue that a woman who feels herself too brutally excluded by power counter-invests the violence she has experienced by making herself ‘a “possessed” agent of this violence in order to combat what was experienced as frustration – with arms which may seem disproportional. ... this terrorist violence offers as a program of liberation an order which is even more oppressive, more sacrificial than those it combats’. Asking whether women are more likely to invest in terrorism she notes ‘that since the dawn of feminism, and certainly before, the political activity of exceptional women, and thus in a certain sense of liberated women, has taken the form of murder, conspiracy, and crime’. In an argument which seems to reiterate deeply conservative and anti-feminist condemnations of women terrorists as more violent than men, Kristeva argues that a woman, specifically because of her relationship to the mother and to motherhood is ‘more vulnerable within the symbolic order, more fragile ... more virulent when she protects herself from it’. She calls therefore for the demolition of the myth of the archaic-mother.16 In representations of conflict the dominant image associated with femininity is passivity; she is defenceless and defended, or an allegory of peace. Representations of men in wars as defeated or wounded means feminizing such figures. Miriam Cooke, in her Women and the War Story, 1996, points out how a mythic war story provides men with political roles, in the politikon or public arena, whereas women are domesticated in the space of the oikon or household. In the mythic war story women may function as Mater Dolorosa, Patriotic Mother or Spartan Mother.17 It follows that there are conditions in which it is permissible to represent women fighting, on behalf of their children or in defence of the home, and in the absence of men. In visual

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representations an example might be Julio Gonzalez, La Montserrat, 1935– 37. This life-size sculpture, cast from welded metal and now in the collection of the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, shows a militant peasant woman holding her baby closely on one arm swaddled in a shawl. The shawl becomes a shield and her sickle in the other hand a weapon for defending the child. The title La Montserrat, refers to the symbol of Catalan people’s identity and their struggle in the Spanish Civil War. While the image appears to represent an insurgent, and consequently to correspond to stereotypes of female revolutionaries, the sculpture was first shown at the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion, in the Paris World Fair, 1937, famous for the exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica, and was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government. Images of women as sanctioned warriors fighting in defence of their children are also found in wider culture, for example Sarah Connor in The Terminator series (1984 onwards). Warrior women are also acceptable if they are chaste or virginal: a prototypical exemplar is Joan of Arc. A photograph, published in the English illustrated press during 1917, [Figure 2.1] shows soldiers of the so-called First

2.1 Women in the Armed Forces during World War I: Russia, 1917. Photographer: David Miller, Imperial War Museum, Q 106252.

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Women’s Battalion of Death, formed by Maria Bochkareva in order to galvanize a defeatist Russian army in 1917. To meet the provisional government’s demands for guarantees about morality, Bochkareva had her recruits shave their hair, in effect to assert their chastity.18 Colvin and Watanabe-O’Kelly, in a wide-ranging study of imagery of women and death in German culture, argue that notions of the chaste woman warrior can then be projected onto images of the nation as a whole, making preparedness for war a simple matter of innocent self-defence. If killing is the inverse of women’s primary function as life-giving, then only if a woman is dissociated from reproduction, for example by being virginal, can she kill without recrimination.19 In her monograph on representations of women warriors in German culture, Watanabe-O’Kelly argues that because the woman fighter leaves ‘the proper sphere of hearth and home’ to go to war not against women but against men, she has to be tamed, usually by dying as in the case of Joan of Arc, and often by killing herself.20 Thus far I have made little distinction between legitimate or perhaps statesanctioned women warriors and others – those classed as terrorists or insurgents. If we focus more closely on the image of the female terrorist, it raises new issues but I want to argue that it is also the case that discussing femininity and the terrorist must involve relating such imagery to representations of the female warrior over a longer timespan. Some questions have shifted since the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, women have participated in organisations classed as terrorist in increasing numbers and dating from the early 1990s, most Western nations have incorporated women into combat roles within their armed forces. Consequently, there are some intricate connections to unpick between the increasing presence of women in the armed forces, what relationship this has to emancipation and the participation of women in violence classed as terrorist. It follows that there has been a growth in the literature on questions of gender and terrorism, particularly studies that focus on women who commit acts of violence. An early article is Rhiannon Talbot’s wide-ranging examination of ‘Myths in the representation of women terrorists’ (2000), which sets out to analyze prevailing stereotypes. Perceptions of female terrorists are summarized by Talbot as drawing on notions such as that: they are (a) extremist feminists; (b) only bound to terrorism via a relationship with a man; (c) only acting in supporting roles within terrorist organizations; (d) mentally inept; (e) unfeminine in some way21

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Talbot argues that because academic scholarship is assumed to be a higher form of knowledge it has had an enormous influence on media representations. Analyses of women in insurgency or terrorist organizations are often rooted in criminology, which perpetuates the stereotypes found in its discourse. She outlines the current contradictions by which representations of women involved in acts of violence are caught in two irreconcilable positions. Either a woman is feminine, in which case she cannot be violent. Or she is violent in which case she cannot be feminine. Violent women must be represented as androgynous or perhaps transvestite, masquerading as men. Because the terrorist is often represented as hyper-masculine, women terrorists are an impossible paradox. A woman is either a woman or a terrorist; she cannot be both. There are two questions which complicate this argument in Talbot’s view. Partially paralleling Kristeva, first of all she notes that women are often considered to be fiercer and more violent than men because of the maternal-sacrifice complex where the female terrorist views the cause as her child.22 Secondly, there is no alternative to the paradox because there is no account of female violence: ‘The rebel woman cannot hope to be judged against feminine structures of armed rebellion – for they do not exist.’23 If terrorism is a transgressive act and terrorists transgress, then women involved in terrorism commit a double act of transgression, by also transgressing assumptions about gender. Women’s violence, because it contradicts the norms of gendered behaviour, is then perceived as more excessive than men’s, as a threat to masculinity and it is frequently sexualized. Jayne Steele, in her Vampira: representations of the Irish female terrorist, 1998, writes that ‘representations of female members of the PIRA [Provisional Irish Republican Army] share, metaphorically, the seductive and deadly qualities of Gothic vampires, draining the will and feeding off the blood of British soldiers and citizens’.24 She also points out that Margaret Ward’s 1983 history of women and Irish republicanism is titled Unmanageable Revolutionaries and derived from a statement Eamon de Valera made in 1976. She glosses this by arguing that the description suggests that a violent woman embodies an excess that is able to ‘unman’ men and that her ‘unmanageableness’ signifies male lack, in a way analogous to the Lacanian ‘phallus’ as signifying female ‘lack’. Her boldness and excess become ‘both the means and the goal of the revolution’ that are ultimately realized through her martyrdom.25 Patricia Melzer, analysing media responses to women terrorists during the German Autumn 1977, also notes: ‘Based on her violent behavior, the terrorist “non-woman” symbolizes a transgression of gender and sexuality which goes beyond simply enacting

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masculinity and instead represents a gender outside the “normal” manifestations of man and woman’.26 When women are violent they are something more excessive, more transgressive than women acting like men. More recently Amanda Third has produced a re-reading of the nonwoman female terrorist in an analysis of the circumstances surrounding the preservation of Ulrike Meinhof ’s brain at the universities of Tübingen and then Magdeburg, which only came to light in 2002, 26 years after her death. She discusses how femininity has been represented as the embodiment of unreason and states ‘The female terrorist represents a limited case of women’s propensity for unreason.’ However, she shifts the paradoxical bind around women and violence beyond the woman/non-woman binary, to suggest the woman terrorist is at once both hyper-terrorist and hyper-feminine. She writes: On the one hand, the female terrorist is constructed as an acutely violent and potent threat to social order – more radical, more subversive, and more violent than her male counterparts. Female terrorists are routinely constructed as highly motivated, excessively emotional beings with the capacity to commit the most heinous of crimes and show no remorse, and they are reportedly more difficult to rehabilitate. The female terrorist is constructed, that is, not only as non-feminine but also as more terrorist than terrorist – as hyper-terrorist.

On the other hand, she also writes that women’s passion and irrationality is written into their biology, as if hormonally driven: ‘she is a manifestation of excessive femininity, she is hyper-feminine. She is thus at once hyper-terrorist (and therefore non-feminine) and hyper-feminine.’27 One, or perhaps, the primary factor in constructions of violent or terrorist women as more horrifying and more sadistic than men is the relationship of women to biological reproduction. Women can both give life and take it. Talbot writes this ‘might explain society’s awe and dread of women who resort to violence outside the sanctioned act of protecting their children from danger ... The maternal-violence link – coupled with social repugnance of female violence – creates an image both gendered and terrifying’.28 Amanda Third takes this further, arguing that women are feared as inherently subversive and that a woman’s reproductive physiology makes the female body a site of excess and fluidity that needs constant surveillance. She quotes H. H. A. Cooper, a former US Director of the National Advisory Committee Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism and author of numerous books on

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terrorism and national security: ‘Experience has shown that woman as terrorist must be dealt with after the fashion of the Gorgon if those responding would survive.’29 Cooper’s perhaps somewhat hysterical recourse to a mythological figure to suggest that women terrorists may necessitate special measures for self-defence can be partly understood through Adriana Cavarero’s much more nuanced philosophical analysis of the feminine relationship between life-giving and life-taking. For example in the case of female suicide bombers, she argues that ‘the female body that explodes in order to rip apart innocent bodies is always symbolically, a maternal body’. Cavarero prefers the term ‘horrorism’ to ‘terrorism’, arguing that when women perpetrate indiscriminate violence, it becomes both darker but also more familiar. The authentic root of horror is feminine, incarnated in the most beautiful and terrifying of the Gorgons, Medusa, sterile mother of all ills.30 Cavarero touches on what may be most troubling about when women act violently which is the exposure of a relationship, usually masked or disavowed, between sex and death. Kelly Oliver notes how the figure of the woman suicide bomber in particular also confuses realms that are symbolically separate, the body as nature (female) and the body as politics (male); being and meaning. When women act violently, at its most extreme when women blow up themselves and others on suicide missions, they insist that the female body is political and reinsert that body into politics in a particularly brutal way.31 For Cavarero the alternative figure to Medusa is Medea. Although Medea’s murder of her own sons is horrifying, because she does not kill herself she allows herself ‘time to gauge the depth of the crime she has committed and to take responsibility for it’. Medea is therefore ‘a precious icon’.32 When women who use violence for political ends are explained as deviants transgressing their biology to masquerade as men or as hyper-feminine hysterics, these women are deprived of agency and refused recognition as politically responsible actors. Moreover, as Sarah Colvin has argued in her biography of Ulrike Meinhof, a male revolutionary can be imagined and thus accommodated to a patriarchal social order, because ‘it is “natural” for young men to want to compete with and overthrow a father figure’. There is no way back for violent women because their violence threatens not just to undermine and replace the social system – it will ultimately destroy it.33 Debate about the legitimacy of violence in pursuit of a feminist political cause, as distinct from the participation of women in armed insurrection alongside men, appears infrequently in feminist cultural works. I will take two examples, one fictional and the second a documentary, both made in

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the 1980s which do explore the question of feminist agency and violence. These films by two feminist film-makers, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, 1983 and Anne Crilly’s Mother Ireland, 1988, specifically investigate the issue of women’s violence in relation to feminist goals. Borden’s Born in Flames, 1983, imagines New York ten years after a socialist revolution in the United States when women, continuing to experience oppression, sexual harassment and discrimination, take up arms against the government and form a Women’s Army. In the film, women from different groups and backgrounds debate whether to form separate women’s organisations and the value of direct action. When the Army is covertly investigated by the FBI and its charismatic founder, Adelaide Norris, is arrested and dies in custody, the women are radicalized. Near the beginning of the film and shortly after a sequence of collaged images showing women’s customary work in childcare, offices, shops, cleaning and prostitution, a black lawyer, onetime leader of women’s militia during the revolution, Zella Wylie explains to Adelaide: I’m going to tell you something. We have a right to violence. All oppressed people have a right to violence. And I want to tell you something. It’s like the right to pee. You’ve got to have the right place, you’ve got to have the right time, you’ve got to have the appropriate situation, and I’m absolutely convinced that this is it. 34

Born in Flames is sometimes parodic – one of its well-known sequences is the rescue of a woman from an attempted rape by the women’s Bicycle Brigade. The film ends with the president’s broadcast to the nation, celebrating ten years of the revolution, being interrupted when the women blow up the radio mast on top of New York’s Twin Towers. Borden claims Pontecorvos’ The Battle of Algiers, 1965 as her inspiration – Zella Wylie’s declaration seems to reference Frantz Fanon’s writings on oppression and violence. Her film explores the dynamics of group organisation, based on The Battle of Algiers, and the radicalisation of women in a real revolution.35 It imagines a women’s movement that might begin to turn words into action, and functions as a critique of the feminist movement in New York in the early 1980s for its intellectualism and its bias towards white middle class women. The question it poses is whether any social system will ever eliminate the oppression of women. Borden writes, ‘not only do political values have to change, cultural values must change and become embedded in practice’. In the film armed revolution is shown as impossible to sustain but that it must survive as a

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potential threat to the cultural order and here be directed at the media, so that women may at least momentarily appropriate the dominant language.36 Anne Crilly directed Mother Ireland with the Derry Film and Video Collective, as a commission from the UK television broadcaster, Channel 4. In Crilly’s account, the documentary was completed and delivered to Channel Four on 2 March 1988; four days later on 6 March, one of the women interviewed in the film, Mairead Farrell, an active member of the PIRA, was shot dead in Gibraltar by the British Special Air Service (SAS) as part of Operation Flavius designed to prevent a PIRA bomb attack. Crilly’s film was examined by Channel 4 lawyers, who recommended that the broadcasters show the film, and the Derry Film and Video Collective agreed to cuts requested by Channel 4, including Christy Moore’s song ‘Unfinished Revolution’ and footage of Belfast resident, Emma Groves being shot by a rubber bullet, which blinded her, fired by a soldier in 1971. Despite this, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) declined to screen the film until mid-October 1988. The broadcasting of a documentary about Operation Flavius by Thames Television, Death on the Rock in April 1988 (the company, heavily criticized by the government for its documentary, subsequently lost its franchise) and the on-going inquest into Farrell’s death in Gibraltar were also factors in the IBA delaying the screening of Mother Ireland. As Crilly has described, on 19 October 1988, the Collective met with Channel 4 to agree to cut Mairead Farrell and replace her with a comparable figure; the same afternoon Douglas Hurd, then home secretary, announced new broadcasting restrictions, known as the broadcasting ban, which meant other interviewees in the documentary were now censored. This included Rita O’Hare, editor of Republican News and Sighle Humphries, Madge McConville and Miriam James, veterans of Cumman na mBan, an Irish women’s republican militia formed in 1914. According to Channel 4’s understanding of the ban, film of Maud Gonne McBride speaking at a rally in the early 1930s was also proscribed. Discussing any further cuts to Mother Ireland to make it possible to broadcast was rendered academic; the film could not be viewed in the UK. Mother Ireland was eventually shown, with cuts, in Channel 4’s ‘Banned’ season in 1991 and Crilly published an account of her experience in the UK scholarly journal, History Workshop Journal.37 For some time, a VHS tape of the film was available in the US with a flyer pasted to its cover: ‘Banned in Britain’. Mother Ireland was the first victim of the 1988 broadcasting ban. Mother Ireland aims, on the one hand, to trace the personification of Ireland as a woman from the eighteenth century and, on the other, to examine the role

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of feminism in the republican cause in relationship to representing the nation of Ireland as female. It sets out to explore in documentary form what Born in Flames investigates through science fiction. Mother Ireland takes as its starting point a weak and oppressed, hence feminine, eighteenth century Ireland and then develops an account of women’s roles in the 1916 Easter Rising and the republican movement to demonstrate the connection between women’s struggles for suffrage and republican commitment to equality. Women are shown as radicalized by their experiences of activism in campaigns for suffrage which leads to sympathy for republicanism and socialism. The 1930s and 1940s appear as decades for the ascendancy of the Catholic Church and conservatism, with a consequent oppression of women, symbolized in the 1937 Irish Constitution. Connections are then traced between women’s roles in the Northern Ireland Troubles which began in 1968, second wave feminism in the Irish Republic from the 1970s and women’s republicanism in the early twentieth century. A key point in the second part of the film is when journalist Nell McCafferty speaks about the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement beginning in 1970. This did not take up a position on Northern Ireland in order to avoid dividing the movement and to concentrate on women’s rights, especially the right to contraception. However, speaking in 1987, she describes it as a time to turn to the national question, ‘the running sore in the body politic of Ireland’. Tellingly she points out that to date ‘no great text has been written on the position of feminism and violence’ correcting herself to say ‘and physical force’.38 The path to the radicalisation of Irish women in the 1970s is the inverse of that taken through women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century. Bernadette Devlin (Bernadette McAliskey) argues that the best feminist women have come to their feminist consciousness through the republican cause, by coming through other layers of oppression to understand the oppression of women. Mairead Farrell speaks of coming to political consciousness through living in Belfast and the ten and a half years she served in prison for possession of firearms. In Armagh Women’s Prison, Farrell participated in the dirty protest in order to gain status as a political prisoner. It transformed her understanding of direct action; whereas previously she thought of women’s use of force as an extension of the men’s military campaign, in prison she came to understand her own politically motivated violence as the equal of theirs.39 The film ends with short clips from several women interviewed more extensively elsewhere in the film each summarizing her view on Mother Ireland. Like Born in Flames, Mother Ireland does not take a view on women’s participation in violence (and it would have been

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illegal for the production to advocate violence in pursuit of the republican cause) but its conclusion leaves open the question whether women’s liberation is possible without national liberation and vice versa. The film also gives Bernadette Devlin the last word, when she declares that women will have no rights unless they organize to fight for them, if necessary being prepared to take them. Miranda Alison’s study of women involved in nationalist struggles in Northern Ireland included interviews with women some of whom had carried out acts of violence and served prison sentences. The majority of these women came to view participating in armed struggle as necessary and inevitable after they witnessed or experienced harassment, violence or injustice against the Irish Catholic community including their own family members.40 Although second wave Western feminism arose against the background of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War, elsewhere feminism sometimes occurred within nationalist or republican struggles which had had recourse to armed resistance, for example rebellion against French imperialism in Vietnam.41 Women who have been classed as terrorist do not lack political consciousness and when women take direct, even violent, action this is not necessarily incompatible with feminist goals. However, when Nell McCafferty protests that there is no great feminist text on feminism and violence or physical force, or Talbot observes that there are no role models or feminine structures for women’s violence, they draw attention to an absence. That absence is an element in why revolutionary struggles, although they may involve women as agents of violence, have almost always resulted in women’s contributions being forgotten and women’s demands being neglected.

N ote s 1. Miranda Alison, ‘Women as agents of political violence: gendering security’, Security Dialogue, 35 (2004), p. 447. 2. Ruth Seifert, ‘Soldiers and mothers in the German Bundeswehr: Constructions of gender and service under arms’, in Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (eds), Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500 (Rochester, NY, 2009), p. 187. 3. See, for example, Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Basingstoke, 1988) and Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1999).

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4. Miranda Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethnonational Conflict (London; New York, 2009), p. 111. 5. Alison: Women and Political Violence, p. 116. 6. Alison: ‘Gendering Security’, p. 97; Francine D’Amico, ‘Feminist perspectives on women warriors’, Peace Review, 8 (September 1996), p. 381. 7. D’Amico: ‘Feminist perspectives’, pp. 380 and 382. 8. Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-transfer War and its Crisis in Iraq (Cambridge, 2005), p. 36. 9. See Edward Luttwak, ‘Toward post-heroic warfare’, Foreign Affairs, 74 (1995), pp. 109–22; Edward Luttwak, ‘A post-heroic military policy’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (1996), pp. 33–44; and Herfried Münkler, ‘The wars of the 21st century’, International Review of the Red Cross, 85, 2 (April 2003), pp. 7–22. 10. Shaw: The New Western Way of War, p. 42. 11. Patricia Melzer, ‘‘‘Death in the shape of a young girl”: feminist responses to media representations of women terrorists during the “German Autumn” of 1977’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11 (2009), p. 37. 12. Mandy Merck, ‘The Amazons of ancient Athens’, in Perversions. Deviant Readings (London, 1993), p. 160. 13. The classic source is Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today ’, in Mythologies (London, 1973) pp. 109–59. 14. Alison: Women and Political Violence, p.105. 15. ‘Ich fühle mich getroffen. Wenn der Kampf gegen Terrorismus unversehens zum Kampf gegen Emanzipation ausartet, wenn die weiblichen Verdächtigen nicht nur wegen ihrer Straftaten, sondern darüber hinaus als unbotmäßige Frauen verfolgt und gebrandmarkt werden, dann richten sich diese Verfolgungen auch gegen mich und mein Bemühen um Veränderung.’ Susanne von Paczensky (ed.), Frauen und Terror : Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1978), p. 15. Cited in I Bandhauer-Schöffmann, ‘ “Emanzipation mit Bomben und Pistolen”? Feministinnen und Terroristinnen in deutschsprachigen Sicherheitsdiskursen der 1970er Jahre’, eurozine, . See Sue Malvern, ‘Zum schwierigen Verhältnis zwischen Feminismus und Terrorismus: Die Darstellung der Terroristen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst’, in Sylvia Schraut and Christine Hikel (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht. Politische Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2012), p. 320. See also Melzer: ‘Death in the shape of a young girl’, p. 53. 16. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in Julia Kristeva and Toril Moi, (eds), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1986), pp. 187–213. 17. Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley; London, 1996), p. 15.

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18. Richard Abraham, ‘Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian amazons of 1917’, in Linda Harriet Edmondson (ed), Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1992), p. 133. 19. Sarah Colvin, and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (eds), Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500 (Rochester, NY, 2009), p. 2. 20. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Beauty or Beast?: The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (Oxford, 2010), pp. 16–18. 21. Rhiannon Talbot, ‘Myths in the representation of women terrorists’, EireIreland, 35 (2000), p. 165. 22. Talbot: ‘Myths’, p. 180. 23. Talbot: ‘Myths’, p. 185. 24. Jayne Steel, ‘Vampira: Representations of the Irish female terrorist’, Irish Studies Review, 6 (1998), p. 274. 25. Steel: ‘Vampira’, pp. 276–7. 26. Melzer: ‘Death in the shape of a young girl’, p. 36. 27. Amanda Third, ‘Imprisonment and excessive femininity: Reading Ulrike Meinhof ’s brain’, Parallax, 16 (2010), pp. 86–7. 28. Talbot: ‘Myths’, p. 180. 29. Amanda Third, ‘Feminist terrorists/terrorist feminists: tracking the rise of the violent feminist threat’, in Susanna Scarparo and Sarah McDonald (eds), Violent Depictions: Representing Violence across Cultures (Newcastle-uponTyne, 2006), p. 70. 30. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York, 2008), pp. 103 and 15. 31. Kelly Oliver, Women as Weapons of War : Iraq, Sex, and the Media (New York, 2007), pp. 132–3. 32. Cavarero: Horrorism, pp. 102–3. 33. Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence, and Identity (Rochester, 2009), pp. 198–9. 34. See Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames: A Film (London, 2011). The script is also reproduced in Lizzie Borden, ‘Born in flames’, Heresies, 16 (1983), pp. 12–16. 35. Interview with Kaisa Lassinaro, 2011, insert in Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames. 36. Borden: Born in Flames, p. 12. 37. Anne Crilly, ‘Banning history’, History Workshop Journal, 31 (1991), pp. 163–5. See also, Mike Jempson and Liz Curtis, Interference on the Airwave: Ireland, the Media and the Broadcasting Ban (England, 1993).

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38. All quotations transcribed from the soundtrack of Mother Ireland. 39. Similar points are made about Farrell and other women prisoners in Northern Ireland, including Rita O’Hare in Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (London, 1991), which is based on interviews, see pp. 147–67, and in Rhiannon Talbot, ‘Female combatants, paramilitary prisoners and the development of feminism in the republican movement’, in L. Ryan and M. Ward (eds), Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women, and Wicked Hags (2004), pp. 140–2. For an account of feminism and the Dirty Protests see Begona Aretxaga, ‘Dirty protest: symbolic overdetermination and gender in Northern Ireland ethnic violence’, Ethos, 23 (2009), pp. 123–8. 40. Alison: Women and Political Violence, pp. 147–50. 41. Chapter 11 ‘Women reformists and revolutionaries in Vietnam’, Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London; Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1994).

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3

Gender and the Terrorist in Historiography Sylvia Schraut

This chapter will discuss four main issues relating to gender and terrorism in German historiography starting with a general overview of gender-bias in studies analyzing political violence. It will concentrate on the case of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in German historiography in order to emphasize the necessity for defining terrorist strategies historically and to argue for the importance and persistence of traditional gender stereotypes in the representation of politically motivated violence.

gendered violence Violence, defined narrowly as an act ‘intended to cause bodily injury to people by people’1 and as a politically motivated non-state phenomenon has not warranted an in-depth discussion in German historiography although the literature has, time and again, dealt with politically based violence. To date, the focus has been on the social and cultural effects of violence in the context of military conflicts and especially on the social and cultural effects of violence during the period of German National Socialism.2 If we analyze historical publications on political violence in general, gender has not played an important role, and this is not just characteristic of German historiography. When historical publications or gender studies deal with gender and violence there is a strong gender bias, which also characterizes the representation of political violence since the French Revolution. When the media or academic 57

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researchers set out to analyze the participation of women in political violence, they still assume that men and women have a different historical or anthropological relation to political violence.3 Consequently, the motivation of women committing acts of political violence is explained by the existence of particular or extraordinary circumstances. The assumption that ‘man = soldiering’ and ‘war = the oppression of women’ which is then opposed to ‘woman = civilisation = peace’, originally linked with fantasies about matriarchy, is still ubiquitous in the relevant literature.4 These alignments persist even though they ignore the historical evidence. Often the emphasis is on the close relation between the nation interpreted as male and the propensity for warfare which is associated with masculinity.5 More recent literature however no longer refers to the peaceful character of women, but rather describes – for which there is also no evidence in historical research – women as victims, whereas men are presumed usually to profit from war. As a rule, commentators examine female acts of violence against the background of their own gender concepts. Cindy Ness puts it concisely in an article about current secular and Islamist female terrorism when she states that ‘females who participate in violent terrorist acts violate conventional notions of gender and power’. She goes on to argue that ‘with few exceptions violence is cross-culturally considered a male arena – and therefore takes as its point of departure that any social group that sanctions female violence, whether secular or religious, must explain itself to itself.’6 What is important however is not only the fact that adversaries, academic researchers and even brothers-in-arms seem to consider it necessary to find particular explanations for female participation in violent political acts but this participation also provokes specific approaches to interpretation which are closely linked with the debate about the legitimacy or reprehensibility of politically motivated violence. Both discourses – the discourse about female participation in political violence and the discourse about the (il)legitimacy of politically motivated acts of violence – are rooted in separate and yet interwoven long lines of tradition whose gendered implications have to be discussed further in order to understand current debates.

p o l i t i c a l v i o l e n c e i n g e r m a n h i s to r i o g r a p hy and gender If we search for studies discussing terrorist methods used in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries we will find only a handful of publications before

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2000, with the exception of studies on RAF-terrorism. However, even in the late 1970s when German literature began to debate the modern terrorism of the RAF it was mostly journalists who engaged with the topic such as, for example, Stephan Aust, who later became the editor of Der Spiegel. An image of the male and female terrorist was often constructed without consulting archival sources.7 In addition, research on RAF-terrorism was instigated on the instruction of politicians.8 Since the 1990s many biographies and autobiographies of former members of the RAF have been published,9 but these books, which were written from the perspective of involved witnesses, have not yet been analyzed by historians in order to discuss the differences between self-staging and historical knowledge. As Gerhard Haupt argued: ‘The recent discussion about the reasons, roots, representations and consequences of terrorism takes place without historical knowledge.’10 And we may add to Haupt’s statement that research mostly takes place without considering the gender implications of representations of terrorism.11 Historical research on politically motivated violence becomes more prominent in times when there is an increase in terrorism, as demonstrated with the publication in the 1980s of studies in relation not only to the RAF but also to a broader history of politically based violence.12 However, this cluster of research did not take into account questions of gender. It was not until after the events of 9/11 that German historiography started to focus on politically based violence in history, and this developed into three research strands: firstly, the beginnings of historical research on RAFterrorism in German historiography,13 secondly, research on the history of political violence and terrorism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14 These studies mostly agreed with understanding violence as a form of communication and in particular as a means to communicate social problems and conflicts. Thirdly, and most importantly for the purposes of this collection of essays, there has been growing research on issues of gender and terrorism.15 Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann’s study, published in 2009, analyzes convincingly the interactions between politics, the media, administrative or judicial authorities and the RAF by identifying the strategies of judicial authorities in relation to the participation of female terrorists. She concludes that the sex and gender of the terrorist do not play an important role in understanding their representations because neither the terrorists themselves nor the other participants in the relevant discourses based their arguments on gender.16

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Other recent publications on gender and terrorism disagree with the conclusion that gender is of minor importance. In her study ‘Gendering Terror’, published in 2011, Dominique Grisard for example analyses the representation of terrorism in Switzerland during the 1970s and 1980s in order to argue that in the media and judicial discourses gender and terrorism are deeply connected and that gender is one of the leading methodological approaches which makes it possible to understand the representations of terrorism she analyzed.17 Using a similar approach Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann is currently working on the gendered representation of the terrorist in Austria18 and a collection of essays is due for publication in 2013 on gender and the RAF.19 The papers in the collection emphasize the important role of gendered representations of terrorism in the media and their messages. What these new methodological approaches demonstrate are the points of intersection between recent research on Islamist terrorism in political science, research on RAF-terrorism in historiography, and research on politically based violence in history and gender studies.

d e f i n i n g te r r o r i s m h i s to r i c a ll y As I have argued, with the exception of studies on RAF-terrorism the history of terrorism is not extensively discussed in German historiography and gender and its representations play only a minor role. There are only a few historical studies about terrorism and gender in the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth centuries. German historians seem to have problems dealing with terrorism before the 1970s and even more problems discussing the history of the gendered representation of the terrorist. One explanation may be the lack of sources, because, as we know, in general clandestine organizations did and do not publish minutes of their meetings, or summaries of their decisions and strategies. And in general the archives do not have many openly accessible sources about the fight against terrorism. This may explain why historians exercise restraint in research on terrorism. But there may be other reasons too. Firstly, there is the question of how to define terrorism historically. Recent studies about the RAF and modern terrorism define terrorism using the definition that is current now. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the terminology continuously changed. Often politically based violence, what we would call terrorism today, was in its own period called revolt, upheaval or assassination, anarchism, nihilism

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or simply political violence, as for example in the case of the ‘Organization Consul’ which used terrorist strategies in the Weimar Republic. We therefore need to define terrorism historically, if we want to analyse a genealogy of the gendered representation of political violence.20 The same problem arises if we do not use the term terrorism but instead discuss security in order to place recent security studies within a historical framework. German conceptual history seems to be helpful on the topic of histories of terrorism. As early as 1990 the historian Rudolf Walther had studied the development of the term terrorism demonstrating not only its changing content since the French Revolution, but also that there was a fundamental break in the middle of the nineteenth century.21 Beginning in 1848–9 terror was used in Europe as a strategy to question the authority of the State. Politically based violence began to aim at indirect rather than direct targets. Gaining influence over the public and winning sympathizers seemed to become the main aim of such violent acts resulting in terrorist strategies designed to be communication processes. Current research demonstrates that if, taking into consideration the dominant characteristics of terrorism, we interpret terrorism as violence-based communication processes, where the targets of violence are not the main political targets – we can define terrorist acts since the early nineteenth century as methods of political violence which aim to launch a public controversy about the legitimacy of the existing state or type of rule, or to trigger public debates about the question what rights of political participation members of a polity are entitled to in dealing with their own or foreign rulers. Last but not least, in these public debates gender roles and their connection with the right to political participation and the use of politically motivated violence become visible. If we analyse traditions of terrorist strategies based on these characteristics we find representative discussions about political violence or terrorism in the contemporaneous media and we discover the iconography of the image of the male or female terrorist which has developed since the French Revolution and the beginning of the bourgeois era in Europe. These considerations were the starting point of a conference on gender, terrorism and remembrance in Munich in 2010. The case studies presented discussed representations of the male and female terrorist in nineteenth and twentieth century European history. The results revealed gendered traditions in the representation of the terrorist and most importantly, how gender roles were transgressed through the use of political violence since the French Revolution.22

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gender implications of political violence in the n i n e te e n t h a n d t we n t i e t h c e n t u r i e s Why should the French Revolution have become the starting point for modern discussions of gender and the terrorist? During this period, which is closely linked with the founding of modern democracy and the shaping of modern gender roles, gendered representations of male and female terrorists were developed. Such representations created a long tradition and influenced current representations of the terrorist in public media. From a historical perspective terrorism as a political and communicative strategy is in several respects interwoven with European bourgeois society which developed from the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution: firstly, one prerequisite of terrorism is a type of government which is legitimized by majorities, irrespective of the way these majorities are gained. A second prerequisite is the existence of a central space in which, for the purpose of winning sympathizers, negotiations about the state’s legitimacy, the legitimacy of attacks on the system, and the right of the actors to commit such acts are possible. This space is provided by bourgeois society’s media public which has emerged since the Age of Enlightenment. Even the early actors – the terrorists and the state – were aware of the importance of this public. The Deutsche Bund,23 for example, used August von Kotzebue’s assassination by the student Karl Ludwig Sand in 1819 to introduce comprehensive press censorship and in 1887 the anarchist paper Freiheit published an article that functioned as a sort of manifesto for the group: Never and nowhere has any anarchist had the idea that the social revolution might gain from the extermination of individuals. It has always been assumed that any such act only proves to be valuable if the effect achieved by it results in propaganda, in order to gain the approval of the masses, to arouse their enthusiasm for the actors and therefore for the party they belong to, to wake their masculine courage, to kindle their boldness, and, above all, to further such qualities in them which are essential for the cause of the revolution and are able to further this cause to a high degree.24

According to this article anarchism should capitalize on the fact ‘that actions of political violence become famous in the whole world at once and therefore generally lead to discussions and agitation.’25 On the basis of this approach and the definition given above, public debates about specific forms of terrorism appear as a discourse in which considerations about the legitimacy of the governing system, concepts of security and

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political participation and dealing with political minorities or outsiders amalgamate. What becomes apparent is how knowledge and patterns of interpretation in the context of terrorist incidents have been generated, handed down and even canonized. If we also consider that one essential element of past and current definitions of gender is the gender-connoted closeness to or distance from power26 then arguments in the media about terrorism, last but not least, mirror the state of gender relations and the chances for women and men to participate in political decision-making processes. At this point it is worth recalling that at the time of the French Revolution the new bourgeois society decided it was itself the nation but that women should not participate in the newly acquired political rights. In view of this, what can be said about terrorist methods and gender? As previously outlined there are gender-biased traditions in representations of women as peaceful and men as ready to use violence to defend the nation. These images represent popular gender models since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In order to conclude I would argue that not only the active participation of women in acts of political violence has to be explained, but most importantly, the peculiar attention such acts attract. What is of interest, above all, are the interpretations made with the purpose of giving meaning to the participation of women. However, not only does women’s violent participation have to be explained but politically motivated men who carry out acts of violence against their own government also seem to transgress their gender roles. In order to illustrate this I will use the example of Charlotte Corday who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat at the outset of the terreur in 1793 in Paris.27 She herself interpreted the assassination as a declaration to the French people to find a new peace between the revolutionary parties. Only some weeks later, at the memorial service for Marat, Marquis de Sade called Corday a hermaphrodite or at least an androgynous creature without sex, who had descended from hell to the despair of men and women.28 Following this a long and influential tradition in referring to Charlotte Corday developed. According to critics of political violence Corday was a woman who denied her gender role. In 1891 for example the Italian criminologist Lombroso lectured about the Russian female anarchists following Charlotte Corday: Petersburg counts 168,000 unmarried or separated women and 98,000 married women ... The consequences are evident. ... The women cannot live their natural lives, and they turn to politics. ... Here we can find these female students or, as they call themselves, ‘tomboys’ (Weib-Männer),

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who fund severe conspiracies, hunt after rich inheritors, in order to fill the treasury of their group, who kidnap prisoners, bribe prison guards, find everywhere openings as maids and nurses and make propaganda, in which they are extraordinary.29

And following a similar argument in relation to Corday the Austrian writer and psychoanalyst Fritz Wittels for example wrote in 1908: The female assassins are the burning mountains of the imprisoned female libido. ... The loneliness of the female political assassins may be voluntary or involuntary, the result is however the same and means rejection of sexuality: they do not want to kiss.30

To sympathizers Corday became a hero or martyr, both of which are traditionally superhuman and predominantly male. The representation of female heroes quite often demonstrates male characteristics. In the Christian tradition a male martyr fights for his ideas and acts as a witness to Christian truth. In contrast to this, a female martyr does not fight primarily for her faith but for her family and in defence of her virginity.31 That is why Corday could not be a ‘real woman’ and hence images of Corday represent her as the (sexless) ‘angel of assassination’, while paintings and writings depict the pale virgin and lonely girl (not woman) who was from another world. Emma Adler for example, a socialist and well known writer in the early twentieth century, wrote: The only picture which exists was painted close to her death. It shows enormous gentleness. Her image shows no connection with the bloody memories, which her name conjures. It is the face of a young girl from Normandy, a virgin face in its springtime. She looks much younger than she is, much younger than other girls at the age of 25. ... Her hair is coloured ash-blond, she wears a white bonnet and a white dress. Her eyes show the glance of doubt and sadness. ... If we look directly into her sad and soft eyes, we feel something, which may explain her fate. Always she was lonely!32

More trivially she was analysed as a woman who only became a politically and violently acting person because the Jacobins killed her boyfriend. Of course, what is implied here is that women could not act politically and violently. Love had to be the cause of their actions. The anarchists or the Russian Nihilists referred to Charlotte Corday along the same lines and identified a connecting link between Charlotte Corday and the politically motivated assassinations of their own time.33 Poems and pamphlets celebrated for example Vera Zaslulič

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– a Russian anarchist, who assassinated a leading police figure in Petersburg in 1878 – as Charlotte Corday. Maria Spiridonowa, a leading figure of the Social Revolutionaries, who murdered the governor of Tamboff in 1906, was called a brave and great girl and was compared with Charlotte Corday by her lawyer.34 Until now feminist historiography which sympathizes with political violence has used her image as a gender role-blasting archetype of feminism and often it combines the image of Corday as a non-real woman, an angel almost, with feminism: ‘Charlotte Corday, the soft woman with the dagger’, wrote for example the feminist writer Salomé Kestenholz in 1984, ‘impressed by the fate of Ulrike Meinhof, other women and the resulting decrying of emancipated women’.35 On this point the sympathizers agreed with contemporary critics of Charlotte Corday. An analysis of the representation of the male assassin, Carl Ludwig Sand who assassinated the conservative author August von Kotzebue in Mannheim (Germany) in 1819 provides the male image of the terrorist.36 Like Corday he interpreted homicide as a declaration to the people that they should struggle against the restoration. As in Corday’s case we find a huge flood of critical or sympathetic statements in the following two centuries. And similarly representations of Sand demonstrate a man who transgressed masculine gender roles. I cannot deal at length with this assassination and the development of the image of Sand but it is worth mentioning that the assassination deeply affected the political world of the time. The conservative and restoration forces drew an image of Sand as a female man, a man whose emotions were too strong and who was primarily educated by his mother, a man who was not able to participate in politics rationally: Sand was a weak man. To quote only one source of 1831, according to Carl Jarcke, Sand was a young man, underdeveloped in mind and body. His writings show (female) ‘depression’, ‘melancholy’ and ‘disappointment’. They show ‘a true impression of the chaos, in which Sand’s mind was destroyed in those times’.37 In discussions of political violence during the following two hundred years we find two competing models of male political participation: on one side the rationally acting man in interior political affairs, on the other side the strong man who uses violence not only to defend his country against exterior enemies in wartime but to defend the nation – later his fatherland – against interior enemies. For the forces of opposition Sand became a symbol for oppressed liberalism. The liberal opposition regarded Sand as a ‘heroic youth’ and as a ‘martyr for the cause of the fatherland’. Following the rules of the traditional image of

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the Christian – now political – martyr they draw an image of a sensible man who suffered too much under political pressure. Following the Christian tradition of the martyr he had to be strong in mind but sexless. According to this interpretation Sand had a ‘fermenting nature, not able to make a woman happy’.38 These characteristics of the female-male enemy who uses violence or the hero and martyr in politically motivated acts of violence seem to form the basis for all further images of male terrorists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We can find many reflections on political violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which refer to Carl Ludwig Sand as the founding father of political violence against the State. In conclusion I would argue that if we analyze the debates about political violence in the media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we can identify the following characteristics: the enemies of the terrorist used to feminize the male terrorist and masculinize the female terrorist. In their opinion using political violence means to transgress accepted political and gender roles, which were defined during the French Revolution. In contrast, sympathizers represent terrorists both as heroes and martyrs. However, by doing so, they follow the gender implications of these concepts. This is why the sympathizers of female terrorists are not free from representing their female heroes as non-political virgins or sexless women, while they can draw a male martyr who is strong in his political opinions. Using the terms heroes and martyrs the sympathizers borrow terms and symbols from the long Christian tradition. The images of the hero/heroine and the martyr carry with them the historical legacy of the logics of representation and, not least, early modern traditional gender concepts which have an impact on the current coverage of terrorism and on current research. As a result the representation of the terrorist oscillates between gender role transgressing (referring to the gender roles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and gender role stabilizing (referring to the gender roles of early modern and modern times), because approval of politically motivated violence can only be formulated with reference to representations and terms accompanied by traditional gender perspectives. I will finish this chapter with an article which discussed the crimes of the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik in July of 2011. In Kulturzeit, a format of the TV channel 3sat, the female journalist Susan Christely came to the conclusion: Breivik is against all that is liberal. He wants to initiate a crusade against Islam. The assassination was an act of public relations, a message

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generator for his interest. But long before Breivik other murderers wrote their ideological ideas, Charlotte Corday assassinated the leading figure of the Jacobins: Jean Paul Marat. The conservative author Karl August von Kotzebue was killed by the knife of the student Ludwig Sand. In more recent days there were at least the members of the RAF, who killed the representations of their enemies.39

The traditional lines and their gender-implications still seem to be in operation.

N ote s 1. Heinrich Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1992), p. 48. 2. See the introduction in Neithard Bulst, Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (eds), Gewalt im politischen Raum. Fallanalysen vom Spätmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 2008), pp. 7–19. 3. Miranda H. Alison, Women and Political Violence (London/New York, 2009), p. 1. 4. For example Miroslav Ninic and Donna J. Ninic, ‘Race, gender and war’, Journal of Peace Research, 39 (2002), pp. 547–68; we can find an overview in Karen Hagemann, ‘Krieg, frieden und gewalt. friedens- und konfliktforschung als geschlechterforschung – Eine Einführung’, in J. A. Davy, K. Hagemann and U. Kätzel (eds), Frieden – Gewalt – Geschlecht. Friedens- und Konfliktforschung als Geschlechterforschung (Essen, 2005), pp. 17–54; Alison: Women, pp. 85–121. 5. For example Bettina Roß, ‘Krieg und Geschlechterhierarchie als Teil des Gesellschaftsvertrages’, in C. Harders and B. Roß (eds), Geschlechterverhältnisse in Krieg und Frieden. Perspektiven der feministischen Analyse internationaler Beziehungen (Opladen, 2002), pp. 31–44. 6. Cindy D. Ness, ‘In the name of the cause: women’s work in secular and religious terrorism’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 28 (2005), pp. 353–73, p. 354. 7. Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex (Hamburg, 1985). 8. Representative of this is for example the group of authors who wrote a book about terrorism for the ‘Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung’ in 1977. The book combines studies of five journalists, two judges, three researchers of political sciences, two presidents of Offices for the Protection of the Constitution, a lecturer on criminology at a police academy, one expert in military history and as the only researcher in contemporary history, Walter Laqueur, who became the only expert on the historiography of terrorism; Manfred Funke

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9.

10.

11.

12.

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(ed.), Terrorismus. Untersuchungen zur Strategie und Struktur revolutionärer Gewaltpolitik (Bonn, 1977). See also Analysen zum Terrorismus, ed. by Bundesministerium des Innern: vol. 1, Iring Fetscher and Günter Rohrmoser, Ideologien und Strategien (Opladen, 1981); vol. 2, Herbert Jäger, Gerhard Schmidtchen and Lieselotte Süllwold, Lebenslaufanalysen (Opladen o. J.); vol. 3, Wanda von Baeyer-Katte, Dieter Claessens, Feger Hubert and Friedhelm Neidhardt, Gruppenprozesse (Opladen, 1983); vol. 4/I, Ulrich Matz and Gerhard Schmidtchen, Gewalt und Legitimität (Opladen, 1983); vol. 4/II, Fritz Sack and Heinz Steinert, Protest und Reaktion (Opladen, 1983). For example: Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof. Die Biographie (Berlin, 2007); Kristin Wesemann, Ulrike Meinhof Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin, – eine politische Biographie (Baden-Baden, 2007); Katriina Lehto-Bleckert, Ulrike Meinhof 1934–1976. Ihr Weg zur Terroristin (Marburg, 2011); autobiographies: Till Meyer, Staatsfeind. Erinnerungen (Hamburg, 1996); Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg, 1997); Margit Schiller, Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung. Ein Lebensbericht aus der R AF (Hamburg, 2000); Astrid Proll, (ed.), Hans und Grete. Bilder der R AF 1967–1977 (Berlin, 2004); Christiane und Gottfried Ensslin (eds), Gudrun Ensslin, ‘Zieht den Trennungsstrich, jede Minute’. Briefe an ihre Schwester Christiane und ihren Bruder Gottfried aus dem Gefängnis 1972– 1973 (Hamburg, 2005). Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ‘Politische gewalt und terrorismus: einige historiographische anmerkungen’, in K. Weinhauer, J. Requate and H.-G. Haupt (eds), Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik, Medien, Staat und Subkulturen in den 1970er Jahren (Frankfurt a.M., 2006), pp. 59–73, p. 59. For an overview of historical studies on terrorism see Sylvia Schraut, ‘Terrorismus und Geschichtswissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, Sonderheft, 1 (2011): Terrorismusforschung in Deutschland, pp. 99–122. In 1982 Wolfgang Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld published a collection of conference papers on social protest, violence and terror by fringe groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study was very influential: Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds), Sozialprotest, Gewalt, Terror – Gewaltanwendung durch politische und gesellschaftliche Randgruppen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1982). In 1983 Dirk Blasius published a small history of politically based crime in Germany from 1800 to 1980: Dirk Blasius, Geschichte der politischen Kriminalität in Deutschland (1800–1980). Eine Studie zu Justiz und Staatsverbrechen (Frankfurt, 1983). See also a book on terrorism in the second German Empire by the lawyer Joachim Wagner published in 1980. He looked for the personality of the terrorist in history:

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13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

69

Joachim Wagner, Missionare der Gewalt, Lebensläufe deutscher Terroristen im Kaiserreich (Heidelberg, 1980). However, these studies were not very influential. See one of the first serious studies by historians: Klaus Weinhauer, Jörg Requate and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (eds), Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik. Medien, Staat und Subkulturen in den 1970er Jahren (Frankfurt a.M., 2006) about the RAF, which combines the research methods of political, media and social history. See for example a volume about violence in the political sphere since the Middle Ages: Neithard Bulst, Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (eds), Gewalt im politischen Raum. Fallanalysen vom Spätmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 2008). In 2009 Martin Schulze Wessel edited an issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft on terrorism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Martin Schulze Wessel, ‘Terrorismusstudien. Bemerkungen zur Entwicklung eines Forschungsfeldes’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2009), pp. 357–67. As an introduction see: Sylvia Schraut, ‘Terrorismus und Geschlecht’, in Ch. Künzel and G. Temme (eds), Täterinnen und/oder Opfer? Frauen in Gewaltstrukturen (Hamburg, 2007), pp. 105–23. Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Frauen, Terrorismus und Justiz. Prozesse gegen weibliche Mitglieder der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni (Düsseldorf, 2009). Dominique Grisard, Gendering Terror. Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Linksterrorismus in der Schweiz (Frankfurt a.M., 2011). Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, ‘Emanzipation mit Bomben und Pistolen? Feministinnen und Terroristinnen in deutschsprachigen Sicherheitsdiskursen der 1970er Jahre’, L’Homme, 20/2 (2009), pp. 65–84; Irene BandhauerSchöffmann, ‘Österreichische Terrorbuben? Zeitgenössische und retrospektive Deutungen des Linksterrorismus in Österreich während der 1970er-Jahre’, in Ch. Hikel and S. Schraut (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht. Politische Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M./New York, 2012), pp. 209–29. Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann and Dirk Van Laak (eds), Der Link sterrorismus der 1970er Jahre und die Ordnung der Geschlechter (Trier, 2013). In the following I refer to an often cited definition by Alex P. Schmid and Albert Jongman from 1988. According to this definition terrorism is an ‘anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi)clandestine individuals, groups or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence ... serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperiled) victims, and

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21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

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main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought’. Alex P. Schmid and Albert Jongman, Political Terrorism. A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988), p. 28. Rudolf Walther, ‘Terror, Terrorismus’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 6 (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 323–443. Christine Hikel and Sylvia Schraut (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht. Politische Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M./New York, 2012). The Deutsche Bund is the federal organization of the German countries which had no central government between 1803 and 1871. ‘Die Propaganda der Tat’, Freiheit, 16 April 1887. ‘Die Propaganda der Tat’; in relation to anarchism see Andrew R. Carlson, ‘Anarchismus und individueller Terror im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1870–1890’, in W. J. Mommsen and G. Hirschfeld (eds), Sozialprotest, Gewalt, Terror – Gewaltanwendung durch politische und gesellschaftliche Randgruppen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 207–36; Wolfgang Bock, ‘Terrorismus und politischer Anarchismus im Kaiserreich. Entstehung, Entwicklung, rechtliche und politische Bekämpfung’, in H. Diefenbacher (ed.), Anarchismus. Zur Geschichte und Idee der herrschaftsfreien Gesellschaft (Darmstadt, 1996), pp. 143–68. See Joan, W. Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review, 91/5 (1986), pp. 1053–75. About popular representation of Charlotte Corday as a founding figure of female terrorism see Sylvia Schraut, ‘Charlotte Corday und Karl Ludwig Sand – Populäre Repräsentation von Geschlecht und politischer Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert’, publication of conference papers (Freiburg, 2013, forthcoming). Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Marion Luckow, 3 vols (Frankfurt a.M., 1978), vol. 2, p. 81. Cesare Lombroso and Rodolfo Laschi, Der Politische Verbrecher und die Revolutionen in anthropologischer, juristischer und staatswissenschaftlicher Beziehung, vol. 1 (Hamburg 1891), p. 230. Fritz Wittels, ‘Weibliche Attentäter’, Die Fackel 9/ 246–47 (1908), pp. 26–38, p. 32. As introduction to the gendered historiography of martyrdom: Ness: ‘In the name’; Christoph Türcke, ‘Martyrium. Terrorismus als Sinnstiftung’, in

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32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

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W. Kraushaar (ed.), Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, vol. 2 (Hamburg, 2006), pp. 1317–27; Türcke (2006), Zwicker (2006). Emma Adler, Die berühmten Frauen der französischen Revolution 1789–1795 (Wien, 1906), pp. 26–7. Lynn Patyk, ‘Gefallene Mädchen. Die Terroristin und/als Prostituierte im ausgehenden zaristischen Russland’, in Hikel / Schraut (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht, pp. 233–55. Ibid., p. 245. Salomé Kestenholz, Die Gleichheit vor dem Schafott, Portraits französischer Revolutionärinnen (Darmstadt, 1988), pp. 9, 16. See Sylvia Schraut, ‘“Wie der Hass gegen den Staatsrath von Kotzebue, und der Gedanke, ihn zu ermorden, in Sand entstand”. Ein politischer Mord und seine Nachwirkungen’, in Hikel / Schraut (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht, pp. 145–68. Carl Ernst Jarcke, Carl Ludwig Sand und sein, an dem kaiserlich-russischen Staatsrath v. Kotzebue verübter Mord. Eine psychologisch-criminalistische Erörterung aus der Geschichte unserer Zeit (Berlin,1831), p. 75. Schenkling-Prévot, ‘Karl Ludwig Sand’, in: Burschenschaftliche Blätter, 10 (1895), pp. 78–81, 108–110, 164–166, 195–197, 221–225: p. 110 http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/kulturzeit/themen/155826/index.html

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4

Upheaval of Daughters and Sons Oedipal Rivalries and the Red Army Faction Historiography Dominique Grisard

There seems to be no way in avoiding the category of generation when it comes to conceptualizing 1970s West German leftist terrorism. The concept of generation has been prominently used in three different ways: first, the Red Army Faction (RAF) is narrated as the crimes of three distinct generations. Second, the RAF’s political violence has been recurrently considered an after-effect of the 1968 generation and/or an excess of Second wave or generation of feminism. Third, the 1968 generation and the RAF tend to be framed as the children trying to kill their literal and/or political fathers – the National-Socialist legacy. It is this third mode, a decidedly Oedipal generational and familial framing of the RAF that this chapter focuses on. In her book Hitler’s Children (1977), South African publicist Jillian Becker demonstrated how severing the ties from both literal fathers and the great impersonal societal father had fatal consequences. Becker’s controversial bestseller may not be the first but it is the most prominent voice in a sea of journalists, publicists, criminologists, psychologists, RAF-members and sympathizers to draw on the Oedipal family narrative about Nazi fathers and their offspring. The RAF founding member Gudrun Ensslin famously said in 1967 ‘this is the Auschwitz generation, there is no arguing with them’.1 Bommi Baumann, founder of RAF’s less intellectual counterpart ‘Movement of June 2nd’, indicts the Nazi father in How it All Began, whereas Fritz Teufel, prominent member of ‘Commune 1’ and the ‘Movement of June 2nd’ accused his own father in court.2 Since then, countless memoirs by 1968ers and RAFmembers insert their experiences into the frame of the Oedipal drama. In 73

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1989, noted sociologist Norbert Elias analysed the 1970s left wing terrorism as a generational conflict, and with journalist Götz Aly’s publication Unser Kampf (2008) the generational debate resurged yet again. What is strangely missing in this debate, and particularly in the popular RAF historiographies by journalists and publicists that this chapter focuses on, is an acknowledgement of psychoanalysis and how it implicitly and explicitly informs the authors’ generational thinking. This omission has the paradoxical effect of ‘suppressing’ gender questions, to make use of psychoanalytic language myself, while preserving them nonetheless. In this chapter I argue that the generational framing of the RAF used by journalists and publicists such as Becker and Schmieding implicitly or explicitly invoke the Oedipal rivalry myth, which in Freud’s understanding was decidedly gen(d)erational. Freud didn’t imagine genderless children struggling against genderless parents. Quite the contrary, his entire point was to show how children develop into boys who develop into men.3 It is thus surprising that in the late 1970s, a time one might call the second wave of psychoanalysis, when both psychoanalytic readings of the 1968 phenomenon and feminist psychoanalysis were flourishing, there were not more gen(d)erational analyses of left wing terrorism. One might argue that the dominance of socialist feminism in West Germany precluded any analysis of the RAF in feminist-psychoanalytic terms. Plus, many feminists were busy defending themselves against the accusation of being (like) left wing terrorists. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule: one short essay by Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen published in 1978 where she adopts a feminist-psychoanalytic approach at explaining female participation in left wing terrorism in generational and familial terms.4 While one might come up with many explanations as to why no substantial gen(d)erational analyses of left wing terrorism came out of the 1970s and early 1980s popular RAF historiography, it seems almost wilful when current debates about the RAF as a generational conflict ignore the overt sexing, gendering and ageing of their Oedipal frame. After 30 years of feminist theory, masculinity studies and queer theory, it is difficult to turn a blind eye to the gendered script of male children killing their literal and symbolic fathers. I contend that acknowledging the influence of psychoanalysis on popular RAF historiographies such as Becker, Schmieding or more recently Aly, entails including gender as a meaningful if not to say necessary category of historical analysis. I thus see my contribution to this debate in raising questions about the explanatory power of a generational approach as a psychoanalytically infused

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category of historical and gender analysis. My larger project focuses on why the generational framing of the RAF keeps resurging in popular texts, and how it shapes popular RAF historiography in profound ways. In this chapter, however, I will concentrate solely on publicists Jillian Becker’s and Walter Schmieding’s contribution to the debate.

generation There are many explanations as to why the generational framing of the RAF has been so dominant. For one, the concept of generation has become increasingly prominent in twentieth-century West German historiography more generally. Based on generation’s etymological root as ‘genus’5 referring to ancestry, genealogy and generativity of families, an understanding of generation as static, coherent generational classes based on age, or philosophical schools that are tied to generations, has become dominant. Generation has also been linked to another etymological root: generation as generatio.6 In this vein genera, following generatio, are in constant movement or flux. This understanding of generation seems to have been far less dominant in West German historiography. The salience that the static category of generation has garnered in the twentieth century has at various times been seen as an effect of the naturalization of bourgeois gender hierarchies, the rise of scientific theories of procreation or the ascendency of genetics.7 It has been argued that the rise of ‘scientific’ sex and race theories has led to an intertwining of biological and sociological notions of generation, and that in the course of these developments generation became seminal for historiography; for those historians attending to continuities in history as well as those focusing on rupture and conflict. According to historian Ulrike Jureit, it is only around World War I that an understanding of generation as conflict and disruption comes to prevail over continuity.8 Incidentally this coincides with when Freud’s psychoanalysis entered popular discourse.9 Since then, the term generation refers to a rift between two succeeding generations. A case in point is sociologist Karl Mannheim’s essay ‘On the problem of generations’.10 Mannheim analysed the impact of generational experience on groups of people across class and geographical lines.11 Given the prevalence of psychoanalytically infused social diagnosis in the post World War II era by the likes of Adorno and Horkheimer,12 Mitscherlich13 and Marcuse,14 it may not surprise that even

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some of the RAF members stylized their actions as motivated by their conflict with literal and symbolic father(s). Some self-critically admitted to having become like their fathers, the deviant offspring of a society traumatized by Nazism. My own understanding of generation is informed by Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of the Oedipal complex15 and feminist criticism of the paradigm by Julia Kristeva, Marianne Hirsch and Judith Roof. In her essay ‘Women’s Time’ Kristeva points out that ‘when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history’.16 She then goes on to unfold the binary logic of women either fighting for inclusion into linear, progress orientated time and history, or women refusing to form part of the male order while celebrating a maternal, cyclical, repetitive time.17 Roof argues that organizing history as a set of seemingly natural cycles the way generational historiography seems to, does not guarantee women a place in history. For generation is neither an innocent empirical model nor an objective assessment of a historical reality.18 Against this background, I will now revisit what film theorist Thomas Elsaesser called the ‘master-narrative of fathers and sons’,19 that is the RAF’s entanglement with the Nazi past in order to discuss the explanatory power of this framework as well as its shortcomings.

h i t l e r ’s c h i l d r e n: o e d i p a l r i va l r y a n d repetition compulsion Hitler’s Children, commissioned by the New York publisher J.B. Lippincott, was published in June 1977. It proved an immediate bestseller; in the same year the publication received the Newsweek (Europe) book of the year award. The author, English-South African journalist Jillian Becker, started to work on a second edition right away. A new chapter was added to the second edition, which came out as a Panther paperback by Granada, London in January 1978. This new chapter focused on the recent attacks by the second generation of the RAF carried out in 1977, namely the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the deaths of Jan Carl Raspe, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader in Stammheim prison on 18 October. This expanded edition was translated into French, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Japanese and German. The German edition was published in 1978.

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The book already instigated a debate well before its publication.20 Indeed, two weeks after the 13 October hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Mogadishu, and the already mentioned deaths on 18 October, a much discussed review of the book appeared in the noted German weekly Der Spiegel written by political scientist Martin Greiffenhagen.21 The author took issue with some of the main points of Becker’s argument but nonetheless engaged seriously and not dismissively with the book. Greiffenhagen stressed, however, that the book’s title was unfortunate if not incorrect. To him Becker’s claim that Meinhof and Ensslin were Hitler’s children was not doing her own analysis of Ensslin’s and Meinhof ’s socio-political background and socialization justice. He thus added that these so called children were also ‘heirs of a reduced understanding of politics that in its moral resistance, prophetic setting of an example, elitist community spirit, and fatal fascination for the exceptional had to be open to the accusation of rather being on the right than on the left politically’.22 Greiffenhagen points out that if one takes into account what Becker unearths about Meinhof ’s and Ensslin’s socio-political background and socialization, one would invariably come to the conclusion that there was more to the RAF than the slogan ‘Hitler’s Children’ suggested. Indeed, in the German edition of the book a question mark was added to the title: Hitler’s Children? For the German context, the adapted title was still provocative enough and Fisher Publishing house still feared repercussions.23 The title Hitler’s Children is reminiscent of Giselher Schmidt’s 1969 monograph ‘Hitler’s and Mao’s Sons’, drawing attention to the continuities between National Socialism and 1968.24 Schmidt too made use of the father– child trope. Not only did the title of his book suggest a natural reproduction of extremism – from ideological fathers to sons – the book’s title also made a case for structural similarities between Hitler or rather the far right National Democratic Party and Mao or the new Left. The generational frame facilitated Schmidt’s analogy between left and right. A similar argument could be made about the title of Becker’s book and the analogies it facilitated. In her bestseller, Becker is mostly interested in the two most prominent women in the RAF: Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. She also writes about Andreas Baader but not in the same depth. This might have led her to choose the seemingly gender-neutral Hitler’s Children as title. By highlighting specific events in the two women’s biographies, Becker demonstrates how intimately bound up the RAF was in recent West German history. Becker suggests that even though the RAF had disqualified any kind of authority as fascist, which to them was identical to Nazism, and even though the RAF’s

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terrorist actions were directed against their Nazi fathers, they inadvertently imitated them. The terrorists, for Becker, had not only disqualified themselves as recalcitrant adolescents rebelling against any adult authority but they were also petulant, spoiled children trying hard to rupture their bond with the Nazi past, so hard in fact that in the end they reproduced the same kind of anti-Semitic violence as their father(s). To substantiate her claim, Becker recounted the revolutionary cell’s 1976 airplane hijacking to Entebbe, Uganda, when the terrorists separated the Jewish passengers from the rest.25 ‘Once again they were ordered about by guards with guns, shouted at to move quickly – “Schnell!” – this time by a German woman hijacker, who also felt it was necessary to slap them (18).’26 According to Becker’s account, the female terrorist in question consciously or unconsciously repeated the anti-Semitism of Nazi concentration camps. The children or rather daughters had become their fathers. Just to make it clear, Becker was not the only one to make these kinds of observations: revolutionary cell member Hans-Joachim Klein, learning of the separation of Jews at Entebbe, said ‘this is Auschwitz all over again, pure and simple’. In fact, the anti-Semitism evident in the Entebbe hijacking had become the focus of long-running internal debates during which Klein eventually left the movement. Klein had sent a letter and his gun to Der Spiegel in 1977, announcing his resignation. And RAF-member Silke Maier-Witt, in her memoir says, ‘in trying not to be like my father, I ended up being even more like him. Terrorism is close to Nazism’.27 As linguist and RAF-scholar Andreas Musolff points out, ‘the implied ethical assessment [of assuming the symbolic position of the child] was ambiguous because it varied with the perception of children as either being in revolt against the perpetrator-parents (i.e., the preferred self-image) or inheriting=carrying forward their legacy (i.e., the critics’ view)’.28 Becker’s popular RAF historiography showed how revolt and emulation were constitutively intertwined. Setting the scene as a generational conflict between children and literal and/or symbolic father(s) allowed Becker and others to question the political nature of the RAF: But whether the idealistic moral-political motives claimed by these rebellious children of the free Western democracies, styling themselves an avant-garde of world communist revolution, are plausible, or whether quite different and personal motives were more likely to have impelled the young gangsters to their acts of violence, is one of the questions which a close inquiry into their histories should help to decide.29

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Becker’s implicitly psychoanalytic frame for studying the RAF connected the ‘private’ children–father conflict with ‘public’ political ruptures between generations. Incidentally, when Becker emphasized the personal dramas that influenced these ‘young gangsters’, she predominantly focused on the women in the RAF. One could argue that she tapped into the long tradition of conflating women with the private and personal in order to underscore her central argument that the RAF was not about politics, their disgust with what to them was an oppressive, fascist state was just a smoke screen. To her it was clear that instead theirs was a misguided rebellion against the father(s) that ended in the unconscious repetition of their crimes.30

‘u n s e r k a m p f ’? a f e m i n i s t r e s p o n s e to t h e r e s u r g e n c e o f o e d i p a l R A F h i s to r i o g r a p hy In 2007, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Benno Ohnesorg’s murder, journalist Jens Jessen wrote a piece in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit suggesting that there might be more to the Nazi-1968 analogy. A year later, Götz Aly’s provocative publication Unser Kampf took the comparison to a new level. The generally indignant responses from noted 1968 scholars and journalists were not long in coming. The debate is still raging on but has become more subdued with responses by Kraushaar31 and Musolff 32 adding nuance. Is this resurgence of Oedipal RAF historiography itself a case of repetition compulsion? How do we make sense of this almost forty year old debate from a gender perspective? First, the decidedly masculine understanding of generation in this debate suggests continuity – both over time and space. The continuity over time is summed up by the popular saying ‘like father like son’. The same ‘like father like son’ trope somehow also manages to imply spatial continuity. The extreme right is likened to the extreme left. As if it didn’t matter whether the pendulum swung to the right or to the left, the trope suggests that the outcome would be the same. Second, generation infers a cyclical yet progressive temporality by drawing on generativity and generative tropes such as the ‘birth of a new generation’. These images naturalize a specific sequence of events, namely an older generation giving birth and then being killed off by a younger one. Generational classifications are construed on the basis of what Roof calls ‘sequential negation’:33 Roof shows how history is organized as a series of intergenerational bonds inevitably ruptured by a new and/or younger

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generation. Third, history that is structured by generational conflicts, tends also to naturalize violence as a necessary movens, each generation needing to kill its fathers. Finally, the generational frame thus lends itself to focus on the continuity or repetition of Oedipal rupture. The Oedipal lens, however, seems to occlude all that lies outside this familial and familiar matrix.34 It is not the goal of this chapter to discount generational historiography. The generational lens can contribute to making sense of the complex psycho-sexual-cultural-political entanglements of those who lived through World War II and those who were born after. However, the complexities invoked by the generational frame are hardly ever explored, especially when they touch on gender and sexuality. More often than not, the Oedipal narrative paints too coherent a picture of two and only two main players, fathers and children. More specifically, the entire narrative is organized around the Nazi fathers. The power relegated to the father’s position overshadows all the other players in the Oedipal constellation, their position and agency within the constellation. For one, it is hardly ever explored how women and men’s relationship to the symbolic and literal fathers might have differed. Freud stresses that women and men resolve the Oedipal complex differently; she needs to work through penis envy, he needs to come to terms with castration anxiety. The result is the child’s identification with the same-sex parent and the successful development of his or her mature sexual identity. In this logic, female RAF members who entered into competition with their fathers, on equal footing no less, assumed the masculine role. Whereas it was deemed almost normal and ‘natural’ for young men to ‘compete with and overthrow a father figure’, women who attempted the same upended or at least upset the symbolic order, 35 which presumably made them all the more threatening yet fascinating a topic to cover in journalistic accounts. Furthermore, when Greiffenhagen lists the different ways that left wing terrorism has been explained thus far, ‘missing fathers’ and ‘excessive hatred of fathers’ figure prominently. Mothers don’t figure on his list. Indeed, mothers are virtually absent in psychoanalytically infused Oedipal narratives of the RAF. One exception is the already mentioned article by Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen where she describes how damaging the mixed messages were that mothers sent their daughters by being subservient to husbands that they clearly despised.36 In contrast to those journalists who characterized the mothers of prominent members of the RAF as dominant, overprotective and domineering, 37 Mitscherlich-Nielsen draws a more ambivalent picture. However, her reading doesn’t call the centrality of the father figure into question when she explains the mother’s confusion is the result of her ambivalent

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relationship to the pater familias. Against this background, one might be inclined to agree with Marianne Hirsch that the Oedipal narrative excludes one particular ‘aspect of women’s experience and identity – the maternal’.38 Hirsch is thus particularly interested in the figure of Jocasta: ‘In asking where the story of Jocasta is in the story of Oedipus, I am asking not only where the stories of women are in men’s plots, but where the stories of mothers are in the plots of sons and daughters.’39 Indeed, if the mother surfaces in analyses on the RAF, she never seems to be implicated in the Nazi atrocities. The ‘Nazi Mutter’ is missing from popular RAF historiography. This omission is reminiscent of Jocasta’s absence in Sophocles’ and Freud’s Oedipus as well as in feminist re-readings of the Oedipus narrative: The story of her desire, the account of her guilt, the rationale for her complicity with the brutal husband, the materiality of the body which gave birth to a child she could not keep and which then conceived with that child – this story cannot be filled in because we have no framework within which to do it from her perspective.40

References to the active role of women and mothers in World War II were written out of the conflict between the RAF or the 1968 and Nazi generations. There might have been the odd analogy between the behaviour of female members of the RAF and female concentration camp wardens in popular RAF historiography.41 However, these analogies never served to substantiate an Electra narrative that is a plot that centres on the child’s rivalry with his or her mother for possession of his or her father.42 If the mother was given a role in the unfolding of the RAF drama, she was firmly situated within the hearth of the home. In other words, popular RAF historiography predictably places the mother outside or on the margin.43 The mother is equated with the Other, which may be seen as a way of disarticulating ‘the political’ from the feminine and/or maternal position.44 What’s more, the focus on the perpetrators and their relation to their father(s), obscures other important aspects that are constitutive of terrorism. Feminist terrorism studies have shown how terrorism is constituted in a constellation of differently situated spectators, consumers and producers of terrorism,45 and they have pointed to the gendered and racialized power dynamic at play in these constellations. As Jasbir Puar, the author of Terrorist Assemblages, underlines, multidimensional perspectives allow us to see more than two opposing fronts. Puar’s insistence on ‘multiple figures of ambivalence’ instead of clear binaries is echoed by those RAF scholars who have

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been working towards a definition of terrorism that questions temporal schemes such as the notion of the past as the inherited legacy or burden for the present. They challenge the binary constellation of perpetrator–victim. In their view, reconstructing possible psycho-social dynamics between the Nazi and the RAF-perpetrators is just one aspect of the story. Norbert Elias concluded his analysis of West German terrorism with the following words: ‘How far from linear, how full of spurts backwards and forwards, is German development.’46 If indeed generational historiography reproduces progress orientated ‘linear, chronological time where the elements that come first appear to cause the elements that come later’,47 this frame may not be so helpful in making sense of West German terrorism. Especially since it fails to take into consideration what Michael Schneider pointed out in an essay entitled ‘Fathers and son’s, retrospectively: the damaged relationship between two generations’:48 [The 1968er generation’s] return to the past was not at all primarily an interest in the fathers and in the dark areas of their pasts, but rather, and to a much greater extent, an interest in their own beginnings. The look back at the fathers is at the same time a retrospective look to the roots of their own emotional lives, to the influences at work on them, and to the psychological legacy of spiritual injuries and deficits.49

Schneider compared the RAF to the tragic figure of Hamlet, a melancholy if not to say whiney dreamer shaped by an authoritarian father and a disciplinarian family. According to him the father and the family are ‘agents for drilling in the same rules and codes of behaviour which had conditioned the generation of the fathers into becoming the submissive followers of the Nazi government and men’,50 and produce sons consumed by the silenced Nazi legacy. What seems insightful about Schneider’s reading of the RAF as Hamlet is how this manages to jumble the predictable temporality of the Oedipal narrative by introducing the unpredictable, volatile figure of the ghost: And like Hamlet, they often did not know whether this apparition was only a ghost of their imaginations, of their suddenly unfettered suspicions, or whether it was a genuine indication of the true natures of their fathers which had previously been kept from them.51

As Berendse and Cornils imply, it could be fruitful to not only focus on the Nazi fathers’ ghostlike (re)appearances to the 1968ers and the RAF, but to conceptualize RAF historiography more broadly as both haunted and haunting.52 This begs the question: what if the past does not produce the future as

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parents produce children?53 Isn’t our understanding of the RAF just as much shaped by the act of looking from the present to the past, and by our specific socio-cultural location in time?

‘u p h e ava l o f d a u g h te r s’; i n s e a r c h o f t h e R A F wo m e n’s m o t h e r s Whereas the legacy and burden of being the offspring of Nazi fathers was hardly ever questioned, the Oedipal script didn’t implicate the Nazi mother in the same way. The complicit figure of the ‘Nazi Mutter’ didn’t surface in popular RAF historiography. However, women’s involvement in the RAF kept terrorism experts searching for precedents or antecedents. In 1978, Walther Schmieding, nationally known as a TV-journalist and anchor, wrote an extensive article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung where he pointed to the striking similarities between nineteenth century Russian revolutionary women and the women in the RAF. A year later he published the widely read book Upheaval of Daughters (1979). In the introduction he observed a resurgence of anarchism reminiscent of the conspiracies of the Russian revolutionaries of the outgoing nineteenth century. As evidence he noted that a pirate copy of the 1883 History of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia by the historian Alphons Thun 54 was back in circulation.55 In the second half of the nineteenth century Russian anarchists bombed and assassinated leading heads of the Russian Empire. These assassinations gave the impression of a vast international network, which in turn led to the counter-anarchist collaboration of the international community of states. According to Walter Laqueur, one of the most widely published terrorism experts in the 1970s, these assassinations indicated the first signs of systematic terrorism.56 In the 1970s one might speak of a veritable renaissance of studies on Russian nihilists. Similar to Schmieding’s more popular work, they were quick to draw parallels between the Russian revolutionary women and the female members of the RAF.57 Newspaper articles on the women in the RAF regularly turned to nineteenth century Russian revolutionaries when it came to explain women’s (political) violence. A Swiss newspaper article on the women in the Red Army Faction called attention to the female revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia: ‘The participation of femininity in terror is older than commonly assumed’, noted the Swiss lawyer and psychologist Susi ThürerReber.58 She quickly qualified her statement, however, by noting that the

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political situation then and today was hardly comparable. In the same vein, the Swiss newspaper St. Galler Tagblatt compared female members of the RAF to nineteenth century female anarchists: Wherever there is – alleged or real – social or national injustice, women stood at the forefront. A century ago in Tsarist Russia Vera Sassulitsch, Vera Figner and the aristocrat Sophia Perowskaya spread revolutionary terror, that in terms of finesse, cold-bloodedness, intelligence outshined their male accomplices.59

The idea that women, once they had fallen out of their ‘passed-down role’, were more brutal and forceful than the male members of terrorist cells, was espoused by these popular historiographies.60 In fact, even certain feminists accepted this convention as fact.61 In the search for an explanation for women’s participation in terrorist cells, many terrorism experts bought into the myth of women’s innate greater radicalism, a myth that was still invoked in an early 1990s account of female violence.62 In this logic, woman’s motherly instincts made her more ferocious than men. The terrorist cell symbolized ‘her brood’ or her ‘ersatz-family’.63 She supposedly felt an intuitive need to defend them from enemies and whistle-blowers. One of the main reasons why those in search of the mothers of the RAF might have looked back to the events that led to the Russian Revolution was the prolific participation of Russian women. Because of this, the comparison seemed obvious, its explanatory power hardly ever questioned. Possibly, the analogies between female members of the RAF and the women who had taken part in the events that led up to the Russian revolution might well have been influenced by the widespread anti-communist sentiments in 1970s Cold War Europe. The reason why the women in the Red Army Faction could be compared to Russian anarchist women in the first place, was that Vera Figner and others had written memoirs.64 In her memoirs Nacht über Russland [Memoirs of a Revolutionist] Figner makes no secret that she is giving an account of the revolution, and that changes in her personal/gender relations symbolize larger social changes.65 Indeed, she never strictly separates the private and the social spheres. Figner’s coming of age – from coddled child and decorative object to political subject – marks the transition from old world order to the anticipated revolutionary changes. In the ‘old’ Russian Empire aristocratic women, Figner explains, were destined to lead existences of mere dolls. The only ambition aristocratic young women had, was to become the Tsar’s bride or a court lady.66 Figner

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was brought up that way too, and as a child, she admits, she didn’t yet see any difference between the past and the present. Another social transformation that Figner narrates as coinciding with changes in her personal gender identity is her decision to join a revolutionary group: Figner writes that she had almost freed herself from her husband’s clutches, and that when she returned to Russia in the spring of 1875 her husband didn’t disturb her any more.67 Soon thereafter she severs all ties to him, she stresses, and a year later she divorces him. To underline her newly won ‘freedom’, Figner also goes back to being called by her maiden name.68 Figner demarcates the next stage of social progress by changes in personal/gender relations: she and her comrades set out to raise the conscience of the peasant population through propaganda, educational programmes and by carrying out assassinations. This meant saying goodbye to her earlier life, ‘all family ties, sympathies, loves and friendships had to be ended’, and going underground.69 In her memoirs, joining an illegal organization is presented as a radical break from the old, traditional life of marriage, family and other intergenerational ties. The fact that Figner emphasizes the radical rupture with family without mentioning the support she got from many of her relatives during her radical days, suggests that narratorially the rupture serves to build up the readers’ suspense. In addition, the stark dichotomization between the old regime and the new social order make the terrorist acts committed by Figner and her comrades seem more drastic. Indeed, the Oedipal rivalry myth served Figner as a narratorial tool to depict the revolutionaries as starkly different from their predecessor. It is noteworthy that changes in gender relations take centre stage in her memoirs – both for narrative structure and content-related purposes. Her descriptions of traditional gender roles and gender relations depict the old regime in negative light, while the ‘freedom’ from husband and father became metaphors for the social freedom from the coercive Tsarist regime. Indeed, the generational frame of the father–son relationship is metonymically linked to the repressive state and its subjects.

t h e r e n a i s s a n c e o f r u s s i a n n i h i l i s t wo m e n i n t h e 1970 s In the 1970s, these memoirs were revived anew, in the hope one would discern important information about why women would turn to violence. Vera Figner, Sophia Perowskaja and other revolutionary women were made

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into the harbingers and forerunners of the ‘modern female terrorists for whom the terrorist fight also signified personal emancipation’.70 Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian journalist well known for his polemic against the 1968ers, usually published in journals of the new Right, noted that Russian terrorism is where it all began. According to him it was the first time that young women started to play a decisive role in terrorist organizations.71 Much like the female members of the RAF these Russian women were a specific ‘type of terrorist amazons’. To him they presented a ‘cruel caricature of a decadent-destructive masculinity’.72 At least the ‘girls’ of the Russian Revolution ‘embodied’ hope of a better future, whereas the women in the RAF didn’t exhibit anything but hatred and an ‘irrational will of destruction’73 opined the Austrian journalist. While Kaltenbrunner placed RAF terrorists at the end of the hierarchy of deviants – a discursive strategy to denaturalize them even more – other journalists and criminologists drew parallels between the Russian women and the RAF.74 Schmieding was convinced we could learn much from Russian anarchists about the psychological make-up of West German terrorists and about the path from ‘human to terrorist’ more generally.75 With this statement Schmieding made clear that terrorists weren’t human. He also intimated that psychologically the ‘Tsar murderesses’ of 1881 and the RAF terrorists of the 1970s were indeed comparable.76 One similarity that Schmieding pointed to was the emancipatory ambitions of both Russian and West German terrorists. According to him these manifested themselves in the female terrorists’ masculine self-presentation, in their lack of (sexual) interest for the opposite sex, their belief in ‘free love’77 and last but not least in their problematic relationship with their fathers. They also both severed their ties with their families which they replaced with the terrorist organization as a type of ‘ersatz’ family. In addition, Schmieding noted that their biographies and conspiratorial activities bore resemblance: they would only commit to relationships with men, whether they were engagements or marriages, if they served the larger cause of the revolution.78 When the feminine charms promised to be of use to the terrorist organization, these women were willing to abandon their masculine self-presentations – short hair, dark glasses and ‘enormous cigarette consumption’ – for the time being.79 To illustrate this point, Schmieding refered to parts of Figner’s memoirs where she describes how she lived under a pseudonym in a secret apartment and disguised herself as a ‘high society doll-lady’.80 During her secret mission these ‘peacock’s feathers’ were her disguise.81 As soon as the mission was over, she went back to

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her masculine self. The fact that these nineteenth century revolutionary women were so good at ‘passing’ as aristocrats, farmers or even as men82 was a frequent topic in the 1970s.83 Their ‘double lives’ were likened to the RAF women’s undercover existence. Similar to the Russian revolutionaries, these ‘female supermen’ and ‘phallic women’ were able to adopt the inconspicuous appearance of bourgeois women.84 Female members in the RAF and their undercover performance of bourgeois femininity confounded deep-seated ideas about the congruence of sex, gender and desire. In other words, their gender presentation unhinged the firm belief that a person’s self-presentation expresses her gender identity and sexual orientation. Most terrorism experts initially assumed that a woman’s feminine self-presentation indicated that she not only identified as a woman and desired men but that she couldn’t commit violent crimes. This easy equation was called into question by some feminists, butch lesbians and other women who dared to dress and act like men but weren’t inclined to commit violent crimes,85 and it was further complicated by feminine women who committed violent terrorist acts despite their feminine appearance.86 The familial genre that a revolutionary like Vera Figner used to frame her path to revolution provided much sought after answers as to what motivated the female/feminine members of the RAF to deviate from dominant notions of femininity. It also gave at least a partial answer to the recurring question of whether women’s involvement in West Germany’s Red Army Faction was a consequence of feminism and women’s sexual liberation. The question itself reveals much about the notion of gender espoused by those who posed it, namely a deep-seated belief in femininity as peaceful, domestic and dependent, while associating feminism and sexual assertiveness with masculinity and violence. To underscore the commingling of feminism and terrorism, terrorism experts inserted 1970s female terrorists in a genealogy: Meinhof and Ensslin became Figner’s daughters, and their acts were believed to be an upheaval against the shackles of patriarchy.87 However, framing the women in the RAF and violent women more generally as ‘Daughters of Upheaval’ linked political violence directly to these undutiful daughters’ relation to their literal fathers. Furthermore, political violence – in accordance with Figner’s autobiography – could be proven to go hand in hand with changes in gender and sexual identity, in essence with a virilization and a quest for independence from both fathers and husbands. The generational framework thus seems to naturalize prescribed genealogies and origins of gender and sexuality.88 The similar descriptions of nineteenth century Russian anarchists and 1970s female terrorists suggest that a transhistorical type of the ‘deviant

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woman’ was created:89 short, unkempt hair, nervous smoking and sexual assertiveness were some of the gender markers used to characterize these different women of different epochs. At times other gender codes were introduced that confused or even contradicted the ones mentioned above. Such inconsistencies notwithstanding, an image of the ‘deviant woman’ congealed over time and reaffirmed an understanding of femininity as peaceful, domestic and dependent. And it legitimized the criminalization of women who visibly deviated from traditional bourgeois gender roles.90

t h e a b s e n t p r e s e n c e o f wo m e n i n o e d i p a l R A F h i s to r i o g r a p hy An understanding of history as generational ruptures has shaped twentieth century West German historiography in profound ways. In these histories of conflict between generations, women rarely figure as agents. They are however deemed emminently important for the reproduction and socialization of future generations of responsible citizens, and in this respect for the progression of history. One example is the generative language such as ‘giving birth’ to a movement commonly used to recount and naturalize a course of events. As Kathleen Jones points out in relation to similar tropes used to conceptualize the nation state: ‘The history of the Western cooptation of feminine powers of generativity in representations of the “birth of the state” as an essentially masculine act of political natality both suppresses and ironically preserves the connection between charismatic rule and female symbology.’91 One could argue that the generational, familial RAF historiography does the same. It suppresses overt gender analyses while at the same time preserving gender by emphasizing the rule of the father and Oedipal rivalry as the prepolitical, natural movens of history as unilateral progression. But why this present absence of the mother figure and of gender analyses more generally? The reasons lie first and foremost in the Oedipal framework of popular RAF historiography. As Hirsch rightly points out, stories of Electra or Antigone, for example, would most certainly shape different plot patterns, foregrounding the mother’s relation to daughter instead of erasing it.92 Within the Oedipal plot, an explanation may be found in the socio-symbolic risk factors that liberated mothers like Ulrike Meinhof or Gudrun Ensslin must have seemed to personify. When these women penetrated movements and histories previously reserved for men, it was considered to be just that, penetration and

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cockiness. Moreover, their violence was seen in stark contradiction to their biopolitical role as the bearers of life.93 Indeed, these terrorists decided to take lives. Thus, rooting the 1970s political violence in Tsarist Russia may be understood as the effort of certain journalists to discursively and narratively tame the unruly events of the 1970s. It is debatable, however, whether this containment contributed to historicizing women’s involvement in the RAF or rather to their decontextualization. In fact, one could speculate that the generational conceptualization of the RAF served to depict Meinhof, Ensslin and Mohnhaupt as neither unique nor novel. The RAF women were written into a long history of violent women. From a feminist point of view one might not only critique that genealogies – the search of the origins of a current question – produce a definite, unambiguous narrative but that this quest for an origin also seeks to unveil and naturalize a pre-discursive truth about gender. At the same time, the insistence on the long tradition of violent women deflects from the specificities of the socio-political context of the 1970s. Whereas the transhistorical comparison of the women in the RAF to the Russian ‘Daughters of Upheaval’ could be seen as giving women’s political violence a proper place in history, one might also surmize that depicting terrorism as the result of the unnatural virilization of woman was a way to deflect from the specific circumstances of 1970s West Germany. Female terrorists were simultaneously given a history and written out of history.

N ote s 1. Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (Philadelphia and New York, 1977), p. 41. 2. Becker: Hitler’s Children, p. 58. 3. Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 164–6; pp. 260–2. 4. Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen, ‘Hexen oder Märtyrer?’ in Susanne von Paczensky (ed.), Frauen und Terror. Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären (Hamburg, 1978), pp. 13–23. 5. Ohad Parnes et al., Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 2008). 6. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1983 [1972]), pp. 276–7; also Iris Van der Tuin, ‘Jumping Generations’, Australian Feminist Studies, 24/59 (2009), pp. 17–31.

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7. Parnes: Das Konzept; also Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Generation und Generationalität in der Neueren Geschichte’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 8/16 (February 2005), http://www.bpb.de/apuz/29215/generation-und-generationalitaetin-der-neueren-geschichte?p=all 8. Ulrike Jureit, Generationenforschung (Göttingen, 2006); Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, (eds), Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005). 9. Parnes: Das Konzept, pp. 293–8. 10. Karl Mannheim, ‘Das Problem mit den Generationen’, Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie, 7 (1928), pp. 157–85, 309–30. 11. Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 330–45. 12. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (London, 1997). 13. Alexander Mitscherlich, Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft: Ideen zur Sozialpsychologie (Munich, [1963] 1996). 14. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 2nd ed. (London, [1955] 1987). 15. Freud: Vorlesungen, pp. 164–6; 260–2; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York 1962), pp. 78–80. 16. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s time’, Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7/1, (1981), p. 15. 17. Kristeva: ‘Women’s time’, pp. 19–20. 18. Judith Roof, ‘Generational difficulties; or, the fear of a barren history’ in D. Looser and E. A. Kaplan (eds), Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Minneapolis and London, 1997), p. 71. 19. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Antigone Agonistes: urban guerrilla or guerrilla urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game’, Rouge, 4 (2004 [1999]), http://www.rouge.com.au/4/index.html (accessed 12 October 2012). 20. Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Die Kinder Hitlers? Eine englische Version der BaaderMeinhof-Geschichte’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 September 1977. 21. Martin Greiffenhagen, ‘Hitlers Kinder? Gewiss nicht’ Der Spiegel, 31 October 1977, pp. 55–59; see also Wolfgang Kraushaar, ‘Hitlers Kinder? Eine Antwort auf Götz Aly’, Perlentaucher.de. Das Kulturmagazin, 25 March 2009, http://www.perlentaucher.de/essay/hitlers-kinder-eine-antwort-aufgoetz-aly.html (accessed 1 October 2012). 22. Greiffenhagen: ‘Hitlers Kinder’, p. 59; ‘Erben eines Politikverständnisses, das in seinem auf moralischen Widerstand, prophetische Zeichensetzung, elitären Gemeinschaftsgeist und den fatalen Hang für das Aussergewöhnliche reduzierten Sinn nicht vor dem Vorwurf geschützt ist, politisch eher rechts als links verortet zu sein.’

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23. See Stephan Scheiper, ‘Traditionen des Terrors. Eine frühe britische Studie zur Roten Armee Fraktion (RAF)’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 4/1+2 (2007), http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Scheiper-2–2007 (accessed 12 October 2012); also Kraushaar: ‘Hitlers Kinder’. 24. Giselher Schmidt, Hitlers und Maos Söhne: NPD und Neue Linke (Frankfurt, 1969). 25. Becker: Hitler’s Children, p. 17. 26. For an analysis of the RAF’s anti-Semitism, see: Kraushaar: ‘Hitlers Kinder’. Most analyses of the RAF turn a blind eye to the group’s anti-Semitism and racism, however. 27. Harriet Rubin, ‘Terrorism, trauma, and the search for redemption’, FastCompany, November 2001, http://www.fastcompany.com/43859/ terrorism-trauma-and-search-redemption (accessed 4 November 2012); Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home (Berkeley, 2004), p. 253. 28. Andreas Musolff, ‘Hitler’s children revisited: West German terrorism and the problem of coming to terms with the Nazi past’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 23 (2011), p. 62. 29. Becker: Hitler’s Children, p. 15. 30. Becker: Hitler’s Children, pp. 291–2. 31. Kraushaar: ‘Hitlers Kinder’. 32. Musolff, Andreas, ‘Hitler’s children revisited’ pp. 60–71. 33. Roof: ‘Generational difficulties’ pp. 69–87. 34. Roof: ‘Generational difficulties’, p. 69. By arguing against the use of generationality, however, feminist theorists invoke inter/generationality. Ironically, feminism has narrated its own history as a story of succeeding generations, commonly referred to as three waves of feminism. This reading of feminism has been strongly criticized by women’s historian Karen Offen for its reductionism and by feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti for its Anglo-American bias; see Van der Tuin: ‘Jumping,’ pp. 17–31. 35. Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence, and Identity (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, UK, 2009), p. 198; see also Sarah Colvin, ‘Ulrike Marie Meinhof as woman and terrorist: cultural discourses of violence and virtue’ in Gerrit-Jan Beredse and Ingo Cornills (eds), Baader-Meinhof Returns. History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (Amsterdam and New York, 2008), pp. 83–101. 36. Mitscherlich-Nielsen: ‘Hexen’. 37. Marion Schreiber, ‘Wir fühlten uns einfach stärker’, Der Spiegel, 11 May 1981, pp. 82–108. 38. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot. Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington, 1989), p. 4.

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

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Hirsch: The Mother, p. 4. Hirsch: The Mother, p. 4. Schreiber: ‘Wir’, p. 103. Infamous terrorist Carlos is supposed to have compared one of the female members of the RAF with a ‘KZ-Aufseherin’ (Schreiber: ‘Wir’, p. 103). Hirsch: The Mother, p. 173. Hirsch: The Mother, p. 152. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC, 2007), p. 48. Norbert Elias, ‘Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany – expression of a social conflict between generations’ in The Germans. Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Cambridge, 1996), p. 286. Roof: ‘Generational difficulties’, p. 71. Michael Schneider, ‘Fathers and sons retrospectively’, New German Critique, 31 (Winter 1984), pp. 11–12. Schneider: ‘Fathers’, p. 23. Schneider: ‘Fathers’, p. 24. Schneider: Fathers’, p. 9. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornills, ‘Introduction: The Long Shadow of Terrorism’ in Gerrit-Jan Beredse and Ingo Cornills (eds), Baader-Meinhof Returns. History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism (Amsterdam and New York, 2008), p. 18. Roof: ‘Generational difficulties’, p. 71. Alphons Thun, Geschichte der Revolutionären Bewegungen in Russland (Leipzig, 1883); several chapters of Thun’s book are devoted to terrorism in the Tsarist Russian empire. Walther Schmieding, Aufstand der Töchter. Russische Revolutionärinnen im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1979), p. 7. Lacqueur’s statement refers to terrorist organizing and the execution of assassinations. It does not allude to the systematic expansion of supranational counter-terrorist efforts and their effect on anarchism/terrorism (Walter Laqueur, Terrorismus (Kronberg, 1977), p. 12). Barbara Alpern Engel and Cliffort N. Rosenthal (eds), Five Sisters: Women against the Tsar (New York, 1975); Seymour Becker and Carol Becker, ‘Book Review: Five Sisters. Women against the Tsar by Barbara Alpern Engel and Cliffort N. Rosenthal’, Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2/3 (1977), pp. 685–7; Amy Knight, ‘Female terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party’, Russian Review, 38/2 (1979), pp. 139–59; Wolf Middendorff, ‘Die Persönlichkeit des Terroristen (I), insbesondere die Frau als Terroristin’, Kriminalistik, 7 (1976), pp. 289–96; Kathy Porter, Fathers

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58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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and Daughters. Russian Women in Revolution (London, 1976); Cynthia H. Whittaker, ‘The Women’s Movement during the reign of Alexander II: a case study in Russian liberalism’, The Journal of Modern History, 48/2 (1976), pp. 35–69; Schmieding: Aufstand. ‘Über Terror und radikalisierte Frauen. Lic. Iur. Susi Thürer-Reber sprach bei den liberalen Luzernerinnen’, Luzerner Tagblatt, 2 March 1978; articles that appeared in academic journals also compared women terrorists of the 1970s with Russian anarchists of earlier eras. Amy Knight (Knight: ‘Female Terrorists’, pp. 144, 147) noted that both the German and the Russian women were highly educated and formed an exceptionally united front. ‘Frauen der Gewaltszene. “Wenn Weiber zu Hyänen” werden ...’, St. Galler Tagblatt, 17 September 1977; ‘Wo immer es seither gegen – vermeintliche oder wirkliche – soziale und nationale Ungerechtigkeit ging, standen Frauen an vorderster Front. Vor einem Jahrhundert im zaristischen Russland verbreiteten Vera Sassulitsch, Vera Figner und die Aristokratin Sophia Perowskaja revolutionären Terror, der an Raffinesse, Kaltblütigkeit und Intelligenz die revolutionären Genossen in den Schatten stellte.’ ‘Frauen im Untergrund: “Etwas Irrationales”’, Der Spiegel, 8 August 1977, pp. 22–33; Schreiber: ‘Wir fühlten’. For example Mitscherlich-Nielsen: ‘Hexen’, pp. 19–20; Margarete FabriciusBrand, ‘Frauen in der Isolation’ in Susanne von Paczensky (ed.), Frauen und Terror. Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären (Hamburg, 1978), p. 64. Eileen MacDonald, Erschiesst zuerst die Frauen (Stuttgart, 1992). See also Schreiber: ‘Wir fühlten’. About the genre and tradition of Eastern European women’s life writing, see Anke Stephan, ‘Erinnertes Leben: AutoBiografien, Memoiren and Oral History – Interviews als historische Quellen’ in Virtuelle Fachbibliotek Osteuropa, http://www.vifaost.de (2004) accessed 29 October 2013. Vera Nikolaevna Figner, Nacht über Russland. Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin, 1985 [1928]). Figner: Nacht, p. 18. Figner: Nacht, p. 45, p. 47. Figner: Nacht, p. 50. Figner: Nacht, p. 91. Walther Schmieding, ‘Sophia Perowskaja und die Faszination der Aktion. Ein Versuch über den Terrorismus’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22 April 1978. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ‘Der Tod und die Mädchen. Über den weiblichen Anteil am Terrorismus’, Schweizer Rundschau. Monatsschrift für Geistesleben und Kultur, 77 (1978), pp. 13–17; also Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner

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72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

(ed.), Verweiblichung als Schicksal. Verwirrung im Rollenspiel der Geschlechter (Freiburg, 1978). Kaltenbrunner: ‘Der Tod’, p. 17. Kaltenbrunner: ‘Der Tod’, p. 17. Schmieding: Aufstand, p. 109, Middendorff: ‘Die Persönlichkeit’, p. 292, Knight: ‘Female Terrorists’, p. 140. Schmieding: ‘Sophia Perowskaja’. Schmieding: Aufstand, p. 249. Figner: Nacht, p. 41; In the German version of her memoirs, Figner writes

that the accusation was that under the guise of pursuing university studies in foreign countries Russian women devoted themselves to the lusts promised by ‘free love’ (Figner: Nacht, p. 41). It is possible that the Russian Tsar reacted to the rumours about Russian women that were circulating in Switzerland at the time. Dominique Grisard, ‘Nationale und geschlechtliche Grenzziehungen “verqueeren”. Transgressionen russischer Sozialrevolutionärinnen und Studentinnen in der Schweiz des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts’, Ariadne. Forum für Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte, 57 (2010), p. 23. 78. Schmieding: Aufstand, p. 107; Schmieding: ‘Sophia Perowskaja’. 79. Schmieding: Aufstand, p. 109, also Becker/Becker: ‘Book Review’, p. 687. 80. Figner: Nacht, p. 94. 81. Figner: Nacht, p. 109. 82. Figner: Nacht, pp. 125–7. 83. Schmieding: Aufstand; Middendorff: ‘Die Persönlichkeit’; Knight: ‘Female Terrorists’; Alpern Engel/Rosenthal: Five Sisters; Christine Fauré, (ed.), Quatre Femmes Terroristes contre le Tsar. Vera Zassoulitch, Olga Loubatovitch, Élisabeth Kovalskaïa, Vera Figner (Paris, 1978). 84. ‘Frauen im Untergrund’, p. 22, Mitscherlich-Nielsen: ‘Hexen’, p. 19. 85. On female masculinity see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham and London, 1998). 86. On female femininity see Robert Corber, Cold War Femme (Durham and London, 2011). 87. Schmieding: Aufstand; Schmieding: ‘Sophia Perowskaja’. 88. Van der Tuin: ‘Jumping’. 89. Sylvia Schraut, ‘Terrorismus und Geschlecht’ in Christine Künzel and Gaby Temme (eds), Täterinnen und/oder Opfer? Frauen in Gewaltstrukturen (Berlin, 2007), p. 114; for an example of this construction see Leonhard Ragaz, Der sittliche Kampf der heutigen Frau (Basel, 1907), pp. 3–13.

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90. see Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, ‘Revolting women: subversion and its media representation in West Germany and Britain’ in Siân Reynolds (ed.), Women, State and Revolution. Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789 (Brighton, 1986), pp. 141–160. 91. Quotd in Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton, 1999), p. 45. 92. Hirsch: The Mother, p. 3; see also Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York, 2002). 93. Isabell Lorey, ‘Als das Leben in die Politik eintrat. Die biopolitischgouvernementale Moderne, Foucault und Agamben’ in M. Pieper and T. Atzert (eds), Empire und die biopolitische Wende (Frankfurt and New York, 2007), p. 284.

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5a

Artist’s Page: Xenofon Kavvadias

On 30 September 2011 in Yemen an unmanned US aircraft killed Anwar alAwlaki and Samir Khan, both US citizens. This strike heralded a new era of extrajudicial executions. It was the first time the USA had officially executed US citizens without a trial since 1975 when President Ford issued Executive order 11905 banning extrajudicial executions. Two weeks later Al-Awlaki’s 16 year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also a US citizen born in Denver, was killed in Yemen by a CIA-led drone strike. Awlaki was an Islamist whose overt endorsement in his sermons and e-books of violence as a religious duty is believed to have inspired new recruits to Islamist militancy. Although the CIA alleged Awlaki was linked with terrorist plots, he had not been officially charged with any crime in the United States. He was executed for his ideological beliefs and perceived influences. I was born and raised in Greece just after the fall of the 1967–74 dictatorship. During the fight for the liberation of my country from the military junta, political violence was used. Some of those who used political violence became members of future governments and are widely considered as heroes in Greece. I migrated to the UK in 2003. I realized from the first months that I was living through a transitional period that was going to transform the landscape of civil rights. In my work I endeavour to record this transformation and the grey areas in civil rights created by recent anti-terrorist legislation. Through my work I also try to investigate by challenging government institutions in what can be made public through official and banned publications relating to terrorism. 97

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r e c e n t l e g a l f r a m ewo r k r e l a te d to t h e p r o j e c t In 2000 the Houses of Parliament passed the Terrorism Act. Section 58 states that it is an offence, liable to a prison term of up to ten years, to collect or possess ‘information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. Section 58 does not include reference to specific intention. Following 9/11 and the declaration of ‘war on terror’ the West has entered a state of permanent alert. A series of counter-terrorism legislations, especially in the UK, outlawed the expression of support or opinion to that effect, in relation to terrorism. This was in line with the 2005 publication by the European Union of the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism. The UK Terrorism Act of 2006 follows on similar lines and states: A person commits an offence if he publishes a statement in which he glorifies terrorism or is likely to be understood by members of the public as direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement to the commission, preparation or instigation of such acts or causes another to publish such a statement.

‘Indirect encouragement’ includes every statement which glorifies the commission or preparation of terrorist acts, or offences and which members of the public could reasonably be expected to emulate. Section 2 of the act prohibits the dissemination of a publication which is either likely to be understood as directly or indirectly encouraging terrorism, or includes information which is likely to be understood as being useful in the commission or preparation of an act of terrorism. Commenting on the above the UN special envoy on freedom of opinion and expression wrote on 21 December 2005: While it may be legitimate to ban incitement to terrorism or acts of terrorism, states should not employ vague terms such as ‘glorifying’ or ‘promoting’ terrorism when restricting expression. Incitement should be understood as a direct call to engage in terrorism, with the intention that this should promote terrorism and in a context in which the call is directly causally responsible for increasing the actual likelihood of a terrorist act occurring.

On the same subject of terrorist legislation, the report of the eminent jurists panel on terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights 2009 concluded that: Many participants at the U.K. hearing raised concerns that the breadth and the ambiguity of the offence of ‘glorification creates a risk

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of arbitrary and discriminatory application. The risk of such abuse is exacerbated by the fact that the offence applies also to past acts of terrorism and to terrorist acts occurring in other countries. Witnesses expressed concern that such wide-ranging laws reduce legitimate political debate, particularly within immigrant or minority communities.

t h e wo r k ‘The law is no less conceptual than fine art’ (Lord Carlyle of Beriew, Independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in the UK)

In the last nine years I have followed terror trials in the UK and catalogued literature that the police have presented as evidence in courts of law. From this I created an extensive archive of books from a wide ideological spectrum that are or can be perceived as illegal. The books vary from the Declaration of war against the American’s occupying the land of the two holy places by Osama Bin Laden, to the CIA ‘PSYOP’ which is the US guerrilla manual that solicited murder, and instructed and assisted the organization of terrorist activities by the Contras against the Sandinista government during the Cold War in Nicaragua. Using these documents I created an art installation where pieces of literature that are deemed illegal under UK counter-terrorism legislation were displayed. It included as much literature and other relevant documents as possible. It was explicitly stated that the documents neither express the artist’s views nor have his endorsement. The books are uniformly bound without titles as bright white, hard-back copies. Every book is accompanied by a text with an accurate description of the book’s content and context in which it was published. The documents are displayed in the gallery on purpose-made tables and shelves. In the space the viewer is able to encounter and read the books. The first part of the project took place in 10 Vyner Street, London in May–June 2011. In order to plot this grey legal area, extensive research and an elaborate legal, conceptual and visual supportive structure was created over the years that led to the show. For this reason I contacted, amongst others, the Metropolitan Police, Liberty, which is a leading civil rights organization, and the UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Lord Alex Carlile. All of them responded to the request for help with extensive

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letters giving their points of view on which books are legal to show and which are not. Also importantly, Birnberg Pierce and Partners, a leading UK civil rights legal firm, offered legal support and insight into the way the law is applied in the UK. All this correspondence – more than 90 pages – is part of the work and gives an insight into the way different institutions deal with civil liberties. Since it is still questionable to display everything that has been collected, only part of the installation has been exhibited in the UK. What was deemed unsafe to display was secured behind steel frames and ceremoniously incinerated at the end of the show. This is an ongoing project and its final manifestation will be a travelling show through countries where books and documents that are illegal under contemporary legislation will be displayed as an art installation. Ultimately it is intended to create a library of banned books for each country so as to create a portrait of each country’s demons and fears. The work inhabits the space that is created by the intersection of life, art, politics and law. It is interested in where life is sensitive to scenes of rupture, to moments that are open and ambiguous and that contain all those tensions that heighten consciousness.

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Xenofon Kavadias solo exhibition at Gift, 10 Vyner Street, London, UK, 5 May–17 June 2011.

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5b

Artist’s Page: Carolina Caycedo

Carolina Caycedo’s Criminal Women (2001– ongoing) is a series of drawings depicting women who have been convicted as criminals for violent actions. Made with marker pen and coloured pencils on paper the images are culled from illustrations in the mass media and on the internet to produce a pantheon of female deviancy. Classified in five groups, the eight portraits here come from the set ‘Political Matters’. They include anonymous individuals, a National Front supporter and a Loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighter, alongside well-known political activists such as Leila Khaled, member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine known as the poster girl of the Palestinian militancy, and Idoia López Riaño, part of the Basque separatist group ETA and called La Tigresa because she was believed to be a deadly seductress. In various ways, however, the drawings undermine conventional stereotypes of violent women as either femme fatales or as masculinized viragos. Rather, through the directness of their visual means the drawings represent these women as individuals, neither heroines nor deviants, but politically conscious people who have taken direct action in pursuit of their political aims and assumed full responsibility for the consequences.

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Figure 1 National Front supporter Loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighter

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Figure 2 La Tigresa ETA Terrorist (Idoia López Riaño) Karina Comandante de las FARC (Elda Neyis Mosquera)

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Figure 3 A.L.A Assata Shakur Black Liberation Party JoAnne Deborah Byron or JoAnne Chesimard when captured in 1973 ‘Yo no vine a matar a nadie, yo vine a morir por Puerto Rico’ ‘I did not come to kill no one, I came to die for Puerto Rico’ (Lolita Lebrón)

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Figure 4 (Leila Khaled) Jihadist/Mujahid Suicide Bomber British 7/7 bomb widow. (Samantha Lewthwaite)

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6

The Gendered Insurgent and the Colonial State of Exception Stephen Morton

European continental philosophy and critical thought has contributed much to our understanding of violent forms of state sovereignty, counter-insurgency and states of emergency. The thought of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben in particular has worked to challenge the claims of both liberal and totalitarian governments that a state of emergency is an exceptional departure from the normal rule of law. But these thinkers have also tended to overlook the significance of gender and colonialism in their analysis of modern forms of political sovereignty. As Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall have written in a critical assessment of Agamben: Agamben maintains a relative silence about colonialism and appears disinclined to engage with those anti-colonial and post-colonial writers and activists whose experiences of exclusion and, indeed, whose work articulates a range of critical subject positions defined in active response to imperial Europe’s exclusionary politics. And yet, his concepts, frameworks and methods of philosophical analysis undoubtedly offer important and valuable resources for thinking critically about the political exclusions and abandonments characteristic of colonial situations.1

Svirsky and Bignall are right to emphasize the value as well as the limitations of Agamben’s methods of philosophical analysis for addressing Western formations of colonial sovereignty. What is more, their valorization of the experiences of anti-colonial activists and writers who have endured the violence of colonial sovereignty raises important questions about how 111

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histories of anti-colonial resistance and struggle are represented in the post-colonial present, and how the gender dynamics of violent anti-colonial insurgency are understood. This chapter attempts to address some of these questions by firstly assessing how questions of gender and the use of emergency law in colonial spaces are elided in the work of Giorgio Agamben; it then proceeds to consider how Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965) and the fiction of Assia Djebar have explored the gendered dynamics of violent colonial sovereignty and resistance during the colonial state of emergency in Algeria. In so doing, I want to suggest that literary and visual culture can help to make visible the gendered determinants of states of emergency, which frame and commemorate the history of anti-colonial resistance in particular ways. Countries are considered to be in a ‘state of emergency’ when executive power is used to suspend the normal rule of law, and power is transferred to the police or the military. The recourse to emergency legislation is often associated with totalitarian governments or so-called terrorist states. It is significant, for instance, that one of the earliest usages of the word ‘terrorist’ in modern English was attributed to the violent actions of the French revolutionary state in the 1790s, almost 50 years before the term was used to denote an act of terror carried out by an individual (OED). Although it may seem to have a self-evident and well-defined meaning, a state of emergency – in a similar way to terrorism – is a profoundly elusive and ambivalent concept. The nineteenth-century legal scholar Albert Venn Dicey in The Introduction to the Study of the English Constitution defined the emergency powers afforded to the English state by contrasting them with martial law. In Dicey’s account, martial law is ‘unknown to the law of England’, and this is a fact which he claims is ‘an unmistakable proof of the permanent supremacy of the law under our constitution’.2 And yet, as Dicey goes on to explain, the law also empowers the police and the military to use necessary force to ‘put down breaches of the peace, such as riots and other disturbances’, provided that such force is not excessive.3 Dicey’s ambivalence about the legal status of such emergency powers, and the legal regulation of the state’s excessive use of force, has important implications for the maintenance of colonial sovereignty. For colonial governments have clearly employed emergency legislation to manage and control colonial populations, thereby consolidating the power of the colonial state. The British colonial administrations in Ireland, India, Kenya and Mandatory Palestine, and the French colonial government in Algeria, for instance, have all used emergency legislation in order

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to suppress anti-colonial insurgency and to maintain colonial rule. This is not to say that the use of emergency law is unique to the European colony. Indeed, it may seem that the use of emergency law is an inherent property of the political structure of all modern nation states, whether liberal or totalitarian, colonial or post-colonial, as some recent commentators have suggested. But contemporary states of emergency owe much to colonial forms of sovereignty, not only because colonialism permitted practices such as detention without trial, torture, execution and other forms of violent state repression, but also because it complicated the distinction between norm and exception that underpins the rhetoric of emergency. For the European colony was often a political space in which order was maintained through force and violence, and the rights associated with citizenship were denied to the native, who was defined instead as a colonial subject. Giorgio Agamben has argued that ‘the state of exception [Ausnahmezustand] tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’.4 By drawing on the German term Ausnahmezustand, or state of exception, rather than the English term state of emergency, Agamben suggests that the state of exception is not reducible to an official declaration by a state that temporarily suspends existing rights, rules and regulations, but also involves multiple actors, institutions and sites of power. Agamben’s argument that there are structural similarities between the use of emergency measures in post-revolutionary France, Britain during World War I and Nazi Germany during the 1930s has far reaching implications for understanding the claims of liberal democratic societies to protect the rights and freedoms of the human subject, and raises provocative questions about the differences between liberal democratic states and totalitarian governments. Yet his comparative analysis of a range of different states of emergency in Europe not only overlooks the precise historical connections between these states of exception and the proliferation of new laws, regulations and agents that are involved in contemporary states of emergency;5 it also elides the complex entanglement of civil, military and police powers specific to political sovereignty in the European colony. The wide powers that were granted to the police and to the military in European colonies certainly challenged the liberal rhetoric of the civilizing mission, but these powers were buttressed by the founding violence of European colonial sovereignty that denied the civil and political rights to the colonized that European nation states guaranteed for its own citizens as well as for European colonial settlers.6 For the European colony, as Achille Mbembe has argued, can itself be understood as ‘the location par excellence

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where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization” ’.7 More than this, Agamben’s account of the figure that is subject to the violence of the state of exception – the figure that Agamben names bare life – is described as an unmarked masculine subject, homo sacer. Agamben draws on the figure of homo sacer or bare life from Roman law in order to demonstrate that the violence of state sovereignty persists in the modern juridical order. In Agamben’s formulation, homo sacer denotes a figure of human life that is included in the political order, and can be killed without reference to the rule of law. The problem with this universalizing use of the masculine form homo sacer to describe all human life that is subject to the violence of sovereign power is that it ignores the significance of the gendered body in the foundation of sovereign power and in challenges to political sovereignty, as scholars such as Ronit Lentin and Cristina Masters have argued. In the Aristotelian account of political life that is central to Agamben’s understanding of the political, gender has been crucial in defining distinctions between the public and the private, the political and the non-political.8 What is more, the experiences of women in conflict zones and colonial wars reveal how the gendered body is subjected to particular forms of violence that are made possible by a state of exception.9 If the state of exception is a law that appears to suspend the normal rule of law, it also consolidates the patriarchal order that underpins colonial sovereignty. By attempting to document and commemorate the ways in which violent formations of colonial sovereignty were experienced by male and female insurgents, writers and filmmakers have explored the ways in which sovereign power was asserted upon the bodies of the colonized in ways that make this gendered dimension of the state of exception intelligible, as we will see. In the opening sequence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film The Battle of Algiers, a group of French paratroopers feed a half-naked Algerian man a cup of coffee. Shivering and visibly terrified, this prisoner’s non-verbal physical gestures clearly suggest that he has been tortured. These non-verbal signs of a masculine body in pain are further confirmed by the appearance of the French military general in the cinematic frame, who inquires whether the man has talked, and by the threat that they will start all over again if the man refuses to comply with their demand that he help them locate one of the leading figures in the Front Liberàtion National (FLN), Ali la Point. In the subsequent scene, which follows the opening credits, the French paratroopers’

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discovery of Ali la Point’s hiding place at an apartment in the Casbah implies that the torture of the unnamed Algerian man in the previous scene has been successful. This cinematic sequence is significant for a number of reasons. First, it suggests that the use of torture as a tactic of counter-insurgency is justified if it leads to the apprehension of ‘violent insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’, and to the prevention of a terrorist attack. Second, the sequence privileges the point of view of the French paratrooper in the counter-insurgency campaign against the FLN insurgents – a perspective that is prevalent in many literary and cultural representations of the Algerian War of Independence. Third, this opening sequence and the subsequent flashback to the beginning of the ‘Battle of Algiers’ in 1954 draws attention to the wide powers that the French emergency legislation granted to the French colonial départements in Algeria to torture its colonial subjects. Related to this, the temporality of the sequence raises questions about the relationship between the supposedly finite temporality of the emergency legislation passed between 1955 and 1960 and the supposedly immutable duration of French colonial sovereignty in Algeria. The discrepancy between these different temporalities draws attention to the systematic violence of colonial sovereignty identified by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe. Finally, by privileging the torture of a masculine Algerian subject, the sequence seems to marginalize the contribution and sacrifice that women made to the Algerian liberation struggle whilst at the same time de-masculinizing the male subject. In so doing, the sequence raises questions about the historical experiences and agency of Algerian women both before and after national independence in Algeria. Such experiences mark the limitations of Pontecorvo’s vision of the tradition of the oppressed in an emergent post-colonial Algeria. For if we take the tradition of the oppressed to mean the intellectual tradition of Third World political thought in the revolutionary context of decolonization, it is important that this tradition addresses the structures of both colonial and patriarchal oppression, and the legacies of these structures in the foundations of the post-colonial state. For the Algerian sociologist Marnia Lazreg, the militarization of colonial policy in Algeria in the 1950s was part of the French military’s formulation of a revolutionary war theory, which can be traced back to the lessons that French military commanders learned from the techniques of guerrilla warfare used by Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese Revolution.10 This theory started from the assumption that conventional military tactics were incapable of defeating

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guerrilla armies, and that modern armies needed to adopt the strategies of guerrilla warfare in order to defeat them. In the context of colonial Algeria, insurgents were deemed to use psychological techniques to win over the support of the population, and to subvert the political authority and cultural values of the French colonial order. By attributing the cause of the Algerian insurgency to the moral character of the revolutionary rather than the inequities of colonial occupation, military theorists were able to ‘uncouple Algerian nationalism from colonialism’ and to justify the use of torture as necessary to preserve French identity and culture.11 Yet, as Lazreg explains, it was ‘the passage of a law of 3 April, 1955 decreeing a state of emergency in Algeria for a period of six months’ that made possible the militarization of the colonial state during the Algerian war.12 While the law specified that camps should not be created for detained persons under any circumstances, this emergency decree granted powers of detention, censorship and the creation of military courts to the Governor General of Algeria.13 This emergency decree was subsequently amended in 1955 and in 1956, granting more and more power to the French military. Article 12 of the emergency law passed on 3 April 1955, gave military courts the power to prosecute crimes such as blocking traffic, poisoning and battery as well as armed rebellion, and all crimes of national security against the State,14 and Article 11 of the 17 March 1956 decree permitted the Governor General to ‘establish zones in which responsibility for maintaining order devolves to the military, which will assume the powers of the police normally exercized by civil authority’.15 Such decrees not only gave the lie to the French colonial government’s suggestion that the emergency was a temporary measure that could be suspended at any time, but also created extra-legal spaces in which the military had exclusive powers to police the Algerian population. Paradoxically, as Raphaëlle Branche has argued, the special powers that were granted to the military in the decrees of 1956 were not military or martial laws since no official declaration of war was ever made in Algeria throughout the Algerian conflict: The ‘events’ taking place in Algeria warranted the treatment of prisoners, under the Third Geneva Convention as prisoners taken in armed conflict. However, these same ‘events’ did not justify the application of the First Convention to those wounded on the battlefield, or the Fourth to civilian populations. And so, as far as those other conventions were concerned, peace officially reigned in Algeria – although the tacit recognition of the Third Convention indicated a state of war. Inasmuch

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as the Third Convention was not officially recognized, however, it was still deemed possible to turn a blind eye.16

While this complex history of emergency legislation is elided in The Battle of Algiers, it is certainly implied in the narrative structure of the film, which suggests that the militarization of the French colonial state was a response to the violent, anti-colonial insurgency of the FLN. Moreover, the film’s opening sequence clearly establishes that the French military appear to have the authority to carry out the torture, and the flashback to a period just before the Algerian war seems on first viewing to document the historical causes which precipitated the war. Beginning with Ali La Pointe’s experiences in prison, and his witnessing of the summary execution of a fellow Algerian prisoner, the film follows Ali’s recruitment into the FLN, a campaign of targeted assassinations of French colonial policemen, the planting of a bomb in the Algerian Casbah by the French colonial police, a series of three bomb attacks carried out by the FLN on French cafés and bars, and the arrival of the French parachute regiment in Algeria. It is significant also that The Battle of Algiers renders the female freedom fighters in the film effectively voiceless even as it represents their increasingly important role in the struggle against colonialism. For Daniele Djamila Amrane Minne, what is striking about The Battle of Algiers ‘is the complete absence of speaking roles for women activists’. ‘Women are’ she says ‘almost totally silent throughout the whole film’.17 For Ranjana Khanna, however, the depiction of three women freedom fighters unveiling in front of a mirror, cutting their hair and applying their make-up in order to infiltrate the French part of the city exemplifies what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘reentry into language for the formerly colonized at the moment of speech’.18 Yet this is not a scene in which the women represent themselves. Rather, as Khanna puts it, the ‘mirror scene in The Battle of Algiers, where women, like actresses, dress and rehearse as they prepare to act, reflects the drama of revolution and of filmmaking, forming a space ... where representation breaks down because it turns in on itself ’.19 And it is only by negotiating with this space where representation breaks down, Khanna suggests, that Algerian women can begin to contest the foreclosure of women’s historical experiences in the Algerian war. Such negotiation is exemplified in Assia Djebar’s novel La femme sans sépulture (2002). Focusing on the life and death of Zoulikha Oudai, an Algerian freedom fighter who disappeared after being arrested and tortured

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by the French army, the narrator, an Algerian filmmaker, attempts to recover Zoulikha’s history by interviewing her daughters, Hania and Mina, and her female comrades, Lla Lbia (Dame Lionne) and Zohra Oudai (Zoulikha’s sister-in-law). In this respect, much of the narrative is a self-conscious polylogue of multiple voices rather than a conventional biography or historical novel. Significantly, the novel contains a frame narrative that draws attention to the narrator’s position as a filmmaker: The history of Zoulikha is outlined in the opening sequence. This is followed by two hours of slow moving film: fiction and documentary, with some conversations between women, and a soundtrack combining traditional and contemporary music.20

This frame narrative is significant not only because it contains an intertextual allusion to the experimental form of Djebar’s filmmaking practice, but also because it draws our attention to the aesthetic status of the narrative as a fictional representation of Zoulikha’s life. Indeed, this metafictional narrative technique is announced in the very first line of the novel: ‘The story of Zoulikha: to write it at last or rather re-write it’.21 By foregrounding the history of the novel’s composition between 1976 and 2001, the narrator suggests that the history of Zoulikha’s life and the circumstances of her death cannot be recovered. As a subaltern woman whose history disappeared along with her body during the Algerian war in 1956, Djebar’s narrator discloses the ways in which Zoulikha is a spectral figure that is resistant to narrative representation. As Anne Donadey puts it, ‘The constant use and staging of mediation underscores the fact that fiction is being used to supplement history, all the while highlighting that no voice may fix Zoulikha or pin her down for good’.22 As a consequence, it may seem surprising that the novel also inserts four chapter-length ‘monologues’ that are attributed to Zoulikha between the pages of the other chapters. If we read these fictional ‘monologues’ as a speculative, subaltern history of Zoulikha’s imprisonment and torture at the hands of the French military, it is possible to interpret Zoulikha’s mediated voice as an embodied history of French colonial violence that traces the way in which the Algerian freedom fighter tried to contest the sovereignty of French colonial violence by attempting to assert sovereignty over her own body. In a central passage from the final monologue, the fictional voice of Zoulikha describes her disorientation and loss of consciousness at the hands of her torturers.23 In so doing, Djebar foregrounds the ‘annihilating

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negation’ that Elaine Scarry associates with the body of the tortured subject: a negation that separates the body and the voice of the tortured subject.24 This ‘annihilating negation’ is registered in Zoulikha’s confusion of pain with memories of sexual desire, and her suggestion that ‘if this was to continue, the torture on my body would have the same effect as almost twenty years of love making nights with three successive lovers.’25 By asking whether her confusion between torture and sexual intimacy is sacrilegious, the fictional voice of Zoulikha certainly foregrounds the radical implications of this confused association, with its suggestion that her torturers are also lovers. More importantly, though, this confusion raises crucial questions about Zoulikha’s sovereignty over her body and voice. Against the cold fury and determination of the French soldiers to reduce her body to a mechanical object of colonial sovereignty, 26 the narrator’s re-writing of Zoulikha’s body in pain could be read as a sign of her ‘annihilating negation’ from the world of her social and cultural values as well as from her commitment to the political cause of Algerian independence. Indeed, Djebar’s subsequent account of the way in which Zoulikha’s voice escaped her evokes a disturbing image of the sexualized dimension of torture during the Algerian war, and of Zoulikha’s attempt to hold on to the names of her daughters and of her ‘disappeared’ husband: Perhaps, it seemed to me, ‘o God, o Dear Prophet’, that these familiar words were hollow; then, little by little, I uttered, in slow incantation, each of your names, including that of the disappeared El Habib, your sweet last name, modulated constantly while my vagina completely electrified whirling like a bottomless pit ... In this den of pleasure past, your name, like a silken thread to wrap up infinitely deep inside me, softens and deafens me.27

In what appears to be the most excruciating point of Zoulikha’s torture, the narrator highlights the fragmented thoughts of a tortured body in pain that struggles to assert sovereignty over her body by recalling memories of her family and of her lovers. Yet such confusion also raises questions about whether the narrator’s expressions of desire under conditions of intense physical pain and sexual humiliation might instead be a sign of the narrator’s subjection to colonial violence. Here, the narrator’s ambivalence about Zoulikha’s agency over her body and voice encourages readers to reflect on the difficulty of recovering the agency, voice and embodied history of the gendered Algerian freedom fighter.

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In this way, Djebar’s narrative makes intelligible the gendered dimension of the colonial state of exception and the violent forms of sovereignty it enables. And in doing so, Djebar’s novel raises important questions about the limitations of Agamben’s account of sovereignty and the state of exception. Like Walter Benjamin in his eighth thesis on the concept of history, Agamben gestures towards a revolutionary alternative to the juridical fiction of a state of exception, which Benjamin names the real state of exception. For Agamben, this ‘real state of exception is a revolutionary state in which a totally different ... relationship of law to life would prevail’.28 Such an enigmatic concept would be meaningless if it does not address the ways in which gendered forms of life are incorporated into the founding narrative of this revolutionary state to come. Shoshana Felman has suggested that literary narratives can do justice to trauma in a way that the law cannot.29 If La femme sans sépulture is a literary narrative that attempts to do justice to the systematic violence that was perpetrated by the French colonial military against the Algerian population under the aegis of the colonial state’s emergency legislation, it also raises questions about how such traumatic narratives are commemorated by the postcolonial state. Throughout the novel, the narrator stages the way in which Zoulikha is a spectral figure that haunts the collective memory of postcolonial Algeria.30 More specifically, the narrator underscores the way in which the contemporary monumentalization of Zoulikha’s body runs the risk of incorporating the violence of the colonial past into the postcolonial body politic. As the narrator puts it: They say: my corpse; come independence, perhaps, they will say, my ‘statue’, as if the body of a woman is lionized, no matter when, as if to dress it outside against a flat horizon, did not take centuries of muzzled silence.31

Here, the narrator’s anticipation of how her own dead body will be transformed into a statue draws attention to the gap between dominant forms of public commemoration and the silencing of Zoulikha’s singular historical experiences as a female freedom fighter. Moreover, if, as Michael O’Riley has suggested, Zoulikha’s fictional narrative of torture at the hands of the French military ‘evokes those contemporary figures tortured in the postindependence period by Algeria’s repressive military regime and retributive violence’, 32 the incorporation of Zoulikha’s dead body into the national narrative of the Algerian postcolony threatens to destabilize rather than reinforce

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that narrative by highlighting the way in which militarized state violence has been normalized in the Algerian postcolony. In this way Djebar’s metafictional evocation of Zoulikha’s spectral body returns to haunt the violent foundations of the Algerian nation. If Giorgio Agamben’s account of the state of exception elides the multiple techniques of governmentality in and through which sovereignty was stabilized in colonial spaces such as Algeria, the fiction of Assia Djebar can be seen to foreground how the embodied experience of the gendered insurgent offers a crucial and situated counterpoint to the masculine formation of militarized colonial sovereignty. What’s more, Djebar’s self-conscious narrative in La femme sans sépulture raises critical questions about the violent legacy of colonial sovereignty, and the ways in which narratives of anti-colonial resistance can serve to normalize ‘exceptional’ forms of state violence in the postcolonial present. This chapter reworks sections in my recently published monograph Colonial States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law (Liverpool, 2013).

N ote s 1. Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall, ‘Introduction’ in M. Svirsky and S. Bignall (eds) Agamben and Colonialism (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 4. 2. A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London, 1897), p. 270. 3. Dicey: Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, p. 272. 4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, 2005), p. 2. 5. See Nasser Hussein, ‘Beyond norm and exception: Guantánamo’, Critical Inquiry, 33 (Summer 2007), pp. 734–47. 6. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001), pp. 24–65. 7. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15/1 (2003), pp. 11–40, p. 23. 8. Cristina Masters, ‘Femina sacra: the “war on/of terror”, Women and the Feminine’, Security Dialogue, 40 (2009), pp. 29–49, p. 33. 9. Ronit Lentin, ‘Femina sacra: Gendered memory and political violence’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 29/5 (2006), pp. 463–73, p. 465. 10. Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, 2008).

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

Lazreg: Torture and the Twilight of Empire, p. 21. Lazreg: Torture and the Twilight of Empire, p. 36. Lazreg: Torture and the Twilight of Empire, p. 36. Lazreg: Torture and the Twilight of Empire, p. 37. Lazreg: Torture and the Twilight of Empire, p. 37. Raphaëlle Branche, ‘Torture and other violations of the law by the French army during the Algerian War’ in A. Jones (ed.), Genocide, War Crimes and the West (London, 2004), pp. 134–45, pp. 136–7. Amrane Minne and Daniele Djamila, ‘Women at war: the representation of women in the Battle of Algiers’, Interventions, 9/3 (2007), pp. 340–9, p. 347. Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford, 2008), p. 120. Khanna: Algeria Cuts, p. 123. ‘L’histoire de Zoulikha est esquisée en ouverture. Deux heures du film s’écoulent ensuite en fleuve lent: fiction et documentaire, son direct souvent, quelques dialogues entre femmes; des flots de musique, traditionelle aussi bien que contemporaine’. Assia Djebar, La femme sans sépulture: roman (Paris, 2002), p. 16. ‘Histoire de Zoulika: l’inscrire enfin, ou plutôt la réinscrire’. Djebar: La femme sans sépulture, p. 13. Anne Donadey, ‘Introjection and incorporation in Assia Djebar’s La Femme sans sépulture’, L’Esprit Créateur, 48/4 (2008), p. 85. Djebar: La femme sans sépulture, p. 197. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985), pp. 27–59. ‘Est-ce que, si cela continuait, la torture sur mon corps aurait le même effet que presque vingt ans de nuits d’amour avec trois époux successifs?’ Djebar: La femme sans sépulture, p. 198. Djebar: La femme sans sépulture, p. 200. ‘Peut-être, il me semble, “ô Dieu, ô Prophète chéri”, ou le dessin en creux de ces mots familiers; peu à peu, ensuite, je déroulai, en lent chapelet, chacun de vos prénoms, y compris celui d’El Habib disparu, ton doux nom en dernier, modulé sans cesse tandis que mon vagin electrifié vrillait entièrement comme un puits sans fond ... Dans cet antre autrefois de jouissance, ton prénom, tel un fil de soie pour s’enrouler infiniment jusqu’au fond de moi, pour m’assoudir et m’adoucir.’ Djebar: La femme sans sépulture, pp. 200–1. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, 2009), pp. 344–5. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 8.

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30. See Michael O’Riley, Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization: Assia Djebar’s New Novels (New York, 2007), pp. 57–81. 31. ‘Ils dissent: mon “cadavre”; l’indépendance venue, peut-être, diront-ils, ma “statue”, comme si on statufiat un corps de femme, n’importe lequel, comme si, simplement, pour le dresser dehors, contre un horizon plat, il ne fallait pas de siècles de silence bâillonné’. Djebar: La femme sans sépulture, p. 207. 32. O’Riley: Postcolonial Haunting, p. 61.

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7

Competing Masculinities in the Museum Space Terrorists, Machines and Mangled Metal Gabriel Koureas

They have succeeded in turning their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a system that operates on the basis of the exclusion of death.1 In the trenches of World War I, Ernst Junger was already celebrating face to face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression.2

Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 pose a number of pertinent questions on the relationship of the West to what is perceived as the ‘terrorist’ and the problems associated with its representation in particular. For Baudrillard, the inability of the West to include death in its cultural milieu is the main issue as terrorist deaths are to a large extent ‘symbolic’ and ‘sacrificial’.3 Their deaths provide the antithesis to the ‘cowardice’ for which they ‘stand accused’ as this is ‘precisely the opposite of what the Americans did in the Gulf War, where the target is invisible and liquidated operationally’.4 According to Slavoj Žižek the shift from face to face combat results in a challenge to traditional ideals of what constituted masculinity during past conflicts while at the same time terrorism becomes the exemplification of these ideals.5 Parallelling the challenge to traditional Western ideals of masculinities constituted in the battlefield including comradeship, courage, self-control and ultimately sacrifice,6 terrorism also embodied the ‘experience of the Real’ which according to Žižek results in a paradox: ‘it culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle’7 and

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what stays with us according to Baudrillard is the ‘sight of the images’ and their ‘impact and fascination’.8 In September 2010, the Imperial War Museum, London (IWM) exhibited the work of the British artist Jeremy Deller, Baghdad, 5 March 2007 in its main atrium amongst the guns and machineries of war that greet visitors as they enter the museum. The work consists of the mangled remains of a car that was salvaged after a suicide street bombing in 2007 at Baghdad’s Al-Mutanabbi, its famous book market and a place at the heart of the city’s cultural and intellectual life. The bomb killed 38 people and wounded many more.9 My main concern in this chapter is how the image of the terrorist can be represented in the museum space and particularly a museum dedicated solely to the representation of modern conflict. I aim to pose a number of questions: is the representation of the terrorist and terrorism possible in a museum that celebrates heroic masculinities established in the battlefield with special emphasis on the two World Wars? How can it represent the invisible terrorist whose masculinity is seen as posing a threat to Western masculinities and is often described in terms of his cowardice? How can it represent the terrorist when his spectacular acts are the antithesis of warfare in the twenty-first century with its guided missiles and unmanned aircraft or drones that abstract the battlefield from literal terrain to a computer screen somewhere in Texas, USA? In addressing these issues, I will firstly discuss the history of the car including its journey in the USA and its subsequent acquisition by the IWM. I wish to examine its positioning in the atrium of the IWM amongst the guns and machinery of war and investigate how this creates a dialogue between the exhibits of World War I that formed the museum’s core collection when it was established and first opened in 1920, alongside its collecting and acquisition policies during that period. My concern here is the degree to which the violent transgressions of the battlefield during World War I and the ‘authentic’ experience of the battlefield with its celebrated heroes and masculinities can provide an understanding of the mangled car and to ask if a dialogue between heroic masculinities of the World Wars and terrorist transgressions can be instigated. While the car was exhibited in the atrium its history was documented on two laminated ring binders attached to the platform on which it was displayed. The notes described the attack on Al-Mutanabbi street market by a suicide bomber with a car bomb as well as the subsequent journeys of the wreckage in Europe and the USA. Two months after the attack the Dutch curator Robert Kluijver shipped the car to the Netherlands as part of an

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anti-war event he had organized. Following this the car was offered to Jeremy Deller who was subsequently invited by the Three M Project in the USA to exhibit at the New Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The work was originally intended for public display on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, but did not win the competition. The car was not only exhibited in three prominent museums in the USA, it also took part in a road trip between these sites, stopping at different public locations across the country. In both the museums and on the road, a main part of the work involved the creation of a dialogue between the artist, the curator Nato Thompson and the public. During the road trip, an Iraqi citizen, the artist and translator Esam Pasha, and an American demobilized platoon sergeant, Jonathan Harvey who served in Iraq, were on hand to encourage discussion and open up a dialogue with the people who came into contact with it. The conversations were placed on YouTube and a website was created for the project where the conversations are transcribed.10

dialogues with mangled metal Grant Kester in his book on what he terms ‘conversation pieces’ argues that these art works are characterized by an ability to speak as well as to listen. What also characterizes them is a performative process-based approach where the object is not always the primary focus. According to Kester, Mikail Bakhtin’s model of ‘dialogical experience’ is central to such works. What Bakhtin advocates is an insistence on preserving the ‘irreducible element in human contact’ that resists co-optation by a more general or abstract conceptual power. Hence our capacity for ethical and aesthetic judgement derives not from a transcendent subjectivity but from a given ‘dialogical situation in all its concrete historicity and individuality’. However, this dialogical situation is not achieved in some abstract manner but is directly linked to a corporeal, affective and meaningful relationship with concrete others. Bakhtin argues that it is only through a dialogical encounter that the boundaries between self and other can be blurred. Rather than seek inter-determinateness and excess in an object that resists conceptual classification, Bakhtin locates subjectivity in the act of dialogue itself, which in turn produces new forms of subjectivity.11 Does the IWM produce these new forms of affectual and corporeal subjectivities through the objects it chooses to display? In attempting

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to answer this question I will go back to the origins of the IWM in 1917 to outline briefly the importance given to the machinery of war, or relics as the museum officials used to call them, during that period and the consequences of such emphasis on the men who served in the army. Almost from the outset, the Crawford Committee, which was given the task of setting up the IWM, adopted the outlook of the universal museum in their recommendations. A. Fisher MP, a member of the Crawford Committee, wrote in a letter to the Earl of Crawford: The museum, in a word, would be selective, not exhaustive, it would consist of paintings, engravings, drawings, maps, plans and designs of all sorts, models of armaments and instruments of war, uniforms and equipment, selected with a view to giving to the visitor an ordered and organised conception of the war [My emphasis].12

Martin Conway who became the first director of the museum argued that the importance of the exhibits would attract a wide range of audiences: Thus the sailor and soldier should be able to see models of ships, batteries, trenches, and the like in which they fought, the uniform they wore, and the weapons they used ... craftsmen should be able to examine models of some of the great munitions works in which they were employed.13

Both Fisher and Conway placed particular emphasis on the ways in which the paraphernalia of war could become a point of attraction and interest for a wide spectrum of society. For Fisher in particular, it was the selective and ordered organization of such objects that would provide the visitor with the necessary appeal and attraction. Yet the orderly organization of the objects of war provides an antithesis to the chaotic way in which the servicemen remembered them and which was of course the traumatic experience of the battlefield. Such display of objects in a museum, Susan Stewart suggests, seeks to replace history with classification and order, something that is usually beyond the realm of temporality.14 For Conway, the associative memories that war objects were able to convey to the ex-servicemen offered the basis for creating a particular memory of World War I and thus this established the cultural icons of the period by selecting which objects deserved to be kept, remembered and treasured.15 Professional bodies such as the Museums Association approved of the machinery of war being used to promote a particular hegemonic ordered and organized memory of the war. The editorial of the May 1917 issue of

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the association’s journal was dedicated to the establishment of the IWM. It applauded the government’s decision to set up the museum and offered ideas on ways in which the collection should function. Its central message was that deeds of devotion and bravery should be represented in the museum. The problem was in representing these deeds; in the view of the Museums Association Journal, the machinery of war presented the best way forward, and these objects should be ‘singled out for special prominence’. Size was also important: ‘A gigantic enemy howitzer requiring two or three railway wagons to accommodate its vast bulk, would form an impressive exhibit without the aid of accessories’, claimed the editorial.16 As Susan Stewart has argued however, the miniature is more likely to offer closure, interiority and domesticity than the gigantic, which is inaccessible to lived experience.17 As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, the lived traumatic experiences of the soldiers begged for closure and interiority which was achieved to a certain degree, through collecting, the writing of memoirs, photographic albums and even taxidermy.18 The gigantic guns denied them access to an interiority that was too painful to approach and most importantly, they could not provide a conversation between the ex-servicemen in terms of their experiences, trauma, grief and their social and economic conditions when they returned to Britain from the Front. Instead, the ‘solid exhibits’, as The Times described the war relics, provided the ‘text’ out of which the ‘history of the war in concrete hieroglyphs’ could be written.19 At the luncheon that followed the opening ceremony of the museum, Winston Churchill gave an address in which he acknowledged that the war relics were ‘grim and fierce’ but that in the future, they would become sacred: Those sombre relics of war would be looked upon, not merely with wonder and astonishment by future generations, they would be regarded as the sacred objects which represented the sacrifice of one splendid generation.20

And so the machinery of war became the main focus of the exhibition and remains so to the present day with the museum website stating that: The Large Exhibits Gallery greets you as you enter the museum and houses some of the most important weapons and vehicles in our collection. Some of the most significant items on display are the 4-inch gun which fired the first British shot from HMS Lance in the First World War, a

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Supermarine Spitfire Mark 1A which saw action in the Battle of Britain and an unusual one-man Biber German submarine. Also on display are some of the most destructive weapons of the Second World War including a V1 and V2 rocket, the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb of the type dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and a post-war Polaris.21

Jeremy Deller’s work was placed amongst these destructive weapons. During a panel discussion with Deller, Roger Tolson, Head of Collections at the time of the exhibition, acknowledged that the atrium of the IWM London was full of ‘polished and extraordinarily destructive machines’ and that Deller’s work provided an opportunity to undermine that.22 The IWM annual report for 2010–11 mentions the acquisition of Deller’s work under the ‘exhibitions’ heading which according to the museum provided an opportunity to ‘engage diverse audiences and encourage new visitors’ as well as providing ‘something different for regular visitors’.23 The director general of the IWM, Diane Lees, stated in relation to the Baghdad Car that the museum hoped the new exhibit ‘will prove a thought-provoking addition to our permanent collections and encourage visitors to consider not just this car, but all our exhibits, in a new light’. She added that it ‘will serve as a sobering reminder of the impact of war on civilians’.24 Hence, the car was instantly seen by the museum officials as transgressing the space of the atrium and providing an alternative view of warfare. It therefore provided a form of dialogue between the machinery of war and its consequences. However, what the artist and museum officials excluded from the dialogue they envisioned was the figure of the insurgent or the fighters who used their own bodies to create the horror of the mangled metal that the artist and museum saw as providing a challenge to the machinery of war. This exclusion is also very evident from the car’s road journey in the USA. Deller stated that during its tour of the USA the mangled car acted as a ‘conversation piece’ and it instigated a number of conversations not only with critics and academics within the museum but most importantly with the public while on tour. Deller argues that the car worked better on the road, because in that way people didn’t see it as art, but as a ‘terrible relic’ that provided a ‘conversational point in relation to the war in Iraq’.25 What becomes apparent however, when one watches clips of these conversations or reads the road diary by the curator of the project is that the main focus is the involvement of the USA in Iraq, life and death, the Vietnam War and a multiplicity of other issues that once again completely fail to address even once the figure

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of the terrorist whose body caused the damage to the car. 26 Even in the vastness of the American landscape the mangled remains of the car fail to convey the most important issue to its public: the face of the ‘Other’. Interestingly, Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian argued that what is immediately striking about the car is the information it conveys, ‘the terrible moment of reality’ as ‘it is a piece of evidence’. He writes: ‘here is something solid, actual, to replace the strange abstraction of nightmare news stories from remote places.’ The car is disturbing according to Jones, ‘really gutchurning, because its fire-reddened, inside-out, flattened metal corpse makes you think unavoidably of human bodies’ and it communicates with ‘unforced truth, the scale of violence unleashed by the invasion of Iraq. It is not rhetoric but reportage.’27 Does it communicate the scale of violence or is it just reportage without the actual facts or rather just a part of the facts? Most importantly, what happens when the mangled remains of the car enter the museum of war and take their place amongst the machinery of war? Is a dialogue and conversation possible at all in this instance? I want to approach this from two perspectives: firstly, the dialogue that is facilitated by the museum itself and secondly, by the narrative that emerges from placing the installation in the atrium. The IWM has created a blog where Deller’s piece features on its first page. One might have imagined that this would have facilitated the emergence of a dialogue about the installation.28 However, there are only four entries on the blog, none of which relate to Deller’s work and most importantly, none of which were posted by the public. In order to find reactions to the piece in the UK, I had to resort to Jonathan Jones’ blog in the Guardian. The discussion on Deller’s piece was very lively, with more than 60 entries. However, what was revealing was that most of the entries related to the eternal, and possibly somewhat tired, question about whether this was a work of art and whether or not the artist could claim ownership of the car. Very few of the entries related to the atrocities of war that were committed in Iraq.29 Unlike Jonathan Jones’ claim that this is a piece that makes you think of mutilated human bodies the bloggers seemed to find this almost trivial in comparison to its artistic qualities and status. It leads one to question whether this is a conversation piece at all. I will return to this after considering the dialogue that it instigates with the objects that surround it. In the atrium of the IWM, the machinery of war is presented each with their technical specifications, the battles they participated in and the heroic deeds they performed. No information is given about their highly destructive

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capabilities, the injuries and ultimately death they can inflict. Take for example the British 18-pounder Mark II Field Gun. According to the IWM label for the exhibit the ‘importance of the gun can be measured by the fact that more than 86 million shells were fired during the war’. For the 9.2 inch Howitzer called ‘Mother’ we get a glimpse into the efforts that went into moving this immobile beast. That the ‘18-pounder’ fired 86 million shells can only lead to guesswork about how many people it killed. As to the struggle to move the immovable beast called ‘Mother’ it is left to the imagination of the visitor to sense the impossibility of the task. What is rather astonishing is that there are numerous letters, diaries and memoirs in the collection that testify to the relationship between man and machine and the consequences of constant shelling. However, none of these is used in relation to these machines. One can of course argue that these can be investigated further in the archive or somehow experienced in the authentic recreation of the ‘trench experience’ in the floor below. However the ‘authenticity’ of the reproduction of the trench experience seems to supports Žižek’s argument that the fundamental paradox of the ‘passion for the Real’ is that it culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle blurring the actual social and political realities that underpin it. The way that the machinery of war is conserved also testifies to the denial of its destructiveness: the highly polished and clean surfaces are in sharp contrast to the realities of the battlefield where it is always an impossible task to keep machines in a functioning order. In the atrium they reflect rather than invite an affectual engagement with the visitor. By sharp contrast the Baghdad car with its rusted metal could offer a possibility of an affectual engagement and one may think that this is the result of what the machines that surround it can ultimately achieve. However, a metonymic substitution takes place in the narrative that runs through the atrium: the aestheticized objects of warfare and their assumed innocence not only cannot have caused this destruction but also they deflect any such possibility through their shining surfaces. This results in the Baghdad Car failing to enter into any meaningful dialogue with the objects that surround it. Most importantly, the mangled piece fails to enter into a conversation with the visitor as the actuality of its destruction, a suicide bomber, becomes an absence that comes to haunt the mangled remains of the car. The horror and inability of the West to engage with the suicide bomber becomes a phantom that haunts the atrium of the IWM together with the death that the rest of the guns in the atrium have inflicted. Rather the objects on display and the

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mangled car work like an eighteenth century ‘conversation piece’, peepshows into the lives of others that have no voice. Since the departure of the Baghdad Car from the IWM London in order to take its permanent position in the atrium of the IWM North another pile of rusted, mangled metal has taken its place: part of the remains of the World Trade Center which are presented complete with an exhibition catalogue published by the National Geographic.30 It is indicative that rusted mangled metal is chosen in both cases as representative of the War on Terror. As in the case of the car the perceived inhumanity of the suicide bomber is chosen to be represented not through the machinery of war they used, in this instance their bodies, but by the resulting materiality of their bodies. The dialogue that takes place between the shining, smooth surfaces of the machinery of war in the atrium and the rough surfaces of metal is one of justifiable and unjustifiable war, good and evil, heroes and villains. However, this dialogue never comes to the surface and is never acknowledged by the museum. To admit this is to question the sheer existence of the museum. The current installations of the IWM do not display bodies because there is a moratorium on depicting the mutilated bodies of Western First World citizens. Their corpses cannot be visualized. This is in part a consequence of social ethics that value some bodies over others and in part a result of the emphasis on individuality in the Western world. Hence, the absence of bodies from the IWM becomes indicative of how visitors to the museum perform a civilizing ritual. Moreover, this absence reinforces the idea of a regular army, celebrated in its displays, as opposed to irregular armies which must be obscured. In the Theory of the Partisan (1963), the political theorist Carl Schmitt argued that irregular combatants, as opposed to soldiers in uniform, demand a rethinking of the ‘enemy’ and the ‘political’ because their non-identification relies on invisibility: ‘secrecy and darkness are their strongest weapons’. More recently, political philosopher Adriana Cavarero has argued that the crux of the matter is in the complex relationship between bodies and war. The image of the warrior disfigured through war represents the antithesis of the ‘body politic’ made visible through public health policy, pathologies and therapies. However, the body of the warrior in hiding, as in the instance of the ‘terrorist’, poses a logistical problem: how can the invisible body be made visible? Would images of mutilation suffice? Instead of concentrating on the mutilated body what needs to be re-configured is the relationship of masculinity to the body politic. This would demystify the hegemony of heroic masculinities as exemplified in the two World Wars and their orchestrated commemoration of performatively

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established masculinities. It would reveal the precariousness of masculinities on both sides of the conflict. It is through this precariousness that ideas of progress, terrorism and masculinity can be challenged and a de-mystification of heroic and terrorist masculinities can take place.

N ote s 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London, 2002), p. 16. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London, 2002), p. 6. Baudrillard: Spirit of Terrorism, p. 18. Baudrillard: p. 26. Žižek: Desert of the Real, pp. 35–36. Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, 2001). Žižek: Return of the Real, p. 9. Baudrillard: Spirit of Terrorism, p. 26. Mark Brown, ‘Iraq car wreckage goes on display at Imperial War Museum’, the Guardian, 9 September 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/2010/sep/09/iraq-car-imperial-war-museum-jeremy-deller For a full description of the project, interviews and conversations with the public during the road trip see http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org/interviews.php Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. (Berkeley, 2004), p. 1, pp. 118–23. Imperial War Museum (IWM), ‘Agenda and Minutes of Committee on Imperial War Museum’, 1917–1920, Central Files, A1/3, Letter from A. Fisher to Earl of Crawford, 20 September 1917. Martin Conway, ‘Memorandum on the Scope of the National War Museum’, Agenda and Minutes of Committee on Imperial War Museum, 1917–1920, IWM, Central Files, A1/3. Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London: 1993), p. 152. Susan Crane, ‘Introduction’, in S. Crane, (ed.), Museums and Memory (Stanford: 2000), p. 7. Editorial, ‘A National War Museum’, Museums Journal, 16/11 (May 1917), p. 246. Stewart: On Longing, p. 70. Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930 (Aldershot, 2007).

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

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The Times, 19 August 1920. Winston Churchill, The Times, 10 June 1920. http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-london, accessed 5 September 2012. Roger Tolson, ‘The Baghdad Car. Panel Discussion’, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=MSBqfL9II54 Imperial War Museum, Annual Report, 2010–11, p. 11 http://www.officialdocuments.gov.uk/document/hc1012/hc12/1286/1286.pdf Diane Lees, interviewed by Mark Brown, the Guardian, 9 September 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/09/iraq-carimperial-war-museum-jeremy-deller Jeremy Deller, http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org/interviews.php http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org/diary.php Jonathan Jones, ‘Jeremy Deller’s blown-up car brings the realities of the Iraq war to life’, the Guardian, 10 September 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/sep/10/jeremy-deller-car-iraq-war IWM Build the Truce blog, http://blogs.iwm.org.uk/truce/ Jones: ‘Jeremy Deller’s blown-up car’. Clifford Chanin, (ed.) Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 (Washington, DC, 2011).

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8

Dressed to Kill The Sartorial Code of Anders Behring Breivik Andreas Behnke

On the afternoon of 22 July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb in the executive government quarter of Oslo, Norway, killing eight people and wounding 209. Less than two hours later, he gained access to Utøya, a small island to the north-west of Oslo, where he attacked and shot participants of a youth camp, organized by the Norwegian Labour Party. He killed 69 and injured more than 100 of them. Since the moment of his arrest, Breivik has consistently admitted to the mass murder he perpetrated and provided extensive explanations of his motivation, which centred on his vitriolic hatred of Muslims, his revulsion towards ‘multi-culturalism’ and his resistance against a Norwegian government that supposedly supports the disintegration and ‘deconstruction’ of Norwegian and European culture. The murder of 69 members of the ruling Norwegian party’s youth organization was justified, he claimed, in these terms: these were ‘political activists’ that sought the ‘deconstruction of Norwegian society’ using ‘multi-culturalism’. ‘Small barbaric acts prevent other barbarism’.1 As became clear in the days and weeks after the attacks, Breivik’s criminal actions were the expression of an elaborate ideology, concocted from fascist, religious, racist and mythological elements. Breivik imagines himself to be a ‘Knight Templar’, that is, a member of a resistance group that, in a tradition reaching back to the Middle Ages, fights against Muslim invasions in order to preserve the race and culture of Europe. The deeply mythologized and peculiarly anachronistic narrative behind the atrocities he committed is supported by a peculiar, yet elaborate 137

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‘media strategy’ 2 through which Breivik performs and presents himself in the above and related roles. Indeed, what is most striking about Breivik’s strategy is his acute sense of how to produce, disseminate and control the visuality of his perverse narrative. In this context, it is worth noting that he refused to be photographed by the Norwegian police after his arrest, leaving the latter to issue an old driver’s licence image as the first official mug-shot. Breivik’s desire to control the visuality of his narrative, that is, its visual performance in photos and videos, highlights the crucial role of imagery and visuality, not only in the case of the July attacks in Norway, but for terrorism in general. The relevance of visual representation has been recognized as part of an ‘aesthetic turn in international political theory’3 and in subject areas such as critical geopolitics, critical security studies and, more recently, critical terrorism studies.4 In the words of one of the experts on the politics of visuality, ‘what we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses’.5 Despite the emergence of critical terrorism studies after 9/11, investigations into the visuality of contemporary terrorism are so far still few and far between. However, James Der Derian’s work on the Military-IndustrialMedia-Entertainment (MIME) Complex includes some pertinent insights into the operation of mediated and networked images of terror and the War on Terror.6 Also, in 2007, the journal Security Dialogue published a special issue that contains a selection of essays dealing with various aspects of the visual mediation and representation of contemporary and historical terrorism. As the guest editors state in their introduction, the essays deal with the power of the images as one of the conditions of possibility for the post-9/11 world in its various guises ... with some aspects of visual culture aiding and abetting securitization and militarization and some serving as a domain of critical practice and counter-memory for the issues, perspectives and people occluded by securitization and militarization.7

Finally, W.J.T. Mitchell has investigated ‘The War of Images’ in the War on Terror and the role images play in the perpetuation and ‘cloning’ of terror.8 All these scholars have made significant contributions to an emergent research agenda, focusing on different aspects of the visuality of terror. What unites their diverse contributions is the focus on the visual mediation and

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representation of terrorist events by media and state agents, the articulation of critical and dissident positions against such representation, and the uses (and abuses) of visuality in the formulation and implementation of counterterrorism policies. However, this particular viewpoint only renders terrorism as the object of visualizations and representations and their contestations by third parties. What remains so far underdeveloped is a systematic analysis of the visuality that inheres within terrorism, and constitutes an integral part of it. If indeed terrorism is symbolic, indeed spectacular,9 we should include in our critical investigation the visual ‘script’ that the perpetrators themselves include in their representations of themselves and of their violent acts. In Jennifer Bajorek’s words: Terrorism, before it is an act, is a calculation, on the basis of future traces, in anticipation of how traces yet to be made will someday be read. As such it is more than casually bound up with the complex movements of textuality on both sides – on the side ... of both the sender and the receiver of the message.10

If we include visuality in Bajorek’s notion of ‘textuality’, we can appreciate that the ‘manipulation’, production and mediation of images of terrorist violence does not begin after the fact. Instead, the perpetrator ‘visualizes’ himself and the act before media and state agents produce their own respective renditions. This self-representation takes on particular relevance in the case of Breivik. Reflecting on 9/11 Jacques Derrida stated: What would ‘September 11’ have been without television? ... [We] must recall that maximum media coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators of ‘September 11’, the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare ‘war on terrorism’.11

The common interest of perpetrator, media and State in the dissemination of terrorist imagery is a crucial indicator of the ‘co-dependency’ of these actors. The spectacular nature of the terrorist act carries almost by definition ‘news-value’ and challenges the state as the sovereign authority on the politics of fear and in/security.12 The re-appropriation of the relevant imagery is part and parcel of the state’s campaign to re-assign a meaning to the terrorist act that prepares the articulation of counter-terrorist measures. In the case of Breivik’s attacks, a crucial part of this relationship is missing. The mass murder he committed on Utøya remained without mediated

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visualization. Images of the destruction in the governmental quarter of Oslo reached the media in the usual way, but the events on the remote island received no such coverage. There is only a blurry photo distributed in the media, showing Breivik on the island, moving about amongst what appear to be human bodies.13 Yet the terror of the events on Utøya was subsequently only related through the harrowing narratives of the survivors, and the detailed account the perpetrator willingly provided to the authorities. Furthermore, Breivik’s refusal to allow the police to take his ‘mug-shot’, created yet another void in the public visual mediation of his act. This refusal reflected a conscious media strategy that he had outlined in the ‘Compendium’, which he had published on the internet shortly before his attacks under the name of Andrew Berwik. A central element of this strategy is to control what images the police are able to obtain and to distribute to the public. In Breivik’s own words, ‘by removing ... all negative photos, and by making available the professional, photo shopped [sic] photos prior to the operation; we make their job significantly harder’.14 This study takes advantage of this lack of an official imagery of Breivik, which led the media to focus on the visual material provided by the perpetrator himself on his Facebook account and in the ‘Compendium’. These images provide crucial insights into the visual self-representation of a terrorist perpetrator, and the gendered and sartorial codes deployed in the representation of a banal person as a heroic warrior.

o n r e a d i n g te r r o r i s t i m a g e s The analysis of Breivik’s visual self-representation is as straight-forward as it is problematic. As the following analysis will show, his imagery is saturated with symbolic, sartorial and gendered cues that reflect his particular ‘marketing techniques’, detailed in his ‘Compendium’.15 On the other hand, any examination of these images once again contributes to their circulation and dissemination, granting them relevance and power. Even a critical investigation has to concede what Breivik intended with this imagery: that they do convey a message, and that they do contribute to the articulation of a relevant context within which the atrocities committed on 22 July 2011 ‘make sense’, that is, are framed within a larger discourse on history, civilization, culture and identity. This is not to say that this discourse is persuasive or

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even coherent. Arguably, most readers of his ‘Compendium’, or viewers of his video, will be utterly appalled by the noxious blend of right-wing ideology, racism, gender clichés and turbid historical mythology presented in those media. Yet even a critical commentary and investigation once again brings the visual elements of this discourse into circulation. The strategy chosen in this chapter acknowledges this problem. It attempts to counteract it through two methodological moves. Firstly, the analysis conducted here is based on what W.J.T Mitchell calls ‘iconology’, which he defines as: the study of images across the media. Images, from an iconological standpoint, are both verbal and visual entities, both metaphors and graphic symbols. ... Some of them become operative forces in sociopolitical reality, attaining what is commonly known as ‘iconic’ status – widely recognizable, and provocative of powerful emotions.16

Rather than considering images to be secondary to text, to be but illustrations of a ‘literary’ meaning found in the written word, the images investigated here are considered to stand in a productive relationship with the text to which they relate, and to provide their own narrative and metaphorical meaning. Breivik’s own ‘media-savvy’ treatment of images supports this approach. Secondly, and concomitantly, the analysis will avoid simple descriptions or – again in the words of Mitchell – a ‘critical iconoclasm’, that is, a facile exposition of the ‘unreal’ or ‘fictitious’ content of Breivik’s imagery. ‘We need instead a method that recognizes and embraces both the unreality of images and their operational reality’.17 What is therefore called for is a deconstruction of Breivik’s imagery in order to understand their operation and their power, while at the same time working against them ‘from within’. In other words, the goal is to demonstrate that Breivik’s imagery, to paraphrase Christopher Norris, cannot mean what it shows, and cannot show what it means.18 There are two thematic sets of images that Breivik disseminated via his Facebook account, the ‘Compendium’ and the video he posted on the internet shortly before the attacks. The first set consists of photos in which he appears as both a proper member of the bourgeois class, and as a preppy young person. The second set consists of images in which he dresses up in different imaginary uniforms, indicating his membership of a variety of organizations, be they real or imaginary. These sets of images will be analyzed in turn.

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t h e te r r o r i s t a s a c l o n e d b o u r g e o i s The first set consists of three images. In two of them, Breivik wears a salmon coloured polo shirt under a navy blue Lacoste sweater. In one image, he stands with his body turned slightly to the left, his left arm hiding behind his body, and facing the onlooker directly with a slightly tilted head. The collar of the polo shirt is kept up so as to enhance the appearance of the subject’s youthful, casual preppiness. The image itself engages the gaze of the onlooker in an open and enticing fashion. It is a typical Facebook image, meant to present the subject in an attractive and ‘like-able’ fashion. [Figure 8.1] The second image has Breivik in the same outfit. The photo is now cropped to a headshot, with Breivik gazing past the viewer to his right, with his upper

8.1

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body turned slightly to the left. Overall, the photo produces a more romanticized version of its subject. The pose is contemplative, the gaze averted, and the right side of his face is cast in shadow. The cropping of the shot now emphasizes that Breivik’s hair is slightly tousled, and that a thin beard frames his face. Contrary to the first picture, the background is a dark grey, which enhances the more sombre and romantic mood of the image. [Figure 8.2] The garment worn in these pictures actually carries a significant symbolic value for Breivik. Wearing Lacoste sweaters is part of a strategy that is supposed to send ‘psycho-social-economic signals’ to ‘trick’ and ‘soothe’ society, that is, to fit in without bringing undue attention to his nefarious plans. More specifically, his explicit concern is not to raise any suspicion amongst suppliers and couriers of those chemicals he ordered for his ‘farm’ in the countryside north east of Oslo.19 At the same time, however, the garment expresses a different, more narcissistic aspect of his personality: Refined individuals like myself is [sic] a rare commodity here so I notice I do get a lot of attention in both the southern and the northern town. It’s the way I dress and look. There are mostly unrefined/un-cultivated people living here. I wear mostly the best pieces from my former life, which consists of very expensive brand clothing, LaCoste [sic] sweaters,

8.2

Anders Behring Breivik

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piques etc. People can see from a mile away that I’m not from around here.20

Breivik’s ambivalent interpretation of ‘Lacoste’ as a sartorial code that allows him to fit in as well as to stand out produces a peculiar figure of the terrorist as a clone. Breivik’s strategy is to emulate, copy and reproduce the sartorial code of the educated, well-adjusted and urbane bourgeois that appears to be a healthy member of the social body. At the same time, his dress code sets him apart from the ‘unrefined’ and ‘un-cultivated’ people in Norway’s countryside, producing and supporting a narcissistic ‘avant-garde’ image of and for himself. Breivik’s cloning of the bourgeois can thus be understood in two ways: as the ‘slavish’ rather than creative or innovative copying of bourgeois dress codes, 21 and as a process of cloning similar to the way a cancerous cell clones the body’s DNA. Cancer ‘is about the body’s inability to recognize a destructive cell structure as alien; the cancer cells are the body’s own cells – their DNA lineage is indistinguishable from the host body. So the immune system sleeps through the attack by the body’s own cells’. 22 Breivik’s symbolic replication of the bourgeois sartorial code of the ‘body politic’ is therefore part and parcel of the campaign of terror he perpetrates against Norwegian society. To quote Mitchell again, ‘the true terror arises when the different arrives masquerading as the same, threatening all differentiation and identification. The logic of identity itself is put in question by the clone’. 23 The terrorist thus appears as ‘one of us’, as a deadly, cancerous other that the body politic cannot discern and identify. 24 Even in setting himself apart from his neighbours in the rural area where his ‘farm’ is located, he still appears as the ‘proper’, civilized and cultured member of society. What distinguishes him is not a (sartorial) code that identifies him as a lethal enemy, but as the carrier of a superior version of the body politic of Norwegian society. There is a third image that belongs in this set, one that shows Breivik in a more formal attire and pose. [Figure 8.3] Different from the other two pictures, there is nothing preppy, casual or likeable in this photo. Breivik’s facial expression is almost menacing, with slightly squinting eyes and a sneer on his lips. The hair is again somewhat unkempt, yet in this image this does not add to any feminized or romanticized tone. Rather, it adds to the impression of a contrived, calculated ‘dressing up’, a purposeful sartorial charade that fails to cover up its performative nature. With his upper body again turned away from the observer to the left, Breivik stares at them in a rather unsettling

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Anders Behring Breivik

fashion. The disquieting air of the image is further enhanced by the obvious display of sartorial incompetence. While the ‘Lacoste’ imagery produced a somewhat coherent text (albeit that one might take issue with Breivik’s description of Lacoste as a ‘very expensive brand clothing’), 25 this third image fails to do so. Breivik wears a white shirt and a silver-coloured tie with a small spot pattern that does not really suit the rest of the outfit. On top of this, he wears what appears to be a dark blue or black jacket, which in turn is covered by a brown overcoat. If anything, the combination of colours in this outfit betrays a lack of the sophisticated understanding of sartorial code that Breivik so adamantly insists upon. The shirt’s collar is obviously too wide, and the tie’s knot is much too large. Finally, due to a misplaced tie clip, the tie bunches on his chest, adding to the clumsy and unsophisticated impression Breivik leaves in this image.

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One might argue that such an analysis of the size of a tie knot and the poor choice of colours in the appearance of Breivik over-analyzes the evidence. But given Breivik’s conscious and explicitly argued commitment to dress code and sartorial competence, a critical analysis of the flaws in this code is necessarily part and parcel of the deconstruction of his appearance. Moreover, it is precisely the flawed and imperfect reproduction of sartorial code that betrays the cloned nature of this appearance. For compared to fresh cells, cloned cells are deficient; cloned animals, for instance, have increased rates of mortality and deformity. Breivik’s ‘deformed’ attempt to clone a ‘bourgeois’ appearance thus reveals the image as a simulacrum, as a clone or copy without an original.26 Breivik’s strategic deployment of images does not refer to, or even produce, any ‘prior’ or ‘real’ subjectivity. The images do not reflect any true (bourgeois) identity of Breivik, for there is nothing to reflect. Or rather, behind the suit – the uniform of the bourgeois – rests yet another layer of images, the ones that represent him as the uniformed warrior for the cause to which he dedicated himself. This second set of images disseminated by Breivik shows him in different kinds of uniform. In the most authentic image he wears regalia that identifies him as 3rd Degree Master of the Norwegian Freemasons.27 A second image shows him wearing a full-body protection suit, including a gasmask. Finally, Breivik included two photographs in the ‘Compendium’ in which he wears military outfits. In the first one he wears a dress uniform with a large number of military ribbons and orders. The second one shows him in a wetsuit with assorted military equipment attached to it, and pointing what appears at first glance to be a sophisticated military weapon at an imagined target to the left of the viewer. These two latter images are the subject of the next section’s analysis.

c l o n i n g a n ex t i n c t o r d e r In the 1993 science fiction thriller Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg, a group of scientists succeeds in cloning and bringing back to life long extinct dinosaur species. The movie reflects the long-standing fascination and desire of both scientists and the public with bringing back to life extinct lifeforms, or to preserve threatened species from extinction. Spielberg’s movie itself adds yet another layer to this process: it brings to life these creatures as computer generated images; the cloned DNA code of the dinosaurs is thus

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turned into life via computer code. The ‘resurrection’ of the extinct species is accomplished in a virtual fashion, creating a hyper-reality that is captured by Spielberg in a scene in which DNA code is projected onto the head of a virtual, computer generated velociraptor.28 I expand on this fascinating case of double coding because Breivik conducts a similar, if less technically compelling procedure. Digital imagery, distributed in the virtual spaces of the internet in the form of his ‘Compendium’ and the YouTube video, brings to life his cloning of medieval knights. At the centre of this rendition stands a ‘Justiciar Knight’ of the ‘Knights Templar’ or ‘PCCTS’ (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici), as he calls this group. 29 In Breivik’s convoluted narrative, the Knights Templar were: re-founded in London in 2002 by representatives from eight European countries, for the purpose of serving the interests of the free indigenous peoples of Europe and to fight against the ongoing European Jihad (referred to as the ‘third Jihad’). The Knights Templar was re-founded as a pan-European nationalist military order and a military/criminal tribunal with two primary objectives. The order is to serve as an armed Indigenous Rights Organization and as a Crusader Movement (antiJihad movement).30

An extinct order is thus resurrected via the extraction of its alleged ideological DNA: the order’s historical role in the crusades against the Muslims, its ‘code of chivalry’ and its symbolic iconographic codes. Most interesting in this respect is the continuity Breivik establishes between medieval knights and assorted historical heroes and himself in the above-mentioned video. While parts one and two outline the alleged ‘Rise of Cultural Marxism’ and the resultant ‘Islamic Colonization’ of Europe (predominantly through ‘demographic warfare’), part 3, entitled ‘Hope’, introduces ‘our forefathers’ and ‘ancestors’ who set the principles we need to embrace in order to ‘save Europe’: strength, honour, sacrifice and martyrdom. The cast of this section includes Charles Martel, the hero of the 732 Battle of Tours, El Cid, Richard the Lionheart, Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, John III Sobieski, the victor of the 1683 Battle of Vienna, and Tsar Nicholas I, for his efforts to liberate the Balkans ‘from Islamic occupation’. What unites this eclectic cast of characters is their respective role and participation in the ‘300-year defensive crusade by Central European kingdoms against the Ottoman Caliphate jihad’. This, rather than any personal commitment to

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the principles mentioned above, seems to warrant their position as historical and cultural points of reference for Breivik.31 Part three ends with the call: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’ and the plea ‘to defeat the ruling Multiculturalist Alliance’ by becoming a ‘Justiciar Knight in your country’. This call is somewhat incongruently illustrated by a cropped photograph, of a very large, possibly digitally enhanced, chest of a blonde female, with the word ‘infidel’ written in both Latin and Arabic script across the T-shirt that she is wearing, and an assault rifle held by her just below the chest. Exactly how this ‘sexploitation’ image is reconciled with a blatantly chauvinistic ideology that calls for ‘patriarchy, not matriarchy’, that identifies femininity with victimhood, and feminism with the ‘deconstruction’ of national and European culture, remains one of the many puzzles in Breivik’s expansive opus. Part four of the ‘Compendium’, titled ‘New Beginning’, brings the narrative into the present. Its textual element focuses on the rejection of ‘Cultural Marxism, Islam(ism), and Nazism’, and threatens that ‘World War II is going to appear as a picnic compared to the coming carnage’, should the ‘conservatives of Europe’ not succeed in preventing the Islamification of Europe. More relevant to the topic of this chapter is the visual and iconographic aspect of the ‘contemporalization’ of the Knights Templar mythology outlined in part three. The historical iconography now is derived from what appears to be comic book or children’s book illustrations of the order, inadvertently advertising and amplifying the fictitious and clichéd rendition of this invented tradition. The video concludes with three images of Breivik in different uniforms: as a Freemason, in the ‘official’ uniform of the Knights Templar, and in a wetsuit, aiming a rifle past the onlooker. The first of these uniforms appears to be ‘legitimate’, as Breivik was indeed a member of the Norwegian Freemasons at the time of the attacks.32 From the point of view of a deconstructive iconology, the other two images offer a more fertile ground for analysis. Both contain a melange of iconographic elements that end up undermining and deconstructing Breivik’s claim to mythological fame. To start with the ‘wetsuit photo’: it is clearly intended to produce a hyper-masculine appearance resonating with ‘special forces’ imageries, reminiscent of SAS or SEAL teams with their distinctive weapons. However, the image fails to produce such a status, emphasizing instead the fictitious and banal identity of Breivik. The wetsuit he is wearing is a commercial rather than a military model, adorned by Breivik with what he claims to be a Knights

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Templar insignia on his left chest, and a tag on his upper left arm, identifying him as a ‘Marxist Hunter’ with a ‘Multiculti Traitor Hunting Permit’. The absurdity of this outfit is further reflected in the weaponry he brandishes in the image. The ‘special weapon’ is in reality a common Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic hunting rifle, which he legally obtained as the holder of a hunting licence.33 The peculiar appearance of this weapon is produced by a variety of added accessories, such as a red-dot sight, a flashlight barrel mount, a bayonet, and a gun mount (or, to be precise, a ‘Grip Pod Automatic Tactical BiPod Foregrip’).34 [Figure 8.4] A banal, commercial and as such meaningless outfit (a commercial wetsuit together with a standard hunting rifle) is turned into the appearance of a hi-tech, special forces combatant, representing the alleged ‘new beginning’ of the Knights Templar. Breivik in effect ‘clones’ himself as such a warrior by grafting heroic iconographic elements onto his own banal presence. The second image continues the logic of cloning-as-grafting a terrorist imagery. In it, Breivik wears a black uniform with red trimmings and golden buttons. The uniform is complemented with a broad black belt with

8.4

Anders Behring Breivik

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8.5

Anders Behring Breivik

a gold or brass buckle. Finally, the outfit is adorned with a large number of insignia, orders, ribbons, as well as a large aiguillette off his right shoulder. [Figure 8.5] As Breivik explains in expansive fashion in the ‘Compendium’, this official uniform of the Knights Templar is a composite of different military iconographies, some derived from official military uniform codes, others imagined. The basis of the outfit is a United States Marine Corps (USMC) ‘dark blue/ black dress blues jacket’ on top of ‘dark blue/black dress pants’.35 In Breivik’s words, ‘The PCCTS, Knights Templar has adopted the stripped version of the USMC dress blues jacket due to the classic design and availability’.36

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Buttons and other insignia are to be removed and replaced by those referring to the Order of the Knights Templar. These include ‘Knights Templar Commander Epaulettes’, collar crosses and assorted badges. All these items, as well as the ‘Sam Browne belt’ worn on top of the uniform can be ordered on the internet; Breivik provides a list of online shops or e-bay addresses for all the relevant items.37 The embellishments also include a set of ‘crosses’ and ‘breast jewels’, handed out according to particular accomplishments – except for the ‘Justiciar Knight Cross of Service, Service (unsuccessful)’, which is handed out to any Knight Templar ‘regardless of success of the operation’.38 The patent absurdity that the ‘valour’ of the new ‘Knights Templar’ is to be rewarded with medals that can be procured on the internet for very little money (£11–£13), the ironic reality that the uniform of this re-created medieval order is a pastiche, compiled via the virtual imagery available at internet shopping sites, is further amplified by the appropriation and re-designation of military ribbons for the purpose of ‘Knights Templar commendations’. In an interesting twist that merges the reality of military valour with the delusional world of Breivik’s imagined ‘Knights Templar’, he provides a list of 19 military ribbons that refer to different historical campaigns and accomplishments, and re-designates these as ribbons for the fictitious accomplishments of these ‘Knights’. Thus, the ‘Army Meritorious Unit Citation’ becomes the ‘Distinguished Destroyer of cultural Marxism Commendation’, the ribbon commemorating the ‘Saudi Liberation of Kuwait with Palm’ becomes the ‘Distinguished Wielder of the Furious Scimitar Commendation’. Breivik’s ‘Multicultural Force Medal’ is in fact the ribbon celebrating World War I victory, and his ‘Defender of Christendom Medal’ was once issued as the ‘Vietnam Presidential Unit’ ribbon, originally awarded to all US personnel assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group in 1954 in Vietnam. 39 This cloning-as-grafting here then produces a re-presentation of a ‘Knight Templar’ without any reference or presence. The order of the ‘Knights Templar’ as imagined by Breivik and re-presented in his bizarre sartorial code belongs to what Baudrillard calls the order of simulation, ‘it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’.40 Similar to the ‘uniform of the bourgeois’ discussed above, the iconographic power of this simulated military uniform lies in the recognizability of its elements: we have seen that uniform before, we have seen those or similar ribbons and orders before. Yet this recognizability is also the undoing of this order: the eclectic and arbitrary appropriation and ‘privatization’ of military – and thus highly

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and rigidly structured – iconography produces nothing but a void instead of a ‘new beginning’ for a medieval order.

c o d a : t h e ‘b a n a li t y o f ev i l’ r e -v i s i te d What does an iconological deconstruction of the imagery produced and disseminated by the perpetrator of one of the worst crimes in Norwegian history contribute to our attempts to understand this incomprehensible act? To start with, Breivik’s visual self-representation and the control over what images would be disseminated was part and parcel of the crime he perpetrated. From the image as a preppy college student to the appearance in military dress uniform, he systematically prepared the visual inventory available to a national and international audience aghast at the scale and brutality of the atrocity he committed. A critical and deconstructive iconology is therefore called for in order to analyze this aspect of his strategy. Regarding Breivik’s images, this iconology can in fact content itself with providing a perspective and a vocabulary to appreciate how these images ‘deconstruct themselves’. Moreover, and more crucially, this iconology deprives Breivik of any political legitimacy, identity or subjectivity. For the first and foremost insight produced by this analysis is the simple observation that Breivik’s visual strategy is utterly self-defeating. It is all too easy to point out that the images produce and disseminate a meaning that runs counter to his intentions. In a rare moment of reflectiveness, Breivik himself observes (and desires) the effects of the ‘urbane’ and, in his view, sophisticated dress code of ‘Lacoste’ that set him apart and distinguish him from the rural population around his farm. The Facebook imagery, offered to attract a virtual audience through well-calculated poses and poise, at the same time repels and alienates ‘ordinary’ Norwegians. The most blatant self-deconstruction, however, occurs in the imagery in which Breivik appears in pseudo-military kit. There is the absurd ‘special forces’ image, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to what it pretends to signify. Instead, it simply denotes a ‘wet dream’ of Breivik, cloning and grafting particular military iconographic elements onto an ordinary person with a conventional weapon. As for the ‘dress uniform’, the iconographic message that the ancient traditions of the Knights Templar can be re-represented by the arbitrary combination and compilation of military iconic

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elements from contemporary and recent history, that is, through the wilful and eccentric appropriation of military symbols, uniforms and orders, simply reflects infantile ‘make-believe’, the creation of a reality purely vested within his imagination. All the elaborate imagery and his sartorial performance express is the ‘grotesque silliness’41 of Breivik and his violent imagination. It is the tension between the blatant ludicrousness of his appearance and the unfathomable horror of the crime he committed that produces the central quandary about Breivik: how do we judge him? To prosecute, to defend, to judge and to sentence him requires: that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them and declare him a clever, calculating liar – which he obviously was not. ... [E]verybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.42

There is a disturbing resonance between Hannah Arendt’s observation about Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem, and Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo. In a sense, Breivik pushes the contradiction between appearance and deed even further than Eichmann: if the latter was an example of, in Arendt’s famous, if problematic, words, ‘the banality of evil’, Breivik introduces an amplified version of this: the farcicalness of terror. Unlike Eichmann, he did directly commit the terrible crime; unlike Eichmann, he represented nothing more than a twisted image and world-view of his own making. As such, we can, pace Arendt,43 understand Eichmann as a trivial bureaucratic cog in a terrorist and genocidal state machinery; Breivik on the other hand appears as an idiopathic entity, an auto-poetic performance, unrelated to any institutional or political context. Drawing incoherently on medieval as well as modern mythology and iconography, and privatizing the meaning of this iconography by assigning it new, eccentric meanings, Breivik refers to nothing but the void of his own farcical violence. It is exactly the vacuous nature of his ideology, its blatant simulation without reality that constitutes the grounds for this violence. What we see in the carefully orchestrated and composed self-images of Anders Behring Breivik is the clo(w)ning of terror. The cloning, the viral dissemination of his manifesto and his images translate into the appearance

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of a violent and vicious clown. As Amos Elon summarizes Arendt’s crucial insight: ‘Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but – with disastrous effect – by morons and imbeciles as well.’44 As such, Eichmann was in fact the incarnation of Nazi ideology with its delirious ideology, vacuous medieval aesthetics, made-up symbols and iconography, and its base regime of terror. Anders Breivik is little more than the farce that repeats, that clones, that tragedy.

N ote s 1. Audrey Andersen, ‘Anders Behring Breivik phoned police to surrender but carried on when they failed to return call’, the Telegraph, online edition, 23 April 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ norway/9221909/Anders-Behring-Breivik-phoned-police-to-surrender-butcarried-on-when-they-failed-to-return-call.html 2. Jonas S. Rasch and Jonas Pettersen, ‘Her er terroristens mediestrategi’, Dagbladet, online edition, 24 July 2011, http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/07 /24/nyheter/innenriks/terrorangrepet/17435272/ 3. Roland Bleiker, ‘The aesthetic turn in international political theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30/3 (2001), pp. 509–33; Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Houndmills, 2009). 4. G. O’Tuathail and S. Dalby (eds), The Geopolitics Reader (London, 1998); David Campbell, ‘Salgado and the Sahel: documentary photography and the imaging of famine’ in F. Debrix and C. Weber (eds), Mediating Internationals (Minneapolis, 2002); Andreas Behnke, ‘Fear as sovereign strategy and the popular tactics of laughter’, in C. Hellmich and A. Behnke (eds), Knowing al-Qaeda. The Epistemology of Terrorism (Farnham, 2012). 5. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), pp. 2–3. 6. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment-Network (London, 2009). 7. David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction’, Security Dialogue 38/2 (2007), pp. 132–3. 8. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2011). 9. Campbell and Shapiro: ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction’. 10. Jennifer Bajorek, ‘The offices of Homeland Security, or, Hölderlin’s terrorism’, Critical Inquiry, 31/2 (2005), p. 874.

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11. Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides’, in G. Borradori (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, 2003), p. 108. 12. Behnke: ‘Fear as sovereign strategy’. 13. Richard Alleyne, and John Bingham, ‘Norway shooting: Anders Behring Breivik first words to police were “I am now finished”’, the Telegraph, online edition, 28 July 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ norway/8668402/Norway-shooting-Anders-Behring-Breivik-first-wordsto-police-were-I-am-now-finished.html 14. Andrew Berwik, [Anders B. Breivik], 2083. A European Declaration of Independence. De Laude Novae Militiae Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici (no location, 2011), n.p. [1066], http://www.fas.org/ programs/tap/_docs/2083_-_A_European_Declaration_of_Independence. pdf 15. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1065ff.] 16. Mitchell: Cloning Terror, p. xvii. 17. Mitchell: Cloning Terror, p. xviii. 18. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1991), p. 33. 19. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1010]; Jarle Brenna, et al., ‘Pågrepet 32-åring kalte seg selv nasjonalistisk’, VGNett, online edition, 23 July 2011, http://www.vg.no/ nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/artikkel.php?artid=10080610 20. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1462]. This assessment was correct. One of the neighbours of his ‘farm’ told the German weekly Der Spiegel, that he considered Breivik a typical city slicker, wearing expensive shirts, and rather clueless about agriculture; cf. Sven Becker, et al., ‘Der Terrorist und die Brandstifter’, Der Spiegel, online edition, 1 August 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-79723321.html 21. Mitchell: Cloning Terror, p. 27. 22. Mitchell: Cloning Terror, p. 49. 23. Mitchell: Cloning Terror, p. 34. 24. The owner of a local bar, a former profiler at Oslo airport where he was charged with identifying potentially dangerous passengers, told Der Spiegel that Breivik would not have attracted his professional attention; cf. Becker et al.: ‘Der Terrorist’. 25. Lacoste apparently contacted the Norwegian authorities requesting that they should ban Breivik from wearing its garments during his court proceedings; cf. Ben Quinn, ‘Stop Anders Breivik wearing our clothes, Lacoste reportedly ask police’, the Guardian, online edition, 9 September 2011, http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/09/anders-breivik-clothes-lacoste-police

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York, 1983). Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1512]. Mitchell: Cloning Terror, pp. 71–2. Berwik: 2083, passim. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [817]. Even Breivik seems to have had some second thoughts about the inclusion of Vlad the Impaler in this list; however the success of the latter in killing scores of Muslims and stemming ‘a jihadi invasion, although brutal’ was supposedly celebrated by the Saxons, the Italian states and the Pope and thus warrants his place of honour in Breivik’s list. According to the video, ‘The fraternal order of Freemasonry is drawn upon some of the Templar rituals and principles’. Arild Aspøy, ‘Skytternes taushet’, Dagbladet, online edition, 29 August 2011, http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/08/29/kultur/debatt/kronikk/22_jåuli/ vapentilgang/17867238/ See the product listing at http://www.botachtactical.com/grippodgps02. html. This latter item is not listed in the Compendium, otherwise cf. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1429]. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1093]. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1094]. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1094ff.]. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1076]. Berwik: 2083, n.p. [1088–89]. Baudrillard: Simulations, p. 11. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (London, 2006 [1963]), p. 252. Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 54. Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 252. Amos Elon, ‘Introduction’, in Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. xi.

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9

Masculinities and ‘the Terrorist’ in Conflict Transformation Representation, Identity and Reconciliation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland Graham Dawson

Cultural representations of ‘the terrorist’, produced in the course of a conflict, bear the marks of that conflict as the focus of contested meanings charged with intense affect. Embedded within cultural memory and internalized within the subjectivities of those affected by violence, the figure of ‘the terrorist’ also has an afterlife that reaches into the post-conflict era, generating challenges and dilemmas concerning the significance of the conflict for those emerging from it. Understanding the effects of this afterlife for cultural memory and subjectivity, and its implications for a society addressing the legacies of past violence, has become a central concern in debates about conflict transformation, peace-building and reconciliation. While a flourishing literature about the relation between masculinities and war and violent conflict now exists, there has been a ‘lack of attention to masculinities in ... the post-conflict context’, and a corresponding ‘failure to account for the myriad of ways in which masculinities transform, adapt and reformulate in the post-conflict environment’.1 Calling for analyses that address ‘the social embeddings of violence in the individual identities and social practices of men’ contextualized within ‘the broader transitional and gendered dynamic of the society in question’, Fionnuala Ni Aoláin raises as a particular concern those identities and practices defined by Angela Harris as ‘hyper-masculine’: a ‘rebellious physical masculinity’ that is ‘tough and violent, yet heroic, protective, and [believed to be] necessary to a society’s very survival’. 2 157

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In this chapter I explore cultural constructions and contestations of the hyper-masculinized figure of ‘the terrorist’ during the armed conflict over Northern Ireland (1969–2005), and its relation to debates and practices concerned with reconciliation and reckoning with the past in the context of the Irish peace process initiated in 1994. The first part of the chapter addresses the subjective dimensions of conflict transformation in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Focusing on ‘the terrorist’ and its converse figure, ‘the soldier hero’, it examines their significance for the cultural representation of paramilitary combatant identities during the Irish conflict (otherwise known as the ‘Troubles’), and their implications for reappraisal of the past and the making of ex-combatant identities in post-conflict lifestorytelling. The second part anchors this discussion through a case study of the Loyalist paramilitary combatant, Michael Stone. It explores the conflicting representations of Stone’s identity as terrorist and hero; the negotiation and contestation of these representations in his own memory-work to fashion a post-conflict masculinity; and the dialogic relationship between Stone’s story and self-presentation as an ex-combatant and the stories and experiences of victims and survivors of his violence, who also grapple with the afterlife of ‘the terrorist’. The analysis offers an interpretation of the gender dimensions and dynamics of these representations and considers their implications for reconciliation within the social world and – utilizing psychoanalytic theorizations – within the internal, psychic world of the ex-combatant.

c o n f l i c t t r a n s fo r m a t i o n , s u b j e c t i v i t i e s a n d t h e hy p e r- m a s c u li n ize d ‘ te r r o r i s t ’ Conflict transformation, as proposed by Jean Paul Lederach, involves the channelling of conflict from ‘mutually destructive, unstable and harmful expressions towards a mutually beneficial and cooperative basis’ expressed through constructive dialogue that recognizes interdependence.3 This has a subjective dimension. For a society like Northern Ireland in transition from armed conflict, it poses questions about how those whose sense of self was shaped, altered or damaged through their experience of violence might adapt or remake themselves and their relations to others in what might be called post-conflict culture. Such transformations in subjectivity require a reckoning with the cultural world of meanings, values, emotions and identities

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formed in the course of responding to and participating in violent conflict in the past, and the attempt at its ‘reconciliation’ with altered circumstances in the cultural present and the imagined future.4 The demands of this attempted reconciliation between past and present, frequently described as ‘coming to terms with the past’, tend to be experienced most acutely by the members of two social groups (whose membership may overlap); the former combatants – during the Northern Ireland conflict, predominantly men belonging to the British armed forces and Loyalist and republican paramilitary organizations – and those women and men harmed by, and usually described as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors’ of, the violence. The subjectivities of combatants and victims and survivors, and relations between these two groups, also become touchstones in debates about reconciliation in the further sense of overcoming the divisions and animosities that fuelled violent conflict, and the remaking of social bonds that will prevent its return.5 The hyper-masculinized figure of ‘the terrorist’, and the identities constructed in relation to its representations, feature centrally in practices of conflict transformation concerned with reconciliation in both these senses. Throughout the Troubles, dominant discourse represented republican and loyalist combatants as ‘terrorists’, an identity constructed in terms of militaristic masculinity under a ‘negative evaluative accent’,6 connoting the transgression of civilized norms and the codes of virtuous martial manliness. Curtis, for example, analysing press reports of the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA or IRA) in 1979, identifies the connotations attached to the figure of ‘the IRA terrorist’ in dominant British news discourse: ‘The act of killing was widely interpreted as irrational, as that of “evil men” (Daily Mail), “wicked assassins” (The Sun), “psychopathic thugs” (Daily Express), ... as “cowardly and senseless” (Financial Times) and as the product of “diseased minds rather than political calculation” (Daily Telegraph)’.7 According to Parkinson, ‘loyalist paramilitaries were frequently represented in a similar fashion to the IRA, usually as barbaric, blood-thirsty killers’, whose organizations lacked discipline and political direction, and who committed ‘criminal and bigoted’ acts of violence.8 The loyalist and republican cultures that sustained and supported the activities of paramilitary volunteers also utilized tropes of militaristic masculinity, now evaluated positively in the idealizing discourse of ‘the soldier hero’, a figure that fuses hegemonic conceptions of ‘real manliness’ with the values of patriotism, capable of eliciting potent popular identifications to counter the derogatory sign of the terrorist.9

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Paramilitary volunteers themselves – whether men initiated into violence through boyhood experiences of sectarian street culture, or those identified with the manly script of defending one’s community or fighting for one’s country, or indeed women fighters10 – have negotiated their own identities in relation to these opposed discourses of conflict culture. Hyper-masculinized representations of ‘the soldier hero’ and ‘the terrorist’ are encountered in social arenas – the news report, the gable-end mural in the local community, the courtroom – but may also be understood in psychoanalytic terms as imagined internal objects or ‘imagos’, figures internalized within the psyche, which provide the basis for identity construction and differentiation from others.11 ‘The soldier hero’ offers a valued figure of identification with qualities that, when ‘introjected’ or taken into the internal world, could inspire the self to acts of emulation. ‘The terrorist’, a condemnatory representation of deviant or transgressive masculinity, enters the internal world as a hostile and challenging imago that requires refutation, or disavowal and projection into others – the enemy – in self-justification and maintenance of the ‘good self ’. As this discursive regime of conflict has subsequently undergone reconfiguration – through a conflict transformation process involving cease-fires, early release of political prisoners, the ‘decommissioning’ of paramilitary arsenals, standing-down of volunteers, and a deepening social engagement with questions of historical truth, justice and reconciliation in relation to the violence – so masculine combat identities constructed through and against the discourses of conflict come to be renegotiated.12 In post-conflict culture, the identity of what is now the ex-combatant, comes under new kinds of scrutiny, as former fighters are called to account for their involvement, and new vantage points and perspectives open up, enabling them to revisit – and perhaps reassess – the historical development of the self in a gendered culture of political violence. The public discourses of post-conflict culture are themselves contradictory, the site of clashing meanings including tropes reproduced from the culture of conflict, as well as the rhetorics of conflict transformation and reconciliation. Celebration of the soldier hero has remained central to the ongoing ‘war over memory’ concerning the legitimacy of political violence carried out during the Troubles by paramilitary organizations.13 In the period since the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994 loyalist and republican memorial cultures have constructed ‘an overtly male-controlled and male-defined presentation of the Troubles’ in public space, centred on the ‘commemoration of paramilitary

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men’, particularly those combatants who died in the conflict. These cultures reproduce and reinforce militarized masculinities that are associated with ongoing sectarian politics of space, and work to marginalize memories of women’s experiences of the war.14 The deployment and contestation of the discourse on terrorism has also remained central in the war over memory, structuring perceptions of paramilitary ex-combatants in terms of an absolute moral distinction between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘real victims’.15 Opposition to the Belfast ‘Good Friday’ Agreement (1998) within Ulster Unionism has focused on the perceived ‘appeasement’ of Irish republicanism by the British government in allowing ‘Sinn Féin/IRA terrorists’ into the new devolved assembly and executive. Some denounce the entire settlement as ‘terrorist friendly’.16 The continuing affective and psychic power of these representations of the terrorist in post-conflict culture was clearly evident in the emotive public reaction to the early release between 1998 and 2000 of 428 paramilitary prisoners, convicted and sentenced for conflict-related offences, under the terms of the agreement.17 The early release scheme has been described as the ‘most unpalatable and difficult aspect’ of the entire peace accord,18 with objections focused on the release of ‘the most callous and ruthless killers’ back onto the streets.19 Post-conflict discourses of conflict transformation challenge both these representations of combatants deployed in the war over memory. Subjective reassessment of the past is encouraged as part of a wider societal process of reconciliation aimed at ‘addressing conflictual and fractured relationships’.20 At once ‘backward- and ... forward-looking’, this requires, on the one hand, acknowledgement of ‘the hurt, losses, truths and suffering of the past’ and acceptance of responsibility by ‘individuals and institutions’ for their own role in past conflict; but also requires, on the other hand, positive relationships to be ‘built or renewed’ in the present, by ‘engaging with those who are different from us’.21 According to the Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (2009) commissioned by the British government to make recommendations on how to ‘deal with the legacy of the past’ whilst ‘building a shared future’, 22 ‘true and lasting reconciliation’ requires ‘acknowledgement of the moral dignity of our common humanity’ coupled with the ‘willingness for mutual forgiveness [ ... and to] address the truth’ about past events.23 Storytelling is given a central role in the Group’s vision of how ‘remembering for reconciliation’ is to be promoted: ‘all sides need to be encouraged and facilitated to listen and hear each other’s stories’, 24 and ‘storytelling must not be used to fit a political

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agenda [... but] should be seen as a process designed to facilitate individual and societal healing and to break the cycle of conflict’.25 These understandings of reconciliation in terms of ‘forgiveness’ (implying remorse) and ‘healing’ were derived from the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1995–2003 (TRC). In the terminology of the TRC, telling and listening to stories about personal experiences of violent events by ex-combatants and their victims was envisaged as having the potential to be ‘reconciliatory’ for the individuals and families concerned and for the transitional society as a whole. By confronting perpetrators with the consequences of their actions for victims, and dignifying victims whilst enabling them to see the humanity (rather than pure ‘evil’) of the perpetrators, storytelling makes possible a ‘re-humanizing’ of what had been ‘de-humanized’ through violence.26 These ideas have been adopted and extended in Ireland, which has seen a proliferation of storytelling practices and reconciliation projects since the ceasefires of 1994.27 However, the TRC also demonstrated that the remorse-and-forgiveness discourse generates contradictions and resistances for combatants and for victims and survivors, whose stories and other actions may refuse, evade or negotiate more complex or nuanced meanings in relation to dominant discourses of conflict transformation. 28 The attitudinal and affective shifts involved in subjective reassessment and reconciliation confront dominant representations and psychic internalizations of the hyper-masculinized terrorist, and encounter the problem of how these are to be accommodated, negotiated or transformed in new representational forms that imagine identities liveable in the post-conflict world. The working-out of this problem in the subjectivities of those responsible for and affected by violence can be discerned in their own voices, mediated through oral, written or filmic text, and the stories they tell about the fracturing and remaking of identities and relations with others through the experience of conflict. These representations of the self and its relationships involve memory-work that addresses the disjunction between the self then and the self now; a reworking of meaning about the past from the perspectives, knowledge and feelings of the present. Nicola King (following Laplanche’s reading of Freud) describes this concept of memory-work as ‘afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit), or the ‘afterwards effect’, emphasizing the activity of an older self in developing understandings of past events that could not have been understood in this way at the time of their occurrence. 29

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Negotiating this past–present relation within the self involves a search for ‘composure’; that is, a way of making sense of experience that enables ‘a version of the self that can be lived with in relative psychic comfort’. 30 The (provisional) settlement of the self rests on the telling of a life-story capable of composing what oral historian Alistair Thomson calls ‘a past that [we] can live with’. 31 For ex-combatants, the search for composure centres on making peace with, and a liveable personal history about, their past involvement in political violence. Revisiting and reassessing that past in the light of changed circumstances in the present, continuities with the past self may be reaffirmed or broken, and different meanings related to new ways of feeling the past may emerge. A factor that complicates memory-work governed by the afterwards effect in this context, identified by Marie Breen-Smyth, is the breakdown of any consensual moral framework in societies undergoing violent conflict, as ‘the moral uncertainties, inversions and ... disruptions generated by war and oppression ... renders previous moral codes and standards ... untenable’. In this ‘perverse moral climate’, conflict-driven moralities justify, and render normal and acceptable to many, actions that would otherwise be considered immoral. Smyth warns of the ‘danger of hindsight’ that occurs once society re-emerges from violence and subjects those actions to post-conflict moral codes that ‘were not and could not be in place’ in the past. 32 However, this dilemma – to engage, or not, in reconsidering the past from a perspective available only afterwards – is precisely at the core of ex-combatants’ search for composure. A further complication for ex-combatants is the difficulty they face in unravelling what Smyth calls ‘fictions of the self ’.33 By this she means a necessary strategy of ‘identity management’ for survival adopted by those leading ‘double lives’ – undercover paramilitary volunteers, secret agents, informers and others needing to protect their identity for security reasons – in a ‘culture of organized and normalized lying’ that permeates everyday life.34 In this scenario, reckoning with the past brings the ex-combatant into relation with plural imagined selves that were necessarily split off from each other during the conflict, and the problem of ‘distinguishing truth from fiction’ with respect to one’s own actions and those of others.35 Where the search for composure is reparative and some resolution of these internal conflicts is sought, these various stories must be worked through towards a more integrated narrative of the past, that can sustain a reimagined moral self.

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t h e a f te r li f e o f ‘ t h e te r r o r i s t ’: m i c h a e l s to n e a n d p o s t- c o n f li c t m a s c u l i n i t y In the second part of this chapter, these arguments are grounded and developed through investigation of a particular instance. The case of Michael Stone – a working-class loyalist combatant belonging to the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) who carried out armed operations under its cover name of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), and in liaison with other loyalist groups – offers particularly rich scope for analysis. Stone became notorious in 1988 as a result of his single-handed attack on several thousand republican mourners attending the funeral in Milltown cemetery, West Belfast, of three IRA volunteers killed in Gibraltar by British security forces. Armed with hand grenades, a pistol and a revolver, he aimed – but failed – to assassinate the Sinn Féin leaders, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuiness and Danny Morrison, but killed three mourners and injured 60 others.36 A self-styled ‘soldier’, Stone described and justified the attack as ‘a military operation’ directed against a ‘terrorist funeral’.37 Convicted for Milltown, three further murders and other offences, Stone received several concurrent life sentences, with the recommendation that he serve at least 30 years.38 In July 2000, after spending over 12 years in the Maze Prison, he was granted early release on license under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. In November 2006, Stone was re-arrested during a bizarre oneman attack on the Sinn Féin leadership at the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont, and in December 2008 was found guilty of attempted murder and other charges and re-imprisoned on a 16-year sentence, which was upheld in January 2011 following his unsuccessful appeal. 39 Stone’s identity as the notorious terrorist responsible for one of the most ‘spectacular’ and shocking violent events of the Troubles, rests on a proliferation of representations across a range of cultural forms. After his release, Stone took issue with his representation as both ‘terrorist’ and ‘hero’ and in 2003 published a memoir that attracted considerable public attention. In 2005, he agreed to meet bereaved relatives of Dermot Hackett, for whose murder in 1987 he had admitted responsibility and been convicted, in an episode of the BBC TV series, Facing the Truth (BBC, 2006), which brought Archbishop Tutu, architect of the South African TRC, to Northern Ireland to broker reconciliation through filmed encounters between ex-combatants and survivors. In what follows, I first address the cultural representation of Stone before examining his

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own composure of post-conflict identity, and conclude with analysis of the dialogic relations between Stone’s story and those of his victims.

t h e c u l t u r a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f m i c h a e l s to n e: te r r o r i s t a n d h e r o Live television footage and a proliferation of photographs of the ‘gunman among gravestones’ at Milltown rapidly became, and have remained, iconic images of the Troubles. [Figure 9.1] Media coverage constructed Stone as the epitome of the psychopathic Ulster killer in transgression of every rule governing the normality and morality of civilized life.40 He was represented as the ‘kamikaze terrorist’, the ‘tombstone assassin’, the ‘monster’ and the ‘madman at the funeral’.41 On his release from prison in 2000, the Conservative and Unionist press in particular voiced ‘Outrage as Stone Walks Free’, and denounced him as a ‘mass murderer’ and one of ‘the most dangerous terrorist killers in the world’.42

9.1

Gunman among gravestones

Source: Rex Features.

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Conversely, Stone also became a loyalist folk hero due to Milltown, and the attack sedimented into loyalist collective memory. Hailed as an Ulster freedom fighter who had served his community and nation by a bold attack on the enemy, his acclaim in loyalist culture rested on his personification of patriotic Ulster manliness: bluff and direct, independent-minded yet loyal and dedicated to the cause, epitomizing the valued stance of ‘no surrender’. Stone was valourized for his willingness to stand up and fight for his beliefs; for his self-sacrifice in risking his life (a lone assailant, he mingled with mourners prior to the attack and was beaten nearly to death after republicans pursued and captured him); and for being pro-active in ‘taking the war to the IRA’ in an operation characterized by audacious courage, emotional control and ‘cool performance’.43 The construction of Stone as a hyper-masculine hero can be read in a range of popular cultural forms. Triumphalist songs, such as the various versions of ‘The Ballad of Michael Stone’, denigrate Stone’s victims whilst celebrating ‘the brave young man/ From the Braniel ... / Who thwarted all the Provos’ plans/And killed the rebel scum/With handgun and grenades’; or as the loyalist singer Rab C puts it, ‘It was Michael 3, Milltown 0’.44 Stone became known as ‘Rambo’, in a heroizing inversion of derogatory news reports likening him to the fictional American war-hero of Sylvester Stallone’s film series of the 1980s.45 Loyalist commemorative murals dedicated to Stone also appropriated iconic media imagery of Milltown, as in the roughly sketched tribute to the ‘lone gunman’ photographed in 1989 in Tanagh Street, Belfast. [Figure 9.2] Heroic representations of this kind constructed Stone as a figure of identification for Loyalists, inviting admiration and emulation, in opposition to his pathologizing image as terrorist deployed in political denunciation of loyalist paramilitarism. Johnny Adair, who later became a feared UDA brigadier, recalls in his memoir that: ‘To me, and plenty of other young Loyalists at the time, the media images of Stone [in Milltown Cemetery] heralded the start of a new era in our fight against the IRA. He wasn’t a criminal, he was a hero [ ... and] an inspiration to Loyalists all over Northern Ireland.’46 Idealizing representations of Stone as hero and his denigratory representation as terrorist both construct his masculinity in ways that reduce human complexity to a set of prescribed traits. An alternative version of Stone’s masculinity, pointing to aspects of his subjectivity that are invisible within dominant public representations, is suggested by an anonymous friend in an interview following his sentencing in 1989. The friend ‘described Stone as “a quiet, inoffensive and polite” man. “He was a family man who loved his kids.

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9.2 Commemorative mural to Michael Stone Source: Bill Rolston.

He never got drunk or fell about the place. He was well up on politics, here and in England.” ’47 At the press conference marking his release from prison in 2000, Stone represented himself in similar terms as an ordinary man – ‘I’m just a basic working class fella who grew up in east Belfast’ – caught up in extraordinary events that had led him to fight for a common cause, at significant personal loss to himself and his family: ‘I have two failed marriages because of being a loyalist volunteer. I don’t know my children. My children now have children themselves, and I hope to get to know them, perhaps to make up’.48 [Figure 9.3] Speaking thoughtfully and with ‘a mixture of sadness and pride’ about his combatant past,49 Stone made it clear that: ‘My war is now over and I hope the war is over altogether’.50 He envisaged his own role as contributing to the work of the loyalist Gae Lairn community centre: ‘Perhaps the youth might listen to me and learn by my mistakes.’51

‘m i c h a e l’s s to r y ’: m e m o r y-wo r k a n d p o s t- c o n f l i c t m a s c u l i n i t y Evidence of Stone’s negotiation and contestation of dominant public versions of his masculinity, and his efforts towards composure of a

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9.3

Michael Stone photographed during the press conference

post-conf lict identity, can be found in his memoir, None Shall Divide Us (2003). The publication of this book has been criticized as an exercise in self-justification that glamourizes a murderer, as a sensationalist text that makes ‘profit out of the pain and misery of others’,52 and for the ambiguity of its authorial voice given the mediation of Karen McManus as ghostwriter of ‘Michael’s story’.53 The memoir can be read nevertheless as a sustained search for subjective composure, involving reassessment of a whole life course from the post-conf lict perspective of afterwards: ‘I committed some terrible crimes over the years ... in the name of Ulster and ... of my Britishness. ... Looking back, I can hardly believe that I did those things and lived the life I led. ... But it is my history’.54 The memoir traces one narrative arc from boyhood towards the fulcrum of Milltown, and another through the aftermath of capture, trial and imprisonment towards a new sense of self and life after early release – the position from which the story is told. Stone suggests that, in telling his story, he is ‘taking responsibility for my past’, and the book begins by ‘acknowledging that I caused pain’ and ‘deeply regret the hurt I caused the families of the men I killed’ (p. xiv). However, this expression of remorse is contradicted by the memoir’s

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inclusion of ‘The Ballad of Michael Stone’ with its reference to those killed at Milltown as ‘rebel scum’, 55 and by Stone’s assertion that ‘I had to kill ... and that was regrettable but unavoidable’ (p. xiv). The construction of Stone’s post-conf lict identity, then, encounters contradictions that must be reconciled in composing a self that can be lived with. The post-conflict telling of Stone’s story involves reappraisal of his identity as a combatant, reconstructed through memories that define him through differentiation. Stone identifies himself as a ‘proud Loyalist’ (p. xiii) and a good soldier of Ulster, a working-class champion of his people who fought a just war against the evil of Irish republicanism. This identity is constructed in defiance of his own representation in public discourse as the psychopathic terrorist (‘I am not a monster’ (p. 125)), and explicitly to counter representations of the loyalist paramilitaries as criminal gangsters (‘Loyalists weren’t backstreet killers. We weren’t thugs. Loyalists sought political targets’ (p. 249)). Fundamental to Stone’s account of why he took up arms is his identification with the imago of tough but fair-fighting British manliness defined against the cowardly or ‘bullying’ enemy, a familiar heroic figure in boys’ comics: ‘When I was a young boy and saw someone being bullied at school or work, I always stepped in. As I grew older ... , I realised Republicans were bullies ... who took life after innocent life’ (p. xiv). With the eruption of the Troubles, Stone’s boyhood identification as a working-class ‘tough kid’ (p. 13) and teenaged ‘street fighter’ (p. 17) transmutes into leadership of a Loyalist ‘Tartan’ gang56 and thence to recruitment into the UDA (pp. 22–3). Becoming a paramilitary is narrated as Stone’s response, ‘like many young Loyalist men’, to the onset of the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign and attacks on soldiers and policemen (p. 22). Personal experience of IRA violence against family and friends ‘sowed the seeds of hatred and resentment that would stay with me for most of my adult life’ (p. 24), and cause Stone to become ‘in love with the idea of being the great defender, the knight in shining armour looking after my people’ (p. 32). His identification with this idealized imago of the hero is secured through projective denigration of the other. The IRA are represented as ‘hooded cowards/With hate-filled eyes’ (p. 26). Later republican atrocities leave Stone ‘burning with rage and hatred for the people who had done this’ (p. 54). The expression ‘I am not’ recurs repeatedly throughout None Shall Divide Us. Stone’s own loyalist violence is felt to be defensive and qualitatively different to the ‘Republican assault’ (p. 22): on joining the UFF, ‘I promised I would never be indiscriminate or sectarian, unlike the PIRA. I would never

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place a no-warning bomb among innocent civilians or randomly spray a place filled with nationalists’ (p. 61). Stone also identifies with the qualities of the ‘true Loyalist’ (pp. 169, 257) against those who ‘bring the Loyalist cause into disrepute’ (p. 105), such as informers, or ‘trophy Loyalist(s)’ who indulge in killing (p. 71): ‘I am not a gangster or a criminal. I don’t assassinate targets in front of their wives and children’ (p. 88). The shift to the present tense is telling here, as it suggests that Stone remains identified with his combatant ‘past’. Stone also distinguishes his combatant identity from celebratory representations of himself as a loyalist soldier hero. In a magazine interview in 2003, referencing a passage in the memoir concerning his work with a group of local working-class youngsters (p. 273), he explains: I’ve had songs and poems written about me. And I’ve met plenty of kids who think I’m some kind of hero. I’m like Rambo to them. I always say there’s nothing romantic about taking a life. People bleed, and there’s no Hollywood director to say ‘cut’. You get to hear their dying words, see the final seconds of their life.57

The memoir attempts to reconcile these two aspects of the self: the just fighter of wartime, and the war-weary ex-prisoner looking ‘to do something constructive, not destructive’, in his new life of freedom (p. 288). Stone’s composure of post-conflict identity also requires his reappraisal of the relationship between his continuing identifications as a true Loyalist and good soldier and his family life and identity as a husband and father. In common with a long tradition of military auto/biography, interest in a ‘domestically oriented mode of masculinity’ and the ‘search for domestic fulfilment’58 is not the principal concern of Stone’s story, but introduces into it tensions and troublings generated by ‘the profound contradictions between public and private spheres that have structured British masculinities’ in the modern era.59 Stone addresses these contradictions between domestic fulfilment and paramilitarism from the beginning of the memoir when he remarks that, by making ‘paramilitary activities ... the focus of my entire life’, he broke his mother’s ‘golden rule’ that “Family Comes First” (p. 9). Stone attempts to maintain a clear separation between the two spheres of his life through a ‘fiction of the self ’ – ‘My family didn’t know about my life as a Loyalist volunteer’ (p. 134), and ‘working as a self-employed builder ... provided the perfect cover’ (p. 75) – and finds the breakdown of this separation disturbing. In one of the text’s key moments, before Milltown, this leads to an internal crisis: ‘I felt uncomfortable that I kept

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my weapons of war in my family home ... I took one look in the mirror and I didn’t like what I saw. I was standing in my own home dressed for my war with republicans’ (pp. 124–5). Here, two modes of masculine identity collide in an uncanny vision in which the soldier is confronted by the values of domestic manliness: ‘I was putting my family’s life on the line. ... My children and wife came a poor second ... No-one in my entire family knew I was a paramilitary. It would be a shock to them all if I were to die on active service [at Milltown]’ (p. 125). Concern for his family’s welfare also brings awareness of his own mortality (p. 127). The memoir’s search for subjective composure centres on Stone identifying and confronting this contradiction and its implications. In prison, disturbing thoughts about his family provoke self-criticism and the reappraisal of his life: ‘I started to reflect, step back ... I had let my mother and my entire family down’ (pp. 173–4), and ‘I would never be a proper full-time father to [my children]’ (p. 212). It is seeing his baby daughter grown into a toddler when his family are first able to visit that persuades Stone to give up fantasies of escape and ‘going straight back to war’ (p. 223), and to accept his future in prison as being ‘part of their lives’ (p. 227). The intrusion of affect associated with his family into the internal world of the loyalist fighter also prompts his reappraisal of his paramilitary activities in the light of memories that trouble composure. Stone recollects how: ‘I tried to look at ... death in a detached way. He was a soldier and I was a soldier, and in war soldiers die ... I tried to look at it as a job that had to be done’ (pp. 71–2). This sought-for ‘detachment’ involves self-protective splitting: ‘I didn’t want to expose myself to the human aspect, the grieving widow and the weeping children, because that’s when it becomes real’ (p. 71). The memoir narrates several occasions when Stone aborts an operation due to the presence of the intended victim’s family-members, most notably in the case of an assassination attempt on the hated Martin McGuinness: ‘I couldn’t shoot ... McGuinness in front of his daughter. I couldn’t live with the responsibility of forcing a little girl to watch her father die’ (p. 88). Recognition of ‘the target [as] a human being’ (p. 71) stems from perceiving him as a family man; and this undoing of the split in masculinity in the case of the other also undoes that same division within the self: ‘I saw my own family reflected in his daughter and she stopped me in my tracks’ (p. 88). On other occasions, including Milltown, the human identification is suppressed as ‘the soldier in me took over’ (p. 133). Writing afterwards, Stone makes sense of his internal conflict as a combatant by utilizing an understanding of dehumanization drawn from the language of conflict

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transformation: ‘When you take a man’s life you lose part of yourself and part of your humanity for ever’ (p. 72). Stone’s memoir suggests a subjective transformation undergone during his imprisonment, towards reconciliation of this internal conflict between alternative masculine selves. This may be understood psychoanalytically as a process of psychic reparation; the self ’s attempt ‘to reconcile and resolve [psychic] conflict in an [...] endeavour to “form a whole out of these various [incompatible] identifications” ’.60 Signs of reparative activity can be discerned throughout the prison episode of the narrative: in Stone’s account of looking after the men under his charge as a commanding officer within the prison (pp. 233–65); in his art-work as a painter, enabling the recovery of aspects of his past that he has ‘completely forgotten about’ (p. 268); and in his involvement in the peace process. The agreement and Stone’s early release from prison create further conditions for reparation, enabling his declaration that ‘my war is over’ (p. 284), his acknowledgement of responsibility for ‘the hurt I caused the families of the men I killed’ (pp. 288–9), and his art class for working-class youngsters. However, ‘reparation and integration are always partial outcomes, never fully achieved’, and identity composed on this basis remains ‘a provisional and semi-resolved response to the contradictions of subjectivity’.61 Unresolved contradictions can be discerned in the stance taken in the memoir towards the IRA enemy, who come to be seen as ‘soldiers and volunteers ... no different from me’ (pp. 136, xv), yet without explanation of how Stone transforms the visceral anger and hatred of republicans that motivated his war; and between Stone’s continuing identification as a true Loyalist and good soldier, and the ‘rehumanized’ self able to acknowledge and make reparation for his destructive effect on others.

d i a l o g i c s to r i e s a n d i n te r s u b j e c t i ve e n c o u n te r s Further unresolved contradictions permeate the account in Stone’s memoir of his relation to the victims and survivors of his violence. Seeing in court ‘women I had made young widows and ... injured people and children and all of them hurt by my hand’, he comes to understand that ‘I was dealing with real people’ (p. 209), and the memoir expresses ‘regret’ and sorrow for the hurt his actions have caused (pp. xiv, 285, 288). But it also fails to recognize, or set about undoing, the positioning of victims according to Stone’s

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own ‘fictions of the self ’. ‘Taking the rap’ for the murders of Kevin McPolin and Dermot Hackett (p. 77) – thereby enhancing Stone’s reputation as a ‘true Loyalist’ (pp. 79, 255) – also creates misinformation and mistaken beliefs for their families, which they take as true for 15 years until he tells a different story in None Shall Divide Us. In the case of Dermot Hackett, Stone’s memoir confronts the family with multiple layers of untruth, counter-claims and demands on their credulity. Firstly, retracting the confession he gave to the police in 1988, his story tells of how he planned but did not himself carry out the killing (pp. 79–82). Secondly, whilst aware that ‘the Hackett family denied that [Dermot Hackett] was involved or active in the Republican movement’, Stone insists that ‘the [UFF] intelligence [file] I saw on him proved otherwise’ (p. 80): that Hackett ‘used his bread van to transport guns for the IRA’ (p. 79). However, the ‘proof ’ contained in this file – evidence that, were it to be persuasive, would expose a terrible ‘fiction of the self ’ within the Hackett family and fundamentally undermine their memory of the character of their loved one – had been ‘burnt [by Stone] after memorising the details’ (p. 80). The family would have to take Stone’s ‘truth’ on trust.62 This clash between the incompatible stories of Stone and the Hackett family point beyond the ex-combatant’s individual search for subjective composure, towards understanding the reappraisal of the past as an inherently dialogical process in which composing one’s own narrative necessarily impacts on and has implications for others and their narratives.63 The stories felt to be necessary by paramilitary combatants impinge directly on the stories that victims and survivors are able to tell concerning their own injury or the death of their loved one, often to the detriment of their search for composure; and the desire of victims and survivors for truth in turn generates pressure upon those who know (or believe they know) to provide reliable information that discloses the truth about the past.64 However, in attending to the stories of ex-combatants, and in the stories they themselves tell, victims and survivors also confront their own internalizations of the terrorist imago. Representations of Michael Stone by the relatives of those he killed attest to the continuing affective power of the terrorist imago within the internal world of victims. This was clearly visible in their public reactions to the early release scheme for prisoners. Although Sally McErlean, whose son Thomas was killed in the Milltown attack, supported the Good Friday Agreement and accepted prison releases in this context, she spoke of Stone’s release as

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‘hurtful, whenever you think here is the man who killed my child’.65 For other relatives, a potent sense of injustice could attach to the freeing of prisoners who had served only a fraction of the life sentences passed when they were convicted, and who are felt to be ‘literally getting away with murder’,66 while their victims – as Dermot Hackett’s widow Sylvia, among others, has pointed out – suffer a ‘lifetime sentence’ of loss and grief for which the killers are responsible.67 Early release could also generate fear that the released terrorist might strike again or be encountered unexpectedly in the street, and a sense of something intolerable about the presence of the terrorist in shared social space. Kevin McPolin’s older brother John told the press that: ‘I couldn’t tell you my thoughts on that man [Stone]. I don’t like talking about him at all. Seeing his face in the papers and on television is impossible.’ Asked about Stone’s imminent release, McPolin responded that to witness the freeing of ‘ “the animal” who killed his brother would be unbearable. ... “I can’t think of anything worse than him running free.” ’68 We see here an intense psychic difficulty in facing the ‘impossible’ imago of the terrorist and its evocation in cultural representations, and a consequent dehumanizing of Stone, who is felt to exist outside the realm of human relations, in a space symbolized by his incarceration in prison. Stone becomes the bad object that had once been destroyed or at least rendered harmless by capture and imprisonment; whose release from prison reanimates the threatening imago to erupt again and ‘run free’ within the inner world as the locus of ‘unbearable’ feelings. In Sylvia Hackett’s contrasting response, ‘to face Michael Stone’ was ‘something I’ve always wanted to do ... I made that vow to myself a long time ago ... Right, I’m going to meet you one way or another’.69 Engaging with the real terrorist in the social world may enable victims and survivors to find the truth and set the record straight, but also to confront and ameliorate unbearable feelings associated with the destructive presence of the terrorist imago within the internal world.70 Sylvia Hackett wanted ‘to ask Stone face-to-face why he had killed her husband’, and ‘to clear her husband’s name’.71 The possibility to do so arose with an invitation to participate in the BBC’s Facing the Truth television series; her meeting with Stone, supported by her brother-inlaw Roddy and daughter Sabrina, was recorded in late 2005 and broadcast in March 2006.72 Directly inspired by the South African TRC, with the aim of ‘model[ling] the type of interactions between victims and perpetrators that could enable reconciliation and co-existence in war-ravaged Northern Ireland’,73 the series’ formally choreographed and facilitated exchanges of ‘stories about

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what happened and how that affected them’ 74 enable Hackett to pose her question, and to communicate to Stone (and, disturbingly, to the television audience) the devastating impact, both emotional and material, that the murder of her husband had on her family. Stone’s presentation of his own story closely follows the account in his memoir. On the ‘truth’ of the killing, both Stone and the family reiterate positions already established in previous public statements. By the end of the exchange, Sylvia Hackett ‘is no closer to knowing who did [kill her husband], nor ... who supplied the files that indicated he was a “legitimate target” ’;75 nor has she been able to establish an agreed narrative with Stone on the question of her husband’s supposed membership of the IRA. However, after the programme, Sylvia Hackett spoke of how ‘meeting [Dermot’s] killer won me back some strength ... After all this time, all the hurt, I was able to face my demons and look him [Stone] straight in the eye’.76 The importance of intersubjective dialogue, in the internal psychic world as well as in the social world, is also apparent in her reflection that: ‘This was something I just had to do. To show him I’m not just this bitter woman who everybody thinks I’m going to be. I do feel sorry for him. But it was my way of showing I’m a Christian’ [my emphasis].77 In the internal struggle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of the self – the Christian, and the bitter woman whose goodness in life has been destroyed by the powerful persecutory figure of the terrorist – identification with the Christian is felt to be strengthened by acting in a Christian-like way in relation to the actual terrorist encountered in reality. This identification in turn strengthens the self as it struggles to ‘face its demons’. The gendered dynamics of these exchanges were alluded to by Roddy Hackett, who describes ‘expecting [Stone] to come to the meeting acting “the big man” but he looked pitiful when he hobbled in with his walking stick and I found myself feeling sorry for him’.78 The difficult affective connection between Stone and the Hacketts established through the meeting did not survive Stone’s ‘return to war’ through renewed armed attack on Sinn Féin’s leadership at Stormont later in 2006, suggesting unfinished business from Milltown and an unravelling of Stone’s post-conflict self-composure, and led to his reimprisonment.79 For Sylvia Hackett, Stone’s attack at Stormont ‘led her to question everything Stone had said on Facing the Truth. “I don’t believe any of it now,” she said ... “I hope they lock him up and throw away the key.” ’80 I have argued in this chapter that conflict transformation processes challenge former combatants to reassess personal life histories and masculinities

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shaped by cultures of violence, and to engage in reconciliatory storytelling that imagines new identities and social relationships in the post-conflict world. Such reassessment encounters representations of the terrorist and the hero, hyper-masculine figures that are internalized and negotiated or contested in the formation of identities during the conflict; that are reproduced in post-conflict discourses; and that continue to have an afterlife for both ex-combatants and victims and survivors of violence in the internal world of the psyche. In the search for composure of a self and its past that can be reconciled with post-conflict values and conditions, the memory-work of ex-combatants is faced with these figures and other, contradictory identifications formed in the course of wartime experience; and endeavours to reassess and integrate them from perspectives developed ‘afterwards’. The case of Michael Stone exemplifies this struggle to compose a more integrated life story, in which a hyper-masculine identity placed at the service of a political cause comes to be ameliorated by a more complex and realistic identification of the self and recognition of a humanity in common with enemies and victims. It also demonstrates how fragile subjective transformation and post-conflict identity can be. Where competing masculinities are not cohesively bound together and internal conflict between them persists, self-composure is especially susceptible to ‘the potential of [... a] renounced identification ... to revert to its original positive value’.81 Reparative composure also involves ex-combatants in dialogic engagement with the stories of victims and survivors, whether in face-to-face encounters or mediated through public forms of cultural representation. These unchosen relationships have histories that bear upon the construction, negotiation and reimagining of gendered identities in cultures emerging from violent conflict. Further investigation of these histories is needed, to tease out the dialogic aspects within storytelling and explore further the intersubjective dimensions of composure linking the internal world with social relations, as a contribution to deeper understanding of the gendered dynamics within transitional societies and post-conflict cultures.

N ote s 1. Fionnuala D. Ni Aoláin, ‘Gender, masculinities and transition in conflicted societies’, Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper, No. 09–49 (2009), pp. 1–33 (8). Social Sciences Research Network Electronic Paper Collection, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1518541

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2. Ni Aoláin: ‘Gender’, p. 15; Angela Harris, ‘Gender, violence, race, and criminal justice’, Stanford Law Review, 52/4 (2000), pp. 777–807, pp. 793–4. 3. Jean Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (New York, 1996), p. 18. 4. Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester, 2007). 5. Brandon Hamber, Transforming Societies after Political Violence (New York, 2009). 6. John Hartley, Understanding News (London, 1982), p. 23. 7. Liz Curtis, Ireland: The Propaganda War (London, 1984), p. 114. 8. Alan F. Parkinson, Ulster Loyalism and the British Media (Dublin, 1998), p. 110. 9. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994), p. 1. 10. Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (New York, 1991). 11. For the object relations psychoanalytic theory used in this article, see Dawson: Soldier Heroes, pp. 27–52; Dawson: Making Peace, pp. 61–7, 250–2. 12. Peter Shirlow, Jon Tonge, James McAuley and Catherine McGlynn, Abandoning Historical Conflict? Former Political Prisoners and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Manchester, 2010). 13. Dawson: Making Peace, p. 15. 14. Sara McDowell, ‘Commemorating dead “men”: gendering the past and present in post-conflict Northern Ireland’, Gender, Place and Culture, 15/4 (2008), pp. 335–54, p. 340. 15. Dawson: Making Peace, pp. 266–87. 16. Graham Dawson, ‘The desire for justice: discourses of victimhood, psychic reparation, and the politics of memory in “post-conflict” Northern Ireland’, Rethinking History, forthcoming. 17. Dawson: Making Peace, pp. 276–9. 18. Attributed to Downing Street spokesperson 1999, in Shirlow et al. Abandoning Historical Conflict?, p. 66. 19. News Letter, 25 July 2000. 20. Brandon Hamber and Gráinne Kelly, ‘A place for reconciliation?’, Democratic Dialogue, 18 (2005), p. 38. 21. Hamber and Kelly: ‘A place for reconciliation’, p. 38. 22. Consultative Group on the Past (CGP), Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (Belfast, 2009), pp. 180, 22. 23. CGP: Report, pp. 23, 25. 24. CGP: Report, pp. 32, 24. 25. CGP: Report, p. 32.

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26. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Chris Van der Merwe (eds), Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past (Newcastle, 2009); Hamber: Transforming Societies. 27. See, for example, Healing Through Remembering, http://www.healingthroughremembering.org/; Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, http://www.glencree.ie/; Cahal McLaughlin, Recording Memories from Political Violence: A Film-maker’s Journey (Bristol, 2010). 28. Hamber: Transforming Societies; Leigh A. Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (London, 2008). 29. Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 4, 21. See pp. 16–24. 30. Dawson: Soldier Heroes, p. 23. 31. Quoted in Dawson: Making Peace, p. 50. 32. Marie Breen Smyth, Truth Recovery and Justice after Conflict: Managing Violent Pasts (London, 2007), p. 33. 33. Smyth: Truth Recovery, p. 36. 34. Smyth: Truth Recovery, pp. 37, 36. 35. Smyth: Truth Recovery, p. 38. 36. Ian S. Wood, Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA (Edinburgh, 2006), p. 139; and see Martin Dillon, Stone Cold: The True Story of the Milltown Massacre (London, 1992), pp. 141–72. 37. David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton, Lost Lives (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 1118–19. 38. Dillon: Stone Cold, p. 217. 39. BBC News, 24 November 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6181994.stm; BBC News, 8 December 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/northern_ireland/7770961.stm; BBC News, 6 January 2011, http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-12128990 40. ‘Is nothing sacred in Ulster anymore?’, Daily Mail, 17 March 1988. 41. Star, Today, Sun, all 17 March 1988; Belfast Telegraph, 25 July 2000. 42. News Letter 24 July 2000. 43. Eyal Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit (Oxford, 1998), p. 45. 44. ‘The Ballad of Michael Stone’, in Michael Stone, None Shall Divide Us (London, 2004), p. xvii. See also ‘The Ballad of Michael Stone’, and Rab C, ‘Michael Stone’, Loyalist Sounds playlist, nos 14, 23, YouTube http://www. youtube.com/playlist?list=PL40D4AB71AB6F4E21 45. See Stone: None Shall Divide Us, pp. 192–3, 213, 254, 273. 46. Johnny Adair, Mad Dog (London, 2009), pp. 47–8. 47. The Times, 4 March 1989.

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

179

Belfast Telegraph, 25 July 2000. News Letter, 25 July 2000. Belfast Telegraph, 25 July 2000. Belfast Telegraph, 25 July 2000. Irish News, 12 May 2003. Karen McManus, ‘Introduction’ to Stone: None Shall Divide Us, p. xii. See Stephen Hopkins, ‘Political autobiography in Northern Ireland’, in Liam Harte (ed.), Modern Irish Autobiography (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 176–97 (182–3). Stone: None Shall Divide Us, p. xv. References to this hereafter are given in parentheses. Hopkins: ‘Political autobiography’, p. 192. The ‘Tartan’ gangs were a loyalist youth subculture named after its adoption of Tartan scarves and flashes as symbols of identity, that emerged in response to PIRA’s targetting of British soldiers in 1971, and engaged in sectarian violence against Catholics. Quoted in ‘Michel Stone: Loyalist icon’, CNN News, 24 November 2006, http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/24/michael.stone/ Dawson: Soldier Heroes, pp. 63, 134. Dawson: Soldier Heroes, pp. 127–8. Melanie Klein, (1948) quoted in Dawson: Soldier Heroes, p. 34; see pp. 40–3. Dawson: Soldier Heroes, pp. 43, 278. For the importance of ‘the files’ in the context of wider conflicts over state disclosure and truth recovery, see Bill Rolston, ‘Facing reality: The media, the past and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland’, Crime Media Culture, 3/3 (2007), pp. 345–64. Dawson: Making Peace, pp. 141–7. Smyth: Truth Recovery, pp. 6–21, 67–90. News Letter, 24 July 2000. Willie Frazer, quoted in Dawson: Making Peace, p. 278. Quoted in John O’Kane and Janette Ballard, ‘Face to face with the past’, BBC News, 3 March 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/ 4758802.stm News Letter, 24 July 2000. Quoted in Rolston: ‘Facing reality’, p. 353. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘Working through the past: Some thoughts on forgiveness in cultural context’, in Gobodo-Madikizela and Van der Merwe: Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness, pp. 148–69; Dawson: Making Peace, pp. 316–17; Hamber: Transforming Societies, pp. 75–93. Roddy Hackett, quoted in ‘BBCs Facing the Truth: Stone Cold’, ElBlogador.com – The Voice of Irish Nationalism web log, 6 March 2006,

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72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

http://elblogador.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/bbcs-facing-truth-stone-cold. html; Rolston: ‘Facing reality’, p. 353. For description and analysis of the televised meeting, see Rolston: ‘Facing reality’; Ronald A. Wells, ‘A televised reconciliation in Northern Ireland’, The Christian Century, 27 June 2006, pp. 27–30, available at www.religiononline.org/showarticle.asp?title=3412 Donna Hicks, ‘Facing the Truth: The BBC and Archbishop Tutu’s effort to “put the past to rest” in Northern Ireland’, Abstract for Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness Conference, University of Cape Town, 22–26 November 2006, p. 54. See also O’Kane and Ballard, ‘Face to face’; BBC News, 27 February 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4723320.stm Donna Hicks, ‘Reconciling with dignity’, 24pp, n.d., www.euforumrj.org/ readingroom/Terrorism/DHicks.pdf, p. 18. Rolston: ‘Facing reality’, p. 359. Quoted in Rolston: ‘Facing reality’, p. 359. Quoted in O’Kane and Ballard: ‘Face to face’. Quoted in O’Kane and Ballard: ‘Face to face’. BBC News, 24 November 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6181994.stm; News Letter, 10 May 2007, http://www.newsletter.co.uk/ news/local/stone-regrets-his-show-at-stormont-1–1853681; Belfast Telegraph, 15 November 2008, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/ final-bitter-rant-as-michael-stone-is-taken-down-14064388.html Susan McKay, Bear in Mind These Dead (London, 2008), p. 254. Dawson: Soldier Heroes, p. 278.

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10

Terrorism as Sexual Envy Adversarial Masculinities in Two Fictions of Ticking Bomb Torture Alex Adams

However we may constitute the genre, even a peremptory survey of counter-terrorism fiction will quickly reveal that much of it is deeply invested in the emphatic lionization of conservative fantasies about masculinity. Further, this chapter will argue that what often gives such narratives their urgency is the paternalist maintenance of the family boundary, an impetus often rather schematically mapped onto counter-terrorist operations that reassert the integrity of the nation. This chapter looks at these gendered dynamics in two influential examples of the genre: Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel The Centurions, the urtext of much modern counter-terrorism fiction and the original literary iteration of the ticking bomb scenario, and Fox’s televisual counter-terrorism saga 24 (2001–9), which re-familiarized global audiences with it through a populist synthesis of ideologically driven political drama and race-against-time action television. Drawing out the two common imperatives of masculinity and the family, the argument I make here is that the representations of the ticking bomb scenario in these two texts allow torture to function both as a successful strategy for defusing the threat of terrorism1 – repeating the myth of controlled torture as a surgical weapon of professionalized intelligence warfare – and as a reassertion of dominant codes of masculinity – explicitly connecting this torture myth to the reactionary fantasies about masculinity and heteronormativity that saturate the genre. By heteronormativity, I mean the cultural and political operations that discursively construct heterosexuality as not only normative and inevitable but, as Berlant and Warner observe, ‘coherent – that is, 181

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organized as a sexuality – but also privileged.’2 In The Centurions and 24, white (colonial) heterosexuality, and the ordered functioning of society of which it is an image in miniature – coded through domesticity, the family unit and inviolable white women – are the targets of terrorist operations, and counter-terrorist masculinity functions as a guarantor, a vital sealant, of this privileged heterosexuality. This chapter consists of two sections. The first describes two interlaced myths – corresponding to the aforementioned reactionary fantasies about masculinity – found in many texts that deal with conflict but that are specifically mobilized in those that represent torture violence and the male body. The first myth is that the notion of necessity upon which the ticking bomb scenario is constructed can only be identified by men with privileged access to the experience of war: having witnessed the brutal truth of conflict, these men know how best to utilize violence against lesser men in the course of violent counter-terrorist interrogations. The second myth is that these superior men suffer torture ‘well’. Appropriating tropes from the tradition of religious martyrdom, which frequently represents bodily suffering as spiritually enriching, this myth activates and provides depth to the first, allowing the men who can identify necessity to seem spiritually and politically superior to other subjects through their ability to resist the dehumanizing power of torture. In both texts, narrative threads featuring the protection of valuable female characters are interlaced with the mission to save the nation, an interpenetration which foregrounds the imperative to punish the competing masculinity of the terrorists whose actions imperil the family unit. This terrorist impulse to attack the family is pathologized in the texts as a form of sexual jealousy, and the final section of this chapter examines the meanings of the thwarting of such envy. The frustrated yet threatening lust for European or American women attributed to the terrorist other operates as a shorthand for the political inferiority of the anti-democratic and anti-capitalist impulses attributed to anti-Western terrorism, and at stake in The Centurions and 24 is the protection of the possibility of domesticity, either of French settler colonialism or of the American city, against a terrorism coded as sexually motivated and politically trivial; through the figure of the rescued white woman these fictions use torture to police the boundaries of such domesticities and to guarantee their continuation. Before proceeding, it is worth acknowledging that 24 is an

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enormous text, about which generalizations often fail and in which torture is located within a constellation of panoptic surveillance techniques and a complex economy of counter-terrorist violences, so this chapter does not attempt to describe exhaustively its gender dynamics but rather restricts itself to tracing the political and representational logics of masculinity that it shares with Lartéguy’s novel. 3

a p e r s i s te n t f i c t i o n: t h e t i c k i n g b o m b s c e n a r i o As well as conceiving of torture as adversarial, militarily successful and morally compassionate, the ticking bomb scenario central to both narratives addressed in this chapter represents torture as an arena in which counter-terrorist masculinity, coded as heteronormative, paternal and violently assertive, can demonstrate its superiority over terrorist masculinities, coded variously as deviant, excessive or weak. It is a pro-torture thought experiment designed to reveal torture as a necessary and morally imperative intervention: if there were deadly bombs hidden in a city and the culprit were apprehended, framers of the ticking bomb scenario argue, it would be legitimate to torture that person into revealing the whereabouts of the bombs in order to save innocent civilians.4 Torture is not a credible method of intelligence work; Darius Rejali writes that ‘[f]or harvesting information, torture is the clumsiest method available to organizations, even clumsier in some cases than flipping coins or shooting randomly into crowds.’5 Nonetheless, ticking bomb narratives are designed to demonstrate and advocate the utility of interrogational torture in emergencies. For example, instant-fix torture is staged with particular force in the fourth season of 24, when a gunshot to the kneecap of a previously unresponsive terrorist immediately forces the revelation of information about a kidnap plot.6 When briefly tortured by protagonist Jack Bauer the previously recalcitrant victim screams ‘Secretary of Defence!’, and although Secretary Heller is subsequently captured by villains – and as such is not saved by torture – the point of this dramatic episode is to show that torture can immediately reveal actionable intelligence where less invasive methods have been shown to fail. Ticking bomb narratives rarely claim that torture solves problems directly: they most frequently normalize it by locating it within a spectrum of other intelligence techniques, by making it appear to

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be one available tactic among many. Here, it is shown as the quickest route to information which, had torture been used sooner, would have prevented the kidnap. One of the objectives of the scenario is to circumvent standard moral prohibitions against torture, such as the argument that it is repellent to turn a person’s personhood against himself, or that it is a priori immoral to participate in the creation of situations in which, as David Sussman writes, the ‘asymmetry of power, knowledge, and prerogative is absolute’.7 The scenario aims to achieve this by positing a situation in which such considerations appear secondary because a utilitarian cost-benefit calculus makes the torture of one guilty person – which at no point ceases to be a repellent act – for the sake of saving a great many more innocents appear to be the course involving less harm. Rather than an unjustifiable act of aggression, torture is made to seem, as Dónal O’Mathúna summarizes, ‘a necessary evil when time is of the essence and the stakes are immense’.8 Therefore, rejecting it must go further than human rights-based objections that stress the inviolable integrity of the human person.9 Elaine Scarry writes, in response to Alan Dershowitz – who proposed in 2002 that Americans should legislate for the ticking bomb scenario10 – that ‘introducing an “imaginable” occasion for torture that has no correspondence with the thousands of cases that actually occur has the effect of seeming to change torture into a sanctionable act.’11 The scenario fundamentally misdescribes the conditions under which almost all torture takes place, which never correspond to the clear-cut emergency situations presented by ticking bomb narratives. Nevertheless, because the scenario is particularly amenable to narrative – it is easily leant to the ‘race against time’ trope found in many thriller novels and films, and which is the dramatic conceit that forms the central structuring principle of 24 – it can be made to seem more intellectually compelling than it in fact is due to the emotional impact of its dramatizations. Although similar thought experiments have existed throughout the history of philosophy,12 and there is evidence that Lartéguy simply reproduced common colonial feelings,13 the situation was not narrated in such terms until the emergence of The Centurions during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Lartéguy’s novel provided a narrative demonstration of the success of interrogational torture under ticking bomb conditions. In the third section of the text, ‘Rue de la Bombe’, Esclavier is forced by an act of terrorism – the murder of his mistress’s grandfather by the FLN – to abandon

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his anti-torture principles and to employ torture against Arouche, an FLN fighter who has planted bombs across Algiers and who refuses to disclose their whereabouts. The news of the murder of old Pélissier had made him see red, and what he dreaded most of all he had managed to accomplish all by himself, without having to appeal to his NCOs. By the time the dentist was carried off on a stretcher, in the early hours of the morning, he had confessed everything; none of the fifteen bombs went off.14

Although he was raised by a left-wing intellectual who impressed upon him the importance of the rejection of torture, the recognition of the realpolitik of the fight against nationalist terrorism forces Esclavier to submit to the demands of the situation. Since torture has been represented as grisly yet effective throughout the novel, the point of the scene is not whether torture works or whether it is repellent – for Lartéguy it does, and it is – merely that there exist certain exceptional circumstances in which even those who oppose torture will recognize that it is unequivocally necessary. Nobody in The Centurions or 24 wants to torture, but the logic of the texts is that the characters are forced by the underhand tactics of terrorists to do so in order to win. The novel proved appealing to French audiences because it provided the systematic military torture that was known to have taken place in Algeria with a superficially persuasive, because emotionally coercive, justification. The 1963 Afrikaans edition remained popular during the years that the South African apartheid state was engaging in ‘counter-terrorist’ torture, and the text was translated into Hebrew by Israeli security forces in the 1960s, a decade in the course of which interrogational torture was often employed by Israeli security services. The absence of heroism from these wars, in which democratic states were militarily humiliated by smaller forces or were guilty of perpetrating war crimes to fight terrorism, is perhaps what makes myths of unequivocally triumphant masculinity attractive. In such conflicts, the retrospective gaze towards Lartéguy’s fictionalized Algeria seems to provide persuasively uncompromising and reassuringly oversimplified solutions. Apart from a short print run to coincide with its film adaptation Lost Command (1966), the novel was not republished in English until 2011; nevertheless, the text itself did not have to resurface for its main contribution to

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popular discourse to re-emerge after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Rather than a paradigm shift of new political thought, as was often claimed, 9/11 in fact provoked a resurgence of forms of political discourse that had begun to seem intellectually unfashionable;15 rather than political innovations, this period was characterized by colonial continuities, and the ticking bomb scenario was a prominent example of one such reactivated retrograde rhetoric. The Centurions had become an educational tool in Western military establishments, including the UK and the USA, and is known to be the favourite novel of General David Petraeus, former Head of the CIA and commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.16 Through such institutionalizations Lartéguy’s partisan and pro-colonial advocacy for torture gained an undeserved veneer of objective intellectual credibility, and the ideas it popularized became silently embedded in diverse international cultural-political vocabularies. 9/11 provided an opportunity for these ideas to re-emerge in the USA: al-Qaeda’s metropolitan demolitions had proven that enormous terrorist atrocities were really possible, and for certain commentators and audiences counter-terrorist torture appeared to provide an assertive militarypolitical response to this possibility.17 Although it was presented as militarily rational, this post-9/11 protorture impulse was primarily emotional and revanchist. In an interview with Jane Mayer, co-creator of 24 Joel Surnow reveals that the appeal of ticking bomb torture lies more in its reassertion of masculine authority against threats to the family than it does in any clear assessment of military strategy: I don’t think it’s honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn’t do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I’d do it.18

As well as revealing that the ticking bomb scenario is as much about policing the integrity of the family unit as it is about terrorism, Surnow’s description of what makes the scenario persuasive also contains an explicit appeal to paternalistic masculinity. Peter Morey writes that in 24, ‘ “Americanness” and American values are distinguished from those of the villains via a process of racialization wherein all threatening elements become, in a sense, “Muslimized” – expelled from the bosom of the nation which is here conceived as an extension of the white, blond, Protestant family.’19 Although this

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may be overstating the case a little – antagonists come in a multiplicity of forms in 24, and are not reducible to Islamic terrorism – Morey is right that throughout 24 counter-terrorist action is mapped over the preservation of the heteronormative white American family. The protection of domesticity – meaning, national integrity – is what gives both the scenario and its narrativizations their emotional urgency and is what determines whether actions are necessary. In both 24 and The Centurions, ‘successful’ torture rehabilitates and reasserts the authority of fatherhood – meaning, strong and nationalistically exclusionary political leadership.

t wo my t h s o f m a s c u l i n i t y R. W. Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity is central to my readings here.20 Although masculinity is often made to seem deterministic, Connell argues that it is complex, and that it requires the constant reiteration and policing of hegemonic practices and performances in order for the hegemonic positions of traditional masculinity to seem invisible and natural. Violence is central: Connell writes that violent events are ‘transactions between men’, and that they ‘are used as a means of drawing boundaries and making exclusions’.21 In other words, violence is a performative means of making legible the hegemonic hierarchies between differing forms of masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity – paternalist, heteronormative, military – depends for its dominance on the delineation of lesser masculinities, and the visible demonstration of their inferiority. It draws conspicuous hierarchies across race and within national identities: this, I argue, is the function performed by torture in The Centurions and 24. Rather than operating as a way of ‘feminizing’ terrorists, it’s more accurate to say that the torture scenes make explicit a hierarchy of masculinities. Rather than a recoding of male flesh as female flesh, torture is represented as a revelation of the inherently inferior masculinity of the terrorist body. With such treasure-value assigned to femininity in the symbolic economies of both texts, it is unlikely that tortured male flesh would be coded as feminine: rather, it is coded as incompletely masculine, because it is as men that the terrorist characters are humiliated and their masculinity is one of the symbolic territories upon which torture finds purchase. Here, I delineate the two myths articulated in these texts in terms of which these hierarchies become legible.

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o n e: h o r r o r a n d m o r a l te r r o r a r e yo u r f r i e n d s One of the defining characteristics of military masculinity is the exclusivity of the knowledge attributed to it – the insularity of the masculine communities it generates, and the conspicuous superiority of those who participate in war. 22 For example, Luise White writes that understanding war is ‘based on intimate knowledge’, and that military narratives – testimonial and fictional – consistently insist that ‘no one can understand the meaning of soldiering unless they have been in battle or at least involved in a war.’23 The most important aspect of the intellectual machinery of the ticking bomb scenario – as opposed to its affective economy, although the two are difficult to unknot – is its appeal to necessity, and one of the central forms of masculine prowess that its protagonists possess is the experience needed to identify it and to deal with it. In Apocalypse Now (1979), Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) outlines a specific relationship between necessity and violence when he declares that ‘it is impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror and moral terror are your friends: if they are not, they are enemies to be feared.’24 In season seven of 24, an ex-soldier articulates the same idea, in simplified form: ‘No-one who hasn’t been to the edge, and looked over, can ever understand.’25 This action movie cliché expresses two ideas: first, that sometimes war demands atrocity, and second, that only a certain kind of subject, one morally purified by exposure to war, can recognize when these atrocities become permissible. In his description of the state of nature, Hobbes claims that there is no injustice during war, and this is precisely the point that the ticking bomb scenario is designed to articulate: that in certain exceptional limit situations torture ceases to be wrong because the moral categories of peacetime, such as the idea of war crime, cease to find purchase. 26 Bob Brecher, however, observes that ‘[t]he “necessity” that gives the thought experiment its force is inevitably absent in the real case. In the real world, necessity is always retrospective.’27 It is almost impossible objectively to define necessity, a term which must be unambiguously rigid for the scenario to make sense. Nevertheless, in The Centurions and 24, the single relevant criterion for decision is utility, and because torture is (falsely) assumed to work, it is assumed that it is simply necessary. Battlefield experience – a key indicator of masculine virility in both texts – is the defining factor that qualifies the counter-terrorist agents to identify the necessity of extreme violence.

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This is readily legible in 24. The counter-terrorist agents of CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) routinely use their battle-earned wisdom to address complex political and moral problems with solutions which consistently appear reducible to force. In the seventh season, Jack is on trial for crimes against humanity. After stressing his status as an experienced specialist in covert operations, he asserts that this privileged subject position grants him a unique ability to assess necessity: BAUER:

Ibrahim Hadad had targeted a bus carrying forty-five people, ten of which [sic] were children. The truth, Senator, is I stopped that attack from happening. SENATOR: By torturing Mr Hadad. BAUER: By doing what I deemed necessary to protect innocent lives.28

This scenario, borrowed directly from the climax of Dirty Harry (1971), makes torture appear necessary and morally compassionate.29 The identification of necessity is shown as a key factor in discharging paternal duty effectively; further, it is used as a short-circuit argument throughout 24 to justify acts of exceptional violence. As Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan observe, CTU’s violence is ‘inevitably justified by results’.30 In the first part of The Centurions, ‘Camp One’, Lartéguy’s paratroopers are defeated at Dien Bien Phu and incarcerated in a Vietminh concentration camp. Here they discuss the war in Indochina, concluding that France’s decolonization is, rather than a series of conflicts against nationalist insurgencies, actually one continuous civilizational meta-war against Soviet communism. Crucially, France must learn from the capacity for unflinching amoral cruelty that Lartéguy attributes to communist powers – the novel describes Vietminh communism as a ‘universe of sexless insects’31 – and fight dirty in order to protect the Empire: ‘For a prisoner, everything is justified,’ Esclavier had declared, ‘stealing, lying ... from the moment they deprive him of his freedom he is given every right.’

Boisfeuras had asked him: ‘And what if a régime, a political ideology deprived the whole world of its freedom?’ ‘Then there are no holds barred.’32

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In another context this dialogue could be attributed to an anticolonial agitator, and this is not accidental: colonial counter-terrorism must, in these representations, take on the appearance of an embattled resistance so that audiences can more readily sympathize with the heroes as underdogs. More importantly, the privileged access to authentic experience that the suffering of the camp confers upon the heroes of The Centurions allows them to earn an aura of uniquely authoritative masculinity. War is a purifying experience, both constitutive of masculinity and an arena for its demonstration, and crucially, victory is not central: the intimate knowledge gained through military experience constitutes expertise and suffering – indeed, ‘Camp One’ reveals suffering as a form of expertise. After their ordeal, which, as Michael Schwartz writes, ‘burns away all illusions, and leaves them damned with the urgent, but incommunicable vision of truth’,33 the paratroopers are morally equipped to perceive the necessity of extreme forms of violence which, to those without such privileged insight, may seem immoral or excessive. Survival, for Lartéguy, is an education in military necessity.34 Since war is by definition animal, Lartéguy’s novel insists, refusing to torture is equivalent to refusing to fight.

t wo: u nw i l l i n g a n d u n a b l e to l o o k ev i l i n t h e eye a n d d e a l w i t h i t As a reinforcement to this, counter-terrorism fiction also establishes domestic enemies against whom its heroes are defined – generally weaker liberals who facilitate terrorism with their permissive political naivete, their failures of fatherhood or their inability to recognize the utility of torture. These men inevitably have no combat experience, and as such do not have the relevant expertise to identify the tough solutions to the otherwise intractable problem of terrorism; these characters’ ignorance of war’s horror is a failure that is directly connected to both their political ignorance and their inferior masculinity. Darius Rejali observes that The Centurions mobilizes ideas about forms of male weakness in opposition to which it positions its characters: Lartéguy’s story feeds on a long-felt, common anxiety that democracy has made us weak and there are no real men anymore. ... The point of

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Lartéguy’s story is that failing to torture is the sissy’s response; only a real man knows what to do.35

The strategy of favourably contrasting conservative world-weary experience against liberal wilful ignorance aims to demonstrate the masculine inferiority of the refusal to employ violence. It is repeated throughout many forms of right-wing discourse, and resurfaces with regard to violence in 24, which recapitulates Lartéguy’s charismatic anti-hero masculinity after filtering it through a series of familiar popular culture tropes. The hypocritical reticence of authority figures to appreciate the inevitability of extremity, and not that extremity itself, is the morally problematic factor. In particular, the character of Senator Mayer, who prosecutes Jack for war crimes, is derided as ‘unwilling and unable to look evil in the eye and deal with it’.36 This character’s preventive intervention in a torture interrogation leads directly to Jack’s inability to stop terrorists invading the White House. The position is unequivocal and uncompromising: torture is a weapon more extreme than but as valid as any other, and prohibitions against it are barriers deliberately constructed by fools in order to deprive agents of their most effective weapon against terrorism. There are plenty of examples: the representative of fictional advocacy group Amnesty Global is called a ‘slimy lawyer’37 and due process is dismissed as ‘stalling’.38 Both texts emphasize the superior justice of extreme violence through their emphasis on tough masculinity circumventing overcautious legalistic self-sabotage. As well as being veterans of wars in Indochina, the principal torturers in The Centurions and 24 are also both torture survivors. Esclavier, Lartéguy’s ticking bomb torturer, was tortured in Mauthausen before his deployments in Indochina and Algeria, and Jack Bauer is tortured both in his Vietnam prehistory and at several points during the eight seasons of 24. As we have seen, enduring violence reveals to the sufferer what is necessary, but further, if that character emerges from torture unchanged, their value as a man is proven. This is where we encounter the second myth of masculinity described above: much as conflict imbues military men with unique knowledge, suffering torture without ‘breaking’ charges a male character with wisdom, pathos and a fortified masculinity; although he may not have confessed any information, his resistant body has confessed its superior value. This masculinity is both embodied and ideological – these warriors, through their rugged physicality and moral durance, operate as enfleshed metonymies of the natural rightness of Western hegemony.

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Such representations borrow much from the iconography of religious martyrdom. For example, the writer of 4 Maccabees claims that ‘those who gave over their bodies in suffering for the sake of religion were not only admired by men, but also were deemed worthy to share in a divine inheritance.’39 Suffering is glorified as both a way to achieve holiness and as a revelation of the inherent value of the true believer. A residue of this sacralizing effect of torture persists in the way that Lartéguy’s paras and Jack Bauer are seen to have been enriched – rather than destroyed – by their suffering, which at once proves their masculine value and their commitment to the preservation of their respective empires, and demonstrates to the survivor-becomeperpetrator the inevitability, and therefore the inherent justice, of certain forms of violence. This idea retains much currency in both pop culture and some forms of mainstream political discourse. Torture is presumed to have the capacity to reveal or produce truth, a conceptual association that stretches back to the foundations of Western thought. Many scholars have noted the mutual implication of truth and torture: Stephen Eisenman, for example, notes that ‘[t]he Greek word for torture, basanos, is also that for “touchstone” ... , indicating that the Ancient Greeks considered chastisement and cruelty a necessary means to arrive at truth’,40 an etymology dissected elsewhere by Page duBois, who traces key conceptual continuities from Greece to the twentieth century.41 The truth revealed by torture in The Centurions and 24 is evidence of either the true physical, moral, spiritual and political value of those who suffer pain with dignity and strength, or the weakness of those who break under it, who are understood to have earned a particularly ignominious species of defeat or to have committed a betrayal. In this selfconfirming, tautologous and reactionary representational economy, those defeated by torture commit a double confession: orally they confess secrets, but in defeat their flesh confesses the superiority of the torturer.42 Torture is also, in the colonial military imaginary, represented as a reliable means for the extortion of specific information.43 Consequently, when there is anything to be revealed – such as the location of a ticking bomb – violence against the captured and culpable body is understood to be a tool uniquely suited to discover this truth, as though the truth were a secret locked in the body and torture a means for its excavation. This metaphor – torture as the physical retrieval of evidence from the flesh of a culpable body – is enacted literally in the eighth season of 24, when Bauer cuts a phone SIM-card from the stomach of a dying Russian gangster.44

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b a r b a r i a n s: t h e s ex u a l t r i v i a l i z a t i o n o f te r r o r i s m Rather than Whiteness versus Arabness, it is Americanness or Frenchness – civilized colonial identity – that is opposed, in these texts, to the barbarism of terrorism. As is well known, in the months and years immediately following 9/11, the Islamic terrorist fanatic became a privileged category of enemy. Much like his counterpart the counter-terrorist centurion, this villain and the clash of civilizations in which they were claimed to be engaged were not actually very new. The tenor of much anathematizing discourse recalled familiar Orientalist tropes in which Islam was conf lated with terrorism; Muslim men were described as inherently chauvinist, misogynist and uniquely prone to terrorist ambition because of their supposedly atavistic and barbaric religio-cultural identity. The cultural production of this enemy operated in much the same way as colonial discourses operated to construct the native – through the manipulation of the fears of the cultural imaginary – as a non-subject designed to deserve violence. The terrorist figure shares with the colonial subject what Achille Mbembe calls ‘the psychic life of the beast’45 – the supposed subhuman intelligence and brutal instincts of the animal – and much as the colonial subject was constructed in opposition to colonial humanity in what Fanon calls ‘zoological terms’,46 the al-Qaeda terrorist became an ill-defined all-inclusive malefactor whose motivations were rooted not in political rationality but in bodily hatreds. Nell Irvine Painter writes that ‘warfare, masculinity, and barbarism’ are ‘at the base of modern ethnogender stereotyping’.47 Drawing on centuries of sexualized colonial stereotyping, terrorists after 9/11 were represented as embodying an inferior – because excessive and unsophisticated – form of masculinity: racial and masculine inferiorities were made to dovetail in the image of the barbarian terrorist. Although more nuanced representations of Islamic terrorism are now available, for example the 2007 movie Traitor or Chris Morris’ Four Lions (2010), for some time this figure was simply demonized. Martin Amis, for example, was representative when he referred to Islamists as ‘fabulists crazed with blood and death’,48 and when he elsewhere psychologized Muhammad Atta’s political trajectory as an outcome of sexual self-loathing and indigestion.49 The central claim of this chapter is that the ticking bomb scenario narrated in both The Centurions and 24 provides an arena in which counter-terrorist masculinity demonstrates its superiority over such terrorist masculinities. In The Centurions and 24, the Islamic terrorist is

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single-minded, cowardly and motivated only by simple and irrational bodily emotions. For example, we could consider Abu Fayed, the antagonist of season six, whose ideological passion is secondary to his desire for familial revenge, or Sayed Ali from season two, whose first targets are the helpless blonde women of the Warner family. Much as Lartéguy shows his paras fighting nationalist insurgencies that are actually Soviet puppets, many of the terrorists in 24 are represented as tools of unresolved Cold War tension, so not only are their ambitions politically unsophisticated, but in both texts terrorists are shown as dupes whose organic and irrational fanaticism allows them to be manipulated by larger forces. Accordingly, the masculinities of the terrorists, although initially saturated with overconfidence and arrogant hate, when demolished by torture, are revealed to be motivated either by the stubborn animality of an unquestioning faith or by simple bodily jealousies: that is, they are revealed as embodying an inferior masculinity. In the climactic ticking bomb scene of The Centurions, the torturing paratrooper Esclavier declares: All you’ve got, Arouche, is hatred, and what a petty little hatred it is! You’ve never been able to have the sort of girl you wanted – a European girl – isn’t that it? I realized that just now. That’s not a good enough reason to blow up a whole town and massacre women and children.50

This demonstrates clearly the construction of racist and heteronormative boundaries dividing white women from the desire of Arab men. As a constitutive correlative of the easy sexual availability of Oriental women to Western desire, here we see emphasis placed upon the impenetrability of Western women. Again, this is achieved through the delineation of a hierarchy of masculinities which lionizes counter-terrorist masculinity at the expense of Arab terrorist masculinity. The proximity of Esclavier’s sexuality to his capacity for violence is foregrounded at the beginning of the book, when Lartéguy inserts a reference to Maurice Barrès into the dialogue during a backstory episode in which Esclavier begins an illicit relationship on the same day as he kills for the first time: ‘All in one day – bloodshed, ecstasy, and death!’51 Esclavier’s capacity for disinterested sexual conquest is emphasized at the same time as he is initiated into murder; it is no surprise, then, that in the ticking bomb scene, we see that the competition between

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masculinities is lost by Arouche, whose political motivations are psychologized in terms of a juvenile penis envy. This jealousy is a depoliticizing shorthand for the political shallowness attributed to FLN violence: the sexually superior colonial officer infantilizes his victim, and, significantly, trivializes his politics, through the emphasis he places on Arouche’s inability to fulfil his sexual fantasies, his inability to fuck or to kill. Esclavier, embodying experienced conservative maturity, forces a confession from Arouche – a confession that firstly provides the specific information necessary for defusing the terrorist threat, and secondly affirms the superiority of Esclavier’s military masculinity, a virility through which all of Western masculinity per se is affirmed. This competition between mythologized masculinities plays itself out more broadly through the reassertion of white heterosexual family boundaries. In an example of a troubling reciprocity that is prevalent throughout much counter-terrorism fiction, it is implied that if Esclavier doesn’t torture, the integrity of the family – a metonymy for civilization itself – cannot be protected against terrorism. This is the point articulated when, as we saw above, Esclavier’s girlfriend telephones him during the torture scene and reveals that her grandfather has been killed by the FLN. This threat to the family provides Esclavier, who previously doubted whether he could do it, with the moral fortitude to torture Arouche. Much as it is argued that liberal democracy is guaranteed by globally dispersed military might, the individual family is guaranteed by individual acts of interrogational torture. The family is also endangered and disrupted by terrorist attack in 24. Jack loses his wife Teri to a terrorist conspiracy in the first season, and in the subsequent seasons he always has a valuable woman to rescue at the same time as he has to save the nation from terrorists. As examples of this figure we could consider Audrey Raines, Kim Bauer, Marilyn Bauer, Chloe O’Brien and even President Allison Taylor. In 24 the opposition between valuable and dangerous femininities is schematic: good women, marked by sexual fidelity and moral integrity, are rescued by Jack, and bad women (intentionally or not) facilitate terrorism, often through promiscuity or financial independence. This emphasis on protecting domesticity – the nation – through extreme violence is the same impulse embodied in Esclavier: torturing terrorists is a way of insulating white women from the sexually motivated terrorism of Arab men. Torture is represented as

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an efficient way to define and reinforce the borders of the family against the irruption of the excessive and degenerate male energy represented by terrorism.

conclusions First, after 9/11 proves that apocalyptic terrorist catastrophes really are possible, colonial discourses of counterterrorist torture regain, for certain audiences, legitimacy. Central to this legitimacy and plausibility is the idea of necessity, and the ability to identify such necessity is frequently represented as belonging only to an experienced class of warrior. Second, torture is perceived to have an edifying effect on those who suffer it well. Not only does it provide evidence of their strength, but it demonstrates to the survivor-becomeperpetrator the inevitability and value of certain forms of violence. Further, torture is presumed to always reveal truth. Consequently, when there is anything to be revealed, such as the location of a ticking bomb, torture is made to appear to be a value-neutral tool uniquely suited to discover this truth. The ticking bomb scenario provides a frame through which hegemonic counterterrorist masculinity demonstrates its superiority over terrorist masculinity, which is represented as degenerate, cowardly and motivated by sexual inferiority complexes. As well as this competition between masculinities, there is in both texts a reassertion of white heterosexual family boundaries. When the nation-read-as-family is disrupted by terrorist attack, torturers reinstate and reinforce its unity through the violent reaffirmation of heteronormative paternalistic masculinity.

N ote s 1. I of course observe the usual caveats about the problems associated with the term ‘terrorist’. I use the term for convenience, and in no way intend this use to communicate any political judgement. 2. ‘By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the

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social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations – often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions.’ Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in public’, Critical Inquiry, 24/2 (1998), p. 548n. 3. 24 comprises, canonically, eight seasons, a feature-length special (24: Redemption (2008)) and a movie currently being made for theatrical release. 4. For a thorough interrogation and refutation of the ticking bomb scenario, see Bob Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb (London, 2007). 5. Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007), p. 478. Rejali makes several errors regarding plot – he states that the ticking bomb torturer is Boisfeuras, for example, whereas it is Esclavier who gets his hands dirty in this particular episode – but he is for the most part correct in his critique of the role played by masculinity in the novel. 6. 24, Season Four, Episode One, dir. Jon Cassar (Fox TV, 2005). 7. David Sussman, ‘What’s wrong with torture?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33/1 (2005), p. 7. 8. Dónal P. O’Mathúna, ‘The ethics of torture in 24: shockingly banal’, in J. Hart Weed, R. Davis and R. Weed (eds), 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack (Oxford, 2008), Hart p. 99. 9. It must be stressed that I share such objections; my position is that torture is wrong on both deontological and consequentialist grounds. 10. ‘[There has never] been a ticking bomb case in this country. But inevitably one will arise, and we should be prepared to confront it.’ Alan Dershowitz, ‘Want to torture? Get a warrant’, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 January 2002. See also Alan Dershowitz, ‘Tortured reasoning’, in S. Levinson (ed.), Torture: A Collection (Oxford, 2004), pp. 257–280; Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven & London, 2002), especially pp. 131–63. 11. Elaine Scarry, ‘Five errors in the reasoning of Alan Dershowitz’, in Levinson (ed.), Torture: A Collection, p. 282. 12. Utilitarianism, for example, could be employed to argue that when choosing between evils on a cost-benefit basis, torture of one culpable person is preferable to the deaths of many innocent people. Such logic is superficially compelling, until it is observed that there is no robust reason to suppose that torture would directly cause a reduction in innocent suffering. 13. In the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, for example, General van der Merwe testified that ‘there was some sympathy

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

for members [of the police] who used torture in an effort to obtain information which could have led to the saving of lives.’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (2003), vol. 6, section 3, chapter 1, p. 207. This sixth volume of the report is available at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/vol6.pdf Jean Lartéguy, The Centurions, trans. by Xan Fielding (London, 1961), pp. 480–1. David Holloway, 9/11 and the War on Terror (Edinburgh, 2008), p. 7. Although Petraeus is on record opposing torture, he still considers that the narrative contains valuable lessons about military life. See Sophia Raday, ‘David Petraeus wants this French novel back in print! Why Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions appeals to our generation’s most influential military strategist’, Slate, 27 January 2011, available at http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2011/01/david_petraeus_wants_this_french_novel_back_in_ print.single.html Donald Rumsfeld, for example, uncritically cites the ticking bomb scenario as a situation in which it would be difficult to morally object to torture. See Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York, 2011), p. 585n. Joel Surnow, speaking to Jane Mayer. Jane Mayer, ‘Whatever it takes: The politics of the man behind 24’, The New York, 19 February 2007, available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219 fa_fact_ mayer?currentPage=all. Emphasis in original. Peter Morey, ‘Terrorvision: race, nation and muslimness in Fox’s 24’, Interventions, 12/2 (2010), p. 255. For a summary of the intellectual development of hegemonic masculinity, see John Tosh, ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the history of gender’, in S. Dudink, K. Hagemann and J. Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War (Manchester, 2004), pp. 41–58. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, 2005 [1995]), p. 83. See for example Tracy Xavia Karner, ‘Engendering violent men: oral histories of military masculinities’, in L. H. Bowker (ed.), Masculinities and Violence (London, 1998), pp. 197–232. Luise White, ‘Precarious conditions: a note on counter-insurgency in Africa after 1945’, in S. D’Cruze and A. Rao (eds), Violence, Vulnerability & Embodiment: Gender and History (Oxford, 2005), p. 113. Apocalypse Now, dir. Francis Ford Coppola (Paramount Pictures, 1979). 24, Season Seven, Episode Four, dir. Brad Turner (Fox TV, 2009).

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26. ‘To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall virtues.’ Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (New York, 1988 [1651]), p. 66. It may in fact be more accurate to describe the ticking bomb scenario’s appeal to extralegal exceptionality as Schmittian, but as Hobbes’ state of nature is Carl Schmitt’s ultimate referent, it is for the sake of brevity that I have restricted my discussion here to Hobbes. 27. Brecher: Torture and the Ticking Bomb, p. 37. 28. 24, Season Seven, Episode One, dir. Jon Cassar (Fox TV, 2009). 29. Uwe Steinhoff uses an intellectually dishonest reading of Dirty Harry to justify emergency torture in cases of kidnapping. He stops short of advocating ticking bomb torture, but concludes that interrogational torture of suspects whose guilt is undisputed can be justified in cases where innocent lives are at stake. See Uwe Steinhoff, ‘Torture: the case for Dirty Harry and against Alan Dershowitz’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 23/3 (2006), pp. 337–53. 30. Sharon Sutherland and Sara Swan, ‘‘Tell me where the bomb is or I will kill your son’: situational morality on 24’ in S. Peacock (ed.), Reading 24: TV Against the Clock (London, 2007), p. 120. 31. Lartéguy: The Centurions, p. 210. 32. Lartéguy: The Centurions, p. 70. 33. Michael Schwartz, ‘What the French army needs: a fighting man’s ideology’, The Harvard Crimson, 24 February 1962, available at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1962/2/24/what-the-french-army-needs-a/ 34. ‘Having learned about efficacité in the frigid but precise universe of the Vietminh re-education camp, there will be no substitute for victory.’ David O’Connell, ‘Jean Lartéguy: a popular phenomenon’, The French Review, 45/6 (1972), pp. 1089–90. 35. Rejali: Torture and Democracy, p. 545. 36. 24, Season Seven, Episode Eleven, dir. Brad Turner (Fox TV, 2009). 37. 24, Season Four, Episode Eighteen, dir. Ian Toynton (Fox TV, 2005). This fictional NGO is very obviously a malicious caricature of Amnesty International. 38. 24, Season Three, Episode Four, dir. Ian Toynton (Fox TV, 2004). 39. 4 Maccabees 18:3. The narrative and its theological exegesis are laid down in four apocryphal books of the Bible. See 2 Maccabees 7 for the narrative of these martyrdoms, and 4 Maccabees for their doctrinal implications:

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40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

the immortality of the soul and the redemptive value of martyrdom. The heroic content and connotation of the endurance of torture is explicitly stated: ‘For all people, even their torturers, marvelled at their courage and endurance, and they became the cause of the downfall of tyranny over their nation. By their endurance they conquered the tyrant, and thus their native land was purified through them.’ 4 Maccabees 1:11. See also Howard Fast’s historical novel My Glorious Brothers (Naperville, 2011 [1948]) for an example of the contemporary resonance of the Maccabees to Israelis. Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London, 2007), p. 46. Page duBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World (New York, 1991). See esp. pp. 9–34 and 145–57. Eisenman identifies this representational logic, in which torture victims affirmatively acknowledge their inferiority to the torturing power, as a pathos formula, and he traces it throughout Western art. See Eisenman: The Abu Ghraib Effect, pp. 60–72. A particular mode of military thinking emerged from the Algerian War of Independence and its predecessors in Indochina and Morocco; it crystallized as Counter-revolutionary War Theory, which emphasized the legitimacy of torture by describing it as a battlefield expedient. See for example, Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, trans. by Daniel Lee (Westport, Conn. & London, 2006 [1961]) or Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Counter-terrorism and Torture in Algeria 1955–1957, trans. by Robert L. Miller (New York, 2006 [2001]). For a detailed critique of this military discourse, see Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, 2008), esp. pp. 15–33. 24, Season Eight, Episode Twenty-One, dir. Milan Cheylov (Fox TV, 2010). Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and Los Angeles California, 2001), p. 2. Emphasis in original. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (London, 1965), p. 33. Nell Irvine Painter, The History of White People (New York & London, 2010), p. 28. Martin Amis, ‘Conspiracy theories, and Takfir”, in The Second Plane: September 11: 2001–2007 (London, 2008), p. 142. See ‘The last days of Muhammad Atta’, in Amis: The Second Plane, pp. 95–124. Lartéguy: The Centurions, p. 480.

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51. Lartéguy: The Centurions, p. 49. These words do much work. As well as highlighting the scene’s associations between murder and sex, its reference to Barrès introduces an explicit politics: populist, anti-Semitic, rightist. For an overview of Barrès, see Zeev Sternhell, ‘National Socialism and Antisemitism: the case of Maurice Barrès’, Journal of Contemporary History, 8/4 (1973), pp. 47–66.

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11

Gangsters, Thugs, Savages, Terrorists? Representations of ‘The Enemy’ in Britain’s Small Wars Aaron Edwards*

Nationalist extremism is, after all, a political disease which has needed no more than the power of its own contagion to spread from Europe to the continent of Africa and beyond.1 Firing at target circles (cut-out collapsible men were a post-war consequence of poor Second World War marksmanship) was not the same as seeing a man’s expressions through rifle sights before blowing half his face away.2

Britain has a long and distinguished history of waging ‘small wars’ against irregular opponents such as insurgents and terrorists. Yet, during the Cold War and the decolonization of its empire, Britain’s conceptualization of ‘the enemy’ changed dramatically. This chapter assesses three cases – Kenya in the 1950s, Aden in the 1960s and Northern Ireland in the 1970s/1980s – where Britain was locked in a protracted struggle with opponents whom British propaganda portrayed as ‘thugs’, ‘gangsters’, ‘savages’ and ‘terrorists’. These wars were as much about safeguarding the legitimacy of British actions on the world stage as they were about ‘starving the terrorist’, to paraphrase prime minister Margaret Thatcher, of ‘the oxygen of publicity on which they depend’.3 Drawing on extensive empirical research – including archival sources and eyewitness testimonies – this chapter explores what Caroline Elkins has referred to as ‘the dark heart of colonial empire’.4 It argues that the reduction of the enemy to an abstract symbol of ‘fanatic’, ‘cut-throat’ or ‘reckless savage’ was a crucial component in the battle for political legitimacy that lay at the heart of Britain’s small wars. In this sense, as Joanna Bourke 203

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has cleverly argued, the physical act of killing another human being becomes ‘the ultimate transgression’.5 Moreover, the chapter delineates how the image of the enemy became symbolically important for the operational effectiveness of Britain’s armed forces in the much wider context of prevailing international norms and rules on the use of force. In other words, by seeking to objectify the concept of the enemy as something other than ‘human’, Britain risked undermining the moral and legal basis of combat and served to do irreparable damage to its standing as a liberal democracy.6

t h e c o n c e p t o f ‘ t h e e n e my ’ Commenting on the release of video footage depicting United States soldiers desecrating the bodies of fallen Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, respected journalist Sebastian Junger noted how ‘[c]learly, the impulse to desecrate the enemy comes from a very dark and primal place in the human psyche. Once in a while, those impulses are going to break through.’7 Although it is tempting to pass moral judgement on human behaviour under the most extreme of circumstances, it is nonetheless important, urges Junger, to see these actions in their proper context. While abhorrent to most human beings who have never been to war, the sight of soldiers gloating over the bodies of those they have killed in the heat of battle, Junger argues, is made possible by societies accustomed to the dehumanization of the enemy. Historically, the tension between, on the one hand, following the laws of war (also known as international humanitarian law or the law of armed conflict) and, on the other, being ruthless in combat is a dilemma that soldiers have had to grapple with since war became a lawful way to solve political differences by other means. Indeed, authors like Junger argue that the basest human instinct will always shine through for primordialism is the default position assumed by most combatants in warfare. Earlier writers, including the eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, have probed the moral basis of war more deeply. In Rousseau’s view, ‘[w]ar is in no way a relationship of man with man but a relationship between States, in which individuals are enemies only by accident; not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers.’8 There is a sense, however, in which the twentieth century has witnessed the grim outworkings of both of these complementary perspectives on the horrors of war. In his groundbreaking study

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of human agency in the context of the structural process of the Holocaust, historian Christopher Browning observed how: War, a struggle between ‘our people’ and ‘the enemy,’ creates a polarized world in which ‘the enemy’ is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation. War is the most conducive environment in which governments can adopt ‘atrocity by policy’ and encounter few difficulties in implementing it.9

Given that the objectification of these violent acts tends to occur, to a greater or lesser extent, in the immediate context of war, it is worth examining Britain’s record in this regard, especially given its predilection for engaging in ‘small wars’ throughout the twentieth century. As the three cases examined in this chapter show, British intervention in Kenya in the 1950s, Aden in the 1960s and Northern Ireland in the 1970s/1980s all demonstrate that even the most liberal democratic of states seek to denigrate the legitimacy of their opponents by playing upon pejorative stereotypes in war. Whether conventional or irregular in character, states have repeatedly directed considerable energy and resources towards psychological operations as a means of starving their enemies of the oxygen of publicity. However, as this chapter concludes, such behaviour should be judged, not according to the primordial instincts of man’s inhumanity to man, but as part of a much broader political context that permitted such activities to occur in the first place.

‘o n s a f a r i’ w i t h b o b b i e e r s k i n e i n ke nya On the evening of 24 January 1953 a quadruple murder took place in North Kinangop in Kenya’s Central Province, 40 miles north of Nairobi, which would have immediate and far-reaching repercussions for life in this British colony. A gang of men from the ethnic Kikuyu tribe, acting under the auspices of the anti-colonialist Mau Mau movement, entered the farm of Roger and Esme Ruck, which they shared with their young son Michael, whereupon they lured Mr and Mrs Ruck out of their farmhouse and promptly hacked them to death in the garden with pangas (a type of machete). One of the Ruck’s farmhands, a young boy, was also cut to pieces in the frenzied attack. Having murdered Mr and Mrs Ruck, the gang then broke into the house and butchered the Rucks’ son as he slept in his bed. All of the bodies were badly mutilated.

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After stealing a shotgun and pistol, as well as other household trophy items, the gang fled the scene. Pictures of the corpses clearly show the depravity to which the Mau Mau movement was prepared to sink in 1950s Kenya.10 Politically, the Ruck family murders ‘sent a shock wave through the settler community’.11 Shortly afterwards, 1,500 Europeans and a handful of Asians held a demonstration outside Government House in Nairobi. The assembled crowd had come to see the new governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, but were prevented from advancing towards the building by a detachment of African askaris (armed policemen) who surrounded the building. Taking umbrage at having been met at the point of rifle bayonets, held by men they disparagingly referred to as ‘dirty niggers’, the protestors surged through the cordon and marched up the steps to the front entrance where they were again faced down, this time by more senior European officers.12 Following a tense standoff, two spokesmen were begrudgingly received by Baring, who politely requested that the crowd disperse peacefully. Following an address by the settler leader, Michael Blundell, the demonstrators broke up. Shortly after the protest, a top secret intelligence report noted how the Ruck murders, ‘have engendered a bitter hatred of the Kikuyu tribe as a whole, and determination to remove these people from the settled areas has gained immensely during the past week’.13 More than anything else, the murders personified a deep-rooted insecurity shared by many white settlers towards the local African population. Indeed, the ‘symbolic weight which the Ruck family bore in the settlers’ collective imagination’ was far-reaching.14 It fed not only demands on Baring’s administration for further military assistance from Britain, which he readily conceded, but also some settlers’ demands for ‘a wholesale extermination of the Kikuyu population’.15 Within hours of making his request for troops, London promptly dispatched three more King’s African Rifles (KAR) battalions to supplement the two existing battalions already in Kenya. They also appointed Major-General Robert ‘Looney’ Hinde as Director of Operations ‘to jolly things along’.16 Matters were finally taken seriously by the London government when prime minister Sir Winston Churchill sent out General Sir George ‘Bobbie’ Erskine as General Officer Commanding to replace the embattled and ineffectual Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Cameron. Erskine set about his task with sincerity and hardened resolve. In a broadcast he made to the colony, Erskine told his listeners that, even though he might have to take stern measures to restore respect for the law nobody need doubt that I believe in justice. I desire to see this country returned to a

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normal process of government where justice and progress for all races and creeds can be developed in an atmosphere of peace.

Privately, Erskine placed much faith in wider public opinion in Kenya, noting how, within a week of his arrival, that ‘as we discredit Mau Mau and make it unfashionable that public opinion will be able to express itself and will certainly do us a favour’.17 Erskine lost little time in reassuring his immediate military boss in Whitehall, Field-Marshal Sir John Harding, how ‘[i]t is therefore most important that we should show without any shadow of doubt that we are determined to wipe out MAU MAU [sic]’.18 The tough language employed by Erskine certainly curried favour amongst the settlers, though he remained vigilant against the Mau Mau, judging them a ruthless and capable opponent. It was in this context that Erskine authorized several high profile operations in the principal rebel strongholds of Fort Hall and the Aberdares, as well as other mountainous areas around Central Province. Just as the British had done in Malaya, they dispatched aggressive patrols to dominate the ground. Erskine impressed upon his men that: Mau Mau must be hunted. We must not be satisfied with a passive defensive outlook. It is no use waiting for these gangs to come and shoot up Home Guards or police stations. We have to go out and find these gangs and hunt them down.19

The first major operation against the Mau Mau – codenamed ‘Operation Buttercup’ – was conducted by the British Army between 23 June and 8 July 1953 in the Fort Hall District. It was an all-out offensive operation designed to place Britain’s irregular opponents on the back-foot. Shortly after the operation, the left-wing New Statesman magazine published a poem which seemed to capture the essence of Britain’s war against the Mau Mau: Operation Buttercup! Soldiers on safari! Regiments are mopping-up, The ragged Kuke their quarry. The game is tracked, the hunt’s away, The Fusiliers to the Devons say ‘How many Kukes have bagged today?’ In Kenya on safari. But the General cries as the bombers roar,

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‘Remember Britain’s mission. This isn’t a full-scale, all-out war, But a punitive expedition’. One side has weapons and planes galore, One side no ammunition, And that’s the difference between a war And a punitive expedition.20

Whether Britain thought of anti-Mau Mau operations as a form of ‘human safari’ became a moot point, especially as the military campaign took an increasingly coercive turn. Proscription bombing, penetrative thrusts by ground forces and an extensive detention system run by colonial administrators all served to create the impression of Kenya in the 1950s as a draconian police state. Interestingly, the masculine figure of the British soldier as heroic hunter figure, complete with his trusted Askari by his side, dominated representations of the Emergency in the world’s press. It was not long before the British Army had accomplished its objective of clearing rebels from key areas; some 241 insurgents were killed and 193 captured in Operation Buttercup.21 Arguably, the soldiers’ tough and uncompromising operations against Mau Mau succeeded not only because of their coercive edge but because they had portrayed their enemies as lacking in basic humanity. Terms such as ‘gangsters’, ‘thugs’ and ‘savages’ came to define Mau Mau in a way that was designed to sap the legitimacy of their armed struggle. General Erskine announced at a subsequent press conference that ‘[c]asualty figures were not the only, or even the best, criterion of success.’22 Indeed, the irony was, of course, that despite such a tough stance in the face of the Mau Mau challenge, the British were fighting blind. They relied disproportionately on blunt tactics such as carpet bombing of what they called ‘prohibited areas’, where they had designated large swathes of Kenya’s Central Province rebel strongholds. Such operations increased in frequency in 1953, until the intelligence picture became clearer by 1954, partly due to the efforts of individual security force personnel like Ian Henderson and Frank Kitson, who were given a free hand to hunt down the Mau Mau and responded to the challenge they posed with unconventional tactics. This necessitated developing new techniques, including establishing so-called ‘counter-gangs’, whereby small groups of Kenyans would disguise themselves as Mau Mau

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and, armed with pangas, rampage across game reserves in a way that mimicked Mau Mau practices. Their aim was to blend into the rugged terrain and interact with real members of the Mau Mau before killing them. The connection to the masculine activity of hunting is curious, especially given that the emphasis became very much about outsmarting opponents, having them turn on each other, rather than seeking a conclusive military outcome in open battle. British military tactics in combating this highly clandestine cult-based nationalism were overly aggressive and tended to apply military strategies to deal with the Kikuyu ethnic group as if it had no basis for protesting at the socio-economic hardship they faced throughout the British colony. Nonetheless, by adhering to a set of superstitions and performing ritualistic murders the Kikuyu also opened themselves to a sustained propaganda campaign by the British which warned Kenyans of the dangers of the terror unfolding in their country. It complemented a relentless British counterinsurgency drive to destroy the Mau Mau by plainly coercive tactics which met with instant approval amongst the settlers and even attracted favourable words of encouragement from the Conservative government in London. However, the Labour left, while opposing Mau Mau violence, were not convinced that the government had been successful in highlighting the real issue in Kenya. As Labour’s Colonial Affairs spokesman, Jim Griffiths pointed out in a House of Commons debate ‘[i]t is clear from these that we have failed so far to convince the people in Africa, in Kenya and in other Territories in Africa, that the struggle against Mau Mau is a struggle against terror.’23 The truth was that the grammar of war had taken on a symbolism that reduced the Mau Mau challenge to a one-dimensional criminal campaign, without addressing the varied motivations for some Kikuyu having resorted to the use of force. By proscribing the constitutionally based Kenya African Union and jailing its leader Jomo Kenyatta, Britain was forcing many Kikuyu to make the stark choice between remaining loyal to the Crown or throwing their weight behind the Mau Mau campaign. Perhaps unsurprisingly the Mau Mau campaign continued into 1955. Erskine was soon moved on to a new posting, though by now his successor, General Sir Patrick Lathbury, had opted to increase secret operations against the Mau Mau, which now found itself in the throes of defeat. Large numbers had been captured, killed or surrendered. Indeed, Erskine had initiated the surrender process early on in his tenure as GOC, with a prominent Mau Mau commander, General China, opting to work alongside the Kenyan authorities to encourage other fighters to follow his lead.

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If nothing else, Erskine’s coercive drive to hunt down his Mau Mau opponent worked in crushing the movement and starving it of much-needed support. By pursuing the twin-track approach of tough tactics and low-level talks with insurgents, the colonial authorities were able to turn the tide on the Mau Mau by 1954. The rebels did themselves few favours in orchestrating largescale attacks against Kikuyu loyalists who chose to side with the British. In a brutal civil war of attrition it has been estimated that over 25,000 Africans lost their lives versus a handful of Europeans.24 The Kenyan case illustrates how effectively a debasement of the enemy worked to Britain’s advantage, particularly when the government was able to treat the emergency as a purely internal colonial matter. As this chapter has highlighted, British attempts to sap the legitimacy of the Mau Mau movement took on an increasingly gender-based character. In the metaphor of the hunting party on safari we have a sense of strong, masculine response being brought to bear on an increasingly racialized notion of the enemy as a deviant race of ‘savages’. This notion of the enemy as a deviant played into the hands of those colonial administrators who detested the superstitions of African tribal society. It was their attempts to force the Kikuyu to civilize their practices which would attract most condemnation and controversy, particularly since Britain presided over a harsh process of dehumanizing achieved through the actuality of detention without trial.

m a d m i tc h a n d a r g y l l l aw i n a d e n The preparedness of British authorities to privately negotiate with those whom they had deemed publicly to be ‘gangsters’, ‘thugs’, ‘savages’ and ‘terrorists’ is curious given the propensity to deny them any measure of political legitimacy. However, talking to the enemy had been firmly established as a complementary means for Britain to deal with its opponents in the last battles of an ailing empire. In December 1963 a state of emergency was declared by the High Commissioner of Aden, Kennedy Trevaskis, to deal with the upsurge in attacks against British colonial authorities and their allies in the fledgling Federation of South Arabia. As strikes, large-scale demonstrations, riots, bombings and shootings by the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) continued to gather pace, Britain’s security forces struggled to contain terrorism and subversion in its last remaining Middle East outpost. By the mid-1960s the British Labour

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government had reneged on its promises to the federation to maintain a base in South Arabia and the imminent withdrawal of troops was announced in the publication of the February 1966 Defence Review. Worryingly, violence intensified in the first quarter of 1967, with over 300 armed incidents, mostly involving selective assassinations, sniping and grenade attacks, being recorded against British troops.25 The effect on British service families was highlighted in a briefing for the Chief of the General Staff by Brigadier Charles Dunbar, who told his boss that ‘[w]e may ultimately have to choose between our efforts to leave stability behind and our need to protect Brit [sic.] servicemen and civilians.’ Attacks against the police had been a reality for some time and a co-ordinated assassination campaign soon removed key figures from the ranks of the CID and Aden Special Branch. The militants even claimed as a victim the mild-mannered Speaker of the Aden Legislative Council, Sir Arthur Charles, who was gunned down as he returned from a workout at his local tennis club on 1 September 1965.26 By June 1967 the security situation had deteriorated with the outbreak of the Arab–Israeli Six Day War, which administered a knock-on effect deep into the Arabian Peninsula. As a direct consequence, Arab soldiers and policemen mutinied and fired on British troops returning from rifle practice near the sprawling Khormaksar military base; nine members of the Royal Corps of Transport were killed outright. An attack later that morning on a reconnaissance platoon in the troublesome Arab neighbourhood of Crater district saw over half a dozen casualties. By mid-afternoon on 20 June 1967, later labelled ‘Black Tuesday’, 22 British soldiers and one civilian lay dead. In an astonishing act of imperial hard-headedness, the Commanding Officer of the incoming 1st Battalion, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell, vowed to retake the district for the colonial authorities. His plan was soon rejected by a higher command nervous at the prospects of political fallout. It was to be two weeks before Mitchell and his men re-entered Crater. When they came, the military occupation of Crater was swift and firm, with British troops taking up positions in key buildings from which they continued to dominate the high ground for the remainder of the summer months until withdrawal on 30 November. Despite the tough imposition of ‘Argyll law’ in Crater from early July – the violence continued to spike in other towns across Aden colony. Daily reports were received of terrorists opening fire on British patrols with Kalashnikov rifles and the frequent lobbing of grenades, an NLF specialism, in the neighbouring district of Sheik Othman. One situation report noted how there

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were over 41 armed incidents in one 24 hour period, ranging from heavy machine gun fire on patrols to mortar attacks on piquets.27 Even though soldiers returned fire in self-defence, setting up snap vehicle checkpoints and deploying Ferret armoured cars to increase security, the insurgents remained undeterred. Over the ensuing weeks the NLF stepped up its armed struggle, in large part to take pressure off the ongoing occupation of Crater. A statement issued to its rank-and-file urged NLF fighters and supporters to violently oppose the British: The entry of British troops into the town of Crater after the siege cannot be considered an act for regaining a lost dignity, but a foolish act. Our bullets and grenades will continue to cause fear in the hearts of the Scottish ‘red rats’. When will Britain understand that the solution does not lie in continuing along the wrong path but in correcting the mistakes ... When will Britain learn this?28

This was typical of the NLF’s tough, paternalistic rhetoric, necessitated by its need to battle its rivals in FLOSY, as much as the British, for the hearts and minds of the people of South Arabia. Anti-colonialist rhetoric emanating from insurgent groups shared much in common with Egypt’s official propaganda Cairo Radio, which sought to undermine the legitimacy of British imperialism in the region. The first real Public Relations war was now being fought between Britain and its enemies, both of whom tried to portray the other as indignant or fearful. For its part, the NLF was now convinced that ‘the use of force and violence, [will] achieve what political methods have failed to achieve’29 and sought to create the impression that they were seizing power rather than having it conferred upon them by a British government eager to ‘cut the knot’. Unsurprisingly, in London the upsurge in violence was greeted with panic. The Labour government sought to use it as an excuse to expedite the evacuation of British troops. Shooting incidents and bomb attacks increased in severity throughout the summer months as British troops were slowly withdrawn from Aden. Internal security operations remained chaotic. While still clinging to somewhat nominal control over the rebellious Crater district, Britain followed no deliberate plan beyond trying desperately to seek an accommodation with the NLF as soon as it became clear that they had triumphed over their rivals in FLOSY. Although the focus had now switched

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to ensuring that withdrawal took place in an orderly fashion, the politicians now turned to the soldiers to shoulder the burden. In the absence of a clear political agenda, the media latched on to Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, christening him ‘Mad Mitch’ in recognition of his tough handling of violence in Crater. The image of a clean-shaven, charismatic, handsome and articulate British officer contrasted readily with that of the insurgent who the world’s media presented as dishevelled, unclean and inarticulate. In his briefings to the media Mitchell played up the lack of political direction coming from London and on more than one occasion pointed to a ‘national malaise’, he felt was emerging as ‘the British civil and military authorities thrust their ostrich necks deeper and deeper into the Arabian sands in the hope that, by pretending there was no emergency, this wish could become fact’.30 After his retirement from the Army Mitchell told the Sunday Express how he: had already displeased my superiors when, on arrival, a few days before, I was interviewed for Aden Forces Radio and, when asked what I thought of the security situation, had replied that Aden was ‘the least buttonedup place I had ever known’.31

Recognizing how he had over-stepped the mark, he lost no time in explaining his rationale for these cutting remarks: This was tactless, but true. I knew what I was talking about. Unlike both General Tower and Brigadier Jeffries I had constantly been on active service since the end of the Second World War and, of the six campaigns in which I had taken part, those in Palestine, Cyprus, East Africa, and Borneo had involved counter-terrorism or internal security work or both.32

This gung-ho approach to operations irked Mitchell’s superiors, including former Director of Publicity for the Army, cum GOC, Major General Philip Tower, who tried on several occasions to censor this vocal battalion commander. Matters were not helped much by the lack of cooperation between the British Army and the local police. Mitchell and other officers detected a disconnection in civil–military relations, publicly rebuking a government policy that seemed to be aimed towards placating local terrorists and mutineers. Indeed, Tower’s Chief of Staff, Brigadier Charles Dunbar, even went as far as to observe how there was ‘still good material to build on in the police

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force but this will not last long under the present leadership’. 33 Politicians gave a mixed reception to military operations in Aden, with Labour MP Tam Dalyell alleging that Mitchell had contravened orders issued to him by his superiors. It later transpired that Mitchell had not, in fact, disobeyed orders. He was a scapegoat for something altogether more sinister. Prior to the occupation of Crater secret negotiations had been taking place involving the Chief of Staff, Middle East Command, Brigadier Charles Dunbar, the Commissioner of the Police, Peter Owen, and the NLF, which would have paved the way for British forces to re-enter Crater peacefully.34 Indeed, further analysis of the situation reveals that both of these civil and military representatives were talking with Abdul Hadi, who was purportedly ‘favourable to the NLF’, and ‘he almost certainly knew that we knew this’. But ‘our people were negotiating with the senior Arab officer in the police on the spot and as far as I know we were not negotiating with the NLF as such’.35 Cleverly twisting the facts, this document exposes the calculated nature of the British approach, which was to ascertain the strongest group capable of forming a government after independence. For some time the Labour government had been investing a disproportionate amount of diplomatic resources to seek out leaders to hand over power to. In November 1967, Wilson’s government authorized a delegation, led by Lord Shackleton, to meet NLF leaders in Geneva, Switzerland. The foreign secretary, George Brown, informed the House of Commons in confident mood in mid-November: I believe that when the dust has died down, not only this country, not only Arabia and the Middle East, but also hon. Members opposite, will realise that, given the situation from which we started, we have done a tremendous job in getting it sorted out.36

Aden demonstrated how willing British colonial authorities could maintain the fiction that the individuals with whom they were working to hand over power were more moderate than they actually were. As the British f lag was lowered in the last colonial outpost in the Middle East the NLF set about establishing a new government. It was not long before they turned their gunsights away from British troops and towards each other. The descent into civil war was not untypical of decolonization processes elsewhere which also tended to affect other European empires to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, Aden proved that Britain’s soldiers could employ the media to good effect in expediting the fortunes of their overt

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military campaign and promoting the ‘clean’ and masculine image of the British Army.

t h e p r o p a g a n d a wa r i n n o r t h e r n i r e l a n d Britain’s tendency to challenge the political legitimacy of its opponents during these military campaigns was not only the preserve of far-flung colonial outposts. Indeed, within months of evacuating its forces from South Arabia it was faced with a new and more serious challenge closer to home. The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland drew the majority Protestant unionist community into confrontation and, finally, direct conflict with the minority Catholic nationalist community. Unhappy at the sluggish pace of reform, nationalists pushed for a greater redistribution of civil rights in employment, housing and the electoral franchise in the 1960s. Meanwhile, a fundamentalist preacher, the Reverend Ian Paisley, mobilized counter-demonstrators on the streets, which culminated in widespread civil disobedience, riots and bombings, mainly in the urban cities of Belfast and Londonderry. Violence reached a crescendo in August 1969, leading the increasingly embattled Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to request the deployment of troops to keep the peace between the warring factions. By 1971 the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) had emerged as the cutting edge of nationalist disenchantment, posing a serious challenge to the local security forces. Here, at least, Britain could call upon the expertise of its policy-makers, spies and soldiers, who had shown considerable competency in applying vigorous counterinsurgency tactics in an altogether different setting. The tendency of the British government to maintain the fiction that they were merely ‘refereeing the fight’ continued to dictate policy throughout the 1970s.37 Indeed, without a political solution to the ‘Irish problem’ in sight, the government placed security in the hands of the military, which initiated a robust counter-insurgency campaign primarily against the IRA. A lack of intelligence and descent into chaos ensued, with sectarian murders between republican and loyalist paramilitaries compounding an already complex security scene. Increasingly beleaguered and marginalized by British politicians after 1972, the RUC found itself hamstrung in the normal procedure of civilian policing by an over-eager military who felt that the defeat of the IRA was within its grasp.38 Irreparable damage came in the form of British policy seemingly accepting republican propaganda that the RUC was structurally

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biased against Catholics and could not be trusted. Importantly, as invaluable sociological research has shown, the RUC could not be properly understood as a homogeneous ethnically biased monolith, particularly since it performed an ordinary policing function as well as a paramilitary role.39 Seasoned commentators writing about the use of propaganda by the principal protagonists in the ‘Troubles’ have suggested that the ‘media have a central part to play in the process by which some problems emerge onto the political agenda and come to be seen as important’. It is in this context that the British government and the republican movement have ‘regarded public relations as a central part of their respective strategies’.40 Political scientist Paul Dixon has done much to clarify our thinking about the effects of what he distinguishes between the ‘real’ war and the ‘propaganda’ war. The propaganda war, he argues, plays both a complementary and supportive role alongside the main effort of the real war. As Dixon suggests, the ‘propaganda war sees participants demonizing the enemy in order to mobilize support for the “war effort”, gain external support and exhibit determination to win’. However, as Dixon also admits, the ‘triumph of propaganda over reality’ can have both positive and negative repercussions. In terms of the former it can reduce the demonization of opponents while also allowing leverage in negotiations and the setting of the agenda for the post-conflict phase, and, in terms of the latter, can also sustain violence and the threat of violence.41 As it had done in Kenya and Aden, Britain could count on talented military officers with a penchant for subterfuge to staff a highly effective counterpropaganda machine in the face of a resolute enemy. Individuals like Brigadier Frank Kitson, Commander of 39 Brigade between 1971 and 1973, and Colonel Maurice Tugwell, who served as head of the Information Policy Unit in Headquarters Northern Ireland during the same period, became implacable enemies of the Provisionals. Tugwell, in particular, thought that terrorism in Ireland and elsewhere was ‘a component of a wider revolutionary strategy, as in the decolonization campaigns of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s’.42 Just as Irish terrorists were aping earlier ethno-nationalist groups, Tugwell articulated the case that the army should adhere to a similar logic to that which had sustained it in earlier colonial emergencies. In this he was moderately successful insofar as British Army doctrine, its compilation of best practice, characterized insurgents and terrorists in the following unflattering manner: The insurgent is usually careless of death. He has no mental doubts, is little troubled by humanitarian sentiments, and is not moved by

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slaughter and mutilation. His upbringing and standard of living make him well fitted to hardship. He requires little sustenance and comfort, and can look after himself. The insurgent has a keen and practised eye for country and has the ability to move across it, at speed, on his feet. He is capable of being trained to use modern and complicated weapons to good effect.43

Such paternalism ran like a guiding thread through much British doctrine and thinking at the time. Arguably, it had been learned in the public schools of the Home counties and nurtured in the plains, jungles and deserts of empire. As they had been in Kenya and Aden, Information Operations became increasingly geared towards denying the IRA political legitimacy in the eyes of the general public. However, it risked much in that it sapped the ability of army officers to see every new problem afresh. It was perhaps of little surprise that intelligence remained poor during the 1970s as the conceptualization of republican terrorists remained discretely one-dimensional. British attempts to further justify their limited understanding of the threat posed by the IRA often sought out concrete examples of individual IRA actions which could be portrayed as indiscriminate and injurious to community relations. Premature explosions, the killing of women and children, and devastating bomb attacks in Protestant centres were all played up at opportune moments, necessitating a careful counter-information policy by the Provisionals. As the Director of Publicity for Sinn Fein, Danny Morrison put it: It was important not to hand a propaganda victory to the enemy ... You had international opinion, which often tended to be ... in a sense less biased, more cynical, you know, they would have watched Britain for decades, from abroad, seen how it handled things ... They’ve been in ... Aden, they’ve been in Egypt, they’ve been in Palestine. They made a fuck up everywhere they were. They were eventually forced to decolonise, particularly after the Second World War.44

In practical terms the Provisionals became adept at ‘armed propaganda’, a type of activity that saw IRA attacks performed to order and the preparation of statements issued to create the impression that their violence was both rational and strategic, husbanding all actions towards a much broader political end goal.45 The narrative became the central dynamic designed to generate sympathy for the terrorist’s objectives while, in later years, increasing the political legitimacy of its political wing Sinn Fein.

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The propaganda coups scored by both sides in the ‘Troubles’ point to the complexity of the tropes designed to highlight the legitimacy of the asymmetric conflict between the British state and its longstanding opponents in the IRA. That meaningful consideration was given to the importance of narrative in shaping IRA actions is disclosed by Danny Morrison, who admitted the centrality of visual imagery to republican propaganda in the IRA hunger strikes of 1980–81: When we issued that famous photograph, iconic photograph, of Bobby Sands we got that photograph well out before the British suddenly realised ‘oh my God, this image here’ – let’s release a photograph of him with a number plate on him, you know after his arrest, where he’s pretty haggard and, you know, doesn’t know what future he’s facing. Whereas that photograph is a very smiling, almost ‘hippie type’ photograph. You know, very accessible, very warm person. There’s nothing dark or sinister about him. Whereas the photograph they were trying to issue ... it was too late. Even when they were trying to flog this to the media, the media were saying, ‘here, hang on a minute, that’s the image that’s out there’. So there’s the international audience and at times that has been particularly attuned to the struggle ... International public opinion actually sees much more clearly what is going on here than the British public.46

Britain’s modus operandi of starving their opponents of any semblance of normality is certainly much in evidence here. However, it was the recognition that conducting military and policing operations against terrorism, by itself, was not enough and required a vigorous assault via a sophisticated propaganda war.47 That the IRA was keen to exploit these opportunities in order to reinforce the legitimacy of their narrative continued unabated throughout the ‘Troubles’ and into the phase known colloquially as the ‘peace process’. Despite British government attempts to silence the Provisionals’ narrative, the organization was able to ensure that an alternative message seeped out into public consciousness which, in many respects, permitted the IRA to facilitate an end to its ‘armed struggle’ without the attainment of its objectives in 2005. What the Northern Ireland case demonstrates is that caricatures of an erstwhile opponent meant that poor decisions were taken on the basis of a misunderstanding of the Provisional IRA’s objectives, the extent of its support-base and of the community which ultimately spawned and sustained its long campaign of terror. British moves to dominate the media coverage of

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the conflict may well have marginalized the Provisionals’ subversive message, but it nonetheless prolonged its armed campaign. In the end, it was the dialectical positions taken by individuals inside the Provisional movement which brought about peace, not solely the application of persuasion or coercion by the British state.

conclusion The dehumanization of the enemy is not a new phenomenon in war. However, in Britain’s ‘small wars’, representing irregular opponents such as the Mau Mau, NLF or Provisional IRA as being devoid of scruples, morals or values, served a three-fold political purpose. First, it allowed Britain to present its colonial role between 1945 and 1968 as a virtuous mission designed to bring democracy to an ailing empire; after 1968 it assisted in maintaining its position as a great power at a time of irreversible decline in its standing in the world. Second, it permitted the armed forces to reconcile the contradictory mission of winning over the ‘hearts and minds’ of local people with a vigorous determination to defeat the IRA. The imperial warriors who had served in a number of colonial hotspots, such as Frank Kitson and Maurice Tugwell, found it difficult to adjust their colonial mindsets to the domesticity of Ulster; this permitted the IRA, amongst other groupings, to portray Britain in a poor light. As Susan Carruthers has observed, in war there are no certainties. The British government may well have taken a pragmatic view of propaganda, insofar as, while ‘words alone were not thought to be sufficient to win battles, they were regarded as weapons which helped shape perceptions of battles, of who deserved to win and lose, and how those battles ought to have been fought’.48 Yet, there is another respect in which Britain’s small wars encouraged a greater efficacy of the media. Clearly, the awkwardness of employing concepts such as ‘terrorism’ is that they are inherently pejorative and, in the words of military historian Paddy Griffith ‘thus [seem] to be an open invitation for double speak and double standards ... to the general detriment of scientific clarity and precision’.49 In an engaging essay written at the end of the Cold War, Griffith argued that ‘[a]mbiguities due to the abuse of language are strongly reinforced by the fact that reporters often enjoy greater freedoms in small wars than in big ones.’50 Therefore, the conclusion one might draw from the three case studies examined above is that the British government

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had a considerable challenge on its hands precisely because the press was more prone to take an independent perspective in each of the three conflicts considered in this chapter, particularly as allegations of human rights abuses demanded greater scrutiny. Furthermore, and despite the British government’s obduracy in the face of investigations by Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross in all three cases, it is clear that we know infinitely more about the domesticity of Northern Ireland than we do about the other two. In this respect, the political context remained nominally one of a liberal democratic state having been challenged by a terrorist group that employed indiscriminate violence. In this context it is difficult to critique the fundamental basis of self-defence, particularly when judging the actions of a democratic state whose actions were enshrined in international law. However, as this chapter has suggested, it is important to consider the processes by which states and their armed forces have been enabled to fight and kill their irregular opponents beyond the legal and constitutional basis of this organized violence. How states represent their non-state enemies in official narrative undoubtedly shapes the war just as much as the physical act of combat itself.

N ote s * The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Ministry of Defence or any other UK government agency. I wish to thank my interviewees for speaking to me and the staffs and trustees of the private papers consulted for permission to quote from material held in their possession. 1. The National Archives, Kew, London (TNA), CO 1035/30, J.V.W. Shaw to T.S. Tull, 23 December 1952. 2. Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: A History of World War II (London, 2010), pp. 370–1. 3. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister to the American Bar Association, 15 July 1985’. Archived at: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106096. Accessed: 10 July 2012. 4. Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, 2005), p. 366. 5. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London, 1999), p. 369.

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6. Colonel David Benest has gone much further than this by arguing strongly that, at times, British soldiers and statesmen disregarded the ‘common law basis for action, with terrible human consequences’. See David Benest, ‘A Liberal Democratic State and COIN: the case of Britain, or why atrocities can still happen’, Civil Wars, 14/1 (March 2012), pp. 29–38. 7. Sebastian Junger, ‘We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy’, Washington Post, 13 January 2012. 8. ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross: Answers to your Questions (Geneva: ICRC, 2004), p. 7. 9. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London, 2001), p. 162. 10. The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), CO 1066/2, ‘Photographs – Ruck Family Murder by Mau Mau Movement, 24 January 1953’. 11. Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-insurgency 1944–1960 (London, 1995), p. 136. 12. Charles Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring: The Last Proconsul (London, 1978), p. 237. 13. TNA, CO 822/377, Political Intelligence Kenya, ‘Top Secret: Kenya Colony Political Intelligence Summary for Period Ending 31 January 1953’. 14. Carruthers: Winning Hearts and Minds, p. 136. 15. Elkins: Britain’s Gulag, p. 43. 16. Anthony Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya, 1952–60 (New York, [1976], 1984), p. 5. 17. Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents (IWM), General Sir George Erskine Papers, 75/134/4, General Erskine to Lord Latham, 16 June 1953. 18. TNA, CO 822/693, Personal Reports by General Sir George Erskine on the Situation in Kenya, ‘Top Secret Report from General Erskine to the CIGS, Field-Marshal Harding, dated 14 June 1953’. 19. Daily Telegraph, 20 June 1953. 20. New Statesman and Nation, 16 July 1953. 21. Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1953. 22. Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1953. 23. House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 16 December 1953, Vol. 522, Col. 406. 24. For more on this under-researched point see Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge, 2009). 25. Jonathan Walker, Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia (Staplehurst, 2005), p. 219.

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26. Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, Shades of Amber: A South Arabia Episode (London, 1968), p. 235. 27. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London (hereafter LHCMA), Major-General Sir Charles Dunbar Papers, 2/2, HQ Aden Brigade Sitrep as at 120700, 12 August 1967. 28. LHCMA, Dunbar Papers, 2/3, ‘The Blazing Hills’, No. 4, 5 July 1967. 29. LHCMA, Dunbar Papers, 2/3. 30. Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell, ‘The truth about Aden by the one man who can tell it ... MAD MITCH’, Sunday Express, 13 October 1968. 31. Sunday Express, 13 October 1968. 32. Sunday Express, 13 October 1968. 33. LHCMA, Dunbar Papers, 2/4, ‘Staff in Confidence: Commissioner of Police – P.G. Owen’. 34. TNA, DEFE 24/1793, JE Pestell to Private Secretary of Minister, ‘Crater Incident’, 15 July 1968. Ironically, Dalyell and Mitchell later became firm friends, particularly after the latter entered the House of Commons as MP for West Aberdeenshire in 1970. 35. TNA, DEFE 24/1793, B L Crowe, FCO, to JE Pestell, MoD, 17 July 1968. 36. House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 14 November 1967, Vol. 754, Col. 231. 37. For more on this point see Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan, The Northern Ireland Conflict (Oxford, 2010). 38. For more on the military campaign see David Benest, ‘Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76’ in Hew Strachan (ed.), Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon, 2006); Aaron Edwards, ‘Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility of British counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–76’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 21/2 (June 2010), pp. 303–30. 39. John D. Brewer and Kathleen Magee, Inside the RUC: Routine Policing in a Divided Society (Oxford, 1991), pp. 275–7. 40. David Miller, Don’t Mention the War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media (London, 1994), p. 281. 41. Paul Dixon, Northern Ireland: The Politics of War and Peace (Basingstoke, 2008, 2nd ed.), p. 49. 42. Maurice Tugwell, ‘Terrorism and propaganda: problem and response’, Conflict Quarterly, (Spring 1986), p. 11. 43. Taken from MoD, Land Operations: Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations, Part 3 – Counter Insurgency, Army Code No. 70516, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 5 January 1970).

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44. Interview with Danny Morrison, 23 November 2010. 45. For more on republican strategy see Aaron Edwards, ‘When terrorism as strategy fails: dissident Irish republicans and the threat to British security’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 34/4 (April 2011), pp. 318–36. 46. Interview with Danny Morrison, 23 November 2010. 47. For more on this point see Dixon: Northern Ireland. 48. Carruthers: Winning Hearts and Minds, p. 270. 49. Paddy Griffith, ‘Small wars and how they grow in the telling’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2/2, (August 1991), p. 217. 50. Griffith: ‘Small wars’, p. 218.

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Index

24 (TV series) 9/11 6, 183–191, 193–197 8, 98, 138–139, 188, 195, 198 abjection 9 Abu Ghraib 1, 6, 27, 33, 36 Abu Hamza Al-Masri 4 Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi 16, 27–28 Aden 205, 207, 212–219 Afghanistan 1, 7, 17, 21, 186, 204 Agamben, Giorgio 111–114, 120–121 al-Qaeda 16, 19, 21, 186, 193 Algeria 112, 114–122, 184–185, 191, 200 Amazons 40–42, 86 Antigone 88 Azoulay, Ariella 27–28 Baader-Meinhof 40, 42–43 Baader, Andreas 23, 76–77 Battle of Algiers, The 2, 49, 112, 114–115, 117 Becker, Jillian 73, 75, 76 Bell, Nikki 7 Beltran, Sandra Avila 10 body 4, 7–11, 18, 21–22, 34, 47–48, 51, 65, 81, 114, 118–122, 131, 133, 142–144, 146, 182, 187, 191–195, 197 Born in Flames 49, 51 Breivik, Anders Behring 6–7, 66–67, 137, 142–143, 145, 149–150, 153–155 Buenoano, Judias 10 Butler, Judith 4, 6 Cavarero, Adriana 48, 133 Centurions, The 6, 181–194 Christian 5–6, 64, 66, 148, 175–176 CIA 97, 99, 188 Clinton, Hillary 7–8, 20, 30

clone 142, 144, 146, 149, 154 cloning 6, 138, 144, 146–147, 149, 151–154 colonial 2–6, 42, 111–121, 123, 182, 184, 186, 190, 192–193, 195–196, 203, 205, 208–212, 214–216, 219 colonialism 111, 113, 116–117, 182 combatant 5, 39–40, 53–55, 133, 149, 158–164, 167, 169–171, 173, 175–176, 204 Corday, Charlotte 40, 63–65, 67 Cotton, Mary 10 counterinsurgency 1–3, 12, 209, 215 counter-terrorism 98–99, 181, 190, 195, 200, 213 counterterrorist 4, 6–7, 196 Deller, Jeremy 126–127, 130–131 Derrida, Jacques 139 Dicey, Albert Venn 112 dissident 4, 139 Djebar, Assia 112, 117–121 Eisenman, Stephen 27–28, 194 Ensslin, Gudrun 9, 23, 73, 76–77, 88 Fanon, Frantz 5, 49, 115, 195 Farrell, Mairead 50–51 female 8–9, 13, 16, 39–40, 42, 44–48, 51, 54–55, 58–59, 61–66, 70, 74, 78, 80–81, 83–84, 86–89, 92–94, 105, 114, 117–118, 120, 148, 182, 187 feminine 9, 30, 45–48, 51–52, 81, 86–88, 187 femininity 20, 43, 45, 47, 54, 83, 87–88, 148, 187 Feminism 39–43, 45, 47, 49, 51–53, 55, 65, 73–74, 87, 91, 148

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feminist 10–11, 41–45, 48–49, 51–52, 65, 74, 76, 79, 81, 84, 87, 89, 91 Figner, Vera 40, 84–87 French Revolution 5, 57, 61–63, 66, 112 Freud, Sigmund 74–76, 80–81, 162 Front Liberation National, (FLN) 114–115, 117, 186–187, 197

Islam 58, 60, 66, 97, 147–148, 187, 193 Israel 11, 27, 185, 211

gender 4–9, 11–13, 30–39, 41, 45–47, 52, 55, 57–67, 74–75, 77, 79–81, 84–85, 87–89, 111–112, 114, 119–121, 140–141, 157–158, 160, 175–177, 181, 183, 193, 206, 210 generation, generational 9, 73–82, 85, 87–89, 129 Gregory, Derek 1–2, 4

Khaled, Leila 10, 105, 109 Kilcullen, David 2 knight 21, 137, 147–152, 169 Kristeva, Julia 16, 43, 46, 76

Hearst, Patty 9 hero, heroine, heroism 4–6, 10, 16, 22, 40–41, 64–66, 97, 105, 126, 131, 133–134, 140, 147, 149, 157–160, 164–166, 169–170, 176, 185, 190–191, 200, 208 heteronormativity 181 heterosexuality 4, 6, 181–182, 196 homo sacer 114 horror 4, 15, 48, 130, 132, 153, 182, 190, 204 hostage 21–28 humanitarian 1, 204, 216 Hussein, Saddam 3, 33 hyper-masculine 6, 148, 157, 166, 176 hypermasculinity 4, 6 iconoclasm 3, 141 Image, imagery 1–10, 15–31, 43–45, 47, 49, 59, 61, 63–66, 78–79, 88, 105, 119, 126, 133, 138–153, 165–166, 182, 193, 204, 215, 218 Imperial War Museum, (IWM) 7, 126–133 insurgencies 3, 189, 194 insurgency 28, 30, 46, 112–113, 116–117, invisible, 4, 7–8, 40, 125–126, 133, 166, 187 invisibility 6, 8, 133 Iraq 1–2, 6, 16, 27, 127, 130–131, 188 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 161, 164, 166, 169, 172–173, 175, 215, 217–218

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Jameson, Fredric 4, 11 Jihad 10, 16, 31, 147 Jurassic Park 146

Langlands, Ben 7 Lartéguy, Jean 181, 183, 185–192, 194 Lawrence, T.E. 1–2 Loyalist 10, 105–106, 158–160, 164, 166–167, 169–173, 210, 215 martyr, martyrdom 4–6, 16, 21, 27, 46, 64–66, 147, 182, 192 masculine 4–5, 39, 41–42, 62, 65, 79–80, 86–88, 114–115, 121, 160, 171–172, 186-188, 191–193, 208–209, 215 masculinities 4–6, 8, 125–126, 133–134, 157, 161, 170, 175, 181–183, 187, 193–196 masculinity 5–9, 42, 46–47, 58, 74, 86–87, 125–126, 133–134, 157–160, 164, 166–167, 170–171, 181–183, 185–188, 190–191, 193–196 Mau Mau 205–210, 219 Mbembe, Achille 113, 115, 121, 193, 200 Medea 9, 11, 48 Medusa 48 Meinhof, Ulrike 10, 47, 48, 65, 77, 88 Middle East 2, 210, 214 Mirzoeff, Nicolas 2–4, 27–28 Mitchell, W. J. T. 3–4, 6, 138, 141, 144 Mohnhaupt, Brigitte 9, 89 Morgan, Robin 8 Mother Ireland 49–51 mother 43, 48–51, 65, 80–81, 83–84, 88, 132, 170–171 motherhood 43 Muslim 137, 147, 186, 193 National Socialism 57, 77, 201 Nazism 76–78, 148

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index

Northern Ireland 4–5, 40, 51–52, 55, 157–159, 164, 166, 174, 177, 203, 205, 215–216, 218, 220

suicide bomber 8, 10, 39–40, 48, 109, 126, 132–133 Symbionese Liberation Front (SLF) 9–10

Obama, Barack 7–8, 20, 27 Oedipus, Oedipal 73–74, 76, 79–83, 85, 88 Olsen, Sara Jane 10 Operation Geronimo 20, 30 Operation Neptune Spear 7 Osama Bin Laden 4, 7–8, 16–17, 19, 21, 27, 29–31, 34, 99

Taliban 7, 16, 18, 204 terrorism 3–6, 8–9, 15, 22, 42–43, 45–48, 57–63, 66, 73–74, 78, 80–84, 86–87, 89, 91–92, 97–99, 112, 125–126, 134, 138–139, 181–182, 184–187, 190–191, 193, 195–196, 210, 213, 216, 218–219 Terrorism Act 98 terrorist 3–11, 17–18, 21, 24–27, 39, 42–43, 45–52, 57–66, 74, 81, 84–89, 97–99, 107, 112, 115, 125–126, 131, 133–134, 139–140, 144, 149, 153, 157–162, 164–166, 169, 173–176, 181–183, 185–189, 191, 193–196, 203, 210–211, 213, 216–217, 220 torture 6, 28, 31, 113–120, 183–198 transgression 4, 7, 9, 46, 125, 126, 159, 165, 204 trauma 76, 120, 128–129 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 162, 164, 175 Tupamaros (Movimeinto de Liberación Nacional, Uruguay) 22

Pakistan 7, 17, 19, 21, 30, 31 Palestine, Palestinian 8, 10–11, 13, 26–27, 40, 43, 105, 112, 213, 217 Petraeus, David 2, 186 photograph, photography 3, 7–10, 16–17, 20–31, 44, 129, 138, 146, 148, 165–166, 218 Plavšić, Biljana 10 Pontecorvo Gillo 112, 114 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 10, 26, 105 postcolonial 5, 111–113, 115, 120–121 Protestant 188, 217, 219 Provisional Irish RepublicanArmy (PIRA or IRA) 46, 159, 169, 219 Pussy Riot 10 reconciliation 5, 157–162, 164, 172, 174 Red Army Faction (RAF) 9, 23, 26, 42, 57, 59–60, 67, 73–89 Red Brigades, Italian Red Brigades 24, 40, 43 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 2–3 revolutionary 40, 48, 52, 63, 78, 83–85, 87, 112–113, 115–116, 120, 216 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin 23–26, 76 Sinn Féin 161, 164, 175–176, 217 Sontag, Susan 27 spectacle 4, 6, 125, 132 spectator 11, 81 state of emergency 111–113, 116, 210 state of exception 111, 113–114, 120–121 Stone, Michael 158, 164–176 suffragette 10

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Ulster Defence Association (UDA) 164 Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) 164 USA 1–3, 6–7, 16–17, 20, 22, 27, 30–31, 36, 47, 50, 97, 99, 126–127, 130, 151, 186 Army 1 Army Field Manual 1–24 victim 4–5, 8, 22, 25, 28–29, 32, 36, 50, 58, 82, 139, 148, 158–159, 161–162, 165, 166, 171–177, 183, 195, 211 video 3, 7, 11, 16, 18, 21, 30–32, 50, 138, 141, 147–148, 204 Vietnam War 2, 41–42, 52, 130 viewer 7, 10–11, 29, 99, 141–142, 146 violence 4–9, 15–17, 27–28, 39, 41–43, 45–49, 51–52, 57–63, 65–66, 73, 78, 80, 83–85, 87, 89, 97, 111, 113–115, 118–121, 131, 139, 153, 157–160, 162–163, 169, 172, 182–183, 187–196, 209, 211–213, 215–217, 220 vision 115, 161, 171, 192

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visuality, visual 2–4, 6–7, 11, 15–16, 27–29, 43, 99, 105, 112, 133, 138–141, 148, 152, 181, 218 Waked, Sherif 11 War on Terror 6–7, 16, 27, 98, 133, 138–139 warrior 39–42, 44–45, 133, 140, 146, 149, 191, 196, 219 weaponry 2, 149

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weapons 11, 15, 17, 42, 128–130, 133, 148, 171, 208, 217, 219 Weather Underground, Weathermen 40, 42 West Germany 9, 24, 74, 87, 89 women 6–11, 16, 30, 39–52, 58, 63–67, 76–77, 79–81, 83–89, 105, 114–115, 117–118, 121, 159–161, 172, 182, 194–195, 217 Žižek, Slavoj 125, 132

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