Liberal Democracies at War: Conflict and Representation 9781350041837, 9781441168719

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PREFACE This book was written as part of a multidisciplinary research project, undertaken by the University of Reading and supported by the Leverhulme Trust through its Major Research Programme, the Liberal Way of War. The project, in its many manifestations, has been immensely rewarding for both of us since its inception in 2008. The book grew out of a conference held at the University of Reading in March 2012; neither would have been possible without Leverhulme’s generous assistance. We are grateful to Professor Richard Overy for reading a draft of Chapter 3, and above all to Professor Alan Cromartie, leader of the Liberal Way of War project, for his unfailing and good-humoured support in this part of it. Thanks are due to A. M. Heath and co., and to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for permission to quote passages from George Orwell on pp. 58 and 60. Acknowledgements for illustrations may be found below the illustrations themselves. While we have made every effort to find the holders of rights to illustrations in this book, we are ready, in cases where we may have not succeeded, to respect the rights of any individual or institution able to justify their position as the artist or the right holder. Hilary Footitt and Andrew Knapp Reading, October 2012

list of FIGURES 2.1 Monthly numbers of photographs representing dead soldiers in Das Illustrierte Blatt, 1914–18.  17 2.2 Organization chart of the German censorship of pictures, 1914–17.  18 2.3 Monthly numbers of photographs representing dead soldiers in Le Miroir and L’Illustration, 1914–18.  20 2.4 ‘A Nightmare Vision for the Kaiser’s Nights’, Le Miroir, 26 December 1915.  21 2.5 ‘Coldly, German 150-mm shells come closer. The photographer snaps them.’ Le Miroir, 6 June 1915.  22 2.6 A shot-down airman. Le Miroir, 31 October 1915.  23 2.7 Organization chart of French censorship of the illustrated press.  24 2.8 Numbers of photographs representing dead soldiers in The Illustrated London News and L’Illustration, 1914–16 (approximately weekly figures).  25 2.9 No Man’s Land, from the second Official Canadian War Photographs Exhibition, L’Illustration, December 1917.  31 3.1 ‘As Hitler Sowed, So Shall He Reap!’ Ministry of Information leaflet, n.d. (1942/44).  44 3.2 ‘Flaming June’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 1 June 1942.  53 3.3 ‘Capital Punishment!’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 3 June 1942.  53 3.4 ‘Better Start Practising, Nero!’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 26 October 1942.  54 3.5 ‘An Experiment Worth Trying’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 22 May 1943.  55 4.1 The self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, in Saigon, 11 June 1963.  75 4.2 The execution of Vietcong suspect Nguyen Van Lem by General Nyugen Ngoc Loan, in Saigon, 1 February 1968.  75

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4.3 Group of civilian women and children rounded up to be killed by US Army in what later became known as the My Lai massacre.  76 4.4 Kim Phuc (centre), her brothers and cousins following the napalming of her village by South Vietnamese forces, 8 June 1972.  76 4.5 Civilians killed by US Army during what later became known as the My Lai massacre.  79 5.1 Arrival at Camp X-Ray.  94 5.2 No photography: Guard Tower at JTF Guantánamo.  95 5.3 Humane: An operating room at the detainee hospital at Camp Delta, JTF Guantánamo.  100 6.1 Map of CSDIC Camp, Bad Nenndorf.  118 8.1 Appropriating occupied space: A building in postwar Germany converted for the use of British troops.  160 8.2 A struggle doomed to failure? Military police notice against black-marketeering, post-war Germany.  164 11.1 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976, Gouache, typewritten texts, collage, and handprinting on laid paper.  221 11.2 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976, Gouache, typewritten texts, collage, and handprinting on laid paper.  222 11.3 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976, Gouache, typewritten texts, collage, and handprinting on laid paper.  223 11.4 Coco Fusco, ‘A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, 2006–2008, Performance’.  226 11.5 Coco Fusco, Operation Atropos, 2006, single channel video.  226

EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Joëlle Beurier is Reader in Communication Studies at the University of Reims, France. She wrote her PhD on Images, violence et masculinités. Les presses illustrées française et allemande en Grande Guerre at The European University Institute, Florence. Part of it has been published as Images et violence. Quand le Miroir racontait la Grande Guerre (2007). Her current research deals with the iconographical representation of war in peacetime (1949–89), as well as gender in warfare. She also organizes an international research group on the illustrated press (OPIIM). Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of ten books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, and rape. Among others, she is the author of Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (1996), An Intimate History of Killing (1999), Fear: A Cultural History (2005) and Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007). Her book, What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present was published by Virago in 2011. She is currently writing a book on the history of pain, which will be published by Oxford University Press in early 2014. Hilary Footitt is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading. She has written on the role of women in politics (Women, Europe and the New Languages of Politics, Continuum, 2002), and on Allied-French relations in the Second World War (War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators (2004)). Most recently she has been working on the role of languages in war and conflict, and is joint series editor of Palgrave’s Studies in Languages at War (Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (2012); WarTalk: Foreign Languages and the British War Effort in Europe, 1940–47, (2013)). Her recent articles have appeared in Intelligence and National Security, Journal of War and Culture Studies, Translation Studies, and Cold War History.

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Andrew Knapp is Professor of French Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Reading. He is joint editor, with Claudia Baldoli and Richard Overy, of Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe, 1940– 1945 (Continuum, 2011), the product of a major AHRC project of the same name, and co-author, with Claudia Baldoli, of Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940–1945 (Continuum, 2012). 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, (Yale, 2004) alongside numerous articles on art and war, museums, feminism and contemporary art. She recently co-convened a series of workshops on Terrorist Trangressions funded by the AHRC and published an essay ‘On the troublesome relationship of feminism and terrorism’ in Christine Schraut and Sylvia Hikel (eds), Terrorismus und Geschlecht. Politische Gewalt in Europa seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Campus Verlag, 2012). Kendrick Oliver is Reader in American history at the University of Southampton. He is the author of three books: Kennedy, Macmillan and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1961–63 (1998), The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (2006), and To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane and the American Space Program, 1957–75 (2013). Sara Poole is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Reading. She has published on various aspects of twentieth-century French and Francophone culture and literature, including essays on Malek Haddad, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mouloud Mammeri in the Bulletin of Francophone Africa and the International Journal of Francophone Studies. Caroline Rooney is Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent. From 2009–12, she held an ESRC/AHRC Global Uncertainties fellowship with a research programme entitled Radical Distrust. She is currently a Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellow, conducting a programme which examines the roles played by utopian thinking and arts activism in the imagining of a common ground. Her books include: African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (Routledge, 2007). With Kaori Nagai, she is co-editor of Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Postcolonialism and Globalisation (Palgrave, 2010), and with Rita Sakr of The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (Routledge, 2013). With Ayman El Desouky, she is co-editor of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Egyptian Literary Culture and Egyptian Modernity, Volume 47, Number 4 (September 2011), and with Blake Brandes, co-editor of Wasafiri, Global Youth Cultures, Issue 72 (November 2012).

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Rita Sakr is a Research Associate on Professor Caroline Rooney’s Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellowship in the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research at the University of Kent. She has published on Middle-Eastern studies, migrant writings, post-conflict literatures, and James Joyce. She is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (Continuum, 2011). With Finn Fordham, she is co-editor of James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Rodopi, 2011); and with Caroline Rooney, she co-edited The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (Routledge, 2013). Sakr’s Anticipating the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies is forthcoming. Simona Tobia is Lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies, and Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, at the University of Reading. Her research interests focus on the history of war and conflict in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on its cultural aspects. She authored the monograph Advertising America. The United States Information Service in Italy, 1945–1956 (Milan: LED, 2008). As a result of her work for the AHRC project ‘Languages at War’ she co-authored with Hilary Footitt WarTalk: Foreign Languages and the British War Effort, 1940–1946 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). She is currently preparing an edited book on interrogation in war and conflict with Christopher Andrew. Elspeth Van Veeren is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her work centres on understanding how violence is legitimized by states and by individuals. Her main research interests include the relationship of war and society, theories of discourse, especially visual and material discourse, and international political theory. She has published articles in a range of peer-reviewed academic journals including New Political Science, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of War and Culture Studies and is currently completing a book on Guantánamo which offers an account of how visual and material practices helped shape and transform security discourses and therefore the policies, norms and laws associated with the Global War on Terror.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction Andrew Knapp and Hilary Footitt

War and armies sit uneasily with democracy. The ostensible purpose of a democratic state is not to fulfil a millenarian destiny  – ideological or racial or religious – proclaimed by its leaders. It is to ensure for its citizens, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. These goods are not obviously best secured within a barracks or on a battlefield. Each of the three large prototype liberal democracies – France, the United States, the United Kingdom – has developed, with varying degrees of intensity at different points in history, an anti-militarist tradition. In England, a key complaint of Parliament’s Petition of Right to King Charles I 15 years before the outbreak of the Civil War (1627) was that great Companies of Souldiers and Marriners have been dispersed into divers Counties of the Realme, and the inhabitants against their wills have been compelled to receive them into their houses, and there to suffer them to sojourne against the Lawes and Customes of this Realme and to the great grievance and vexacion of the people. And a central demand of the petition was that the King ‘remove the said Souldiers and Mariners and that your people may not be soe burthened in tyme to come.’1 Similarly, the Bill of Rights that founded the post-Stuart constitutional settlement established among ‘the subject’s rights’ that ‘the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdome in time of Peace unlesse it be with Consent of Parlyament is against Law.’2 A century later, the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution returned to the

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billeting issue, declaring that ‘No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.’3 France, as a continental power, could not afford the same mistrust of standing armies, but a national antipathy to excessive pretentions of the military reached an apogee during the Dreyfus Affair of 1896–1906. Democracies, democratic peace theory suggests, do not go to war against other democracies.4 Yet since 1914 democracies have repeatedly found themselves embroiled in wars, great or small, whether to defend their colonial possessions, their economic and strategic interests, or even their national territory against other powers, less democratic and less satisfied with the prevailing international system. Such wars have great potential to subvert democratic values. Unwilling young men may be forced into uniform. Basic freedoms (freedom of speech and of the press, freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention) may be suspended or eroded. The slaughter of enemy civilians or colonized peoples betrays the universality of the liberal promise – that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or the Rights of Man and the Citizen, are the rights of every human being, not merely of citizens of democracies. The subversive power of distant wars may be blunted by using censorship and distance to isolate them from the democratic heartland. As late as the 1950s, much of the reality of conflicts in Kenya or (in the early stages) in Algeria could be concealed from civilians at home. Such treatment was impossible, however, in larger wars  – especially the two world wars  – and has become increasingly so, thanks to the development of media technologies, in any conflict. The ways in which wars are presented to the publics of democratic states, such that support is maintained both for the war and for the democratic government fighting it, are therefore crucial. The image-making of liberal states in war, the (in)visibility of the violences committed and the reactions of the victims themselves  – these are the central subjects of this book. Our starting-point is 1914, for several reasons. World War One was Europe’s first general war in a century. It involved hitherto unprecedented levels of mobilization, whether through conscription or through the gearing of economies to war needs; it killed unprecedented numbers; it made exceptional demands on the military and civilian populations concerned. Moreover, the war began at a critical moment in the media history of the democracies. The war correspondent and the war photographer had become recognizable figures half a century earlier, in the Crimea and the American Civil War. 5 But the spread of literacy since then had vastly increased the audience for newspapers and magazines, while improvements to printing techniques meant that the demands of such an audience could now be cheaply satisfied. In particular, illustrations  – first elaborate engravings, then photographs – could now be regularly incorporated into dailies and weeklies.

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Since Alexander Gardner had photographed the battlefield of Antietam in September 1862, the question of how much of the true nature of war a photographer should represent had been posed. More broadly, the question of how much the public should be told about a war, in words or in pictures, was posed with renewed acuity in the new context of mass mobilization and the mass media. At least three elements are at stake here. The first is the professional motivation of the reporter and the photographer to communicate the truth of what they see and hear to a wider audience. The second is the commercial interest of the news media in supplying the public with news and images they will wish to read, hear and see. The third is the concern of governments, backed if necessary by the force of the censor, to safeguard national security, and to ‘protect’ civilian morale. What holds the three in play may be called patriotism: the notion that when servicemen are fighting and dying for a national cause, it does not do to undermine or belittle their efforts or to suggest that their behaviour is much less than noble. This is partly a matter of sentiment: few people are closer than the war correspondent or photographer to the men (and, more recently, women) who do the fighting and dying; they share in the fear and suffering, and occasional elation, of the battlefield. But it is also a question of calculation: news media that oppose wars in democracies may find their government sources cut off and their readers, in any but the most unpopular war, put off. Such dangers will not prevent criticism of the conduct of the war as irresolute or incompetent; they do normally preclude condemning the war itself, or attacking its conduct as wicked. So the news media have remained, broadly, onside and feed the patriotism that defined their position in the first place. Democratic governments, meanwhile, while routinely securing all necessary powers of censorship, prefer the public credibility of an ostensibly free press to the disaffection associated with an obviously censored one. Complicity is therefore a constant of the relationship between the news media and democratic governments in time of war. Whether it makes for good reporting is a different question. As the Canadian journalist Charles Lynch wrote after World War Two, ‘It’s humiliating to look back at what we wrote during the war. It was crap . . . We were a propaganda arm of our governments. At the start the censors enforced that, but by the end we were our own censors.’6 The first section of the book, ‘Liberal Democracies and War’, considers how the conduct of four wars  – the First World War, World War Two, Vietnam, and finally, the ‘War on Terror’  – by democracies has been defined in the written, broadcast and visual images of the media. In Joëlle Beurier’s chapter, the issue was simply how much of the unparalleled horror of World War One the public should be allowed to see. There is a sense here of governments finding their way, of shocking material being seen of a type that reach the public domain in future wars rarely if at all. Equally, however, the boundaries of what is forbidden – close-ups of shattered bodies and especially shattered faces, and the agony of the wounded – are set here;

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so too, especially in the British case, is a template of complicity between press and government. Complicity is also central to Andrew Knapp’s study of how the Allied strategic bombing offensive was reported in World War Two. Here a fundamental issue was the representation of suffering and death, not only among British and American airmen, but among civilians in Germany and occupied Europe. The nature of the bombing war placed the media in a position of almost total dependence on the Royal Air Force for stories; but both the RAF and the government needed the media, at a time of small or unsuccessful land campaigns, to demonstrate the Allies’ capacity to strike at the Reich from the air. The resulting press coverage certainly overestimated the achievements of bombing, but it did little to conceal from the public the consequences of bombing for Europe’s, and particularly Germany’s, cities and their inhabitants. But revulsion against the consequences of bombing remained the preserve of a minority, at least until after the war. A similar case is established by Kendrick Oliver’s chapter on Vietnam. When American soldiers committed actions that were recognized and punished as war crimes in the US courts, and the crimes and the verdicts were reported with illustrations, a large section of the American public nevertheless sympathized more with the perpetrators, who were viewed as let down by their superiors, than with the victims. Elspeth Van Veeren’s study of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, finally, can be seen as demonstrating both the efforts a democratic state may be prepared to deploy to bring the perception of its own highly illiberal acts into line with its claims to represent liberal democratic values, and the wider public’s continuing willingness to be convinced of these claims. Each of these four chapters, in short, suggests a certain elasticity in what the majority of citizens of liberal democracies may be prepared to countenance from their governments in time of war: the deaths of large numbers of their own young men in the peculiarly horrible environment of the trenches of the Western Front; the killing of enemy civilians in their hundreds of thousands by bombing; the deliberate murder of hundreds of civilians within a country, South Vietnam, which the United States had pledged itself to protect; the detention with neither trial nor access to lawyers of hundreds of unnamed individuals classified by the government as terrorist suspects. Joëlle Beurier’s comparative study shows how the illustrated press in Germany, France and Britain reported the Western Front in 1914–18. A diachronic analysis shows that in all three countries, the depiction of horror reached a peak early in the war, and was already diminishing by 1916. But the distinction between the three belligerents’ official treatment of war photographs was more important. The illiberal regime of Wilhelmine Germany rapidly developed ‘an efficient and authoritarian system of censorship’, under which photographs had to pass the censor twice, both before their inclusion in illustrated magazines and at the proof stage. The representation of dead bodies was extremely rare, and the violence of war represented obliquely, through epic engravings, or through photographs of

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monuments. With quite rare exceptions, the German home front had access only to an old-fashioned and stylized vision of modern warfare. In France, by contrast, censorship arrangements were much more relaxed: there was no preliminary vetting of pictures on the German model, and the censors were chiefly motivated by a narrow view of national security rather than by considerations of morale. In any case, the French press repeatedly flouted the censors’ rules with impunity. As a result, while French cinema newsreels glossed over the horror of the war, ‘the French illustrated press concentrated and amplified the violence from the front’. The offer of cash prizes to amateur war photographers from the illustrated weeklies, especially early in the war, encouraged a copious representation of shells bursting over platoons, or of soldiers killed in action. When they were re-published in the 1930s, many of these pictures were erroneously believed to have been previously censored, such was their graphic depiction of the realities of the front. The British model, finally, was one of self-censorship, in which (again, with some exceptions) the vision of life at the front offered by the illustrated press was almost as sanitized as in Germany. Here, however, restrained reporting relied more on the (generally abundant) goodwill, patriotism and concern for ‘decency’ of the news media than on more formal processes. Two major exceptions to a generally anodyne picture of British self-censorship stand out: two Canadian exhibitions, displayed in London in 1916 and 1917, which featured vast photographs of action on the Western Front; and the half-hour film the ‘Battle of the Somme’, which, though produced by the War Propaganda Bureau, offered, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, ‘a visualisation of the hell that is war’. The British model of self-censorship, in which (substantial) government powers were mostly kept in reserve, also applied to World War Two, and now extended to broadcasting, and to a far wider area than the Western Front. For civilian involvement in the war was now direct, thanks to bombing, which successive conferences, at The Hague and at Geneva, had failed to ban.7 The Luftwaffe’s apparently indiscriminate bombing of civilians – in Poland, the Low Countries and France in 1939–40, and on a much more sustained basis in the Blitz over Britain in 1940–41 – was held up to the British and American publics as evidence of the wickedness of the Nazi regime. But the British (from 1942) and the Americans came to rely on their own bomber forces as their only means, beyond the relatively small North African front, of striking directly at the German Reich until 6 June 1944. How did the British press report the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe? As Knapp shows, the British press and the BBC, though technically restricted by severe censorship, in fact co-operated readily with the government and the Royal Air Force in reporting the offensive, and protests against Allied bombing were the preserve of a small, albeit articulate, minority. The Air Ministry’s consistent denials that the bombing campaign was targeting German civilians have led some commentators to claim that its true nature was

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concealed from the British public. This is half true. Allied, and especially British, air raids were regularly compared in the press to sporting events, while cartoons presented them as directed against Hitler and Mussolini in person, not enemy civilians. No images appeared in the press of dead German (or Italian, or French) civilians, still less of the remains of RAF airmen hosed out of the turrets of bombers. Yet the regular publication of bombing statistics, of descriptions by airmen (and, more rarely, reporters) of the ‘boiling cauldron’ they could see below them during raids, and of estimates of German civilian dead and homeless, could leave little doubt to an attentive reader about the extent of destruction and loss of life. This was only reinforced once Allied reporters could visit bombed localities in France, Italy and, finally, Germany. What prevented the British public from opposing the bombing offensive was not so much ignorance of the facts as a reservation of compassion for British air raid victims and Allied aircrew, not German or other civilians. Selective compassion is also a feature of Kendrick Oliver’s chapter on press coverage of the Vietnam war, and especially of massacres committed by US soldiers. As Oliver observes, the practice of war readily entails a presumption fundamentally at odds with liberal theory: ‘that some human lives are more dispensable than others: twenty of their civilians can be killed to keep five of our soldiers safe.’ A tenacious myth of Vietnam is that the US withdrawal was determined, or hastened, by liberal opposition to the conflict, itself shaped by outrage at Vietnamese civilian casualties, faithfully relayed by the media, especially television. In fact the American media paid little attention to Vietnamese civilian victims of the war and generally portrayed the anti-war movement negatively; even the most ‘iconic’ pictures of the war (the much-used term hardly begins to convey what they show) were framed with text in such a way as to minimize the instinctive response of horror; and outright opponents of the war were in a minority, though a ‘middle constituency of hawkish doves’ had misgivings about it. Such misgivings, however, were chiefly motivated by American casualties; ‘In the view of many Americans, the lives of U.S. soldiers  – including those who committed massacres  – counted for more than the lives of others.’ Oliver examines an extreme case, the massacre at My Lai of over 400 unarmed and unresisting civilians by US troops, including a platoon under the command of Lieutenant William Calley. He shows that neither the published images of the dead nor the Lieutenant’s conviction for murdering them produced anything like the wave of anti-war opinion that liberals had hoped for and the Nixon administration had feared. On the contrary, many Americans identified with Calley and excused his conduct on the ground that he was – or thought he was – obeying orders (a defence explicitly rejected in relation to Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials). If the Calley affair provoked disgust with the war, it was because Calley’s superiors had failed to protect him, in ‘a betrayal of the contract with authority’. Oliver frames his findings with the observation that ‘images

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of the deaths of others . . . have only a limited, highly contingent power to call their viewers directly to conscience’. Elspeth Van Veeren concludes this first part of the book with the most contemporary of liberal wars, the Global War on Terror declared by President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The Global War on Terror offers a clear, deliberate and public subversion of liberal values in the right claimed by the United States for its military to detain indefinitely and without trial any person, American or foreign, deemed to be a terrorist. A particular effort is required to reconcile this practice (which, in Van Veeren’s estimate, has involved as many as 100,000 suspects) with the simultaneous claim of the US government to embody democracy, the rule of law and human rights. This effort involves, in the first place, the characterization of the war itself as ‘both necessary and achievable, but also legitimate, good, and just’. Second, the US government presented the incarceration and interrogation of suspects as necessary and humane. The Guantánamo Bay detention facility was a ‘central plank’ of this presentation. The characterization of Guantánamo detainees as ‘the worst of the worst’ (an unverifiable claim, as their identities were concealed) established their incarceration as vital to national security. The choice of a space outside US and international law allowed constitutional safeguards to be sidestepped (as they had been years before, in the treatment of native Americans and then of Japanese-Americans in World War Two). As ‘“no-touch” approaches based on stress, humiliation and fear’ were preferred as interrogation techniques to outright physical assault and maiming, the claim could be made that no detainee was tortured. Waterboarding was redefined as a ‘dunk in the water’, and the discourse surrounding Guantánamo suffused with the language of cleanliness, even as detainees faced forms of physical and psychological torture designed to make them feel (and indeed be) dirty. Visits were organized to demonstrate to the press and to government officials the clean, agreeable aspect of the facility against efforts both inside and outside the wire to trouble these representations. As Van Veeren argues, with the cooperation of the media a construction of Guantanamo as ‘safe, humane, legal [and] transparent’ has emerged as the commonsense understanding of the site, enough that Guantanamo remains open, despite its subversion of liberal values: an opinion poll in February 2012 showed 70 per cent of respondents approving the continued functioning of the facility, compared to just 24 per cent who wanted it closed down.8 Until these figures change, they will ensure that any president attempting to close Guantánamo will be accused of being soft on terror. President Obama, despite promises made before and after his election, has not succeeded. The second part of the book, ‘Violence and War’, takes our attention away from the bigger picture of liberal governments’ image-making in war to confront the more intimate violence committed by soldiers ‘on the ground’ of battle, in their face-to-face dealings with the enemy, or with the local

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civilians they meet. Here, the relationship between the actions committed by the troops of western democracies, and the framing of these actions as ethically irresponsible, immoral or criminal, is largely determined not by broadly accepted definitions of civilized or decent behaviour, but rather by the extent to which such activities are actually made visible within the public narratives of liberal war making. What classifies soldiers’ conduct as ‘immoral’ is the assigning of categories to it  – torture, rape, physical exploitation – and this ‘power of naming’,9 normally monopolized by the liberal democracies themselves, is, in practice, a refusal to name and hence to call into existence such troubling moral undersides of war. The three chapters in this part address the problematic of visibility and recognition: what blinds liberal democracies to the violence perpetrated in their name, by service personnel from their own armies? Two particular issues arise in these detailed case studies, one concerning the ways in which we characterize the victims of such violence, and the other relating to what appear to be the largely accepted and unquestioned norms of military life. The visibility of victims depends crucially on our seeing them as human, men and women not dissimilar to ourselves, a perspective which, as Simona Tobia argues in relation to the torturing of German prisoners of war, is more likely to be adopted in retrospect, 50 years after the events, rather than during, or in the immediate aftermath of the conflict itself. The denial of humanity to others may be related to the extreme inhumanity of which such victims themselves stand accused  – the perpetrators of Belsen for example  – or to their marked physical ‘otherness’, as in the Vietnamese women referred to in Joanna Bourke’s chapter, or to the geographical and imaginative distance which typically separates western militaries from foreign civilians, as in the chapter by Hilary Footitt. The ‘othering’ of the victim is an enterprise which develops over time: Joanna Bourke traces a narrative on sexual violence which moves from rape as a biologically natural response for men at war, to one which justifies it as an inevitable product of a number of ‘stressors’ to which soldiers are subject, finishing with a more recent framing in which the perpetrator himself takes centre stage as the real victim, replacing the abused woman altogether. The visibility of the victim may be hidden by the deliberate actions of the authorities, refusing, for example, to release damaging papers; by narratives which deny the existence of a crime by explaining it away; or simply by keeping the victim at arms’ length beyond the physical and conceptual framework of the military. In all three chapters there is a sense that the collective norms of army life make it particularly difficult to identify a suffering victim. Thus the interrogation environment in Bad Nenndorf, in Simona Tobia’s chapter, assumes a shared understanding (comparable to that of the American authorities at Guantánamo) that mental abuse is an acceptable approach to obtaining information, while, as Joanna Bourke maintains, aspects of American military training seem calculated to promote an association

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between sexual violence and virility. For Hilary Footitt, the ways in which an army occupies foreign territory inevitably creates a military interior and an external frontier zone which, in its very ‘otherness’, licences behaviour outside the recognized western standards of good conduct. What indeed emerges from the three studies is the persistence of this problematic of visibility and recognition through twentieth century/twenty-first century conflicts, involving different sorts of mission, in various parts of the world. Thus Simona Tobia looks at the experience of a British interrogation centre in the aftermath of the Second World War, and focuses on the way in which interrogation procedures which caused physical as well as psychological damage to prisoners were only fully recognized as such through a media exposure in 2005 (though they had been the object of criminal proceedings in 1948). In an interview after the media revelations, one of the soldiers who had served in the centre, and indeed defended the actions of his superior officers in the 1948 inquiry, now presents himself as a victim who feels that he was deliberately manipulated and duped by the authorities. Joanna Bourke, examining western liberal narratives of rape and sexual abuse in the Second World War and Vietnam, argues that the framings adopted served to explain, and hence decriminalize, sexual violence, focusing on the reasons that it had taken place, rather than the specifics of the abuse itself. What marks these presentations is the implicit assumption that sexual crimes committed by western servicemen are isolated aberrations, wholly incidental to the mainstream discourse of liberal war making and quite different from the mass rapes perpetrated by other military forces, in, for example, Nanking or Berlin or Rwanda. By pathologizing the perpetrator, both victim and crime become invisible. Hilary Footitt, using evidence from the Second World War, peacekeeping in Bosnia/Herzegovina, and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggests that an incoming army, whatever its ostensible mission, develops a physical and imaginative geography of occupation which bunkerizes the military, and distances foreign civilians. An asymmetrical relationship is established which, despite the more recent ‘cultural turn’ in western strategies, serves to legitimize conduct which would be quite unacceptable in a home environment: driving heavy vehicles in ways likely to cause traffic accidents, casual attitudes to property rights, lack of restraint in personal behaviour and problematic interpretations of fraternization and sexual consent. The physical and temporal displacement of the occupying military force means that such behaviour is largely invisible in the war narratives of liberal democracies. The last part of the book, ‘The Victims’ Gaze’, explores the ways in which victims seek to make themselves visible, affirming their own existence within discourses of war generally controlled and mediatized by the West. Issues of power, identity, subversion and aesthetics mark these chapters in which

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the victims of liberal wars speak through novels, poetry and hip-hop, and artistic presentations and installations. These voices are framed by a basic asymmetry in cultural relations between the powerful liberal democracies and the generally powerless victims – how can victims express themselves in media conditioned by the assumptions of their oppressors? Thus, as Sara Poole points out, Algerian writers who wanted to promote an understanding of their own experiences during the colonial war with France in the 1950s had to do so in the language of the enemy, French, a language in which they had been educated, and through which they expected to find a publisher and audience for their books. Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr describe a dialogue of incomprehension between western journalists – ‘just give us a story, a human story’ – and residents actually living through the siege of Gaza – ‘Today my body was a TV’d massacre’. Those dissonant discourses within liberal democracies which might be thought to express solidarity with the victims may themselves be subject to revision: Sue Malvern depicts a western feminism challenged to accept that women are perpetrators of violence just as much as they are victims. In this situation, it is works of imagination – literature, performance and painting – which provide a means through which the subjective voice of a victim can at last be heard. Sara Poole contrasts the novels of Algerians writing during and just after the colonial war, each of whom employs different literary devices  – symbolism, realism and surrealism  – in order to transmit heartfelt experiences of dislocation and suffering. Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr focus on the voices of the young as heard through their activist sub-cultures, performing their own poems, or appropriating and delivering those of others, while Sue Malvern explores how the work of two female artists, 30 years apart from each other, poses uncomfortable questions about the nature of violence and femininity. A key theme in these chapters is the ethical implication of witnessing to violence, and the effect that this inevitably has on the artists concerned. As Sara Poole points out, Malek Haddad, the author of one of the first novels of the Algerian war (La Dernière Impression) ultimately found that he was unable to resolve the dilemma of expressing his testimony of Algerian suffering in the language of the colonizer, and concluded that he would have to give up writing altogether. Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr focus on the ethics of using the testimony of children as victims, and on the responsibility of witnesses to develop a poetic language which can offer some hope beyond the ‘interminable mimetic rivalries’ of war and conflict. Sue Malvern reminds us that the manichean distinction between victim and perpetrator is anyway a difficult one to sustain. When the victims, in this case tortured women, have been imaginatively endowed with agency, they might choose, as Coco Fusco demonstrates, to turn themselves into the perpetrators, leaving Virginia Woolf’s classic Room of One’s Own to become a space for A Field Guide for Female Interrogators.

INTRODUCTION

11

All these chapters argue that works of imagination – the poetic voice – transmit the real complexity of a victim’s subjective experience within discourses of war and conflict. Sara Poole examines the novels of three Algerians who ‘write in the enemy tongue’ about the war of independence – Malek Haddad, Mouloud Mammeri and Mohammed Dib. Through images of broken bridges, sparse descriptions of the barbarity of war and surrealistic creations of townships on the borders of apocalypse, these authors seek to convey their perceptions of physical and imaginative exile, and the horror of living the reality of a shifting power struggle. As Mammeri argues, historical wars can lose ‘the flesh and blood that made them important. But novelists restore all the life, the drama, the living experience . . .’ Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr explore the gap between terminologies of conflict and the poetic language of human experience, with particular reference to testimony from civilians in Palestinian camps in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Focusing on the role which children play as witnesses, they examine two films  – Mai Masri’s Children of Shatila (1998), and Mahamed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002). They argue that the young – in particular through their own YouTube performances of poetry – may show us ways of moving beyond the political battleground of rival representations of reality, to witness outside and beyond what they term the ‘mirrored oppositionalism’ and frameworks of hatred which mark our understanding of war and conflict. Sue Malvern looks closely at the relationship between feminism and torture as represented by two artists  – Nancy Spero in her Torture of Women (1976), and Coco Fusco in A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006–8). While it is evident that the depiction of women in war has changed radically between the two pieces, and that the traditional feminist identification of war as a masculine domain is being subverted in its post Abu Ghraib formulation, Malvern’s chapter examines the ways in which artistic representation, in particular the choice and arrangement of materials, acts as a visual manuscript for both victim and perpetrator. Thus, Spero’s use of distressed material, and the mistakes in her typing attest to the mental distress and trauma of those who are tortured, and Fusco’s public performances of the role of interrogator and prisoner witness to the confusion and blurring of identities between the oppressor and the oppressed. Fighting a war as a liberal democracy is, as the chapters in this book attest, a morally challenging exercise. Any army, once engaged in war, must be effective militarily. By recognizing the humanity of potential victims of conflict, and listening attentively to their dissonant and critical voices, the armies of liberal democracies may find themselves less capable of achieving the strategic goals they have been set by their governments. On the other hand, a failure to acknowledge the reality of violence, and the responsibility of their own armies in wrongdoing, brings with it a potentially huge reputational loss: the values of liberal democracy on which western states

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claim to be based are seen to be ephemeral and highly relative. As this book argues, the traditional robust checks and balances of a liberal democracy – a free press, a lively civic and political space, an evolving army training culture – are all themselves called into question when liberal democracies go to war. Acknowledging and understanding the moral complexities revealed in conflicts of the past is itself neither easy nor comfortable, but it may at least serve to warn us about some of the persistent invisible violences of our liberal warmaking.

Notes 1 Petition of Right, 1627, arts. VI and VIII, www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Cha1/3/1/ data.pdf, accessed 19 September 2012. 2 Bill of Rights (Great Britain), 1689, www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/ WillandMarSess2/1/2/introduction, accessed 19 September 2012. 3 Bill of Rights (United States of America), www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/ bill_of_rights_transcript.html, accessed 19 September 2012. 4 For the debate on democratic peace theory, cf. for example the essays in T. Barkawi and M. Laffey (eds), Democracy, Liberalism and War: Rethinking the Democratic Peace Debate (Boulder, Colo. and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). 5 Cf. P. Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (London: André Deutsch, 1975). 6 Quoted in ibid., 332–3. 7 Attempts to ban bombing failed due to opposition from great powers who considered they stood to gain from retaining it as an option: Germany and France at The Hague in 1907, the United Kingdom at Geneva in 1932. Cf. W. Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction: Norms and Force in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 99–115. 8 A. Rosenthal, ‘Hurray for Guantanamo Bay’, The New York Times, 12 February 2012; Washington Post-ABC News Poll, 1–4 February 2012 (qu. 13), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postabcpoll_020412. html, accessed 21 September 2012. 9 M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/ New York: Routledge, 2008), 32.

CHAPTER TWO

Mapping Visual Violence in Germany, France and Britain, 1914–18 Joëlle Beurier

Despite the long tradition of the free press in France and Great Britain, Jay Winter argues that the Allied media during the First World War engaged in a ‘conspiracy of silence’, composed of minimized defeats, euphemisms, manipulations and commercial propaganda.1 This reproach is all the more important because the technical progresses of the late nineteenth century – portable cameras and celluloid films2 – enabled photographers to capture the images of the battlefield for the first time. Pictures could then be sent to the home front within 15 days and presented to a mass audience via the illustrated press. The media’s portrayal of the violence of the front through photographs could create the illusion of reality to a public of relative neophytes. Photographs, therefore, as they appeared in the main illustrated magazines or in exhibitions, will be our main sources, along with film, whether newsreels, documentaries or features. Comparing the ‘iconographic landscape’ of Germany, France and Great Britain allows us to gauge what the home front knew in each country about the extreme violence of the Great War. In the First World War, vastly more than in any previous war, governments realized the need for propaganda and thus censorship. In order to mobilize the entire society to an unprecedented extent, they used all traditional and technical means to represent war. But how do they deal with the new extreme violence of modern warfare?3

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What does ‘extreme violence’ mean as far as the pictures were concerned? During the pre-war generation, sensational news items like rail crashes, mine explosions and, above all, crimes were presented to readers of the illustrated press with dramatized descriptions and, crucially, coloured engravings.4 As Thierry Gervais has demonstrated, photographs took a growing place in the illustrated weeklies before 1914. 5 Some pushed back the limits of visual decency, notably by depicting dead bodies.6 In time of war, the representation of soldiers’ corpses is the ultimate example of extreme visual violence, and will be the first major theme of this study. Secondly, we will analyse how the illustrated media tried to depict the changing nature of combat as it evolved during the war. Our third theme is devastation, images of which produced a strong culture shock by revealing the anomie of the modern battlefield. Finally, more globally, representations of the sufferings of soldiers might also project civilians into the reality of conflict. Behind this study lies the relationship of liberal regimes to the damages of modern warfare. Were violent pictures of the violent event presented to the public? Were they massively shown? How did liberal governments react to their subversive potential? In order to understand the relationship between liberal societies and the shock of war news, we will first address the German model, the most commonly remembered by historians and the public, among whom the conflict of 1914–18 is often seen as an extreme example of how the violence of war could be censored.7 We will then study the French counter-model, which offers a concentration of violence.8 Finally, we will see how Great Britain preferred a more polymorph but less shocking visual landscape.

Model 1: Silence, sublimation and authority in Germany The German illustrated press was largely silent about modern death experienced via the body of the soldier. The German home front barely saw German soldiers dying, either in the famous Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung or in smaller local magazines like the Lüdenscheider Zeitbilder, which in over four years presented four and one bodies respectively. Even these appeared as distant, blurred forms, unlikely to trigger emotions. There were, however, exceptions: a few illustrated weeklies tried to depict the idea of terrifying and massive death at the front. The Frankfurt weekly Das Illustrierte Blatt drew arrows on its photographs to guide readers’ eyes towards bodies9; it also published a terrifying photo of the battlefield, which conveyed the notion of mass death by the sheer quantity of shocking bodies present.10 In Zeit im Bild (3 January 1915), a particularly morbid picture showed the ‘grave of a Belgian franc-tireur’, whose hand comes out of the soil to grasp his own cross.

MAPPING VISUAL VIOLENCE IN ALLIED COUNTRIES

17

2

1

27

5 29 -24 D Oc Se ec t.p . 1 22 t. 1 9 9 N 21 14- ov 14 Fe 17 . 19 14 b . Ja 18 -14 n. 1 Ap Ma 91 5 13 r.-9 r. 1 Ju Ma 915 n y 8 . Au -4 J 191 u g5 29 l. 1 9 28 3 Au 15 N - 24 g 1 o 9 23 v.-1 Oc 15 Ja 9 D t. 1 91 n. e c 19 - 1 .1 5 9 M 3F ar eb 15 14 .-9 . 1 A 9 M ay pr. 16 -4 19 16 J 9- un 30 . 1 91 J 3 24 29 -24 ul. 6 D Oct Se 191 ec . 6 p . 1 -19 t. 1 9 N 9 18 16- ov. 16 1 1 4 Fe 91 b Ja 6 15 .-11 n. 1 Ap M 91 r .- a r . 7 10 6 1 Ju Ma 917 n. y -1 1 9 J ul 17 30 5se 26 . 19 25 pt.- Aug 17 N 22 1 o O 9 20 v.-1 ct 17 Ja 6 D . 19 1 n. 17 -1 ec. 7 M 0 F 191 a e 12 r. b. 7 M - 7 A 19 ay p 1 - 2 r. 1 8 91 J 7- un. 8 28 1 9 27 1-2 Jul 18 O 2 s . 19 ct e .-1 pt. 18 7 19 N ov 18 .1 91 8

0

FIGURE 2.1  Monthly numbers of photographs representing dead soldiers in Das Illustrierte Blatt, 1914–18.

Both magazines multiplied such pictures in 1915 (Figure 2.1).11 From 1916 onwards, however, they were almost absent from all the German magazines and the home front was cut off from images of the terrible violence which was dismembering the bodies of their loved ones in the trenches. Fighting was treated similarly to corpses. Most German ‘combat’ photographs are posed, static and without any apparent danger.12 Few snapshots show smoke from shells, which might have communicated the intensity of bombardments or given some idea of industrial warfare.13 In Illustrirte Zeitung, only one photograph suggests the movement of troops under shellfire – and even that may have been taken during training.14 The only realistic image is taken from The Illustrated London News and shows the Somme at the beginning of the ‘big push’. It reveals the tracery of the trenches but prevents the readers from feeling empathy for the soldiers, who are reduced to small static black spots in the distance. To readers of the German illustrated press, only the devastated landscape conveys the idea of chaos.15 The rest of the information is optimistic, multiplying snapshots and engravings of impassive wounded soldiers,16 or fighters moving forwards to conquer open spaces.17 The proportion of sensational pictures is similarly small in official photographic albums.18 Among the photo-postcards that German soldiers regularly sent to their families, finally, grim images amount to just 1 per cent of the total, and are predictably lost among routine representations of daily activities at the front.19 Violence, though not banned in Germany, is depicted through heroism, mostly in epic engravings embodying the ideal of the national fighter and a promise of victories to come.20 Above all, it is sublimated in

LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES AT WAR

18

the idea of sacrifice for the Nation, represented via the numerous photos of monuments which were regularly published in the place of dead bodies. 21 They guarantee and testify to the commemoration of the dead by the German people. The German iconographic landscape is homogeneous: no document allows the public to realize the traumatic nature of modern warfare. This denial of reality was ensured by an efficient and authoritarian system of censorship. Its main feature was that pictures were censored one by one in advance, when photographers sent them in triplicate to the Oberzensurstelle (Oz) which authorized or refused publication (Figure 2.2). The Oberzensurstelle would send newly received images, depending on the theme represented, to specialized institutions: the Headquarters banned

Oberste Heeresleitung (High Command) from 1870

Section IIIb (Spying, Information, censorship) from 1870

Kriegspresseamt Press Bureau

Information Bureau Section Ia from 1870

Foreign Office Bureau Section Ib from 1870

Instructions

Oberzensurstelle Section Ic Censorship bureau

Zensurstelle (Headquarters, Navy, Interior, Colonial, War offices)

Local censorship in every region

Censorship of local illustrated press

Censorship of Berlin illustrated press

Censorship of pictures

FIGURE 2.2  Organization chart of the German censorship of pictures, 1914–17.

MAPPING VISUAL VIOLENCE IN ALLIED COUNTRIES

19

any ‘representation of the war space’; the Oberzensurstelle itself censored political photos; pictures of prisoners or technical material were studied by the War Office; the Colonial Office or the Navy were also involved in relation to their specific areas of expertise. Each document was thus assessed by a specialist, who then gave the Oberzensurstelle a visa for publication. Moreover the final proof of each magazine was checked a second time by local censorship services. There were thus two separate pre-publication checks and the flowchart reveals a many-headed but very centralized institution. From December 1914 onwards, the Oberzensurstelle generated real reflexion, visible in numerous exchanges between the various censorship organizations, about which images were and were not permissible. 22 From this sprang two booklets, both on 8 January 1917. Instructions on the censorship of pictures was intended for publishers and photographers; a second, secret brochure, Conditions to apply to censorship of pictures, was a guide for censors. 23 In March 1917, most of these instructions reappeared in a (secret) Alphabetical Register for Censorship. 24 The body and its sufferings inevitably figure in this normative corpus of texts. Instruction BV4 from Conditions to apply to censorship of pictures forbids any snapshot of a body whose face can be recognized. The same applies to prisoners. But curiously, if these texts prove that the German authorities were conscious of the strong psychological potential of the photographs, one cannot find a word about anonymous bodies without faces. The disposition BV5 gives an explanation: ‘any representation of injured or mutilated German soldiers can be authorized if it aims to show less the suffering of these war casualties than the care given and the improvement of health, and if it gives the names of the soldiers’. The physical and moral sufferings of the German soldier, then, can be represented, but only if they are sublimated in optimism and sacrifice. There is no freedom to represent combat wounds, or anxiety at the front, since they are not optimistic enough. These instructions were enforced by a vigorous fining policy. 25 In consequence, German photographic information is vapid, without any emotional relief. The German home front was allowed access only to an old-fashioned vision of modern warfare, consciously produced by an authoritarian and efficient censorship. 26

Model 2: Shock and emotion in France In France too, the public was denied access to the full trauma of the war in newsreels, 27 factual or feature films, 28 photograph albums and photographic exhibitions. 29 In sharp contrast, however, the French illustrated press concentrated and amplified violence from the front. In policy terms, France offers a clear counter-model to the efficiency of German censorship.

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20

From 1915 onwards, French civilians had access to the most violent images of industrial warfare: the utter devastation of towns in ruins expressed an annihilation of the most intimate recesses of private lives; the destruction of landscapes provoked by endless bombardments, whether the immense forests of mutilated trunks at Verdun or the chalky and chaotic no man’s lands of the Somme, rendered the violence of the front visible and almost tactile, offering the viewer images of endless desolation. For soldiers, as Leed observes, these spectacles created a new identity. 30 In magazines, they produced a visual shock, plunging readers into a profound dejection. 31 Through such images, often published in the most striking format of a two-page central spread, 32 the French public could realize the extent of their national mutilation. In terms of combat, as Joanna Bourke has shown, it is impossible to witness hand-to-hand fighting directly. 33 As Bodo von Dewitz observes, the soldier-photographer, faced with the crucial question ‘Schiessen oder fotografieren’, will invariably respond by shooting (with a gun, not a camera) to save his life.34 Hard as it tried to approach real fighting, the press could not present anything other than post-combat images. 35 Nevertheless, French press photos sometimes succeeded in coming close to the supreme moment of death in battle, showing soldiers shot in action, a shell exploding on a platoon or the constant menace of shellfire hanging over running or crawling men.36 Regarding photos shot behind the lines, photos perfectly rendered the atmosphere of the war’s new style of combat. 37 Finally and above all, corpses appeared in French magazines early on, reaching a numerical peak in 1915 (Figure 2.3). 12

10

8

6

Le Miroir

L'Illustration

4

2

N

Au g. 1 O 91 ov ct. 4 .-D 19 1 Ja ec. 4 n. 1 -F 91 4 e M ar b. 1 .-A 91 M pr. 5 ay -J 191 Ju un. 5 l.1 Au 91 g. 5 Se 191 D Oct pt. 5 ec 1 . . 1 -No 91 91 v. 5 5- 19 Ja 15 Fe n b. . 19 -M Ap ar 16 r.- . 19 M 1 Ju ay 6 n. 19 -J ul 16 .1 Au 91 g. 6 19 N Oct 16 ov .1 .9 Ja De 16 n. c. - F 19 16 e M ar b. 1 .-A 9 M pr 17 ay . 1 9 -J un 17 .1 Ju 917 l. S 19 O ep 17 c D ec t.- t. 19 . 1 No 1 91 v. 7 7- 19 Fe Jan 17 b. . 1 -M 9 Ap ar 18 r.- . 19 M ay 18 19 1 Ju 8 n Se Au -18 g pt . - . 19 O 18 ct .1 91 8

0

FIGURE 2.3  Monthly numbers of photographs representing dead soldiers in Le Miroir and L’Illustration, 1914–18.

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21

Many of these photos were obtained via competitions organized by the magazines. Beginning in March 1915 with Le Miroir, this practice led to an increase in photographs depicting corpses (Figure 2.4). After a summer holiday break without heavy fighting, terrible photographs returned in October 1915, with the two offensives of Champagne and Artois on 25 September. In 1916, coverage of Verdun and the Somme again presented corpses, particularly with the recapture of the forts of Douaumont and Vaux in October and November 1916. Through 1915, and to a lesser extent 1916, the most terrible photographs, believed after the war to have been censored, were actually published in France: pieces of men built into trenches38, or hanging from trees39 or forgotten on a battlefield for the crows to pick at.40 Despite repeated bans on front-line photography by the High Command,41 then, a considerable area of freedom was available to French soldier-photographers. This autonomy allowed magazines to innovate in representing the violence of war. First, they searched for sensational photographs where they could find them, on the battlefield. Like Robert Capa 20 years later, they considered that good photographs were close-ups.

FIGURE 2.4  ‘A Nightmare Vision for the Kaiser’s Nights’, Le Miroir, 26 December 1915.

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LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES AT WAR

And their offers of cash prizes threw soldiers into an incredible competition to shoot the most sensational snapshot. They thus created the figure of the ‘photocombattant’, predecessor of the photo-reporter,42 using his camera obscura under shellfire. Never in the history of photojournalism would this fusion of the two roles reappear.43 In addition, magazines invented strategies to increase the power of their pictures. Aware that it is impossible to recreate the intensity of emotions lived by the soldiers, they simulated them (Figure 2.5). By associating varied formats on two pages and dramatic texts, this filmic report recreates the intensity of a bombardment, and fabricates an emotion of suspense, aiming to bring the reader closer to the emotion of a soldier trapped in his blockhouse. The photographic shock reminds readers of daily experience at the front, and builds an emotional unified community. Fifty-one years before Daniel Filipacchi’s celebrated slogan for Paris-Match, French magazines were already achieving ‘The weight of words, the shock of photos.’44 However, limits to the exhibition of horrors were progressively applied even to photo-magazines. The representation of decomposing bodies was avoided, as a form of distancing from an ultimate horror. The crushed face of a shot-down airman (Figure 2.6) was unique in French magazines at this time. Similarly, the sufferings of the living were banned: at worst, soldiers appeared as exhausted or bored.45 Their emotions were absent, as if physical or mental pain was a taboo imposed within photojournalistic sincerity.

FIGURE 2.5  ‘Coldly, German 150-mm shells come closer. The photographer snaps them.’ Le Miroir, 6 June 1915.

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23

FIGURE 2.6  A shot-down airman. Le Miroir, 31 October 1915.

As 1915 progressed, however, the media gradually domesticated the culture of sensationalism. The decline in displays of horror is particularly visible in the second half of the year. In Le Miroir’s photographic competitions, after the first three, terribly crude, months, the rhythm of shocking shots decreased rapidly. After 3 June, Le Miroir sometimes continued its clinical descriptions of mangled corpses, but it did not award prizes to such images. After having provoked an amateur quest for terrible snapshots, Le Miroir therefore imposed a certain distance from poor taste. Henceforth mangled flesh, innerds and disfigured faces would fall under a taboo that John Taylor describes as still in force today;46 decency and morality regarding what is humanly tolerable have set boundaries that cannot be crossed. As Umberto Eco reminds us, the ‘intolerable’ consists in not respecting the body of the Other.47 After having toyed with sensationalism in order to secure new readers, French magazines adopted a more moral tone. In the second half of 1915, they intuitively fixed the limit of the tolerable by turning to less morbid visual sensationalism, based on rarity,48 technical challenges49 or aesthetic value. 50 Did censorship shape this change? It seems more likely to have resulted from specific initiatives of the press. Photographs of corpses, some of them explicit, continued to appear until 1918. Indeed, the French authorities were tolerant towards such terrible photographs. French national censorship was dominated by the ‘Bureau de la Presse’ (Figure 2.7).

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Military Government of Paris (August 1914–January 1916) War Ministry (January 1916–November 1918)

Press Bureau (1914–16) General Directorate of Press Relations (January 1916–September 1917) Maison de la Presse (September 1917–November 1918)

Sub-section for periodicals, illustrated papers and brochures

Illustrated magazines censorship All Parisian publications No pre-censorship of pictures

FIGURE 2.7  Organization chart of French censorship of the illustrated press.

Regarding the illustrated press, authorizations were given by the department called Périodiques, Illustrés, Brochures. There is a double specificity about the French censor’s work in this department. First, unlike his German counterpart, he did not pre-censor pictures before their use by the press but judged the final proofs of magazines, a few days before publication. Secondly, he worked alone, without specialist assistance. He had to be very adaptable, but his judgement was necessarily limited. Finally, the French censors’ archives reveal a lack of interest in photographs, and in pictures in general. The only instructions regard technical aspects, or troop movements. The psychological impact of grim pictures was hardly taken into consideration. 51 But were the French authorities so liberal that they were prepared to advertise all the terrifying aspects of this war? Such a demonstration of horror forces us to investigate France’s national relationship with the dead body. A book written in 1931 by Paul Allard revealed all the photographic documents censored in 1914–1852: heads built into parapets, or bodies hanging in trees. It is interesting to note, however, that these pictures – or ones like them  – were actually published in the illustrated press, mostly in Le Miroir. The reason  – and this is the third feature of the French censorship – was simply that the press did not respect the censor’s decisions. The magazines gave the final proofs too late, 53 or they published photos without the censor’s agreement, 54 or they did even not come to pick up the final proofs. 55 And, above all, the French censorship did not punish them. It gave warnings, sometimes summoning editors, but financial sanctions, so

MAPPING VISUAL VIOLENCE IN ALLIED COUNTRIES

25

decisive in Germany, were rare. 56 This relatively relaxed approach appears to have been quite deliberate; on the rare occasions when they took drastic action, the French censors could prove as effective as any. In September 1917, for example, when L’Illustration flouted the censors’ instructions and published a four-page photoreportage, with eight photos, on defeat and desertion in the Russian army, the authorities ordered and secured the seizure of the offending issue from newsstands in Paris and across provincial France. 57 More than a democratic will to inform the Home front about the reality of war, the ‘sincerity’ of the French press must be considered as the result of laxity or, at least, of a conscious ‘laissez-faire’ on the authorities’ part.

Model 3: ‘Decency’ versus realism in Britain The British photographic corpus also suggests a visual counter-model. Nevertheless, it presents a different chronological approach and intensity of discourse. In general, Britain’s illustrated press from 1914 to 1916 was particularly dull and entirely failed to express any of the emotions experienced by soldiers. That said, in the first weeks of the war, the Illustrated London News used particularly tough photographs to tell its readership that war kills. On 28 August 1914, even before its French counterparts, it displayed two Belgian corpses. Such pictures reappeared regularly until the offensives of Champagne and Artois, covered in October 1915 (Figure 2.8). Thereafter, 8 The Illustrated London News

L'Illustration

7 6 5 4 3 2 1

08 /0 8 08 /19 /0 14 9 08 /19 /1 14 0 08 /19 /1 14 1 08 /19 /1 14 2 08 /19 /0 14 1/ 08 19 /0 15 2 08 /19 /0 15 3 08 /19 /0 15 4 08 /19 /0 15 5 08 /19 /0 15 6 08 /19 /0 15 7/ 08 19 /0 15 8 08 /19 /0 15 9/ 08 19 /1 15 0 08 /19 /1 15 1 08 /19 /1 15 2/ 08 19 /0 15 1 08 /19 /0 16 2/ 08 19 /0 16 3 08 /19 /0 16 4 08 /19 /0 16 5 08 /19 /0 16 6 08 /19 /0 16 7 08 /19 /0 16 8 08 /19 /0 16 9/ 08 19 /1 16 0/ 19 16

0

FIGURE 2.8  Numbers of photographs representing dead soldiers in The Illustrated London News and L’Illustration, 1914–16 (approximately weekly figures).

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Britain’s quantitative ‘superiority’ in images of corpses ended: still on display till the end of 1915, they were now fewer than those in French magazines. From that winter, dead bodies almost disappeared from the Illustrated London News. Other illustrated papers, meanwhile, opted from the start for something like the German model. The Sphere, for example, preferred showing visual euphemisms such as crosses and cemeteries rather than bodies. 58 Corpses only appeared eight times in the Sphere, 59 which is only twice more than in the very clean Illustrirte Zeitung. The number of shocking images in British magazines, then, did not allow the home front to sense the scale of the disaster. Nor did the content of British illustrated magazines convey the idea of extreme violence. In The Sphere, only three photographs exhibited modern warfare: the impact of the technological war appeared with electrocuted bodies on barbed-wire fences on 3 July 1915; the humiliation of corpses was shown on 7 April 1917, in a third-page picture depicting a soldier hanging from a tree; finally, mass death was represented on 1 September 1917. But in the other photographs such as the report ‘Showing result of shell’, the eye can just about distinguish a body in the foreground of a destroyed house.60 None of the bodies or the faces demonstrates suffering; neither the dead civilian in front of her child who looks at her with a strange stoicism,61 nor the three gassed soldiers who appear to be asleep, their hands in their pockets and legs crossed.62 In The Illustrated London News, only a very few photographs make clear the causes of death, whether mass death in the trenches63 or death by electrocution.64 Consequently, the impact of the war on bodies does not really exist in British magazines and the public cannot plunge into the horrific reality of the event. Above all, the principal characteristic of the British press was the atmosphere it created. Even the few very harsh photographs remained in an iconographic ensemble that erased the potential grimness of their emotional aspect. Three factors contributed to this. First, information remained anonymous and distant from British civilians since, up to the summer of 1916, British newspapers showed their Belgian, French, Serbian and Russian allies under the impact of violence that did not seem to affect the United Kingdom. Secondly, the magazines were removed from reality because the pictures remained static and kept the public at a distance from any true impression of life on the front line. For example, on 26 June 1915, The Sphere published Le Miroir’s photographic sequence (Figure 2.5) reproducing the anxiety of soldiers under shellfire.65 In the British version, the six photographs are assembled on one page, as opposed to four plus two in Le Miroir’s spread. The format is therefore reduced. In addition, the last two photographs are inserted into a rounded frame, giving them an artistic sheen and softening their harshness. Finally, the text is modified. The aim of French reporting was to increase the psychological tension of the reader by imitating a hide-and-seek style, from the title onwards, and insisting on the inexorable approach of the shells:

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Taken at the door of a blockhouse [. . .] they demonstrate how, little by little, the enemy corrects his shots. The Germans are looking to reach the battery [. . .] The shells advance steadily [. . .] we can see them approaching after every shot [. . .] The four explosions that we have reproduced here took place in front of the French battery, but the shots fell short; the last two shells fell behind the battery, between it and the blockhouse. The sixth exploded fifteen metres from the photographer. The danger here was palpable and the reader feels paralysed. The British text also pointed to the shells but, from the title on, emphasized the ‘Failure of [the] German 150-mm to locate a French battery.’ The commentary reassures the reader, instead of creating a strong emotional reaction: The beginning of the search for the French guns [. . .] Approaching nearer to the Concealed Battery [. . .] The third shell, still at fault, bursts a little closer [. . .] The nearest approach – shell bursting just short [. . .] The range lost – shell bursting behind battery [. . .] Only 15 yards from the photographer, but hopelessly at fault. All the shocking dimension of the French report, created by the rhythm of the images and the uncertainty given by the text, is eliminated. It is obvious that the British weekly does not want to transport the public into the battleground, close to the soldiers, but aims to reassure. The suspense is equivalent to what might be induced by a rather inferior bowler at a cricket match: the public is led onto familiar ground, and emotions are thereby dampened. One final element of the atmosphere annuls the realistic potential of grim photographs in British magazines. In every issue, the written discourse remains fundamentally heroic. This epic mystification, inherited from a war culture founded on daring hand-to-hand encounters with fierce enemies, is similar in all belligerent countries.66 It is found in France too, but it had been abandoned in 1915 in favour of the gritty realism of the soldiers’ photographs. In Britain, at that time, stark images from the front were too few to modify the optimistic tone of each week’s issue, and most of the snapshots presented soldiers living a serene round of sports67 or quiet recreation.68 The drawings particularly heighten the epic aspect. They focus on bravado and sacrifice and pursue the myth of an active war, where the fear of death is diluted in the energy of killing, as in Matania’s work for The Sphere.69 These numerous epic drawings bathe the reader in a mood of adventure, action and camaraderie, annulling the potential realism of the few morbid documents that might be found next to them. The quantitative absence of provoking snapshots, along with the thematic choices of the pictures and their immersion into an epic environment, shape the relationship between civilians and the violent event. Photographic ontology, the Barthian assurance that what one sees on the photo has really

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happened, was not exploited by the British press, which failed to modify its visual perspective on war. It should be noted that in this early phase of the war, (1914–15), the tone of British illustrated magazines stemmed, not from official propaganda directives, but from the supply of images to the magazines and their selection. Some came from civilians who had no contact with the violence of war; others, from amateur photographers, were rarely sensational; many, finally, were simply borrowed from French illustrated papers. One can ask then whether the establishment of an official photographic section, starting from 1916, modified the atmosphere of the magazines. As Nicholas Hiley reminds us, on 1 July 1916, photographers sent by the War Propaganda Bureau (Wellington House) were posted in the trenches to cover the ‘big push’ on the Somme.70 From July to November 1916, they offered a monthly average of 317 photographs; some photographers, at least, tried to adapt their photos to the needs of the press.71 To ‘give the impression of what it was like to be on the front line’, Ernest Brooks took realistic photographs of shell splinters; Jane Carmichael underlines that ‘the press recognized their uniqueness and the privilege of their publication’.72 However, the impact of these photos on illustrated magazines remained modest. It enabled a stronger emotional investment by the public in the war, since the real daily life of British soldiers was finally presented.73 Images like Ivor Castle’s iconic ‘Over the top’ – even taken during training – where a soldier leaps into no man’s land, sought, for example, to capture the real movement of troops.74 Realism is also reflected in growing numbers of explosions and devastated landscapes.75 From these gentle photographic changes resulted a slight increase in emotional intensity. But official photographers, though free to go and photograph anything, usually stuck to the range of subjects laid down by Wellington House, rather than seeking scoops or provoking emotional reactions. They were hardly at all innovative; nor did they allow magazines to generate a visual language, to engage with the public’s emotions. Ivor Castle’s photographs, for example, appeared on a small, grey quarter-page – not a format likely to render the psychological tension of men throwing themselves into a hail of bullets.76 In Great Britain, then, if the official agreement of 1916 allowed more photographic realism and finally connected the public with the army, the illustrated press was still not the place where the home front could discover the horror of the conflict. What did change the relationship of the British to the war were, first, films and second, photographic exhibitions. It was the film The Battle of the Somme (August 1916), produced by Wellington House in partnership with a private association of factual film companies called the Trade Topical Committee, that gave the British people an idea of what modern warfare was really like.77 Twenty-seven minutes long and taking a chronological approach, the film begins with preliminary bombardments (Parts I and II), putting the audience in direct contact with the firepower of an industrial war. Part III covers the attack itself and

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its consequences, including the treatment of wounded soldiers. The film closes (in Parts IV and V) with the aftermath, including wounded soldiers, prisoners and a devastated landscape. The Battle of the Somme has been much criticized. It does not give a body count or mention the soldiers’ physical and psychological sufferings. The famous scene with the parapet is particularly problematic. For 21 seconds, men jump into no man’s land; two soldiers collapse immediately and two others fall when they set out over the barbed wire. This sequence gives the impression that the troops are walking on the real battlefield, but it was filmed away from the battle and was therefore later criticized as imposing propagandist views.78 These limitations are nevertheless relative. The film does not present quantitative data or facts; it does highlight the real nature of the war taking place, which is the most important point. The wounds may be minor and the bandages white, but death is the object of a raw, and objective, sequence lasting more than two minutes which contrasts strongly with the previous picturesque scene showing jolly soldiers receiving their mail. Shockingly, images of German deaths are followed by British corpses. Almost a third of the whole film is devoted to the wounded and the dead, far more than the proportion provided by the illustrated magazines. Above all, the sight of men falling without fighting offers a poignant demonstration that in modern warfare, soldiers die without heroism. Finally, despite the film’s relative restraint, mass death is perceptible and the audience can experience the extent of the massacre through the speed at which men fall. The Battle of the Somme offers the public a narrative of overwhelming and profound humanity. Soldiers’ emotions are palpable on their faces. German prisoners and British soldiers, some of them wounded, help one another. Such proximity in a context of ‘hate culture’ 79 testifies to the horror of the fighting that had just taken place. The viewers’ anxiety arises even from the difference between the picturesque or the serenity of the initial scenes, and the extreme tension of the battle, from which men come back stunned and numb. Projected in 34 London cinemas at once, the film then circulated throughout the United Kingdom and was seen by 20 million spectators, nearly half the total population, in six weeks.80 Most British people saw the film with a quasi-religious attitude and left the cinema with tears in their eyes, ‘purged in their minds through pity and terror’.81 The Battle of the Somme does not describe ‘the glory of war . . . but war as grim, murderous reality and hideous ruin’, wrote the Daily Telegraph; it provides ‘a visualisation of the hell that is war’, said the Daily Mirror. Unlike Modris Eksteins, who deduces from the parapet scene and the lack of detail that the era of modernity opened by Great Britain is an era of falsehood,82 we consider that the film’s images, real or staged, are images of media sincerity in democratic societies. Though officially commissioned, the film upset the traditional and optimistic vision of war that had hitherto been represented as picturesque and epic. Henceforth, war would become a profoundly human event, dominated by the gravity of terrifying sacrifices. Inaccessible to the

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press, the ontology of modern war was shown predominantly, definitely and exclusively in 1916, in this 30-minute film.83 The following year, the limits of what could be represented in war was again pushed back in Britain in two photographic exhibitions, which, like The Battle of the Somme, represent a break with the past. Between 1916 and 1918, the Canadian War Record Office organized two striking exhibitions of official Canadian photographs at the Grafton Gallery, in London, for the benefit of the Canadian War Memorial Fund.84 Opened on 4 December 1916, the first Official Canadian War Photographs Exhibition received more than 50,000 visitors in six weeks, before touring in Canada and the United States. The second exhibition opened on 16 July 1917 and remained in London until September before going on tour around Great Britain; duplicate exhibitions appeared in France and then in Canada. Both exhibitions offered the diversity required by Wellington House, but the photographers’ personal choices expressed a wish to underline the terrible reality of the front. In order to do so, the power of mechanical images to record ‘reality’ was emphasized. Indeed, the curators innovated in the way they set up images to transport visitors into the raw brutality of a battlefield: formats were widened to infinity, as in the amazing photograph entitled No man’s land (Figure 2.9). The pictures shown, of men walking on churned-up earth, shell-holes and bodies in contorted positions showing their suffering, not only embodied the essence of the Great War; they also transformed the viewer’s position, drawing him into the scene thanks to the huge size of the prints, which upset the traditional lay-out of an exhibition. Instead of piling works up to the ceiling, as in contemporary exhibitions of paintings where some pictures are invisible, this set up allowed intensified interactions between viewer and image. Faced with this life-size photograph, visitors stumble in mud or find themselves face to face with corpses. They are dominated by images of active soldiers who seem to walk over them. The effect was immediate and the critics noted that one felt transported into a battlefield, immersed in horror. The commentary published in The Sphere testifies to this novelty by itself innovating.85 Breaking with the usual smooth discourse, the journalist focuses right away on the grimmer, more sensational aspects that could shock the visitors. He notes the immense photograph of the no man’s land of Vimy ridge, which gives the article its title: ‘No man’s land: from the exhibition of Canadian War Photographs at the Grafton Galleries.’ Then he stops at a photograph of a suffering soldier: ‘Take, for instance, no. 51, with the nurse standing at the door of a hospital in France. A wounded man is being brought up on a stretcher to the train.’ He finishes with the destructive modernity of war and, under a cover of technical details, describes a wave of deadly gas in close proximity to the soldiers: ‘Gas shells. Another very interesting picture is that showing gas shells bursting near the lines. These shells must not be taken for “crumps” or “shrapnel”.’ Furthermore, the journalist not only innovates in emphasizing grim details; he also invents

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FIGURE 2.9  No Man’s Land, from the second Official Canadian War Photographs Exhibition, L’Illustration, December 1917, reproduced in L’Illustration, 29 December 1917. Courtesy L’Illustration.

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textually to provoke emotion. This is particularly true in the moment of departure into battle, henceforth crucial in the minds of the audience who had seen The Battle of the Somme. This crucial moment had now become so central to British representations of the new war86 that the journalist devoted an entire paragraph to it: ‘Time’s Up’ A subject which has an inevitable thrill is the one described in the word ‘Time’s up; over you go!’ This is the psychological moment of the war, to which all else has led up. The officers have stood, watch in hand, and then the moment for the attack has ticked as the hands move to the appointed moment. Then comes the cry, ‘Time’s up; over you go!’, and at this moment the camera has caught the scene. The men are scrambling up the awkward slippery sides of the trench, and are exposed to the flying bullets of the enemy. The journalist creates suspense equivalent to the tension of men in the trenches, by narrating the seconds that are being shattered, the starting cry, the frailty of human flesh in the face of bullets. Just as the French illustrated press had invented new photojournalistic means to express a new ontology of war, these exhibitions multiply iconographic and textual mises-en-scène to convey the experience of extreme violence at the home front. Great Britain therefore offered a more gradual, fine-grained and polymorphous version of the French counter-model – with the authorities’ agreement. How far, though, were the British authorities responsible for this model? We should not exaggerate the role of Wellington House in the fabrication and circulation of shocking images. The setting-up of official photographs initially resulted from private initiatives, and the decisive choices came chiefly from the photographers producing new information. Indeed, the authorities had envisaged their official label to guarantee the authenticity of photos rather than to reveal the horrors of war.87 Their requirement for a diversity of snapshots to depict life at war led some photographers to specialize: Thomas Scales, the British photographer for New Zealand, focused on recreations, while William Rider-Rider photographed British soldiers fraternizing with the French, as well as concerts, sports and celebrity visits. The photographic turn towards grittier subjects came chiefly from Dominion photographers, who focused on the extent of the sacrifices accepted by soldiers, in particular after the decision to create the Imperial War Museum in 1917. They aimed not only to inform the public, but also to record the sacrifices of the troops, in order to build a national memory.88 For example, the reporter Charles Bean pressed his fellow-Australians Frank Hurley and George Hubert Wilkins, both photographers, to include death, devastation and the everyday constraints of the front, in the banality of daily life. The choice to build terrible images did not stem from the authorities but from photographers who, though officially commissioned, made their own plans of what to depict.

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How then can we explain the absence of challenging photos taken by official photographers in the illustrated press? These lacunae come from the magazines’ choices rather than from official directives. One proof of this is given by the record of The Illustrated London News, which published pictures of corpses during the first months of war. The fact that other weeklies, such as The Sphere, did not show dead bodies during this time shows that the representation of the dead depended on choice rather than on authorization. The grim photos in the Illustrated London News ended after 1915; yet just a few months later, the film The Battle of the Somme, and then the Canadian exhibitions, received much press coverage and presented the war in all its brutality without any restrictions from the authorities. The presence or absence of sensational photographs in a magazine thus depended on the magazine’s illustrations policy, not on the censor. These decisions can be chiefly explained by a concern for decency within the press. For example, a tough photograph borrowed from France was transformed in The Sphere into a drawing,89 as though violence against the body could not be portrayed through precise fleshly appearance. The accompanying text confirms this, explaining the absence of detail as resulting from a technical fault that did not exist in the French original: ‘The photograph was taken with the aid of a German flare, for lack of the usual magnesium powder, hence it is rather indistinct as to details.’ A second intervening example is the famous Canadian photograph of No Man’s Land published by The Sphere the 21 April 1917. The magazine chooses to cut the image at the level of the soldiers, masking the shocking bodies abandoned in the mud. As Jane Carmichael reminds us, Photographs of the dead were taken and could be horrific, showing fly-blown and boated corpses, but these were relatively few, as the military, the propagandists, the press, and the photographers were in tacit agreement with contemporary standards of decency that they were not fit for publication.90 Decency and self-censorship, more than official censorship, thereby explain the absence of a sensational photographic press in Britain. The authorities favoured the expression of the new reality of war without being precise about its contours or imposing any demands. As happened in France, the liberal regime did not seek terrifying images but expressed a laissez-faire attitude conceded to its civil society. Whatever the limits of the representation of violence in democratic countries, Jay Winter’s claim of a conspiracy of silence must therefore be qualified from the photographic point of view. It is now clear that the representation of the violence of the Great War depended on a double variable. On the one hand, a precise iconographical cartography must be established before speaking about censorship or propaganda, since each belligerent used a different medium to reveal the

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horrors of the front. On the other hand, since the consciousness of the changing nature of the war was progressive, a chronological study of all images must be done, in terms of quantitative intensity as well as qualitative display. That work has been here completed for France, Great Britain and Germany. It reveals a double visual model, based on the political choice to allow the media to tell the full grimness of war, or to forbid it. In France, violence was displayed with barely any decency, in a very popular medium. In Great Britain, horror was mentioned when it became impossible to hush up. In Germany, violent images were abruptly and efficiently hidden. However, there is a difference between the liberal regimes. In France, realism arrived thanks to the refusal by the illustrated press of official photographers and of censorship decisions. In England, on the contrary, the realistic information was allowed by the authorities. In every case, one can conclude that democracies tolerate, and sometimes generate, a sincere, and even crude, visual information; but democracy does not lie in an accepted choice of presenting horror; it lies much more in the freedom accorded to civil society.

Further reading Joëlle Beurier, Images et violence. Quand Le Miroir racontait la Grande Guerre (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2007) studies the visual ‘transgressions’ effected by the photographic illustrated magazine Le Miroir during the First World War. It contests the view that the media in wartime France were totally censored, and reveals the violence of the images presented to readers on the Home Front. Paul Gerhard’s Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder. Die Visulaierung des modernes Krieges (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2004) considers the pictorial representation of war, in different forms of illustration, throughout the twentieth century. It includes a brief treatment of magazines in the First World War. The exhibition catalogue 1917 (Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2012) covers pictorial representations of the First World War across the world – though the most thoroughly examined, because the most varied, of these, are works of art rather than illustrations. Laurent Gervereau, Montrer la guerre, information ou propagande? (Paris: Isthme Éditions, 2006) concerns war through the eye of the photographer, and highlights the unchanging elements in the use of photography in conflicts from 1914–18 to the present day.

Notes 1 J. M. Winter, The Experience of World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 186–9. 2 A. Fage, Histoire de la photographie française des origines à nos jours (Paris: Créatis, 1980); M. Frizot, ‘Les Kodaks’ in M. Frizot (ed.) Nouvelle histoire de la photographie (Paris: Larousse, 2001).

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3 This was also the subject of ‘1917’, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Metz concerned chiefly with painters in their relationship with the front. Cf. C. Garnier and L. Le Bon, 1917 (Metz: Éditions du Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2012). 4 A. M. Thiesse, Le Roman du quotidien. Lecteurs et lectures populaires à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Le Chemin Vert, 1984). 5 T. Gervais, ‘L’Illustration photographique. Naissance du spectacle de l’information, 1843–1914’, (PhD thesis, École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2007), http://issuu.com/lhivic/docs/l-illustration-photographique. 6 As examples, see La Vie Illustrée, 23 February 1903 or L’Illustration, 22 April 1911. 7 See for an example, Le Monde’s commentary on the Nicéphore Niepce Museum’s exhibition Les yeux de la guerre. 14–18 en images. 5 November 2005. 8 French and German visual representations of the Great War are the subject of J. Beurier, Photographier la Grande Guerre. France-Allemagne (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013, forthcoming). 9 Das Illustrierte Blatt, 25 July 1915. 10 Ibid., 17 October 1915. 11 Zeit im Bild: 24 September 1914; 26 November 1914; 3, 10, 17, 24 January 1915; 7 February 1915; 18 April 1915; 30 May 1915; 24 October 1915. 12 Illustrirte Zeitung, 18 November 1915. 13 Ibid., 31 December 1914. 14 Ibid., 5 July 1917. 15 Das Illustrierte Blatt, 19 November 1916. 16 Ibid., 21 March 1915. 17 Ibid., 1 and 29 August 1915. 18 Der grosse Krieg in Bildern, n° 22 (Berlin: 1916), 10–11. 19 J. Beurier, ‘L’apprentissage de l’événement. Le Miroir et la Grande Guerre’, Études photographiques 20 (June 2007), 74. Cf. also Archiv Kölsche Funke, Köln, Rut-Wiess vun 1823 e.V. ‘Akten 253 bis 256’: four albums containing approximately 1,000 documents, photographs and postcards of private individuals. 20 Illustrirte Zeitung, from 6 August 1914 to 7 November 1918. 21 Ibid., 12 August 1915. 22 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau (BAMA), RM3/ 10 307, KPA, OZ Nr. 13255 presents all regulations on pictures from 1 August 1914 till 30 June 1916. These instructions were brought together in the Leitsätze für die Bilderzensur. 23 Leitsätze für die Bilderzensur and Ausführungsbestimmungen für die Leitsätze für die Bilderzensur. BAMA, RM3/10 297, Nr. 1076/, May 1916; BAMA, RM3/10 297, Kriegsministerium, Nr. 774, June 1916. 24 T. Eisermann, Pressephotographie und Informationskontrolle im Ersten Weltkrieg. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, (Hamburg: Ingrid Kämpfer Verlag, 2000), 57–61.

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25 B. Sösemann (ed.), Theodor Wolff. Tagebücher 1914–1919 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Beldt Verlag, 1984), 395. 26 This prefigured the practices of democratic regimes in later wars. The United States, indeed, was deploying the same arguments and the same bureaucratic efficiency as early as 1917, in order to avoid horrific photos. Cf. Kendall Banning (Lieut. Col., Signal Reserve Corps), ‘The military censorship of pictures’, unpublished paper, 1926, www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/photos.pdf, accessed 1 October 2012. 27 L. Véray, Les films d’actualités français de la Grande Guerre (Paris: SIRPA/ AFRHC, 1995). 28 L. Véray, La Grande Guerre au cinéma. De la gloire à la mémoire (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). 29 Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, Nanterre, France, Q 2351, 1917. Documents de la Section Photographique de l’’Armée Française. 30 Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land. Combat and Identity in World War I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 31 Cf. L. Guilloux, Le Sang noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1978 (1st edn 1935)), 410. 32 L’Illustration, 23 March 1915. 33 J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in TwentiethCentury Warfare (London: Granta, 1999), 44–52. 34 B. von Dewitz, ‘Schiessen oder fotografieren? Über fotografierende Soldaten im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Fotogeschichte 43 (1992), 49–59. 35 Le Miroir, 8 October 1916. 36 Ibid., 2 and 9 May 1915; 17 September 1916; 17 January 1915. 37 See Auguste Pilette’s photograph in Le Miroir, 10 March 1918, awarded the first prize in April 1918. 38 Le Miroir, 23 May 1915. 39 Ibid., 6 December 1914; 9 May 1915; 14 May 1916. 40 Ibid., 26 December 1915. 41 Service Historique de la Défense, Château de Vincennes (SHD), 5N/59, 19 January 1916; 5N/360, 13 March 1916. 42 J. Beurier, ‘Le photocombattant ou la naissance d’un métier’, in P. Kaenel (ed.), Face à face. Ecrivains, artistes et photographes à l’œuvre dans les périodiques illustrés (1890–1940), (Lausanne: Infolio, 2011), 189–213. 43 In Vietnam, photo reporters ran alongside with the soldiers. See for instance P. Chauvet Rapporteur de guerre. Récit (Paris: J’ai Lu, 2003). Nowadays, with digital cameras, amateur photography has returned to the foreground of visual news. Cf. A. Gunthert, ‘Tous journalistes? Les attentats de Londres ou l’intrusion des amateurs’, Actualités de la recherche en histoire visuelle, 19 March 2009, www.arhv.lhivic.org/index.php/2009/03/19/956-tous-journalis tes, accessed 30 September 2012.

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44 On the famous Paris-Match slogan, see J. Durieux and P. Mahé, Les dossiers secrets de Paris-Match. 60 ans de scoops, 60 ans d’Histoire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009), 20–9, 30–6. 45 L’Illustration, 3 February 1917; 31 March 1917. 46 J. Taylor, Body Horror. Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 90–1, 129–56. 47 ‘One could construct a whole ethic based on respect for the body and its functions.’ Cf. U. Eco, ‘Tolerance and the Intolerable’, Index on Censorship, 23.1–2 (1994), 54. 48 First prize, June 1916, published in Le Miroir, 25 June 1916. 49 First prize, October 1916, published in Le Miroir, 29 October 1916. 50 Third prize, November 1917, published in Le Miroir, 18 November 1917. 51 SHD, 5N/363. 52 P. Allard, Images secrètes de la guerre. 200 photographies et documents censurés en France (Paris: Les Illustrés Français, 1933). 53 SHD, 5N/360, 12 March 1915. 54 Ibid., 5N/382, 7 September 1917. 55 Ibid., 5N/360, 25 October 1915. 56 Ibid., 5N/360 and 5N/382. 57 Ibid., 5N 382, Cabinet du ministre, Censure et saisie. L’Illustration, 8 September 1917. 58 Photographs of crosses, funerals or memorials to represent death appear in The Sphere on: 27 February 1915; 6 March 1915; 10 April 1915; 15 May 1915; 26 June 1915 (6 photos); 3, 17, and 31 July 1915; 21 August 1915; 4 September 1915; 2 October 1915; 13 November 1915; 22 January 1916; 29 January 1916 (4 photos); 25 March 1916 (5 photos); 1 April 1916; 17 June 1916 (5 photos); 19 and 26 August 1916; 23 September 1916; 7 October 1916 (two photos); 23 December 1916; 13 January 1917; 7 and 14 April 1917; 30 June 1917; 7 July 1917; 6 October 1917 (4 photos); 20 and 27 October 1917; 15 June 1918 (3 photos); 19 October 1918. 59 The Sphere, 27 March 1915, 22 May 1915 (2 photos), 3 July 1915, 6 November 1915, 9 December 1916, 7 April 1917, 1 September 1917. 60 Ibid., 27 March 1915. 61 Ibid., 22 May 1915. 62 See also Ibid., 6 November 1915 and 5 February 1916. 63 The Illustrated London News, 2 October 1915. 64 Ibid., 30 October 1915. 65 See above, p. 22. 66 G. Mosse, Le guerre mondiali, Dalla tragedia al mito dei caduti (1990) (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2002). 67 The Illustrated London News, 26 February 1916. 68 Ibid., 2 October 1915.

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69 The Sphere, 15 July 1916. 70 N. Hiley, ‘La bataille de la Somme et les médias de Londres’ in Guerres et cultures (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), 193. 71 Ibid., 198. 72 J. Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London: Routledge, 1989), 49. All details on official photographers are taken from this book. 73 In The Sphere, 6 May 1916, the first British official photograph shows a British soldier. 74 The Illustrated London News, 21 October 1916. 75 The Sphere, 22 July 1916. 76 The Illustrated London News, 21 October 1916. 77 N. Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda. Myth or reality? (London/ New York: Continuum, 1999), 23. 78 Roger Smither, ‘“A wonderful idea of the fighting”: The question of fake in The Battle of the Somme’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13.2 (1993), 149–68. 79 S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker 14–18, Retrouver la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 122. 80 On the success and impact of the film, see Nicholas Reeves, ‘The Real Thing at Last: Battle of the Somme and the Domestic Cinema Audience in the Autumn of 1916’, History 51 (Autumn 1996), 4–8. 81 Ibid., 7. 82 Quoted by Ibid., 10. 83 No other film enjoyed such success. From January 1917 onwards, documentaries were replaced by sanitized newsreels. Cf. Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda, 23. 84 C. Saouter, Le progrès, les médias, la guerre (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2003). A third Canadian exhibition took place at the Grafton Gallery in 1919. 85 The Sphere, 9 December 1916. 86 Indeed, it remains so today. 87 Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda, 21–2. 88 J. Carmichael, First World War Photographers, 64. 89 The Sphere, 1 September 1917. 90 J. Carmichael, First World War Photographers, 25, 53.

CHAPTER THREE

The Allied Bombing Offensive in the British Media, 1942–45 Andrew Knapp

In October 1943, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris complained to the Air Ministry of the press coverage given to RAF Bomber Command, which he had headed for 20 months. The Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive, he stated, was being ‘written down’ in the interests of the Allied ground forces. Worse, reports of Bomber Command raids were ‘dull and unconvincing’: they gave the impression that ‘the authorities are ashamed of area bombing’, and thus demoralized his aircrews. Harris’s suggested remedy was a robust and public statement of Bomber Command’s true aims – ‘the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilised community life throughout Germany’  – which would emphasize that such outcomes were ‘not by-products of attempts to hit factories’ and that ‘Acreages of housing devastation are infinitely more important’ as a gauge of the bombers’ success than the destruction of industry.1 The Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, demurred. ‘If we were to [. . .] adopt as the principal measure of our success the number of men, women and children killed and the number of houses burnt out rather than the number of factories damaged and destroyed, we should provoke the leaders of religious and humanitarian opinion to protest.’2 The official Air Ministry reply to Harris, dated 15 December, praised the ‘superb achievements of your Command’, but declined to ‘change the emphasis of their publicity’,

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stressing that while the devastation wrought upon German cities was not concealed from the public, It is [. . .] desirable to present the bomber offensive in such a light as to provoke the minimum of public controversy and as far as possible to avoid conflict with religious and humanitarian opinion. Any public protest, whether reasonable or unreasonable, against the bomber offensive could not but hamper the Government in the execution of their policy and might affect the morale of the aircrews themselves.3 The exchange concluded in March 1944 with a fudge. While refusing to ‘change the emphasis’ of its publicity, the Ministry stressed that there had been no attempt ‘to disguise from the public the fact that your Command’s attacks are aimed at the destruction of vast acreages of industrial cities’. Harris observed that ‘any civilian who produces more than enough to maintain himself is making a positive contribution to the German war effort and is therefore a proper though not necessarily a worthwhile object of attack’. 4 He was not contradicted. The Combined Bomber Offensive killed an estimated 420,000 German civilians, as well as nearly 60,000 French men and women and a comparable number of Italians.5 But the Air Ministry continued to tone down the precise nature of Bomber Command’s efforts. The record of reporting the bombing offensive in World War Two suggests two possible interpretations. Geoffrey Best claims that ‘During the second half of world war two the indiscriminate nature of area bombing was systematically concealed from public criticism by the RAF’s political spokesmen.’6 Noble Frankland, by contrast, observed that ‘Most people were very pleased with Bomber Command during the war and until it was virtually won; then they turned around and said it wasn’t a very nice way to wage war.’7 Who was right? How much concealment was there, how much approval, and how far was that approval manufactured? The chief focus of this chapter is on how much the British public could have known from press and BBC reports about Bomber Command’s raids and their impact on cities and civilians. A necessary preliminary, however, is to establish how bombing news was made in wartime Britain.

Censorship and complicity: A controlled news environment Journalists and broadcasters reporting bombing worked in a heavily constrained environment. They could not visit bombed cities (except British ones) until 1944. They could only rarely fly with bomber crews; when Wynford Vaughan Thomas and Reg Pidsley recorded and commentated a raid on Berlin from a Lancaster in September 1943, they made broadcasting

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history. And journalists were subject to wartime censorship.8 ‘D-notices’ could ban publication of sensitive material. Preliminary submission to the censor was required for any report on the total strength of the RAF or any unit thereof; for technical information on aircraft, bombs or ammunition; or for casualties to aircraft or crew.9 Visitors to squadrons, and conversations with aircrew, were carefully vetted. The BBC came under Information Ministry direction, its independent constitution suspended for the duration.10 Between the printed press and government, relations could, on occasion, turn sour. In March 1942, one of the worst moments of the war, Churchill considered political censorship of newspapers, and was dissuaded only by his own Information Minister, Brendan Bracken, using Churchill’s friend Lord Beaverbrook as an intermediary.11 In extremis, the Home Secretary had the power to close down a newspaper  – a punishment visited upon the Communist Daily Worker from January 1941 till September 1942 and threatened by the Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison against the Daily Mirror.12 But although confrontation between media and government could occur, complicity was far more frequent. This was far from unique to Britain in World War Two. As Welch has observed of twentieth-century Britain and America, ‘the media willingly collaborated in disseminating propaganda, justifying war aims, sustaining the morale of the home and fighting fronts and demonising the enemy’.13 The model of a liberal censorship regime, broadly established in World War One, held good a generation later.14 Thus for Cyril Radcliffe, controller of press censorship and news at the Ministry of Information from 1939, ‘each side [newspapers and censors] genuinely wants to help the other’.15 His successor Francis Williams, formerly editor of the Daily Herald, relied chiefly on ‘private and confidential guidance letters to editors’, not D-notices.16 In October 1945, the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff thanked the BBC’s controller of news ‘for all the co-operation and help you gave me personally during these war years’, and for the ‘sympathy and open-mindedness with which you were always ready to listen to us’.17 Even Cecil King, who liked to regard his paper, the Daily Mirror, as the enfant terrible of Fleet Street, told Churchill that ‘we made it a strict rule not to criticize the conduct of military operations or personnel in any way’.18 The Air Ministry rapidly became an active propagandist for the bombing campaign. On the broadest canvas, it compiled quarterly reports and weekly summaries of bombing operations for politicians, senior civil servants and military personnel, especially Americans.19 In Britain, a ‘Wings for Victory week’, in which aircraft and bombs were exhibited and financial support for the bombing effort solicited, was organized in March 1943; it drew the largest crowds in London since the 1937 Coronation. 20 The Evening Standard carried a photograph of children ‘sticking savings stamps on a 500lb bomb case at Trafalgar square to-day. At the end of the week the bomb will be filled and dropped over enemy territory.’21

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Within this context, journalists reporting on the air war, if not precisely embedded, were heavily dependent on the Air Ministry and the RAF for their information. From day to day, it was the Air Ministry’s aim to get reports on night raids from RAF air stations to London in time for the evening papers; details of American daytime operations would be similarly relayed so as to appear in the next morning’s editions. Each paper, and the BBC, typically had an air correspondent, sometimes with a service rank: Major Oliver Stewart for the Evening Standard and the Observer, Basil Cardew for the Daily Express, Ronald Walker for the News Chronicle. The BBC received weekly background briefings from a Group Captain Rose; Rose also supplied talks, as did E. Colston Shepherd, Secretary-General of the Air League of the British Empire and pre-war editor of The Aeroplane, and John Strachey, the future Labour minister, whose job as an Air Ministry spokesman carried the rank of Squadron Leader. Despite disagreements between Harris and his ministry, therefore, and despite the potential for explicit censorship, relations between the bombers and the press were characterized chiefly by close collaboration. How much freedom was available, under these conditions, to the news media covering the bombing campaign? Five answers may be offered. First, some aspects of the bombing offensive were off limits. In particular, Bomber Commands’ record of technical and operational failures early in the war, which led to its being practically stood down in the winter of 1941–2, was concealed from the public. So were the periodic disputes between Harris, the Air Ministry, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff. Second, there were alternative sources of information to the Air Ministry: these included the German and neutral media, available in neutral countries. British journalists usually used them, however, to confirm rather than to contest a British line – whether to ridicule German propaganda claims or, on the contrary, to cite German or neutral reports of damage to demonstrate the success of the air offensive. Third, reports of the bombing war broadly reflected the diversity of the British media, and most obviously the division between the sobriety of the BBC and the broadsheets and the more raucous tabloids. Fourth, most newspapers (including the tabloids), and the BBC, carried both reporting in the narrow sense and analysis. The latter typically included the place of the bombing war in the Allies’ wider strategy, its degree of success, and even, within limits, its moral justification. Fifth, some media space was available for outright critics of bombing. William Douglas Home, it is true, had to publish his condemnation of the bombing of Le Havre in the obscure columns of the Maidenhead Advertiser; but this was an unusual case of a serving officer refusing to fight (he was subsequently court-martialled, for the publicity as much as for the refusal). 22 But the pointed moral criticisms of bombing policy made by figures such as Bishop Bell of Chichester, or the Labour MP Richard Stokes, were bound to be reported by newspapers that still systematically reported parliamentary debates. 23 The successive

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pamphlets produced from 1942 by Vera Brittain and the Bombing Restriction Committee also received (mostly negative) media attention, and chiefly in the broadsheets rather than the tabloids. Such dissenting voices were not censored; indeed, Morrison – a conscientious objector in World War One  – explicitly refused, in the name of free expression, to ban the Committee. But the critics had no access, for example, to RAF personnel. The questions they raised might feed into mainstream debate – a Mass Observation survey, an article in the New Statesman or Tribune; their answers still tended to be marginalized. 24 If dissent could be taken seriously, albeit within limits, it was partly because the mainstream message fed by the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information was inherently contradictory. On the one hand, the bombing offensive received maximum publicity, for obvious reasons. A few commando raids aside, bombing was the only British (or American) contribution to war on the European continent for over three years; only the D-day landings pushed it durably off the front pages. The RAF, moreover, could be presented as the most successful of the three services: victorious in the Battle of Britain and not obviously defeated anywhere else, modern, employing cutting-edge British technology, and apparently unfettered by class distinctions and antiquated rules. The idea of reprisals for the Blitz, suggested in letters to the press by a minority of readers, was willingly taken up by editors – and by the Prime Minister. 25 As Churchill told the City of London Corporation in July 1941, claiming to voice Londoners’ desires, ‘We will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, they have meted out to us.’26 The idea of out-bombing the Luftwaffe, however, sat uneasily with claims to Allied moral superiority. These suggested that the targeting of civilians, and even ‘indiscriminate’ bombing, were the unique preserve of the Axis. The distinction was nicely encapsulated in a woodcut illustration for an Information Ministry leaflet. The double page shows two burning cities. On one page (‘As Hitler sowed’), we see a representation of the Blitz: bombs fall among houses; a church spire stands defiant in the distance; a boy and a girl run towards their family, anxiously waiting in an Anderson shelter. The second illustration (‘. . . so shall Hitler reap!’) shows bombs destroying another city (Figure 3.1). Here, however, only industrial buildings are in flames; no human being is in sight; and a great burning Swastika in the background designates the ultimate purpose of the attack. 27 The implausibility of the implied claim – that the Allies bombed more than the Axis but somehow killed fewer civilians  – ran through most media coverage of the bombing campaign, whether it concerned the course of the raids themselves, the devastation they caused, or the place of bombing in the Allies’ strategy. The issue was further complicated by the reporting of German raids on Britain, where civilian casualties were indignantly condemned.

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FIGURE 3.1  ‘As Hitler Sowed, So Shall He Reap!’ Ministry of Information leaflet, n.d. (1942/44). The National Archives, ref. INF2/8.

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Reporting bombing In a typical Allied air raid, thousands of highly trained, frightened young men took to the air in unheated, unpressurized aircraft for up to 12 hours at a stretch to devastate German cities and kill German civilians. Each airman on each mission (a tour of duty ran to 25 or 30 missions, more for elite units) had approximately one chance in 20 of not returning, which usually meant being shot to pieces, burnt to death or shattered as they hit the ground from 20,000 feet. None of these disagreeable aspects was quite concealed from the public. Rather they were overlaid with other types of reporting, in which the bombing offensive was treated as a statistical contest with the Axis in which the Allies were ever more triumphant, 28 and air raids as a form of sport or a source of humour. Numerical triumphalism was evident as early as Churchill’s City of London speech of July 1941: ‘In the last few weeks alone’, he declared, ‘we have thrown upon Germany about half the tonnage of bombs thrown by the Germans upon our cities during the whole course of the war’. 29 In May 1942, a Daily Express article entitled ‘Biggest Bombers Out-Coventrate Rhine City’ observed that the RAF had just dropped 40,000 incendiaries on Mannheim, 10,000 more than the total dropped on Coventry. 30 ‘One Bomber Every 6 Seconds, 3,000 tons in 90 minutes’, the Express declared after the first thousand-bomber raid, on Cologne, or even ‘Trainload of bombs a minute’.31 ‘The raiding force’, added the Daily Mirror in bold capitals, ‘was at least twice the size and had more than four times the carrying capacity of the largest air force ever before concentrated on one objective’.32 As Hamburg burned a year later, the Mirror could report ‘The latest Hamburg blitz [. . .] was even faster than the first attack – the 2,500-ton raid last Saturday which lasted fifty minutes. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris this time planned to save five minutes, and, in fact, a weight of bombs just over the last record tonnage was dropped in three-quarters of an hour.’33 In February 1944, as the Luftwaffe conducted its so-called Baby Blitz over England, Strachey reminded listeners that ‘we’ve been putting anywhere between 600 and 1,000 aircraft over Germany in each of the main operations of this week – the Americans by day, Bomber Command by night. The Germans have been sending between 100 and 200 over England’.34 The Manchester Guardian called the German raids, which delivered no more than 275 tons on a single night, ‘insignificant and costly’. After the February 1945 raid on Dresden, the Mirror stated that ‘Germany suffered her greatest air battering of the war in the 24 hours which ended last night. Allied planes flew nearly 9,000 sorties to hammer targets in the path of both East and West Front advances.’35 In a front page entitled ‘The Blasting of Dresden’, the Evening Standard told readers that 1,350 American bombers were following on from 1,400 from Bomber Command, adding that Red Army soldiers could see the fires from 70 miles away.36

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The Manchester Guardian reported that nearly 650,000 incendiaries had been dropped. 37 Nor were the figures limited to German targets. ‘Brest blitzed’ and ‘1,000 tons smash down on Havre’ bellowed the Express on 6 September 1944, ‘1,500 tons more smash on Havre’ the following day, and ‘Havre hit all day with 5,000 tons’ on 11 September, the day before the German garrison’s surrender of the French port. 38 The cumulative tally of raids was also generously covered. The Times, for example, reported the 136,000 tons dropped on Germany during 1943, as well as 15,000 tons on occupied territory and 6,000 on Italy, and the American contribution of 55,000 tons to ‘this terrible method of attack, which, on German initiative, has given so much of its distinctive character to the present war’.39 The Observer used a graph to show how the RAF’s tonnage dropped had exceeded the Luftwaffe’s by mid-1941, and had outdone it at least tenfold by August 1943; a year later, it pointed out that ‘In 1939, Bomber Command operated with twin-engined aircraft and its largest bomb weighed 500lb. To-day it operates with heavy, four-engined aircraft and its largest bomb weighs 12,000lb.’40 The British reader or listener could have been in little doubt that Germany was receiving air raids on a far larger scale than the Blitz. It is true that details of operations were often softened by sporting or humorous metaphors. Bomber Command’s landmark raid on Renault’s Billancourt works outside Paris in March 1942 was reported as ‘A night out in Paris’ by the Express. ‘It was a piece of cake’, said one of the ‘first men home’; ‘Boy, how we pranged that target!’ ‘Paris by moonlight. Boy, I pinpointed the Eiffel Tower’ said another.41 ‘One pilot saw a gasometer doing what he believed a record flight for a gasometer’, the Evening Standard claimed.42 The raid on the Schneider works at Le Creusot in October 1942 was headlined as ‘Lancasters over France for Schneider Trophy!’ in the Mirror, referring to a pre-war seaplane race.43 Of the same operation, the normally restrained BBC news bulletin reported that ‘On their outward journey through France they hedge-hopped through country districts frightening farm animals, but receiving friendly waves from French workers in the fields. They met with no opposition in the air, the only fliers to intercept them were feathered ones.’44 ‘Pilot says Flight was Like a Grand National’ added the News Chronicle, comparing the low flying to England’s most famous steeplechase.45 The Air Ministry’s scripted interviews from 5 Group taken for the BBC in 1943–44 produced similarly cheery results: ‘“The flak actually looks nice”, said Sgt. Harry Geller. It comes up at you in colours, just like fireworks.’46 Recalling a raid on Milan, Sergeant Rademeyer (from Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia) observed that ‘there was about the prospects of the whole trip an air of a tourist’s holiday with the Alps seen from above by moonlight, the Italian lakes and all the things that will make the travel agencies’ best selling points after the war’.47 The realities of raids for aircrews were never quite edited out. Rather, they were balanced with either humour or stoicism. The Vaughan-Thomas

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recording of September 1943 allowed listeners to experience at least some of the adrenalin and terror of a raid over Berlin: ‘they seem to splay out at first like the tentacles of an octopus waiting to catch you’, Vaughan-Thomas said of the searchlights; Berlin was a ‘boiling cauldron’.48 British understatement was also mobilized: a BBC account of another raid on Berlin mentioned a rear-gunner injured with a ‘shattered right arm and a nasty eye wound’, the tail plane shot up and the mid-upper-gunner hit on the head. ‘Apart from this, everything was fine  – so we carried on to the target.’ On the return journey, crew members passed out for lack of oxygen trying to help one another. ‘You never know with Berlin’ concluded the Flying Officer narrating.49 Losses of aircraft, too, were regularly mentioned in the press, though the numbers given were always absolute, leaving reporters to guess the proportion of the force lost. But a disastrous figure, like the 96 shot down in the raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944 – 11 per cent of the total – could still appear and be commented on. 50 Churchill told the Commons in February 1944 that 38,300 airmen had been lost in bombing operations and 10,400 had gone missing. 51 Individual deaths were rarely mentioned unless they were heroic, such as that of Flying Officer L. T. Manser, who earned a Victoria Cross for holding the controls of his doomed aircraft long enough for his crew to bail out. 52 More frequently, in scripted BBC talks, losses were treated as personal yet anonymous, and always worthwhile. ‘Of course’ said one interviewee, ‘there are a few who don’t reach the end of a tour. That’s inevitable. I’ve lost so many good friends in three years’ work as an Intelligence Officer – but somehow I can never get used to it’. 53 Squadron Leader J. D. Nettleton, who won the Victoria Cross after leading a precision raid on Augsburg in April 1942, recalled seeing ‘four of my Squadron shot down one after the other. There isn’t very much to be said about that. The best thing is to think about the merchant seamen who won’t now be torpedoed because we have bombed those sheds where they build the submarine bases’. 54 An Australian Squadron Leader observed that ‘there are bound to be [losses] when you’re sending out a huge, concentrated force night after night. But though the losses may some nights appear to be heavier than others, the percentage remains small’. The introduction to his script suggested its use ‘for transmission on the day following an attack where our losses might be considered by the public to be more than usually high’. 55

Reporting devastation Regularly informed of the scale of the Allied bombing offensive, and, broadly, of the losses it entailed, British readers and listeners were also given a fair idea of what bombs did to German and other European cities.

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The more sober statements referred to economic damage: for example, the News Chronicle announced that raids on the Ruhr had ‘cost Nazis 1,250,000 tons of steel’ and that coal production was down by 80,000 tons per day.56 Sir Archibald Sinclair told parliament in March 1943 that a raid on Essen had wrecked 13 main buildings of the Krupp works and damaged 40 others, and that severe damage covered 136,000 square yards; ‘Here are 140 of Essen’s 450 Devastated Acres’, the News Chronicle’s headline read the following day.57 More frequently, the press referred to the destruction of the built-up area in general, as Harris would surely have wished. ‘R. A. F. Night Raiders Made a “Torch” of Baltic Port’ said the News Chronicle of the March 1942 raid on Lübeck; ‘Rostock’s old town is practically demolished’, the same paper announced a month later.58 ‘Below us’, recalled one airman after the first 1,000-bomber raid over Cologne, ‘in every part of the city buildings were ablaze. Here and there you could see the outlines, but mostly it was just one big stretch of fire.59 Three days later, a Flight-Lieutenant sent over Essen recalled seeing ‘a new type of fire. It is hard to describe it, for we had not seen anything like it before. These fires were like great balls of red embers – like a peep into hell itself. They were the fires left from the night before. There were no flames or smoke – just circles of red-hot buildings that were burning themselves out’.60 Of the Genoa raid in October 1942, the Manchester Guardian reported that ‘Seen from a height, one has the impression that half of the town has been destroyed.’61 Cardinal-Archbishop Faulhauber of Munich was quoted describing a raid on his city as ‘a prelude to the Last Judgment’.62 The celebrated dams raid of May 1943 prompted the Daily Mirror to announce ‘Huns get a flood blitz’, and ‘Torrent rages along Ruhr’. After the attacks on Hamburg of July–August 1943, the Manchester Guardian referred to ‘Seven square miles of devastation – an area equal to almost seven times that of the City of London.’ The firestorm caused by the bombing was clearly described: Reports reaching Washington spoke of the ‘unparalleled horror’ of devastation wrought in Hamburg [. . .] Reports reaching Stockholm say that ‘The town, after being paralysed by the preceding raids, became a howling inferno on Monday night,’ one eye-witness was quoted as saying. ‘A wind rose during the attack and spread the flames.’ A Danish consular official, interviewed by the Copenhagen correspondent of the ‘Aftonbladet’ (quoted by Reuter) said: ‘District after district was literally razed to the ground. When you drive through Hamburg you drive through corpses.’63 Both of the main illustrated papers used German or neutral sources to tell readers of the destruction to Berlin. Under the headline ‘Phosphorous Bombs in the Streets of Berlin’, Picture Post claimed that ‘Not all the sand

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in Berlin, nor all the water in the Spree, seem likely to put out the flames which rise from the blazing asphalt and spurt all over the melting street.’64 Its rival, the Illustrated London News, stated that ‘Whole districts in the heart of the city, as well as in the outlying factory areas, have been razed to the ground.’65 It was the Illustrated London News, too, which reminded readers of the past glories of Dresden after the city’s destruction.66 Devastation in Italy and France was also covered. From the Italian front, the Daily Express reported that ‘Velletri reeks of death, destruction and desolation [. . .] Italians spoke with horror of our first big air attack on January 22, when heavies plastered the town, killing many Germans and Italians. [. . .] I did not see one house that was still standing complete.’67 Of the Norman town of Saint-Lô, hit by American bombers, the Express said that ‘It is to all intents and purposes a dead city [. . .] It is estimated to be 40 to 50 per cent destroyed and it will be another case of the bulldozers having to come in and do their work after the bombers have done their part.’68 The fate of Caen, which received 2,000 tons of Allied bombs (as well as numerous German shells), inspired reservations among reporters after its liberation: ‘One must drive through Caen every time one goes to or from the Orne front and it’s still a horrible and rather shaming thing’, the Daily Mail reported on 28 July.69 The human consequences of bombing were harder to know, and reports correspondingly uncertain. Attempts at evacuation, whether official or not, received ready attention. The News Chronicle announced the ‘Flight of terror’ of Rostock’s population in April 1942.70 Six months later, the Mirror, quoting a German businessman, referred to ‘One million homeless – before the winter bombings begin’, and later claimed ‘Ruhr Riot as Havoc Spreads’ after the Dams raids of 1943.71 After the Hamburg raids of 1943, newspapers mentioned official efforts – including ‘impassioned exhortations’ from Goebbels – to evacuate Berlin before its turn came.72 Other reports described suffering worse than evacuation. As Bomber Command’s (ultimately unsuccessful) offensive against Berlin progressed in the winter of 1943–44, the Standard quoted from the Stockholm Morgen Tidningen to claim that the German capital was ‘dying, slowly and painfully, amid scenes of indescribable destruction’, that ‘the smoke-grimed inhabitants watched their houses burn with an air of bitter resignation’, and that ‘Hundreds of bodies are still buried under the ruins and rubble where streets once stood.’ 73 In October 1944, the BBC’s E. Colston Shepherd told listeners to his War Review that ‘About 700,000 people lived in Stuttgart. Today, more than half of them are homeless’, adding that ‘By the end of the year, the plight of millions of Germans will be desperate.’ 74 If anything, these reports suffered from exaggeration; they certainly made no attempt to gloss over what the raids were doing to German civilians.

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Reports of civilian deaths were relatively rare, but this appears to have resulted more from the difficulty of knowing the facts than from censorship or squeamishness: when given, figures might be exaggerated or minimized, according to the information available. After the Billancourt raid of March 1942, the Evening Standard stated ‘Vichy says 600 die in two-hour bombing’; the correct total was just under 400.75 After the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne, the News Chronicle quoted ‘reliable reports’ which stated ‘in one quarter of the city 2,000 were killed and several more thousand are homeless’; the Evening Standard cited reports that 20,000 had been killed. The true figure for civilian deaths in Cologne was 486.76 Similarly, early reports on the Hamburg raids spoke of as many as 200,000 killed, while Major Oliver Stewart, the Evening Standard’s air correspondent, guessed 10,000 deaths, raising this figure to 11,800 on reports from Stockholm. Here the true figure, the highest for any raid on a German city, was approximately 40,000 killed.77 If the true death toll remained unclear to the British public (as it long did to postwar historians), they were certainly in a position to know that raids on Germany, and civilian suffering, had reached a scale and intensity far exceeding anything visited on their own country. But if triumphalism over the scale of the bombing offensive was routine, it was frowned upon where the plight of its victims was concerned. According to Strachey, the well-known American reporter Ed Murrow had been impressed by ‘the entire absence of any tendency to gloat over the sufferings of the German people, now that they, instead of us, are under the bombs. All Murrow found here was a steady satisfaction that our bombing was bringing nearer a victorious end of the war’.78 Where ‘steady satisfaction’ turned into ‘gloating’ was not always clear, though. One Flight Officer, scripted by Strachey, recalled a raid on Rostock in the following terms: At midnight we picked up the news from the BBC and were much amused to hear the announcer describing the Rostock raid the previous night. There were [. . .] a number of ribald remarks from the crew at this. We wondered whether the citizens of that town suspected that another force was well on its way to visit them. [. . .] We lost height to 1,000 feet, and then flew across the Southern suburbs, giving the houses several good bursts of machine gun fire.79 Strachey himself recounted a ‘grim little anecdote [which] is on everybody’s lips in Germany. People in the Reich are saying to each other “Last night twenty British bombers were shot down, and one of our cities is missing.”’80 That passed the censor without difficulty. However, when the entertainer Wilfred Pickles repeated virtually the same joke six months later, on the Light Programme’s ‘Monday Night at Eight’, he provoked a flurry of memos within the BBC on the ground that ‘this is clean against existing

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policy instructions about not gloating over bombing’. W. J. Haley, the Director-General, wrote that ‘We regard bombing as a military necessity to be performed as coldly and scientifically as a surgical operation. It is not a matter to gloat over or to make jokes about.’81 Quite different, for obvious reasons, was the reporting of German raids on Britain, which remained – even after the Blitz – a regular counterpoint to the Allied offensive over Europe. The ‘Baedeker raids’ of spring 1942, in which historic cities like Bath, York, Exeter, Norwich or Canterbury were bombed in reprisal for the attacks on Lübeck and Rostock, minor raids in early 1943, and the ‘baby Blitz’ during the first half of 1944, all killed civilians; the V-weapon offensive that began in June 1944 claimed over 10,000 victims. Here, the focus of reports was on the effectiveness of British fighters and air defences (‘RAF’s 14–2 victory in big battle’),82 the wickedness and ineffectiveness of the German raids and the courage of the emergency services and the civilian population. After Bath was bombed in 1942, Picture Post wrote that ‘people of taste shudder a little, less at the amount of damage done than at the evidence that there are still people in the civilised world who want to do this kind of damage’.83 Reports on the destruction of a Lewisham primary school by German fighter-bombers in January 1943 are representative of the general tone. The Mirror’s headline ran ‘30 infants killed and 30 buried in murder day raid on London school’; another article recounted how ‘Siren went again, but rescuers dug on’, while the RAF’s ‘Avengers bagged 7 of murder raiders’. ‘They dug for little victims, found only their books’, the Mirror reported the next day; at the funeral ‘Men wept with broken mothers at child victims’ graveside.’ The schoolchildren’s deaths, the report continued, ‘showed us the hideous black soul of the enemy’. The Bishop of Southwark, Dr B. F. Simpson, told the funeral service that ‘They were in a way martyrs and [. . .] they will be avenged.’84 In a juxtaposition that was far from exceptional, the Manchester Guardian’s article on the Lewisham raid, stating that the death toll could reach 56, was followed immediately by the mention of 110 deaths in the latest raid on Berlin.85 The obvious inference was that the Allied offensive was a legitimate response to that of the Luftwaffe, though this was more often put into the mouths of witnesses than expressed by journalists: ‘It lifts my heart to hear them [RAF bombers] taking back some of what we got’, said a bombed-out London bus driver to the Evening Standard in September 1943.86 On the whole, the British media stopped short of glorying in the sufferings of German civilians. Nor, however, were they concealed from the British public; rather, they were justified in terms of a bomber offensive that was presented as a major contribution to the war effort, and in the light of the Germans’ record in the Blitz and after. Alongside the relative consistency of this mainstream discourse, however, Britain’s liberal censorship model allowed for a degree of debate about the purpose and effectiveness of bombing.

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Thinking about bombing Interpretation of the bombing coexisted with reportage, though the two were not, of course, entirely separate. The regular substitution of ‘Nazi’ for ‘German’ in accounts of raids could be viewed as an act of interpretation that legitimized bombing; ‘Nazi industries’ were more obviously legitimate targets than ‘German factory workers’ or even ‘German cities’ (Figure 3.2). But there were three ways in which the public might be invited to think about bombing outside reports in the strict sense: cartoons, the coverage of protests against the bombing campaign, and the analysis of the campaign, including its ethics, by the press and the BBC. Cartoons often personalize issues, and the bombing campaign was no exception. The effect was to suggest that bombs were dropped directly on the Axis leadership itself. For example, a Zec cartoon that appeared in the Daily Mirror in June 1942 showed Hitler, Goering and an unidentified Nazi framed in the letters RAF, free-falling into fire, over the legend ‘Capital Punishment!’(Figure 3.3). Vicky presented the first 1,000-bomber raid for the News Chronicle by showing a worried Hitler, Goering and Goebbels counting aircraft into Germany, over the caption Alles über Deutschland.87 As raids turned to Italy late in 1942, Mussolini was depicted propping up the leaning tower of Italian morale amid falling bombs;88 Zec’s cartoon, ‘Better start practising, Nero’ showed a violin falling among an Allied bombload, implicitly comparing Mussolini to the Roman emperor who had fiddled while Rome burned (Figure 3.4). Five months later Goering, holding a list of cities bombed by Germany, cowered below a gigantic bird of prey representing the air war – come ‘Home to Roost’.89 And in June 1943 the Mirror’s Zec used the term ‘an experiment worth trying’ (referring to a statement by Harris from 1942) as his text and portrayed a lab-coated Churchill pouring bombs into a test-tube containing a cowering Hitler and Mussolini (Figure 3.5). The amusing presentation of bombing as personal retribution, of course, ignored the fact that the Axis leaders were the last people likely to be in personal danger from an air raid. Such levity would certainly have attracted the disapproval of the moral critics of bombing. The critics were active, though always in a minority, from 1940 onwards. Organized into groups such as the Bombing Restriction Committee and Christianity Calling, they were capable of getting 15,000 signatures onto a petition against bombing in 1942.90 They did receive press coverage, though not invariably. When two military opponents of bombing, Captain Basil Liddell Hart and Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, wrote a fierce article attacking the combination of a merciless bombing policy and the requirement of unconditional surrender, it was refused by Michael Foot, editor of the Evening Standard, though a later, more general, piece by Fuller, denouncing ‘War Without Rules’, did get into print.91 Other coverage of protest was very brief. When Christianity Calling held a rally to oppose ‘the new bombing policy’ – area bombing – in September

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FIGURE 3.2  ‘Flaming June’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 1 June 1942. © Mirrorpix.

FIGURE 3.3  ‘Capital Punishment!’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 3 June 1942. © Mirrorpix.

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FIGURE 3.4 ‘Better Start Practising, Nero!’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 26 October 1942. © Mirrorpix.

1942, the Air Ministry replied that Government policy ‘is the bombing of harbours, industrial areas and military targets of Germany, and that since all such localities are defended areas, attacks of this kind are justified under international law’. The Manchester Guardian’s report of the protest published the reply and the rejoinder by Dr A. D. Belden, general secretary of Christianity Calling, to the effect that area bombing of military targets in residential areas was ‘against Christian morality and international law, and involves death, mutilation, and suffering to innocent civilians’, but left the matter there.92 Slightly fuller treatment was given to the town of Selby, in Yorkshire, after the ‘Wings for Victory’ campaign of March 1943. Selby refused the practice of sponsoring bombs by sticking savings stamps on their cases. Under the headline ‘Town Rejects “Stamp a Bomb” Campaign’, Canon Glover, of St James’s Church, told the Daily Mirror that while he did not oppose bombing, ‘If you ask people to put stamps on a bomb and you tell them the bomb is going to be dropped on Germany you are appealing to a questionable spirit. You are making fun of a thing that is tragic.’93

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FIGURE 3.5  ‘An Experiment Worth Trying’ (Zec). Daily Mirror, 22 May 1943. © Mirrorpix.

Where a protest reached Parliament, finally, it received fuller coverage. In a House of Lords debate in February 1944 Bishop Bell of Chichester, while accepting that ‘the killing of civilians as the result of bona fide military activity was inevitable’, argued in the Lords that ‘the obliteration of towns was not a justifiable war objective’. Hamburg, he remarked, which had suffered 28,000 deaths according to ‘early German statistics’, ‘happened to be the most democratic town in Germany where the anti-Nazi opposition was strongest’. Berlin had probably suffered 74,000 dead (an exaggeration, unlike the figure for Hamburg) and three million homeless. ‘Did the Government understand’, he asked, ‘the full force of what our aerial bombardment was doing and what it was now destroying?’ Bell was seconded by Lord Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury till 1942, who ‘deplored the mood of exultation which appeared to have been aroused in this country by the heavy attacks on Germany’ and added that this ‘must bring us into competition with our enemy at his worst’. The reply from Lord Cranborne,

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Minister for the Dominions, offered no concessions: although the RAF ‘had never indulged in purely terror raids’, and ‘it would be wrong for us to gloat over the destruction of German cities, forced upon the Government by the necessities of the military situation’, the offensive would continue; it would target ‘enemy administrative centres, great industrial areas, ports and centres of communication’; moreover, ‘great industries could only be paralysed by bringing a whole city to a standstill’; this was the quickest way to achieve victory and to bring relief to ‘the Jews and other people of the occupied countries’ suffering under Nazi rule.94 That area bombing had been the Government’s official policy since 1942 was not only acknowledged but publicized. Harris’s best-known statement on bombing  – ‘They sowed the wind. They will reap the whirlwind’  – appeared in the Manchester Guardian that 10 June: A lot of people, generally those with no qualifications to speak  – if to think – are in the habit of reiterating the silly phrase ‘Bombing can never win a war.’ We shall see. It hasn’t been tried yet, and Germany, more and more desperately clinging to her widespread conquests and still foolishly striving for more, will make a most interesting subject for the initial experiment. [. . .] Let the Nazis take good note of the western horizon. There they will see a cloud as yet no bigger than a man’s hand. Behind it lies the whole massive power of the United States of America. When the storm gathering there and here breaks in its full fury over Germany they will look back to the days of Lübeck, Rostock and Cologne as men lost in the raging typhoon think back to the gentle zephyr of a past summer.95 That October, Picture Post carried a long article entitled ‘Can Bombing Break Germany?’ A two-page panorama detailed major targets across Europe; the switch to area bombing was correctly dated at February 1942. ‘Air Chief Marshal Harris’, the article said, ‘is an area-bombing man. He believes that the effect of one flattened German industrial town on the morale and war production of all other towns in Germany, is much greater than the effect of a dozen smaller, target-seeking raids on a dozen towns’. He had ‘very soon made good his claim that he would make the bombing of Britain by the Luftwaffe look insignificant’. And whereas ‘In the old precision bombing days our bombers strove to upset German communications by aiming time and again at marshalling yards such as the famous Hamm’, now ‘they try to shatter with their intensive area bombing the industrial life of a town like Kassel, site of the Henschel and Sohn works, biggest locomotive plant in the Reich.’ The conclusion pointed out that ‘To be completely successful, [the plan] would involve the destruction of some fifty or sixty German industrial cities of all types.’96 The following year, after the raid on Kassel (which killed at least 5,599 civilians), Strachey would emphasize that ‘this is destruction such as we in Britain never knew’, adding (approvingly) that ‘Neither the German

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bombing of us three years ago nor our bombing of Germany a year ago are real guides. Then damage was done to this factory or that; now centres of production as a whole are being destroyed. How long can the people of Germany bear it?’97 A month later, he called the campaign against Berlin ‘a deliberate attempt to deprive the enemy of the use of his capital city’.98 This was far from the somewhat intellectual discourse of Strachey the left-wing civilian. In winter 1943–44, he achieved the highest ever number of listeners for a wartime radio talk, comparable to ratings for light entertainment.99 The area bombing policy was again set out in The Times, a month before the House of Lords debate. ‘It is the proclaimed intention of Bomber Command’, the Times stated, ‘to proceed with the systematic obliteration, one by one, of the centres of German war production until the enemy’s capacity to continue the fight is broken down.’100 The same point was made more simply by E. Colston Shepherd in his March 1944 ‘War Review’ on the BBC: ‘You’ve probably heard the argument that if we could put out of action about 60 of the principal towns in Germany and keep them out, Germany’s war effort would be crippled. I believe there’s some substance in that claim, especially in view of the way the British do their night bombing. They put the towns and not merely the factories out of action.’101 Officially sanctioned and publicized, area bombing was also very widely defended. Some of the support came from the obvious candidates. Squadron Leader J. R. Robinson, Conservative MP for Blackpool, told the Evening Standard that ‘No crew has ever been briefed to destroy a German target which is not of industrial or military importance. Any suggestion to the contrary is the foulest and most unfair criticism of a body of men prepared to sacrifice their lives to destroy the German war machine.’102 The right-wing historian and columnist Arthur Bryant stressed that ‘Like millions of men and women all the world over, I hate the very thought of bombing inhabited cities from the air.’ Still, he insisted that ‘the unhappy herrenvolk have got to see reality coming true: truth bursting with its brazen clamour through the walls of false sentiment and crazy romanticism in which they have so long been encased’. ‘No evil deed’, he continued, ‘is ever complete until the deed’s doer has experienced the full logic of his own act’; within this perspective, airmen were ‘ministers of moral justice’.103 Germany was not the only enemy seen as deserving to be bombed. When Italy received heavy raids in autumn 1942 and summer 1943, the Daily Mirror observed that ‘The Italian people [. . .] have rejoiced in [Mussolini’s] arrogant demands and condoned his sordid acts of treachery’, reminded its readers of ‘The Italy that Invented Fascism’, and detailed atrocities of the Yugoslav campaign.104 Other defenders of area bombing, however, were less obvious than the RAF, the tabloid press or Arthur Bryant. The Labour Party, despite its pre-war pacifism, paid little attention to bombing; opponents of it like Richard Stokes had no influence with the leadership.105 George Orwell, responding to the work of Vera Brittain and the Bombing Restriction

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Committee, asked ‘Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?’ and ‘Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?’ ‘I can’t’, he continued, ‘feel that war is “humanized” by being confined to the slaughter of the young and becomes “barbarous” when the old get killed as well. [. . .] War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that.’106 Accepting area bombing and the slaughter of civilians it entailed, however, did not mean accepting Harris’s claim that it would win the war. Picture Post in 1942 saw the bomber offensive as having ‘a vital place in the combined attack’. For the Observer, ‘The instrument of victory then will not be either the Navy, the Army, or the Air Force, it will be the integrated whole of an intelligent concentrated and highly organized combined force, without quite so much emphasis on Air Power as the Air Ministry would have us accept.’107 Squadron Leader Strachey, too, was sharply at odds with Bomber Command. ‘Depend upon it’, he argued in 1943, ‘bombing is one of the ways by which Germany will be brought to her knees. Of course it is only one of the ways. Of course we aren’t trying to win the war “by bombing alone”. How could bombing “win the war on its own”, when already the marvellous armies of the Soviet Union have killed and maimed several million of the best soldiers of Germany?’108 Paul Anderson, meanwhile, struck a note of caution when he told Evening Standard readers that according to a Swiss observer, ‘In spite of continued air raids and of indescribable destruction all round, the moral of the ordinary Berliners is simply admirable’ – comparable, in fact, to that of Londoners under the Blitz.109 When Cyril Falls wrote in the Illustrated London News, ‘That bombing alone will or can win the war is not a doctrine now held by any except a few fanatics’, he was broadly correct  – but he still believed that ‘Germany has richly merited the suffering which she now has to endure.’110 Bombing was oversold by Harris; the British press treated his claims with scepticism, though probably not enough; but it continued to support the area bombing policy.111

Conclusion Public opinion polls were in their infancy in World War Two, and polls on bombing fairly rare. Those that were undertaken, suggest, first, that the public shared some of the scepticism of the press. Asked if bombing alone could win the war, 69 per cent of respondents to a Gallup poll in July 1943 said No. This did not, however, preclude other desirable results: upsetting German morale (40 per cent of respondents to a poll that December), shortening the war (24 per cent) and smashing war industries (10 per cent).112 Secondly, in the early stages of the war people who had not been bombed themselves were more likely to favour bombing German civilians than those who had suffered raids: in April 1941, 76 per cent of respondents polled in the untouched northernmost counties of England approved of

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‘reprisals’ against Germany, compared with 45 per cent of Londoners.113 Thirdly, however, public opinion hardened as the war went on. In October 1940, a few weeks into the Blitz, 46 per cent of respondents to a Gallup poll favoured bombing German civilians, against 46 per cent who opposed it. In April 1941, the proportion in favour had risen to 55 per cent. By December 1943, 47 per cent of respondents expressed positive satisfaction at the raids (‘the Germans are getting some of their own medicine’), and another 36 per cent considered them a necessity, with varying degrees of regret. Only 2 per cent favoured restricting the range of targets, and 7 per cent opposed bombing altogether.114 Similarly, a Mass Observation survey of Londoners, published in the New Statesman in February 1944, found that six out of every ten respondents fully approved of raids; two accepted their military necessity but worried about their impact on civilians; only one in ten felt the raids were too awful to be approved, and even in this group ‘few go so far as wanting them stopped’.115 By this time the British public had been repeatedly told that the Allies were dropping vastly greater quantities of ordnance on Germany than the Luftwaffe had visited, or were visiting, on them. They knew that for the RAF, whole cities were targets. They were given copious information on the destruction caused to German cities, and on the evacuation measures – and the panic – the raids had provoked. They had access, albeit sparing, to arguments formulated by the opponents of bombing. On the ultimate questions, however  – the precise level of civilian casualties, and the precise aims of the offensive – the available information was less clear. Casualty figures, though available, were rare and unreliable. And government spokesmen, consistently with Sinclair’s response to Harris in October 1943, continued to claim that the government was targeting military objectives in cities, with civilian deaths an unavoidable but unintentional consequence, that the Allies’ conduct of the war was as morally superior to that of the Axis as their cause was, and that ‘terror’ raids were exclusively an Axis preserve. E. Colston Shepherd’s broadcast of 17 October 1944 nicely captures the ambiguity of what the British were invited to believe. It’s no use blinking the fact that people are involved in this blotting out of organized existence over a large area. I don’t mean that they’re being killed in tens of thousands. I don’t believe they are. But just as you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, so you can’t destroy an industrial region without making life in that region impossible for the majority of those who live there. I gather that my reference of a week ago to half the population of Stuttgart having been made homeless, was seized on by Lord Haw-Haw as an admission that we are now making war on civilians. He might as well argue that when we were forced to bomb the Germans out of part of Caen and out of part of Rouen, we were making war on French civilians.116

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Only in the aftermath of Dresden would the ambiguity begin to be lifted. A fumbled briefing by an RAF spokesman at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe included an apparent admission that the presence of many evacuees had been a factor precipitating the raid. This prompted an Associated Press reporter, Howard Cowan, to file a story, which was published across the United States, referring to ‘terror bombing’ as an Allied policy.117 Officially suppressed in the United Kingdom, the story reached and shocked Cecil King, whose newspaper, the Daily Mirror, had consistently supported the offensive. King wrote in his diary ‘Not only does [the report] make nonsense of all our protestations about our war aims and about our bombing policy: it gives official proof for everything that Goebbels ever said on the subject. It is wicked as well as being typically un-British.’118 Churchill, faced with the reality of Dresden, wound down the area offensive for which he was ultimately responsible, and implicitly blamed Harris for it. King’s horror, though, had little effect on his paper. On 22 February the Mirror was telling its readers, after a second Associated Press report, that ‘Although admittedly any bombing of populated areas is bound to cause terror, the air forces here take the position that terror is a by-product of bombing and not its intent or purpose, which they describe as obliteration of road or rail bottlenecks of vital traffic.’ The next day’s edition was back on form, announcing that ‘6,000 Allied planes meet over Reich’ to deliver a ‘Mighty blow at Hun rail routes.’119 Perhaps the best characterization of what the British were invited to believe about bombing, and how the Air Ministry tried to shape those beliefs, was supplied in a book that appeared five years after the war’s end. Doublethink is defined in Nineteen Eighty-Four as ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’ – in this case, that the Allies were dropping unimaginably large quantities of ordnance on Germany and other European countries but were not engaging in ‘indiscriminate’ bombing on the model of the Luftwaffe. And the Air Ministry, as much as the Ministry of Truth, may have considered it necessary ‘To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.’120

Further reading Of works on the media and war, the essays in M. Connelly and D. Welch (eds), War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007) cover print, radio, cinema and television representations of conflicts from the Boer War to the late twentieth century. J. Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991) sets war photographs firmly in the context of the economy of newspapers, as well as that of censorship, and questions the apparent ‘realism’ that they convey. P. Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: the War Correspondent as Hero,

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Propagandist, and Myth Maker (London: André Deutsch, 1975) argues persuasively that war correspondents, willingly or (sometimes) unconsciously, come to serve the demands of national propaganda. Books on the bombing offensive in World War Two are legion. The British Official History, Sir C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945 (4 vols: London, HMSO, 1961) remains an invaluable reference guide. M. Hastings, Bomber Command (London: Michael Joseph, 1979) is a classic that balances the sufferings of aircrews against the carnage they inflicted. T. D. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) offers a critical examination of the claims made for bombing and the frequency with which they have been proved wrong. Finally, M. Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001) provides the clearest account of the relationship between Bomber Command, the media and British public opinion.

Notes 1 The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew (henceforth TNA): AIR2/7852; Harris to Under-Secretary of State, Air Ministry, 25 October 1943. Extracts from this exchange may be found, for example, in T. D. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 228. 2 TNA, AIR2/7852, Sinclair to Portal, 28 October 1943. 3 Ibid., A. W. Street to Harris, 15 December 1943. 4 Ibid., A. W. Street to Harris, 2 March 1944; Harris to Under-Secretary of State, Air Ministry, 7 March 1944. 5 For Germany, see O. Groehler, Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990), 320; for France and Italy, see C. Baldoli and A. Knapp, Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack (London: Continuum, 2012). 6 G. Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 283. 7 N. Frankland, ‘Some Thoughts about and Experience of Official Military History’, Journal of the Royal Air Force Historical Society, 17 (1997), 20. 8 J. Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991), 2. 9 TNA, DEFE53/4, Ministry of Information Defence Notices, revised edn. 1942, 6, 11–13. 10 F. Williams, Nothing so Strange (London: Cassell, 1970), 166. 11 Ibid., 169. 12 H. Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned! (London: Andrew Dakers, 1953), 183.

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13 D. Welch, ‘“Winning Hearts and Minds”: The Changing Context of Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003’, in M. Connelly and D. Welch (eds), War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), x. 14 See Joëlle Beurier’s chapter in this book. 15 TNA, DEFE 53/3, ‘How the Censorship Works’, talk by Mr C. J. Radcliffe, K. C., 31 December 1940. 16 Williams, Nothing so Strange, 185. 17 BBC Written Archive, Caversham (henceforth BBC WA), R28/10/3, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peck to A. P. Ryan, 13 October 1945. 18 C. King, diary, 30 January 1941, quoted in Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned!, 157. 19 Cf. TNA, AIR 14/1951 and AIR20/2955. 20 The Economist, 6 March 1943, quoted in M. Farr, ‘The Labour Party and Strategic Bombing in the Second World War’, Labour History Review 77.1 (April 2012), 133–53: 147. 21 Evening Standard, 8 March 1943. 22 W. Douglas Home, Sins of Commission (Salisbury, Michael Russell, 1985), 60–5; B. Penrose, ‘Douglas Home Seeks Pardon’, The Sunday Times, 21 February 1988. 23 Cf. for example Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), 176–7; M. Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 54–6, 116–9; The Manchester Guardian, 10 February 1944. 24 Connelly, Reaching for the Stars, 119; Farr, ‘The Labour Party and Strategic Bombing’, 146. 25 J. Gardiner, The Blitz: The British under Attack (London: HarperPress, 2010), 371; Connelly, Reaching for the Stars, 49. 26 The Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1941. For the full speech, cf. W. S. Churchill, The War Speeches of the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill, ed. Charles Eade, Vol. ii (London: Cassell, 1952), 22–7. 27 ‘As Hitler sowed . . .’, Brochure in TNA, INF2/8. 28 According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the Allies dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on continental Europe during the war, slightly over half of it on Germany. This compares with a total of 74,172 tons dropped by Germany on the United Kingdom. 29 The Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1941. 30 Daily Express, 21 May 1942. 31 Ibid., 1 and 2 June 1942. 32 Daily Mirror, 1 June 1942. 33 Ibid., 29 July 1943. 34 BBC WA, Talks, John Strachey, ‘War Commentary’, 24 February 1944, 9.25 pm. 35 Daily Mirror, 15 February 1945.

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36 Evening Standard, 14 February 1945. 37 The Manchester Guardian, 15 February 1945. 38 Daily Express, 6, 7 and 11 September 1944. 39 The Times, 10 January 1944. In 1944, Bomber Command would drop 275,559 tons on Germany and a further 249,943 tons on German-occupied territory, chiefly France. 40 The Observer, 15 August 1943, 17 September 1944. Cf. also ‘Drawings illustrating the remarkable increase in size and blast effect achieved by British bomb-designers’ in Illustrated London News, 29 April 1944. 41 Daily Express, 5 March 1942. 42 Evening Standard, 4 March 1942. 43 Daily Mirror, 29 October 1942. 44 BBC WA, News Bulletin, 18 October 1942, midnight. 45 News Chronicle, 19 October 1942. 46 TNA AIR14/2222, RCAF Overseas Headquarters, Directorate of Public Relations, 27/7/43 Woodhall Spa/Hamburg. 47 TNA AIR14/2238, S/Ldr Ware, PRO 5 Group to W/Cdr Lawrence, Senior PRO Bomber Command, 16 February 1943, Proposed Script of Broadcast by Sgt Rademeyer. 48 BBC WA, R46/8/1, Transcription of recordings made in a Lancaster Bomber during a raid on Berlin, Saturday 4 September 1943, 7.30–7.45 p.m., Home and Forces. 49 TNA AIR 14/2235, One of those ‘Other Nights’, F/O T. H. Blackham. 50 Evening Standard, 31 March 1944. 51 Ibid., 22 February 1944. 52 Daily Mirror, 24 October 1942. 53 TNA AIR 14/2235, The Squadron Spirit, F/Lt E. H. C. Williams. 54 TNA AIR14/2238, F/Ltr Strachey, PRO 5 Group to S/Ldr Lawrence, Senior PRO Bomber Command, 17 April 1942, Proposed Script of Broadcast by S/Lr J. D. Nettleton. 55 TNA AIR 14/2235, Bombing Technique: S/Ldr McLeod. 56 News Chronicle, 26 October 1942. 57 Ibid., 12 and 13 March 1943. 58 Ibid., 30 March, 28 April, 30 April 1942. 59 Daily Express, 1 June 1942. 60 Ibid., 4 June 1942. 61 Manchester Guardian, 23 October 1942. 62 Daily Mirror, 20 November 1942. 63 The Manchester Guardian, 4 August 1943. 64 Picture Post, 22.8, 19 February 1944.

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65 Illustrated London News, 13 May 1944. 66 Daily Express, 16 February 1945; Illustrated London News, 24 February 1945. 67 Daily Express, 3 June 1944. 68 Ibid., 13 July 1944. 69 Daily Mail, 28 July 1944. 70 News Chronicle, 28 and 30 April 1942. 71 Daily Mirror, 27 October 1942, 19 May 1943. 72 Evening Standard, 7 August 1943. 73 Ibid., 1 February 1944. 74 BBC WA, E. Colston Shepherd, War Report, 10 October 1944. 75 Evening Standard, 4 March 1942. 76 News Chronicle, 3 June 1942 and 2 June 1942; M. Middlebrook and C. Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, 1939–1945 (Leicester: Midland Publishing, 2000), 262. 77 The Manchester Guardian, 4 August 1943; Evening Standard, 7 August 1943; Middlebrook and Everitt, Bomber Command War Diaries, 414. 78 BBC WA, John Strachey, ‘War Commentary’, 24 February 1944, 9.25 p.m. 79 TNA AIR14/2238, F/Ltr Strachey, PRO 5 Group to S/Ldr Lawrence, Senior PRO Bomber Command, 26 April 1942, Proposed Script of Broadcast by F/O Wooldridge. 80 BBC WA, John Strachey, ‘War Commentary’, 16 December 1943, 9.25 p.m. 81 BBC WA, R34/275/2, Director-General to Controller of Programmes, 9 May 1944. See also C. Davies, ‘Puritanical and Politically Correct? A Critical Historical Account of Changes in the Censorship of Comedy by the BBC’, in G. E. C. Paton, C. Powell and S. Wagg (eds) The Social Faces of Humour: Practices and Issues (Aldershot: Gower, 1996), 29–62: 43. 82 Daily Mirror, 21 January 1943. 83 Picture Post, 16.1, 4 July 1942. 84 Daily Mirror, 21, 22 and 28 January 1943. 85 The Manchester Guardian, 22 January 1943. 86 Evening Standard, 7 September 1943. 87 News Chronicle, 3 June 1942. 88 Ibid., 22 October 1942. 89 Ibid., 9 March 1943. 90 R. Overy, ‘“To Outbarbarian the Huns”: Popular Opposition to Area Bombing in World War II’, Past and Present, Autumn 2013, forthcoming. 91 M. Hastings, Bomber Command (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), 176; MajorGeneral J. F. C. Fuller, ‘Barbarity of War without Rules’, Evening Standard, 4 February 1944. 92 The Manchester Guardian, 16 September 1942. 93 Daily Mirror, 1 April 1943.

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94 The Times, 10 February 1944. Lang’s successor, Archbishop William Temple, conspicuously refused to condemn area bombing. ‘At this time’, he said in a sermon broadcast on the BBC on 26 December 1943, ‘we almost daily hear and read of the devastation caused by our bombers. We are bound to take satisfaction in their achievements. But oh! the misery and horror of it all!’ Quoted in S. Hobhouse, Christ and our Enemies (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1944). 95 The Manchester Guardian, 10 June 1942. 96 Picture Post, 17.3, 17 October 1942, 13–18. The article provoked numerous (mostly approving) letters in response: cf nos. 17.5, 31 October 1942, and 17.6, 17 November 1942. 97 BBC WA, John Strachey, 18 November 1943, 9.25 p.m (original italics). 98 Ibid., 16 December 1943, 9.25 p.m. 99 H. Thomas, John Strachey (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), 219. 100 The Times, 10 January 1944. 101 BBC WA, E. Colston Shepherd, War Review, 28 March 1944. 102 Evening Standard, 29 February 1944. 103 Illustrated London News, 1 May 1943. The historian Andrew Roberts made a comparable argument (in The Storm of War (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 460) when he wrote that ‘Germany is today such a model democracy, and so pacific in her foreign policy, partly because of the terrible retribution that that war visited upon her.’ 104 Daily Mirror, 26 October 1942 and 27 July 1943. 105 Farr, ‘The Labour Party and Strategic Bombing’, 141. 106 G. Orwell, ‘As I Please’, Tribune, 19 May and 14 July 1944, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume iii: As I Please by George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 (© George Orwell)), 179–81 and 213–5. 107 ‘The Puzzle of Air Power: Will Bombing Suffice?’, The Observer, 13 September 1942. 108 BBC WA, John Strachey, 11 March 1943, 9.25 p.m. 109 Evening Standard, 16 February 1944. 110 Illustrated London News, 19 June 1943. 111 Hugh Cudlipp wrote after the war that his paper, the Mirror, had ‘grossly exaggerated the effects of the bombing on Germany’. Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned!, 148. 112 G. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, Vol. i: 1937–64 (New York: Random House, 1976), 79, 84. 113 Peace Pledge Union, ‘Bombing: Challenging Untruths’, www.ppu.org.uk/ bombing/bombing11a.html, accessed 2 October 2012. 114 Gallup (ed.), Opinion Polls, 35, 43, 84. 115 Connelly, Reaching for the Stars, 119.

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116 BBC WA, E. Colston Shepherd, War Review, 17 October 1944. Material crossed out in original script. Vichy had claimed since 1942 that the RAF was targeting French civilians. 117 T. D. Biddle, ‘Wartime Reactions’, in Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang (eds), Firestorm: the Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2006), 104–8. 118 C. King, With Malice Towards None: A War Diary (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970), 290 (entry for 17 February 1945). 119 Daily Mirror, 22 February 1945. 120 G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954 (© George Orwell, 1948)), 171. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘I would too, wouldn’t you?’ Regarding the Deaths of Others During the Vietnam War Kendrick Oliver

What do the people of a liberal nation think when its wars kill innocents liberally? ‘War’, writes Michael Walzer, ‘is the hardest place: if comprehensive and consistent moral judgments are possible there, they are possible everywhere.’1 The practice of war exposes the liberal tradition to two existential tests. In theory at least, liberals fight wars for the promise of Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’  – to bring about a world in which liberal principles have the universal application required by the liberal concept of rights. 2 If they do not win, the liberal tradition is reduced to a provincialism and its promise dissolves. But the manner in which a liberal war is fought matters as much as its ultimate outcome. Because liberals fight their wars for the sake of a common humanity, they can – in the name of human conscience – sanction the human suffering that results from prosecution of their cause. A liberal war does not become unjust as soon as it kills civilians. Yet the use of force in a liberal war often exceeds what can be easily reconciled with liberal theory. In particular, it may involve, or evolve, a presumption that some human lives are more dispensable than others: 20 of their civilians

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can be killed to keep 5 of our soldiers safe. And if military strategy is not disciplined by ‘comprehensive and consistent moral judgements’ rooted in a liberal faith in the equal value of every human life, in what sense is this still a liberal war? The liberal is left with a choice: to stop endorsing the war, effectively accepting the end of liberal ambition in the world, or to embrace the logics of realism and tribal allegiance, inheritances of a state of nature. Better a provincial liberalism than one that has lost its soul?3 Vietnam began as a liberal war, but it had been disowned by almost all liberals by the time that it ended. In the attrition of liberal support lies one obvious explanation for the American defeat: a liberal nation looked at the war and judged it, rightly or wrongly, irreconcilable with liberal principle. But that explanation is itself at odds both with the mature historiography on the conflict and with much of what has been written generally on the power of images displaying the suffering of others to prompt moral action on the part of viewers and to change the terms of national debate. In addition, the actual record of public responses to atrocity images from the Vietnam War does not attest to the ubiquity of a liberal discourse of conscience. Indeed, the record speaks at least as much of a disowning of liberalism as of a disowning of the war. In the view of many Americans, the lives of US soldiers – including those who committed massacres – counted for more than the lives of others; and the war could have been won if only liberals with their delicate principles had stepped out of the way. Liberals cannot trust in common conscience to make good the moral fault when their wars get out of hand. This is another good reason why liberals should not start wars.

The historiography of American hearts and minds It was a grievance often rehearsed in the memoirs of those who once had hoped to win the Vietnam War. They had not been defeated in the paddy fields and jungles, but in the pages of newspapers, on television screens and in the battle between an irresolute executive and the student anti-war movement for American hearts and minds. After the failure of the Tet offensive in spring 1968, claimed General William Westmoreland, former commander of US forces in Vietnam, the enemy was so weak that it could have been quickly harried into giving up the struggle, if only he had been granted the resources to seize the military initiative. ‘But that was not to be. Press and television had created an aura not of victory but of defeat, which, coupled with the vocal antiwar elements, profoundly influenced timid officials in Washington.’4 According to Richard Nixon, the news media focused its attention ‘primarily on the failings and frailties’ of the US military and allied forces, overlooking both the ruthlessness of the enemy

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and the progress being made in the effort to establish a viable, independent South Vietnamese nation. Over time, media coverage ‘contributed to the impression that we were fighting in military and moral quicksand, rather than toward an important and worthwhile objective.’5 Subsequently, recalled William Colby, a senior CIA official, the antiwar movement became an ‘invisible participant’ at the peace negotiations in Paris: a rapidly disintegrating home front forced the Nixon administration to settle for a ceasefire that permitted enemy forces to remain in South Vietnam, in the sure knowledge that – once the United States had withdrawn – they would move swiftly to resume their struggle against the Saigon regime.6 Yet as Richard Nixon also acknowledged, the ‘shrill voices of dissent’ – in the media and in the streets – could not, by themselves, have commanded the fate of South Vietnam.7 After all, if the public sphere had become so saturated with the discourse of opposition, how could he have credibly claimed the support of a ‘silent majority’ for his policy of maintaining American involvement in the war until the enemy agreed to a ‘just and lasting peace’ or until the regime in the south was strong enough to take charge of its own defence?8 Those who have researched the role of the news media during the conflict have commonly concluded that it was not an ‘agent of defeat’.9 With only a few exceptions, the coverage that appeared in American newspapers, news magazines and television news broadcasts was supportive of the aims of the nation’s policy in Vietnam and the means of its implementation  – until the elite consensus in favour of that policy started to fracture in the wake of the Tet offensive. Thereafter, reporting on the war admitted a greater plurality of perspectives, but it continued to be pliant to official news management and to accord a significant increment of authority to the views of government agencies and the military command. The media also rationed and sanitized its representation of the violence of the war: it was rare for television news to screen footage of heavy fighting, and audiences were never shown the faces of dead American soldiers.10 Reporters did not generally dwell on the toll of civilian casualties produced by American bombing raids, artillery fire, helicopter assaults and ground troop operations.11 The conjecture that the media had formed a potent, unholy alliance with dissenters during the Vietnam War encouraged the US military to impose stricter controls upon press reporting in subsequent conflicts, but the conjecture was false.12 Indeed, for many seasons of the war, the media coupled favourable appraisals of national policy in Vietnam with accounts of the antiwar movement which cast it as a dangerous and deviant force in American life.13 It is not difficult to identify occasions when the anti-war movement influenced official policy on Vietnam; more elusive, however, is evidence that it played a decisive role in bringing the war to an end.14 The fear of provoking widespread civil unrest did, at times, deter American policy-makers from major escalations of military action. It was in part their desire not to exacerbate existing domestic divisions, alongside their

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conviction that the war was in stalemate and could not now be won at any acceptable cost to the nation, which encouraged a number of senior Johnson administration officials to oppose Westmoreland’s post-Tet request for 200,000 more troops.15 In late 1969, Nixon abandoned plans for a major military offensive against North Vietnam – which would have included the bombing of Hanoi, the mining of North Vietnamese ports and assaults against communications links with China – because he feared that it might lead to a catastrophic collapse of order on American college campuses and in American cities.16 Yet at other times, such escalations proceeded as planned, as in 1970, when Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia, and in 1972, when he resumed the strategic bombing of North Vietnam. By the late 1960s, there were many Americans who were unhappy with the war, but not all discontents derived from the same source and commended the same outcome. The antiwar movement, ethically exercised by the crude application of US military power to the complex politics of Vietnamese self-determination, demanded immediate withdrawal. In the starkest of contrasts, a sizable constituency of hawks – close to one-third of the population in early 1969 – believed that the United States should use every weapon at its disposal, including the atomic bomb, to force the enemy to yield.17 Inhabiting the ambivalent middle were those who had come gradually to the view, as a result of the multiplications in American casualties, that the war had been a mistake, but who – precisely because of the value they placed upon such a scale of loss  – were reluctant to accept that it had been entirely in vain. Hence both their aversion to the cut-and-run advocacy of the antiwar movement and their endorsement of a president who promised that something of worth – some measure of honour and credibility – could still be salvaged from the conflict, given a little more time and a little more force. In September 1969, 58 per cent of Americans polled believed that sending troops to fight in Vietnam had been a mistake, but 52 per cent also approved of the way that Nixon was handling the war; two months later, following the President’s ‘silent majority’ address, 74 per cent rejected proposals for a precipitate withdrawal.18 Nixon’s initial strategy in Vietnam was made possible by this middle constituency of hawkish doves.19 The antiwar movement, Nixon asserted, would have been overwhelmed by ‘victory in a just cause’. 20 The movement only became significant, he believed, because opportunities for achieving success in Vietnam had been squandered during the first critical years of the US commitment. It is not just the self-exculpatory memoirs of former officials and military commanders which advance the argument that the war could have been won. Since the 1980s, a number of analysts have contested the orthodox historiographical view that, because it was waged on behalf of a Saigon government which lacked political legitimacy and popular support, the American enterprise in Vietnam was doomed from the start. 21 But these revisionist writers, in contrast to the memoirists, show little interest on

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the whole in perpetuating the legend of a war lost at home. They agree that what mattered most was what the United States did  – and did not do  – in Vietnam itself, even as they differ in their designations of the primary strategic error: was it undermining the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, prioritizing search-and-destroy operations over the task of pacification, or failing to secure the borders of South Vietnam against enemy infiltration from the north?22 Implicit in such analyses is an assumption that the home front would have accepted the costs of the nation’s intervention in Vietnam had it been fighting ‘a better war’. 23 Western scholarship on the conflict, then, ascribes only modest interpretative significance to the fateful consequences of American military intervention for the civilian populations of North and South Vietnam: estimates of the total non-combatant death toll range from 420,000 to 1.4 million. 24 For all that their accounts may register the measures of civilian suffering resulting from the war, orthodox historians regard such suffering as incidental to their thesis. America did not fail in Vietnam because it killed thousands of innocent peasants; it killed thousands of innocent peasants because its leaders confused an authentic post-colonial revolution with a concerted communist geopolitical challenge and so dispatched their nation’s armed forces to fight an intractable war. 25 To revisionists, the death and devastation wrought by the US military in Vietnam serves as additional evidence that the strategy of search-and-destroy was poorly conceived. It was an inversion of the ideal economy of destruction if civilians were suffering and the enemy was not. As a marker of strategic failure, however, the abjection of a peasant society was subordinate to the cardinal point that the war had been lost. Moreover, as we have seen, analyses of the home front have identified the news media as reticent in its reporting of non-combatant fatalities and the majority of its readers and viewers as concerned almost exclusively with the rising numbers of American dead.

What we do when we see suffering: A signature theme of modern thought There is more than enough in the annals of the Vietnam War to induce and sustain a melancholy assurance of the limits of human feeling. But it was not Vietnam alone that converted the problem of moral inertia in the face of the suffering of others into a signature theme of modern social and cultural thought. In March 1964, Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered outside her apartment building in Queens, New York. Reports that her cries for help had been heard and ignored by several of her neighbours prompted social scientists to enquire into the dynamics of ‘standing by’ and to conclude – counter-intuitively  – that the greater the number of witnesses there were to a human emergency, the less likely it was that any would intervene.26

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of historical studies pointed to the failure of the Roosevelt administration to act upon its knowledge of the Holocaust by opening American borders to Jewish refugees and engaging in efforts of rescue.27 Meanwhile, drawing upon a wealth of experimental data, the social-psychologist Melvin Lerner was developing his influential theory that, when confronted by the victimization of others, many of us respond in a manner that preserves our cherished illusion that we live in a just world. Rather than permit the evidence of victimization to challenge our faith in immanent justice, we work our way – almost unerringly – to a conviction that the victims must have brought their fate upon themselves. No need, then, to deplete our emotional resources by summoning up outrage; no need to waste our valuable time venturing assistance where it is not truly deserved.28 And in the mid-1970s, Susan Sontag observed that post-war practitioners of ‘concerned photography’ may have increased our awareness of the existence of social evil, but they had not increased the compassion of our response. The ‘vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world’ had served to make atrocity seem ordinary, overwhelming the economies of conscience. ‘Images anesthetize’, she wrote. 29 The thesis of an exhausted western moral imagination has been recently revived to explain the many defeats of humanitarianism in the post-Cold War era. In the wake of the US withdrawal from Somalia, the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide, and the torpidity with which the international community responded to Serbian aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina, the anticipation that the end of the Cold War might permit the flowering of a global civil society grounded in a universalist conception of human rights came quickly to be annulled. 30 There were warnings instead of a ‘contemporary crisis of pity’, of a pervasive scepticism about the point of participation in ‘any form of political action orientated towards a horizon of moral ideals’.31 The sociologist Stanley Cohen identified ‘denial’ as a commonplace – almost normative – reaction to distant horrors.32 Thoughtful journalists sought to salvage what they could of their mission to inform out of the apprehension that the media’s coverage of international crises was inducing ‘compassion fatigue’ in its audience. 33 Samantha Power observed that, through each of the major genocides of the twentieth century, American policymakers had chosen to ‘stand by’, safe in the knowledge that public opinion would apply no pressure to intervene: ‘No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.’34 After media and public alike exhibited minimal interest in the findings of a major research study into non-combatant mortality during the US intervention in Iraq, John Tirman  – who had been involved in the study  – wondered whether such inattention was unusual.35 In his subsequent book, The Deaths of Others, he concluded that it was not. Wherever and whenever US armed forces had engaged in combat overseas, he declared, the brutal consequences for civilians caught in the zone of conflict had ‘escaped Americans’ notice or

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sympathy, appeared very rarely in literature or film, stirred virtually no debate or calls for new policies, and never seemed to be at the roots of disgust with the war’. 36 Yet in many of these reflections, a similar move is made: before his or her pessimistic assessment of the human capacity for moral indifference deepens into despair, the writer begins to hedge, identifying exceptions and contingencies, proposing potential solutions, marking out some modest philosophical basis for hope. The universal ‘we’ which responds with outrage and initiative to news of the slaughter of innocents has already been dismissed as a figment of the liberal imagination, but the writer refuses to invert it into another social absolute: a world of individuals, each one of us held captive in localized moral space. For Stanley Cohen, denial may be commonplace, but it is not inevitable. There are people who are willing, in the most hostile, unpromising settings, to intervene on behalf of victimized others; and in more tractable contexts, where information about the atrocity flows freely, instances of conscientious action can be expected to increase.37 In 2003, Susan Sontag returned to the subject of ‘concerned photography’ in order to quarrel with what she had written 25 years before. Certainly, images might anesthetize, but this was not – she now decided – the only thing that they could do. The graphic evidence that a photograph provided of a human disaster invited those who viewed it ‘to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers’. Some might refuse that invitation; some might accept it, think a little, and then move on; some might commit themselves more fully. It was in the power of a photograph to provide ‘an initial spark’ to critical thought; it was up to politics to do the rest.38 Where Sontag led, others followed. In her 1998 examination of Holocaust photography, Remembering to Forget, Barbie Zelizer had reflected upon the manner in which, over the post-war era, an initially varied repertoire of atrocity representations was reduced to a ‘meager selection’ of imitative images. Each new atrocity was announced by photographs that referred to the iconography of some earlier, canonical horror  – the still-living gazing out from behind barbed wire, the dead piled up in courtyards or lining a long mass grave  – as if history had simply repeated itself, imposing its remorseless pattern over and against all human hope and will. 39 But more recently Zelizer has revised her conclusion that images of atrocity make their viewers feel helpless. She has argued that a particular category of news photographs  – images which show people about to die  – possess a special capacity to move the public, because those who look upon them are forced to complete the sequence of events in their own imagination. Compared with photographs of the dead, which tell of fates already sealed, about-to-die images make it possible to conceive of alternative endings, of a world arranged differently so that their endangered subjects might continue living. In Zelizer’s words, these images ‘establish the opportunity for a

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public engagement in which at least some people can temporarily assume more moral, compassionate, and responsible parameters of looking’.40

Regarding the deaths of others during the Vietnam War It is common for such reassertions of the transformative power of images to claim corroboration from the history of the Vietnam War. The photographs taken during the 1968 My Lai massacre, Sontag declared, ‘became important in bolstering the opposition’ to the conflict.41 Zelizer agrees. She examines the reception of four iconic images from the war: of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, in 1963; the summary execution of Nguyen Van Lem, a Vietcong soldier, by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in February 1968; seven victims of the My Lai massacre, just moments before they were shot; and the naked Kim Phuc, running along a road in June 1972, her body scorched by napalm (Figures 4.1–4.4). Each of these images, Zelizer observes, ‘generated attention, debate, and discussion’, and she notes – as others have done – that they were often reprinted on antiwar posters, placards and leaflets.42 By the early 1970s, she says, ‘images were helping to push a more critical public response to the war’. According to Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, the photograph of Kim Phuc, like the other iconic images, ‘exposed the criminal conduct and systematic deception that were the foundations of US prosecution of the war’.43 It was to become, they declare, ‘a rallying point for opposition’ to what was being done in Vietnam, because it confronted the viewer with visceral proof of the harm that the conflict was inflicting upon innocent Vietnamese: ‘Despite anyone’s best intentions or prior indifference, the public audience now was obligated to counteract the violence of their own state.’44 Often manifest in such arguments is an ambivalent attitude to certain modes of empirical enquiry: they exhibit a resistance to approaches that tend to reduce the significance and meaning of an image to a function of the way that it was initially framed – by a caption, a news report or the comment of public officials; they also question the capacity of quantitative measures, such as indices of audience response or national opinion polls, to capture the complete pattern of the image’s reception in the culture. But to ground a claim of effect primarily in the evidence of an image’s passage to iconic status may simply be to wear a different set of blinkers. After all, the iconic status of an image could result as easily from an unfounded presumption of effect as from its actuality.45 Reading backwards from that status to the image itself, with little intervention from other sources, skirts around the task of disaggregating immediate viewer response and sublimates the writer’s voice – once again – into that of the universal, liberal ‘we’.

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FIGURE 4.1  The self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, in Saigon, 11 June 1963 (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne).

FIGURE 4.2  The execution of Vietcong suspect Nguyen Van Lem by General Nyugen Ngoc Loan, in Saigon, 1 February 1968 (AP Photo/Eddie Adams).

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FIGURE 4.3  Group of civilian women and children rounded up to be killed by US Army in what later became known as the My Lai massacre (Time Life Pictures/ Getty Images/Ronald S. Haeberle).

FIGURE 4.4  Kim Phuc (centre), her brothers and cousins following the napalming of her village by South Vietnamese forces, 8 June 1972 (AP Photo/Nick Ut).

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Better to begin with what we do know: that the news media preferred content which flowed with the prevailing political winds and that the American public, on the whole, took little moral interest in the fate of the Vietnamese. A number of studies have shown that what are now regarded as the iconic images of violence from the war were – at the time of initial dissemination  – usually assigned interpretative frames which worked to contain the challenge they posed to national policy and conscience. Some of the most prominent news outlets, for example, responded to the photographs of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation by questioning the validity of Buddhist grievances, not American support for the repressive regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.46 General Loan’s execution of Nguyen Van Lem was placed in the context of the assassinations of South Vietnamese officials carried out by the Vietcong during the Tet offensive and presented as a decisive, defensible act of summary justice.47 Reports which accompanied the picture of Kim Phuc emphasized that the napalm had been dropped by a South Vietnamese plane: this was an accident that had occurred in the course of an engagement between opposing Vietnamese forces, in a war from which the Americans had already largely withdrawn.48 It was possible, of course, for the audience’s response to such images to resist editorial cues towards a fatalist acceptance of Vietnamese suffering and death, but there is not much quantitative evidence to show that it did. In March 1968, in the wake of the battles of Tet, a Harris survey asked respondents to indicate which aspects of the conflict personally troubled them the most. Nearly half replied that they were concerned about US military casualties; only 4 per cent made reference to the killing of South Vietnamese women and children and the destruction of Vietnam.49 It is unlikely then that many Americans were morally exercised by the image of General Loan executing a man commonly identified in news reports as an enemy combatant. 50 When graphic film of the same incident was aired on NBC Nightly News  – to an estimated audience of 20 million  – only 90 letters were received from viewers, most of them complaining that the broadcast was in ‘bad taste’, rather than expressing outrage at the killing itself.51 David Perlmutter, indeed, suggests that the execution image could easily have been used to rally popular support for the war. What would have happened, he wonders, if Lyndon Johnson had marched onto television and declared that what he needed was a thousand more General Loans? ‘Would not tens of millions have agreed with him out of disdain for the Viet Cong our enemy, and with an eagerness to “win”?’52 The case of the My Lai massacre affords us the clearest view of how Americans understood their own relation to the consequences of their nation’s war-making for the people of Vietnam. In March 1968, American soldiers were directly involved in the killing of unarmed and unresisting civilians – over 400 of them, including many women and children – in the South Vietnamese village of Son My (much of the killing occurred in a sub-hamlet marked on US military maps as My Lai (4)). 53 Due to a cover-up

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by local commanders, accounts of the massacre were not published in the American press until mid-November 1969 – but that was a season of fierce controversy about the conflict and so the revelations seemed charged with political significance. There were still thousands of US soldiers fighting in Vietnam; Richard Nixon had recently asked ‘the great silent majority of Americans’ to show support for his war policy; and the anti-war movement was engaged in a series of mass demonstrations. These included a March Against Death in Washington, DC, commencing on 13 November, coincidentally the very day that the first detailed reports of the massacre appeared in US newspapers; 45,000 protesters, each holding a placard inscribed with the name of a dead American serviceman or a destroyed Vietnamese village, walked from Arlington National Cemetery to the steps of the Capitol via the Nixon White House. 54 Nixon administration officials were concerned that the massacre revelations would dissolve the ‘silent majority’ only a few weeks after it had been invited to speak up. 55 In the wake of the initial press accounts, which focused upon the murder charges preferred against a platoon commander, Lieutenant William Calley, came a storm surge of evidence confirming that scores of Vietnamese civilians had been put to death in Son My and that the responsibility for their killing lay with American forces. Photographs of the victims, taken by Ronald Haeberle, a combat photographer, as the massacre had gone on, were published in newspapers and news magazines and exhibited on network television (Figures 4.3 and 4.5).56 Reporters in Vietnam interviewed survivors; back in the United States, former GIs who had been present during the massacre described what they had seen; and some, indeed, confessed that they had themselves shot women and children – ‘And babies’, declared one. 57 By the end of November 1969, for most of the national news media, the question of whether a massacre had actually occurred was settled, and so they took up the challenge of determining its causes, identifying who was to blame and deciding what the massacre disclosed about the justness of the wider war and the moral condition of the American nation.58 For the next year and a half, climaxing with Calley’s conviction in March 1971 for the murder of an unknown number of Vietnamese civilians, there was a painful and comprehensive debate across the public sphere focused upon these problems. 59 And ordinary Americans followed the unfolding story of the massacre and Calley’s court-martial closely. In spring 1971, a survey commissioned by the White House found that 96% of respondents were aware of the court-martial verdict: ‘the highest we’ve gotten on any subject in any of our polls’, observed Nixon’s Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman.60 Yet surveys of public opinion – both after Calley’s court-martial and in the weeks that followed the initial revelations in November 1969 – reveal that awareness of the massacre was one thing; a regard for the suffering of its victims, and more generally for the fate of Vietnamese civilians caught in the crosshairs of American armed forces, was something else

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FIGURE 4.5  Civilians killed by US Army during what later became known as the My Lai massacre. (Photo by Ronald S. Haeberle//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images).

entirely. The percentage of respondents who questioned the wisdom of the original decision to commit US troops to the war rose by only a single point between September 1969 and January 1970.61 In a poll commissioned by Time magazine, only 22 per cent of those surveyed ‘clearly expressed moral repugnance’ at the massacre; 65 per cent subscribed instead to the view that ‘incidents such as this are bound to happen in a war’.62 In contrast to the concerns of the White House a few weeks before that news of the massacre would prompt a haemorrhaging of popular support for the President’s policy in Vietnam, Haldeman noted in December 1969 that the public ‘seems to have taken it pretty well in [its] stride and then become bored’.63 After the conclusion of Calley’s court-martial, there was a marked increase in the proportion of Americans who judged that the war was morally wrong, from 47 per cent in January 1971 to 58 per cent in April.64 But this did not constitute evidence that, as they followed the court-martial, Americans had awakened to the claims made upon their conscience by the suffering of Vietnamese civilians in Son My and elsewhere. The shift in sentiment about the war coincided with an outpouring of public sympathy for Calley in the wake of his conviction – 79 per cent of poll respondents expressed disapproval of the verdict – and it was most marked in the south, the heartland of support for the lieutenant.65 The proportion of southerners declaring the war to be morally wrong increased from 38 per cent in January to 58 per cent in April.66 Previously, the south had been the region

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most in favour of the conflict – and most in favour also of waging it without restraint.67 Southerners and other erstwhile hawks did not see in the Calley court-martial a compelling indictment of their own advocacy of total war in Vietnam. Calley, in their view, had fought the war as it should have been fought all along. His prosecution, then, was proof that national institutions were no longer in the conflict to win. In such circumstances, persisting with the war seemed unconscionable. Who could encourage young men to serve when defeat had already been conceded and their efforts to engage the enemy might condemn them to the stockade? President Nixon’s approval ratings on Vietnam, indeed, fell abruptly in late March and early April, perhaps also influenced by the failure of the recent South Vietnamese incursion into Laos.68 Though his poll numbers quickly recovered (helped no doubt by his popular intervention to release Calley from jail pending a legal appeal), Nixon could not reverse the deeper transformation that had occurred in the political context of Vietnam policy-making.69 The Calley conviction had withered support for the deployment of American troops in any aggressive ground operations in Vietnam at the very same time that the Laotian incursion had revealed that the South Vietnamese army was incapable of taking their place. Nixon could still respond to North Vietnamese military offensives with fierce airborne assaults, as in Easter 1972, and attract significant public support.70 But he could not sustain that support without also providing clear evidence  – in the form of further troop withdrawals and progress towards a peace settlement – that the United States was finally on its way out of a hopeless war. The empathetic connection that many Americans made during the national debate about My Lai, therefore, was not with the victims shown in the massacre photographs, but with the perpetrators from whose perspective such images had been shot. One detailed national survey found that opposition to Calley’s conviction correlated closely with membership in the socio-economic groups that were most conditioned to the notion that orders had to be obeyed and that, if they were, those who gave the orders, not those who carried them out, were accountable for the consequences.71 Calley’s supporters identified with his lowly position within a large hierarchical organization, assuming – against much of the evidence heard in the court-martial – that he had been ordered to lead the killing of the people of My Lai (4) and that there was no scope for him or anyone else below the operational command to exercise moral autonomy there. Respondents to the survey were asked what they would have done if, as a soldier in Vietnam, they had been ordered by their superior officers to shoot all the inhabitants of a village suspected of aiding the enemy, including old men, women and children. Fifty-one per cent declared that they would have obeyed such an order.72 In March 1971, an elderly lady from Columbus, Georgia – the site of Calley’s court-martial – was interviewed by NBC Nightly News and, in a striking inversion of the universal, liberal ‘we’, volunteered: ‘They went

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in there, were told to shoot so they shot. I would too, wouldn’t you?’ 73 For those who shared her view, the images of the dead and about-to-die in My Lai (4) presented no challenge to conscience; rather, they were evidence of Calley’s assiduousness in the necessarily brutal business of making war. Such attitudes exhibited an incomplete assurance in a world of immanent justice, for they involved an admission that there were innocent victims of the atrocities in My Lai (4). It was just that victim status was assigned to the soldiers who had done the killing, not the civilians who had been killed. The same Americans who had shrugged their shoulders when they first looked upon photographs of the massacre were outraged at the sight of William Calley, convicted of mass murder, leaving his court martial under guard. The spectacle represented a betrayal of the contract with authority around which many of those watching had structured their lives. If it could happen to Calley, it could happen to anyone. A moral logic was at work in such concerns, but it was not liberal: there was no extension of empathy to the Vietnamese peasant in accordance with conceptions of a common humanity; nor was there a strong commitment to universal juridical standards which held that all combatants, whichever country they fought for, were legally accountable for their own actions in wartime. Only 45 per cent of respondents to the post-court martial survey believed that it had been right to convict German officers at Nuremberg for war crimes ordered by superiors. Fewer still – 32 per cent – approved of convictions when the officers involved in such crimes were American.74 Not every passage in the story of the My Lai massacre draws its readers deeper into moral gloom. There were soldiers who refused to participate in the slaughter or actively tried to stop it.75 The massacre eventually came to the attention of military investigators because Ronald Ridenhour, a soldier who had talked to some of the perpetrators, returned home from Vietnam and sent a detailed account of what he had been told to several high officials.76 General William R. Peers, the senior army officer who was commissioned to enquire into the massacre, took his task seriously and produced a substantial report describing both the killings and the efforts of local commanders to cover them up.77 Media institutions were slow to follow up early intimations that American soldiers had been implicated in a major war crime, but once the story had been broken, their coverage was enterprising, vivid and morally engaged – to the point, indeed, that editors often seemed dismayed and confused by the sluggish, parochial patterns of reader and viewer response.78 The six army officers who served on Calley’s court-martial jury, registering the cumulative force of eye-witness testimonies which pointed to the lieutenant’s role in leading the killing on the ground in My Lai (4), unanimously concluded that he was guilty of murder. And, for whatever it may be worth, Calley himself has recently – for the first time – expressed remorse for his actions.79 Perhaps also the composition of popular attitudes would have been different if it had been more evident to the public that Calley had not been

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ordered by senior commanders to shoot the inhabitants of Son My or if the massacre photographs had explicitly shown the lieutenant and other American soldiers in the act of killing Vietnamese women and children.80 But all this is surely to hedge once more. To limit the interventions of conscience and concern to instances when a perfect evil has been documented perfectly is to grant a wide licence to atrocity-makers across the world. As it was, against the findings of army investigators, the extensive coverage in the media and the careful judgement of Calley’s officer peers on his court-martial jury – and despite the pictures of dead babies – the balance of public sympathy continued to be directed towards those who had effected a massacre in Son My, not those who had been massacred. ‘The horror of the 20th century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.’81 So declared Norman Mailer: his subject was the Apollo moon landing, but his words were published in the wake of Nixon’s silent majority address and on the eve of the first detailed press reports about the My Lai massacre. Writing and representing the sufferings of others, like presidential speech-making and exhibiting national technological prowess, is a communicative practice which – when deployed to persuade, inspire and transform – fails much more frequently than it actually succeeds.82 Or, more precisely, such practices are judged to have failed when their success is measured against a ‘magic bullet’ or ‘hypodermic’ model of communication – according to which the recipient of a message is directly and immediately affected in the manner intended by its sender  – that has long been regarded as an anachronism by most theorists working in the communications field.83 Images of the deaths of others, however they are presented, have only a limited, highly contingent power to call their viewers directly to conscience. That is the work that they are expected to do, but it seems to be too much to ask. We cannot invest in such images any confident hope that they will compel liberal states to act against violations of liberal peace or prompt a nation to correct itself when its liberal war goes wrong.

Further reading For a good introductory account of the My Lai massacre, see W. T. Allison, My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Bernd Greiner drew upon Pentagon records to reveal that the massacre occurred within a much wider context of American violence against civilians in the Vietnam War: see B. Greiner, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (London: The Bodley Head, 2009). In The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), John Tirman identified a chronic pattern of political and popular indifference to the civilian casualties of America’s overseas military campaigns.

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Notes 1 M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 2006), xxv. 2 I. Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1903). 3 For an elegant account of liberals’ relationship with war, see M. Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 4 W. C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 499. 5 R. M. Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (London: Arrow, 1979), 350. 6 W. Colby with J. McCargar, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 336–7. 7 R. M. Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 14–15. 8 R. M. Nixon, ‘Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam’, 3 November 1969, The American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2303, accessed 12 March 2012; Nixon, Memoirs, 409–11. 9 See, especially, D. C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); W. M. Hammond, ‘The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat: A Critical Examination’, Reviews in American History, 17 (June 1989), 312–23; W. M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–1968¸ (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1988); W. M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1996); J. Landers, The Weekly War: Newsmagazines and Vietnam (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2004); and C. R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (New York: Norton, 1993). 10 L. W. Lichty, ‘Comments on the Influence of Television on Public Opinion’, in P. Braestrup (ed.), Vietnam as History: Ten Years After the Paris Peace Accords (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1984), 158; Hammond, ‘The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat’, 316; Hallin, ‘Uncensored War’, 129–30. 11 Hallin, ‘Uncensored War’, 136–40, 151–6, 176–7; B. Greiner, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (London: The Bodley Head, 2009), 2–5; K. Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 13–25. 12 P. Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (London: Prion, 2000), 483–500. See also P. Young and P. Jesser, The Media and the Military: From the Crimea to Desert Strike (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 13 T. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); M. Small, Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

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14 Positive appraisals of the movement’s effectiveness can be found in M. Small, Johnson, Nixon and the Doves (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); and T. Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For a more sceptical analysis, see A. Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 15 D. F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 125–47. 16 J. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 162–70. 17 Thirty-two per cent of Americans polled favoured the option ‘Escalate war, go all-out’ when asked: ‘What do you think the United States should do next in regard to the Vietnam situation?’ G. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Volume Three 1959–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 2189. 18 J. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973), 54–5; Gallup, Public Opinion 1935–1971 Vol. 3, 2217, 2224. 19 On public opinion and the Vietnam War, see Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion; Howard Schuman, ‘Two Sources of Antiwar Sentiment in America’, American Journal of Sociology, 78 (November 1972), 513–36; W. L. Lunch and P. W. Sperlich, ‘American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam’, Western Political Quarterly, 32 (March 1979), 21–44. On Nixon, public opinion and the war, see Kimball, passim; and A. Z. Katz, ‘Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Nixon Administration and the Pursuit of Peace with Honor in Vietnam’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 27 (Summer 1997), 496–513. 20 Nixon, No More Vietnams, 15. 21 For a useful discussion of historiographical debates about the war, see G. R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). 22 On Diem, see M. Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); on pacification, see A. F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) and L. Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011); on securing the borders, see H. G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press 1982). 23 The term ‘better war’ comes from L. Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999). See also G. Gentile, ‘The Better War That Never Was’, The National Interest, March–April 2012: http://nationalinterest.org/issue/ mar-apr-2012, accessed 14 March 2012. 24 J. Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 320–1. 25 Key orthodox accounts include D. L. Anderson, The Vietnam War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); G. C. Herring, Vietnam: America’s Longest War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996); J. Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009);

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and R. D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 26 See, especially, B. Latané and J. M. Darley, ‘Group Inhibition of Bystander Intervention in Emergencies’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10 (November 1968), 215–22; B. Latané and J. M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Subsequent research has called into question whether there actually were many bystanding witnesses to the assault upon Genovese. See R. Manning, M. Levine and A. Collins, ‘The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses’, American Psychologist 62 (September 2007), 555–62. 27 H. L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970); S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973); A. D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1968); D. S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1939–1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). 28 M. J. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). 29 S. Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1977), 16–21. 30 See, for example, D. Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (London: Vintage, 2002). 31 L. Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xvi. 32 S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 33 S. D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999). 34 S. Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), xxi. 35 Tirman, The Deaths of Others, 10–11, 307–9. The study arrived at a total of 655,000 ‘excess deaths’, a third of which were attributed to American firepower. 36 Ibid., 6. 37 Cohen, States of Denial, 261–6, 290–6. 38 S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 103, 117. 39 B. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 209. 40 B. Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 317. 41 Sontag, Regarding, 37–8, 90–1.

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42 Zelizer, About to Die, 220. See also P. Hagopian, ‘Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory’, in A. Kuhn and K. E. McAllister (eds), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), 216–17. 43 R. Hariman and J. L. Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 22. 44 Ibid., 179. 45 On this point, see Hagopian, ‘Vietnam War Photography’, 219; D. Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage (Westport: Praeger, 1998), 53–4. 46 L. M. Snow and G. N. Dionisopoulos, ‘A Struggle to Contextualize Photographic Images: American Print Media and the “Burning Monk”’, Communication Quarterly, 45 (1997), 393–409. 47 R. Hamilton, ‘Image and Context: The Production and Reproduction of The Execution of a VC Suspect by Eddie Adams’, in J. Walsh and J. Aulich (eds), Vietnam Images: War and Representation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 171–83; Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy, 43–6. 48 G. Westwell, ‘Accidental Napalm Attack and Hegemonic Visions of America’s War in Vietnam’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28 (2011), 407–23. 49 M. Lorell and C. Kelley, Jr., ‘Casualties, Public Opinion, and Presidential Policy During the Vietnam War’, Project AIR FORCE report for US Air Force, R-3060-AF (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1985), 26–7: www.rand. org/pubs/reports/2007/R3060.pdf, accessed 26 March 2012. 50 Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy, 49. 51 G. A. Bailey and L. W. Lichty, ‘Rough Justice in a Saigon Street: A Gatekeeper Study of NBC’s Tet Execution Film’, Journalism Quarterly, 49 (June 1972), 221–38. 52 Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy, 54. 53 Comprehensive historical accounts of the massacre are contained in M. R. Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); M. Bilton and K. Sim, Four Hours at My Lai (London: Penguin, 1992); Greiner, War Without Fronts; and Oliver, The My Lai Massacre. For an excellent discussion of atrocities committed elsewhere in Son My during the same operation, see M. J. Taylor, ‘The Massacre at My Khe 4: A Different Story’, PhD Thesis (University of Hull, 2010). 54 C. DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 261–2. 55 Haldeman diary entry, 25 November 1969, folder: ‘H. R. Haldeman Journal Volume III, September 23, 1969 – January 12, 1970’, Haldeman Diaries, Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California. 56 J. Eszterhas, ‘Cameraman Saw GIs Slay 100 Villagers’, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 20 November 1969, 1, 4-B, 5-B; ‘The Massacre at Mylai’, Life, 5 December 1969, 36–45; CBS Evening News, 20 November 1969, Vanderbilt Television News Archive (hereafter VTNA), Nashville.

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57 ABC Evening News, 18 November 1969, VTNA; CBS Evening News, 18 November 1969, VTNA; NBC Nightly News, 18 November 1969, VTNA; S. Hersh, ‘GIs Call Viet Killings “Point-Blank Murder”’, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 20 November 1969, 5-B; CBS Evening News, 24 November 1969, VTNA; ‘Transcript of Interview of Vietnam War Veteran on His Role in Alleged Massacre of Civilians At Songmy’, New York Times, 25 November 1969, 16; R. Reed, ‘Veteran Says He Slew Ten in Vietnam Village’, New York Times, 27 November 1969, 18. 58 See, for example, the cover of Time, 5 December 1969, which carried a photograph of William Calley, with a diagonal banner: ‘THE MASSACRE: Where Does the Guilt Lie?’ 59 For a detailed analysis, see Oliver, The My Lai Massacre. 60 Haldeman diary entry, 2 April 1971, Audio Cassette No. 6, Part 2, Haldeman Diaries, Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California. 61 Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, 54–5. 62 ‘Nation: Bound to Happen’, Time, 12 January 1970, 8. 63 Haldeman diary entry, 16 December 1970, folder: ‘H. R. Haldeman Journal Volume III, September 23, 1969 – January 2, 1970’, Haldeman Diaries, Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California. 64 Harris poll data, folder: My Lai 8/83, Papers of Four Hours in My Lai, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London. 65 ‘A Newsweek Poll on Calley’s Fate’, Newsweek, 12 April 1971, 28. 66 Harris poll data, folder: My Lai 8/83, Papers of Four Hours in My Lai, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London. 67 J. A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and US Foreign Relations 1789–1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 278–84. 68 In early March, 41 per cent of those polled approved of Nixon’s Vietnam policy. By April 1, only 32 per cent did so. See Oliver, The My Lai Massacre, 162. 69 Katz, ‘Public Opinion and Foreign Policy’, 502. 70 Ibid., 503. 71 H. C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Towards a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 188–91, 227–35. 72 Ibid., 173. 73 NBC Nightly News, 22 March 1971, VTNA. 74 Kelman and Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience, 182. 75 See, in particular, T. Angers, The Forgotten Hero of My Lai: The Hugh Thompson Story (Lafayette: Acadian House, 1999). 76 Ridenhour’s letter is contained in J. Goldstein, B. Marshall and J. Schwartz (eds), The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-up: Beyond the Reach of Law? The Peers Commission Report with a Supplement and Introductory Essay on the Limits of Law (New York: The Free Press, 1976), 34–7. 77 For the Peers commission report, see ibid. See also W. R. Peers, The My Lai Inquiry (New York: Norton, 1979).

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78 On media reporting of the massacre, see Oliver, The My Lai Massacre, 11–52, 80, 91–2. 79 D. McMichael, ‘William Calley Apologizes for My Lai Massacre’, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 21 August 2009: www.ledger-enquirer. com/2009/08/21/813820/william-calley-apologizes-for.html, accessed 8 May 2012. 80 The photographs that Haeberle gave to army investigators and sold to the press in 1969 included no pictures of soldiers in the act of killing. Recently, on the fortieth anniversary of their publication, Haeberle claimed that he had taken such pictures but destroyed them before they could be used to incriminate anyone: ‘I’m not gonna point a finger at some soldier out there and have him, you know, put up. No. We were all guilty.’ E. Theiss, ‘My Lai Photographer Ron Haeberle Admits He Destroyed Pictures of Soldiers in the Act of Killing’, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 20 November 2009:http://blog. cleveland.com/pdextra/2009/11/post_25.html, accessed 8 May 2012. 81 N. Mailer, ‘The Psychology of Astronauts’, Life, 14 November 1969, 56. 82 On presidential rhetoric, see G. C. Edwards III, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ address may represent a rare example of success, but the favourable poll responses to the speech also reflect the ability of White House officials to influence the questions pollsters asked. L. R. Jacobs and R. Y. Shapiro, ‘Presidential Manipulation of Polls and Public Opinion: The Nixon Administration and Pollsters’, Political Science Quarterly, 110 (Winter 1995–96), 519–38. 83 A. A. Berger, Media and Society: A Critical Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 190. Some scholars of communications question whether the ‘hypodermic’ model was ever very influential in their field, though they often note that it still informs analyses of the effects of rhetoric and image in other disciplines. See D. Lubken, ‘Remembering The Straw Man: The Travels and Adventures of Hypodermic’, in D. W. Park and J. Pooley (eds), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 19–42.

CHAPTER FIVE

Clean War, Invisible War, Liberal War: The Clean and Dirty Politics of Guantánamo Elspeth Van Veeren

The Global War on Terror (GWoT) now ranks as one of the costliest and most extensive wars of the last 100 years and is certainly one of the largest counter-terrorism operations in history.1 Beginning with President Bush’s speech on 16 September 2001 declaring a ‘war on terror’ and continuing over ten years later, the GWoT has cost $1.121 trillion in Pentagon war appropriations, and is set to exceed $4 trillion once debt repayments and the costs of caring for veterans are considered. It has included the mobilization and deployment of military force by some 40 states in several countries, most notably Afghanistan and Iraq; entailed covert operations in several additional locations; reinvigorated US foreign military assistance programmes and facilitated transformations in foreign policy; led to major increases in military and intelligence spending in the United States and elsewhere; justified the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; enabled the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act which included substantial implications for civil liberties within the United States such as extended domestic surveillance and intelligence-gathering programmes; and most recently, facilitated the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 which controversially included the provision for allowing the military to detain indefinitely non-US and US citizens deemed terrorists. 2

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The GWoT has also led to extensive human costs including the death of as many as 252,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as uncounted numbers injured; the death of 6,000 US soldiers and the injury of over 30,000 more (excluding coalition forces, journalists, aid workers and contractors). It has contributed to the displacement of millions of Iraqis and Afghans from their homes; the detention of over 100,000 people at sites around the world, including CIA ‘ghost sites’. It has been used to justify the extension of extraordinary rendition and ‘harsh interrogation’ programmes, and the transformation of norms around torture, detention and targeted killing. It has produced scandals such as the abuses at the Abu Ghraib detention centre (the revelation that US interrogators systematically tortured Iraqi detainees, some sexually), as well as ongoing controversies associated with the US detention and interrogation site established at Guantánamo in January 2002.3 A war of this scale ‘could not be initiated and sustained without widespread public consent or at least acquiescence . . . without beliefs and forms of knowledge [in this case] about the nature of terrorism and counter-terrorism’.4 In other words, such a vast amount of political and military activity and investment requires the development and deployment of a set of knowledges and associated practices to justify and normalize decisions associated with the GWoT. The public at home (and to a degree abroad) must understand that the war is both necessary and achievable, but also legitimate, good and just. And while there is an extensive literature exploring the GWoT in connection with the ‘Just War’ tradition and its interpretation, this chapter’s aim is to explore the ways in which ideas about what is ‘just’ are communicated, in this case to explore the interconnections between ‘just’, ‘humane’ and ‘clean’. 5 Importantly, these sets of knowledges and practices produce a ‘common sense’ or ‘reality’ of war based on the ways in which the conflict and its actors are constructed.6 Producing the legitimacy for war and related security measures requires the construction of a form of danger or threat and, by implication, the means by which the threat should be addressed.7 Since World War Two, wars fought by the United States have involved the construction of an American identity built around the idea of the United States as an advanced western liberal democracy committed to the rule of law and the freedom of the market against the threat posed by communism. Under President Jimmy Carter, and following the Vietnam War, this construction evolved to include respect for human rights. With the support of Congress, the United States was cast as a global beacon of human rights principles and standards with foreign aid and security policies tied, at least in rhetoric, to human rights records. Thus, a national security-human rights nexus was produced that the United States has navigated ever since, and which has necessitated a defence of its own human rights record at home and abroad.8

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Key to the legitimacy of the GWoT was therefore the continued construction of the United States as waging a good war not only to bring terrorists to justice and safeguard American citizens, but to do so humanely with respect for human rights as expressed in the National Security Strategy of 2002.9 Thus when the United States sought to suspend normal judicial processes in connection with the new perceived security threat of terrorism, and committed acts that conflicted with liberal values and its human rights message – including reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture concerning the treatment of detainees – it had to do so in a way that worked within this national security-human rights nexus. On the one hand, US officials maintained a construction of the GWoT as a national security crisis, as an exceptional threat requiring exceptional measures and ‘whatever it takes’.10 On the other hand, they minimized, concealed or transformed these departures so as to maintain the construction of the state as a ‘humane’ actor and that of the GWoT as a ‘clean war’, one where international laws and norms are respected, where violence is restricted such that the risk to civilian life and to ‘friendly forces’ is minimized, and where practices such as torture and the use of weapons of mass destruction are prohibited.11 As is argued here, Guantánamo in particular became a central plank in the US Administration’s efforts to produce constructions of the GWoT as a ‘clean war’ and maintain an image of the United States as a champion of human rights. Despite the many controversies surrounding Guantánamo’s use as a detention and interrogation facility  – its misidentifications, disappearances, indefinite detention, extended solitary confinement, harsh interrogation/torture, denial of legal rights, forced feeding, deaths in custody and questions surrounding the overall militarization of criminal law and the extent of presidential power – it nevertheless evolved into, and remains, a key way to imagine the war and therefore to convince the public that the war was necessary and that its conduct was just and humane. Following the scandal associated with the arrival of the first detainees and their housing in wire-mesh cages, the frame of Guantánamo was shifted and the site was reconstructed as exemplifying liberal values as a ‘safe, humane, legal, [and] transparent’ way to detain and interrogate enemies.12 Compared to sustained international criticism of the site, public opinion within the United States continued to reflect an understanding of the site as a necessity and as consistent with international standards for the treatment of detainees: a poll taken in 2005 found that as many as seven out of ten respondents considered that detainees were being treated ‘better than they deserve’ or ‘about right’.13 To support these views, Guantánamo’s various official (and semi-official) representations produced by Bush administration officials and consistently repeated by members of Congress underlined the professional, modern and technologically sophisticated nature of the site while erasing (sometimes

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literally through disappearances) detainees as political subjects with ‘grievable lives’.14 Images of interrogations were concealed, detainee individual identities erased, detention practices reframed, conditions rewritten as ‘too good’, guards recast as victims and resistance practices reappropriated. But as the understanding and image of what constitutes ‘clean war’ is constantly shifting, the aim of the state in producing legitimacy for war is both to present an image of the state as engaged in a ‘clean war’ and to define what clean means. Guantánamo played a role in redefining what ‘clean war’ looks like. In short, the emergence of Guantánamo’s ‘clean’ language and imagery – which maps being ordered, tidy and hygienic onto the metaphorical sense of legal, precise and proportionate – helped to generate legitimacy for the war. It helped to render the violence of war (its dirtiness) invisible and thus to create an overall context in which the GWoT was legitimate. Guantánamo, alongside terminology such as ‘surgical strikes’, ‘smart weapons’ and other expressions characteristic of the ‘clean’ language of modern warfare, was used not only to produce an understanding of war, and by extension of the United States, as ‘humane’ and ‘clean’, but also to construct what humane meant and looked like. Guantánamo was therefore part of the performance of a national identity that is always in need of securing. To make this case, this chapter examines several of the ways in which Guantánamo served to physically embody the overall discourse of the United States as engaged in a ‘clean’ form of warfare. It did so through a construction of Guantánamo as precise, proportionate, legal and ordered through practices of concealment, redefinition and redirection, which are each addressed in turn. But it did so in the light of resistance to these practices, which are considered in the final section.

Practices of concealment The idea that clean has value and that things and people, let alone war, can be understood in this way was most famously studied by Mary Douglas in her seminal text, Purity and Danger.15 As Douglas argued, to be clean, or pure, is essentially to introduce a system of classification. ‘[D]irt is essentially disorder’, matter out of place, and introducing order becomes a means to measure purity, to enable certain groups and practices to be understood as unclean, dirty or messy (‘other’), and so distinguish between orders of civilization.16 Cleanliness is therefore intimately connected with the creation of a discourse of normality and legitimacy, one produced and communicated not only linguistically, but materially as well. To transgress norms by being ‘dirty’ is to threaten order and to be illegitimate. But as Katherine Ashenberg documents through her history of ‘clean’ as practice, ideas governing cleanliness shift over time.17 Power therefore lies in the

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capacity to shape these categories, to control which objects, spaces, bodies, even ideas are defined as clean or dirty. To shape these is to shape and define legitimacy itself. When applied to understandings of war, clean and dirty as linguistic and visual metaphors become powerful ways to produce and communicate legitimacy for certain violent actions.18 Clean wars  – and the chain of associated signifiers such as civilized, safe, pure, hygienic and sterile – are ethical, legal and just (in the ‘just war’ tradition), even virtuous, wars. They ‘minimize collateral damage’, depending on ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘smart’ or ‘clean bombs’.19 By contrast, dirty wars are associated with underhanded action, guilt, danger, illegality, impurity and uncivilized, transgressive, disproportionate and out-of-place practices. A war not fought by the rules, on ‘the dark side’ and ‘where the gloves come off’ is unjust and in violation of the ideal of a ‘just war’. 20 States which self-identify as liberal must therefore associate themselves with clean war. As they distinguish between friend and enemy, they also take care to draw lines between tolerable and acceptable violence (usually their own) and intolerable (others). 21 For a state such as the United States, a significant amount of effort is invested in communicating a war as ‘clean’ and the US military as clean, ordered and self-restrained, where violence is minimized and contained. 22 However, in the words of John Beck, all wars are ‘dirty wars’ that ‘produce material devastation and waste’. 23 To characterize a war as clean is to suggest that war can be anything other than violent and messy; that it can be carried out in an orderly, rule-respecting way where civilians and life-preserving infrastructure are spared. Yet as Patricia Owens and Maja Zehfuss both argue, to maintain this distinction between clean and dirty warfare, legitimate violence and illegitimate violence – distinctions which lack rigour, are impossible to maintain, and are easily manipulated – and to argue in support of some wars and practices as humane regardless of the permissible ‘collateral damage’ that takes place, is to continue to justify war and its inevitable unethical practices, including civilian deaths. 24 ‘Cleaning up’ Guantánamo, and the production of a sanitized version of military detention, was therefore part of this image-making of war, accomplished through practices involving concealing violence, redefining it, and redirecting attention away from it to other aspects of detention. Beginning with concealment, one of the early and key messages to emerge from Guantánamo was that the site was specially developed to hold the most dangerous terrorists associated with 9/11 and the GWoT. According to US officials, the US military carried out extensive screening processes in Afghanistan to ensure that the men detained were the ‘worst of the worst’. 25 Pentagon and White House spokespeople maintained that as a result of this screening process, Guantánamo held senior Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters directly responsible for 9/11, ‘the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth’, the ‘worst of a very bad lot’ who had been captured on the battlefield. 26 General Richard Myers, then Chairman

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of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed: ‘These are the kind of people who would chew through the hydraulic cable of a C-17 cargo plane to bring it down . . . So these are very, very dangerous people, and that’s how they’re being treated.’27 Or, as Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke explained, ‘You’re talking about people who are incredibly dangerous, incredibly dangerous, who are willing to blow themselves up or do anything possible to hurt and kill others. And so all the precautions are being taken, all the appropriate security precautions are being taken, considering what you’re dealing with.’28 As if to emphasize their dangerousness, detainees arriving at Guantánamo were clothed in orange prison jumpsuits, common to US prisons, and held individually in wire mesh cages where they could be watched at all times (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). To justify the need for such a facility, for such practices and ultimately for a war such as the GWoT, the Bush administration consistently maintained, and guards at Guantánamo believed, that all detainees were hardened fighters caught on the ‘battlefields’ of Afghanistan – even though, over time, it was revealed that detainees were most often kidnapped and ‘bought’ for a bounty from across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Gambia and Zambia. As well as labelling them the ‘worst of the worst’, US officials concealed the identities of detainees, principally, they argued, to safeguard detainee privacy and to act ‘in the spirit of’ the Geneva Conventions and not parade detainees for public curiosity. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld quipped when asked whether there were any high-profile terrorists within the initial

FIGURE 5.1  Arrival at Camp X-Ray (US Navy/Getty Images).

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FIGURE 5.2  No photography: Guard Tower at JTF Guantánamo (DoD, Photo by Capt. Lance Cagnolatti, 13 July 2007).

detainees transported to Guantánamo, he did not know: ‘I don’t even know their names.’29 Conveniently, the policy also made identifying the individual men and therefore challenging their detention in US courts impossible until lawyers were granted access in 2003. 30 The US military insisted on keeping detainee names, ages, countries of origin and any individualizing and personalizing details secret, even concealing the existence of an entire camp, Camp ‘No’.31 This included preventing visiting journalists from photographing their faces, but enabled  – again facilitated by a prison uniform that performed ‘an expert magic trick’ by making detainees vanish into a sea of orange anonymity and sameness – the United States to make the claim, akin to the language of ‘surgical strikes’, that it had captured the right men.32 Even the space of Guantánamo was rendered invisible. In an effort to deny legal protections to captured ‘terrorists’ (redefined as illegal

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enemy combatants) and in turn to safeguard interrogators from possible prosecution, the Bush administration selected the US Naval Base at Guantanamo as a geographical space ‘outside’ US and international law (an interpretation later rejected by the US Supreme Court).33 This initial interpretation of the legal status of detainees and of the space of Guantánamo translated into policies whereby it was acceptable to hold detainees anonymously and indefinitely without access to lawyers or family, and where they could be subjected to harsh treatment in order to extract ‘highly valuable intelligence’ without consequences for interrogators or those involved in the chain of command. The justification for this approach was the supposed extreme danger posed by terrorism. In that sense, Guantánamo, defined as exceptional, also helped to erase and render invisible the violence of the wider carceral system, the ‘shadow carceral state’, in operation in the United States. 34 Guantánamo can therefore be read as emerging not only out of US military and CIA history, but also out of the US prison and wider carceral system, and therefore something un-exceptional. To focus on it as exceptional is to erase the violence of historical and more everyday sights and spaces, ones often based on race. For example, many of the guards who worked at Guantánamo were part of a revolving door of prison guards who worked in both military and civilian prison environments. Along with them came a host of prison practices, from the orange prison jumpsuits to the shackling, the system of levels of detainees, and the extreme reaction force used to forcibly extract detainees from their cells, to solitary and indefinite detention. Historically, Guantánamo also owes much to the earlier exclusion and confinement of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two, the detention of refugees (even in the very same spaces), 35 and the continued high levels of incarceration of African–Americans and Latinos within US prisons, which operated on the basis of the same logic of redefinition of the threat based on race. The road to Guantánamo and its (in)visibilities can therefore also be understood as connected to these practices operating across the United States, which also include the rapid expansion of detention of illegal migrants, the return of debtors’ prisons, and the expansion of civil detention for sex offenders and juveniles. They are a product of an American carceral system built around a ‘culture of punishment’, in Michelle Brown’s words, where incarceration is an expanding and logical response to managing risk and where pain is justifiable according to everyday understandings of detention and its purpose. Guantánamo’s emergence can therefore be understood first and foremost as a ‘collision’ of the politics of exception as well as of the unexceptional culture of punishment and risk. 36 We cannot consider Guantánamo solely as an exception carved out of the law when these practices transpire across the United States on an everyday basis and we should therefore look to

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what happens inside the US state as an explanation for how Guantánamo came to be a scene of so much (often invisible) violence. 37

Practices of redefinition As lawyers finally gained access to clients, as detainees were released, and as former guards came forward to offer their testimonies of what transpired inside the wire, accounts of the practices at work at Guantánamo began to circulate more widely, facilitated in part by the scandal of Abu Ghraib and its links to Guantánamo. This led to renewed efforts to use a different strategy to cleanse the violence of the site: its practices of redefinition. These included, most importantly, the redefinition of torture, and correspondingly, what constitutes humane and legal treatment with respect to detention and interrogation. 38 Redefining these concepts, and therefore US obligations towards international laws and norms, was a cornerstone of generating support and legitimacy for the site among not only domestic, but also international, publics. Within months of opening, Guantánamo evolved from a holding facility to a ‘battlelab’ for interrogations. Under pressure from the White House and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for ‘actionable intelligence’ to help fight but also justify the war, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel and personnel from Guantánamo devised a programme of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and a legal framework to support their use. These enhanced interrogation techniques relied on ‘self-inflicted’ pain (prolonged stress positions and environmental manipulation) and ‘no-touch’ approaches based on stress, humiliation and fear. 39 They were the foundation for the form of abuses now synonymous with Abu Ghraib. To justify them as clean, however, these techniques, deeply embedded in a discourse of ‘scientificity’ and professional control, were constructed as unlikely to inflict any lasting physical damage  – ignoring the ‘mental torture’ and longer-term psychological impact – and therefore as consistent with the Geneva Conventions, as legal, and overall as more humane.40 Torture in turn was redefined as ‘delivering pain equivalent to organ failure . . . or death’, or ‘things like cutting off fingers’.41 So, while the US administration vowed that ‘we do not torture’ it engaged in a series of practices that nevertheless left some detainees with ‘behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma.’42 By switching from torture to enhanced interrogation techniques, torture was somehow cleansed, ‘both sanctioned and disavowed’, as enhanced interrogations became the acceptable way to talk about torture.43 Similarly, new terminology was developed and imported from the US prison system as part of the sanitization, routinization and trivialization of

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these violent practices. This included the use of terms such as: a ‘three-piece suit’ (shackles), the ‘frequent-flier programme’ (sleep deprivation), ‘credit card swipe’ (body cavity search), ‘package’ (the detainee) and ‘reservations’ (interrogation). Among lawmakers, waterboarding was a ‘dunk in the water’ and stress positions the equivalent to standing around (‘I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?’).44 Speaking like this in the form of abstractions and euphemisms was a way of ‘speaking clean’, referring to the ‘destructive power’ of detention but ‘without emotional fall-out’.45 But the irony of this clean language that avoided the word ‘torture’ was that detainees were made to feel as dirty as possible as part of their interrogations. In addition to the ‘self-inflicted’ pain (stress positions) used on detainees to induce cooperation, a series of techniques involving humiliation were used to take advantage of their supposed especial susceptibility, as ‘Arab’ men and as ‘terrorists’, to humiliation.46 These techniques revolved around the desire to make detainees feel ‘dirty’ whether through gendered and sexual violence, contact with bodily fluids, or through comparisons with animals. As an interrogator expressed to Eric Saar, who worked as an interpreter at Guantánamo in 2003: I just need to make him feel that he absolutely must cooperate with me and has no other options. I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can’t go back to his cell and spend the night praying.47 As bodies ‘get dirty’ and are made ‘dirty’, often in connection with bodily processes around which taboos circulate, and as ‘dirtiness’ is often articulated with impurity and guilt, interrogators capitalized on this in order to induce cooperation. For example, the touching of detainees by women, and particularly with the simulated menstrual blood of women during interrogations, was intended to induce a feeling of disgust and degradation.48 Detainees were watched as they showered or used the toilet, or were compelled to soil themselves during interrogations when denied access to the toilet.49 As former detainee Tareq Dergoul recounts, after being short-shackled in an interrogation cell for an extended period of time: ‘As soon as I wet myself, a woman MP would come in yelling “Look what you’ve done! You’re disgusting.”’50 These soiling practices, often used in conjunction with pain and fear, were a deliberate part of the process of making detainees ‘feel dirty’ and produce Guantánamo’s docile bodies. Though part of Guantánamo’s ‘clean’ language, they nevertheless amounted to torture as condemned by the United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights groups, and therefore in contravention of US obligations under the Geneva Conventions, under the UN Convention Against Torture, with respect to US federal and state laws, and even under the Military Code of Justice concerning care of prisoners.

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Practices of redirection Finally, to supplement practices of concealment and redefinition, the US administration and military engaged in practices of redirection (or misdirection) in order to control the image of Guantánamo and render it and its associated practices legitimate. In light of mounting criticism directed at the administration over its detention and interrogation policies, first in the wake of the controversy over the initial series of photographs published depicting Camp X-Ray and then particularly in the wake of the scandal of Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration set out to redress Guantánamo’s public image and reinforce a position of Guantánamo as humane not just through press statements and speeches, but also through its practices of promoting VIP and media tours of the site, and thereby limiting the kinds of photographs produced. 51 As Rumsfeld claimed: The situation in Guantanamo Bay has been looked at by literally hundreds of journalists, by hundreds of members of the United States House and Senate, by the International Committee for the Red Cross . . . Uniformly people who go there come away saying that it is being handled in a highly professional manner and that the treatment that’s being provided people in Guantanamo Bay is excellent. 52 The visual record of Guantánamo, its ‘domain of representability’, 53 was very closely managed ‘to produce and privilege specific readings and understandings of the sight/site that were consistent with its message of Guantánamo detention practices as ‘Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent’, which included shifting the frame in response to ‘opposition’. 54 Visitors were required to sign strict media ground rules, had to be escorted at all times by a military minder, could not deviate from the pre-programmed tour, could not, at any time, speak or interact with a detainee and were subject to a search of their belongings, including having computers and cameras screened for illicit imagery. Once detainees were relocated out of the wire cages of Camp X-Ray and into the more permanent Camp Delta, tours of the facilities, and the resultant photographs and videos, presented Guantánamo as ordered, modern and state-of-the-art; in short, a clean and humane space. Guantánamo visitors, as well as those gazing from ‘outside the wire’ through photographs, were consistently offered views of empty ‘tour’ cells with ordered uniforms and objects arranged on cell beds as well as views of sterile and ordered hospital facilities (Figure 5.3). Detainee bodies were generally absent from these spaces. It was the humane without the dirtying presence of humans. Over time, in response to criticism, these tours also came to include a view of the forced-feeding equipment arranged for display to demonstrate the extreme lengths the US military went to keep detainees alive, as well as a visit to

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FIGURE 5.3  Humane: An operating room at the detainee hospital at Camp Delta, JTF Guantánamo (DoD, Photo by Staff Sgt. Stephen Lewald, 3 December 2002).

the abandoned, overgrown, and therefore messy, Camp X-Ray to remind visitors how much Guantánamo had evolved. To distance Guantánamo from the stories of harsh interrogations and humiliating and painful treatment, Guantánamo tours included these spaces and objects as representative of the ‘humane’ way in which detainees were treated. After a tour of this kind in 2005, House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) described Guantánamo as: a world-class detention facility where detainees representing a threat to our national security are well-fed, given access to top-notch medical facilities and provided an opportunity to obtain legal representation, which, incidentally, uniformed soldiers under the Geneva Conventions are not given.55 Or, as Miss Universe, Dayana Mendoza, blogged in 2009: This week, Guantánamo!!! It was an incredible experience . . . It was a loooot of fun! . . . We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the(y) recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books . . . It was very interesting I didn’t want to leave [the base], it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful. 56

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Regardless of detainees’ claims that they felt dehumanized and degraded, like animals in cages, this message of Guantánamo as ‘clean’ registered with visitors, and by extension, with the voters who reproduced this imagery. Guantánamo came to be viewed as acceptable not only because it delivered security from terrorists, but because it was humane due to its modern, clean and state-of-the-art facility with health care, abundant food and religious freedoms, despite the ongoing practice of indefinite detention, solitary confinement and limited legal recourse. Indeed this construction was so successful that a narrative of Guantánamo as a ‘Club Gitmo’ emerged. Former Governor of Arkansas and Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee suggested that ‘most of our prisoners would love to be in a facility more like Guantanamo . . . The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas. In fact, we left saying, “I hope our guys don’t see this. They’ll all want to be transferred to Guantanamo.” . . . If anything, it’s too nice.’57 As then House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) expressed, ‘I don’t know that there’s a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo. . . . we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get.’58 Guantánamo was an image of a job well done.

Resisting ‘Clean War’ These practices of concealing, redefining and redirecting were not without their counter-practices, however. Both detainees inside the wire and lawyers and activists outside the wire engaged in resistance in order to contest the production of Guantánamo as ‘safe, legal, humane, transparent’ facilities, and to challenge the construction of detainees as terrorists and the ‘worst of the worst’, and therefore the war as a good and ‘clean’ one. Inside the wire, detainees resisted not only by intimidating guards, hunger striking and physical violence, but also through dirty protests. Although the public relations campaigns of the US military emphasized the clean, and therefore modern and humane, side of Guantánamo, in fact dirt was as important a part of resistance to the site as it was a part of interrogation strategies. In particular, body fluids, used to humiliate detainees as part of their interrogations, also became weapons in the ‘battle for Guantánamo’ and its complex negotiations of power (as they do in many civilian prisons, most notably the ‘dirty protests’ of Long Kesh-Maze in Northern Ireland). 59 Just as guards sought to make detainees feel impure, some detainees sought out opportunities to accomplish the same, to create a form of disorder. Guards were spat on, had toilet buckets emptied on them, encountered fecal matter

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on floors or objects, and in the most extreme cases, had mixtures of bodily fluids, water and other objects that facilitated throwing hurled at them. This was amplified by the fears guards had that detainees carried a variety of diseases such as tuberculosis and hepatitis. ‘Shit throwing’, though it contaminated their environment and in some cases led to a beating or the revocation of privileges, was a political act and a satisfying form of resistance for some detainees: ‘throwing shit says something’.60 Throwing body fluids or smearing a camera in a cell with faeces to interfere with surveillance, were theatrical or spectacular acts designed to make a point, to garner attention and ultimately to challenge the constructions of detainees as passive and docile and the United States as the civilized and benign jailkeeper. In debasing themselves, as some understand it, they turned ‘one of the few things over which they [had] control – their faeces’ into a weapon.61 They ‘weaponized’ their waste and in so doing kept all perpetually engaged in a round of dirtying and cleansing.62 In response to this form of resistance and dirtying of detention, the US military employed technologies to limit the spread of waste, such as plastic sheeting and safety goggles, but most importantly, they reappropriated the resistance as part of their discourse of clean detention and therefore of national identity construction. They renamed and sanitized these protests into incidents of ‘TOWs’ and ‘SOWs’ (Turd Offensive Weapons and Semen Offensive Weapons) as well as through the more commonly used term ‘cocktails’. More interestingly, Guantánamo public relations teams began reporting these dirty protests as part of a wider message that the real victims at Guantánamo were the guards who suffered through these attacks. Instead of pointing the finger at the circumstances that produce these behaviours and which make them a common (if invisible) feature throughout the prison system, detainees were recast as the irrational and dangerous terrorists who were so unclean as to engage in shit-throwing compared to the more civilized, controlled and self-restrained guards working at Guantánamo. As Admiral Harris, Commander of Guantánamo in 2006 (who also controversially described suicides at Guantánamo as ‘acts of asymmetric warfare’) explained: We provide outstanding medical care to every detainee, the same quality as what our service members receive . . . That said, many detainees persist in mixing a blood-urine-faeces-semen cocktail and throwing this deadly concoction into the faces of the American men and women who guard them, feed them and care for them. . . .63 In the construction presented by the US military, and according to the logic of clean and dirty politics first described by Douglas, the image of detainees using their own bodily waste in this played into racialized images of detainees as uncivilized and barbarous and the United States as pure, clean and self-restrained.

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While hunger striking and dirty protests went on inside the wire, outside the wire the clean construction of Guantánamo was continually challenged by the actions of lawyers, activists and former detainees. Drawing attention to the accounts of violence used against detainees, such as the enhanced interrogation techniques, or the violent ‘extraction’ of detainees from cells by Immediate Response Force teams, campaigners worked to counteract the ‘cleansing’ practices used by the US military and Bush administration. Often this meant recasting the detainees as victims, especially as traumatized victims psychologically impaired by their detention.64 For example, as much as the US military and Bush administration sought to conceal the identities of those detained and the details of some of the more violent practices associated with the site, detainees and activists worked to bring these practices to light. Under pressure from lawyers, human rights groups and press freedom activists and under the threat of a Freedom of Information Act request, the Pentagon finally released documents containing the names of the majority of detainees held at Guantánamo in March 2006, four years after the site opened. Furthermore, as detainees were released, including British citizens such as the Tipton Three (Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal) and Moazzam Begg, their stories became public and they themselves became very prominent critics of the detention facility, setting out to counter US accounts of their capture and detention. On top of this, many activists outside the wire engaged in public protests against Guantánamo, most notably by dressing in orange jumpsuits and performing Guantánamo. Despite the evolution of the site, and the efforts of the administration to distance itself from the Camp X-Ray representation and therefore ‘clean’ it, performances of the Guantánamo Icon enabled activists to continually remind viewers of its violence. Consequently, in the ten years since the initial images of the US military detention facilities at Guantánamo were released, an impressive range of street theatre and artistic interventions has emerged as part of collective worldwide protests against US detention and interrogation practices, including mass protests outside embassies of silent figures dressed in orange, dance performances, ceramic figurines, art installations, guerrilla art, films and theatre where the orange suit literally takes centre stage. To perform Guantánamo is to render visible ‘the experience of torture and incarceration and to expose its brutality’.65 These performances and interventions therefore helped to contest the official construction of Guantánamo, transforming its meaning and producing instead a common sense in which military detention, the military and the US state were ‘dirty’. The image of the orange-clad Guantánamo detainee became visual shorthand, a visual metaphor, for a tortured rather than a terrorist subject position, and through its iconic status became a central feature of a discourse that sought to delegitimize Guantánamo and the Bush administration. To opponents of Guantánamo, mostly abroad, as indicated by the multiple ways in which this figure has appeared,

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US military detention continues to mean Guantánamo and Guantánamo continues to mean Camp X-Ray and its dirty practices.

Conclusion In the short ride from the ferry terminal on the approach to the detention facilities, lawyers, journalists, politicians and senior military staff visiting Joint Task Force Guantanamo are greeted with views of the Caribbean sea and the sparse terrain. They are also driven by a cliff face carved out of the rock to make way for the road when United States Naval Base Guantanamo Bay was first established. In the 1990s this rock face was covered by the graffiti of soldiers, sailors and marines frustrated with their posting. Today, the first impression of the rock face as visitors pass by is that it appears to be clean, as if the graffiti had never been there.66 On closer examination, however, the rock has in fact been painted over in the same rock colour, camouflaging and concealing the graffiti beneath. Guantánamo, like many military spaces, is an exercise in navigating the complex politics of security and identity, part of which is accomplished through the practices that involve concealing, redefining and redirecting to produce clean war. Liberal democracies, such as the United States, work hard to convince the public about the ‘cleanliness’, and therefore the ‘goodness’, of their wars. They must deploy a set of practices and knowledges in order to construct an understanding of a war as ‘clean’. As part of this construction, the costs of war and its violences are either presented as military necessity or left out of representations, concealed, erased, reframed, rewritten, recast and reappropriated. Though opponents of Guantánamo have described it as a stain, or a blot, on the reputation of America, Guantánamo was part of this process and used to communicate key ideas and concepts associated with military detention, with producing the GWoT as a ‘clean war’, and therefore with the identity of the US state as a humane actor. Guantánamo was used to (re)define understandings, even realities, of not only what constituted the threat, namely terrorism and terrorists, but also what constitutes an adequate yet humane and liberal response. US military personnel and Bush administration personnel repeatedly emphasized that Guantánamo was humane. ‘Guantanamo is a professional, humane detention and interrogation operation . . . It is bound by law and guided by the American spirit. It has contributed and continues to contribute to winning the war on terrorism.’67 To make such claims, the Bush administration and US personnel in charge of Guantánamo had to use practices of concealment, redefinition and redirection in order to clean Guantánamo, to (re)define detention, and by extension the GWoT and the US state.

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In 2009, two days after assuming the Presidency and in accordance with a campaign pledge, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13492, requiring the closure of Guantánamo within a year. Four years later, the site remains open despite operating at 30 times the cost of equivalent civilian-run facilities.68 Why? Because in contrast to continued international condemnation of the site, first, a majority of Americans remain convinced that Guantánamo is consistent with international law and offers the best way to guarantee US security. Second, Congress’s passage of the NDAA 2012 not only formalizes the militarization of counter-terrorism but also presents a significant challenge to the closure of the site. Finally, third, along with public opinion and Congress, President Obama has chosen to formalize rather than dismantle Bush-era policies with regard to detention. After a two-year review of Guantánamo, Obama signed a new Executive Order, EO 13567, effectively calling for the resumption of Military Commissions and the indefinite detention of many remaining detainees. As this chapter argues, part of the process of producing this degree of support for Guantánamo domestically was through US military and Bush Administration efforts to ‘clean up’ the site, an effort continued under Obama. This effort was so successful, and bound up so tightly with the US national security-human rights nexus that it has become all but impossible to close the site in the near future. Guantánamo can therefore be read as connected to the practice of constructing the United States as a liberal and humane actor, and inseparable from the image-making of modern ‘clean’ war.

Further reading C. Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs, 12.4 (1987) is a classic study of how the language and practices of defense intellectuals engaged in ‘war gaming’ during the Cold War ‘sanitizes’ and rationalizes security policies. James Der Derian’s Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment-Network, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2009) was the first major text in International Relations to map the interconnections between the military, entertainment, spectacular events and technology that help produce ‘virtuous’ wars. D. P. Forsythe, The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners After 9/11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) is a comprehensive overview of controversial US Global War on Terror practices such as rendition, detention and torture and their relation to human rights and international humanitarian law. R. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-terrorism, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) provides a useful overview of the language circulated by the Bush administration at the start of the Global War on Terror to justify its policies.

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W. J. T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a study of the power and circulation of images of the Global War on Terror, how new technologies enable the rapid production and distribution of these images, helping to generate support for terror on all sides of the conflict.

Notes 1 A. Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 (Washington: Congressional Research Service, 2010); S. Daggett, Costs of Major U.S. Wars (Washington: Congressional Research Service, 2010); Eisenhower Study Group, Costs of War, Watson Institute (2011), available online at: http://costsofwar.org, accessed 17 July 2011; J. E. Stiglitz and L. J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 2 As of writing, this measure as outlined in Section 1021, is now blocked by a ruling in the fourth US District Court pending further review or amendment. 3 Eisenhower Study Group, Costs of War, fn. 1. M. Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books: 2004); S. M. Hersh, ‘Torture at Abu Ghraib’, New Yorker, 10 (2004), 42–7; D. P. Forsythe, The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners after 9/11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); J. Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Random House, 2009); E. Van Veeren, ‘Interrogating 24: Making Sense of U.S. Counter-terrorism in the Global War on Terrorism’, New Political Science, 31.3 (2009), 361–84. 4 R. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 8. 5 For work on ‘just war’ and the GWoT, see for example the work of Michael Ignatieff, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Falk, Michael Walzer, Oliver O’Donovan, Neta Crawford and Alex Bellamy among others. 6 R. L. Doty ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of US Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly, 37.3 (1993), 297–320; J. Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); M. Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); D. Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 7 Rather than understanding threats as fixed and externally determined – and therefore that security can be delivered by a sovereign nation-state in an anarchical world order – threats can be understood not only as contingent but as internally determined. States are not pre-given and stable entities but are ‘always in a process of becoming’ and ‘in constant need of reproduction’. Campbell, Writing Security, 11–12.

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8 Carter’s record at safeguarding human rights is less clear. See M. Stohl, David Carleton, S. E. Johnson, ‘Human Rights and US Foreign Assistance from Nixon to Carter’, Journal of Peace Research, 21.3 (1984), 215–26; D. Carleton and M. Stohl, ‘The Foreign Policy of Human Rights: Rhetoric and Reality from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan’, Human Rights Quarterly, 7.2 (1985), 205– 29. On human rights and US foreign policy, see also A. Schlesinger Jr., ‘Human Rights and the American Tradition’, Foreign Affairs, 57 (1978), 503–26; D. P. Forsythe, ‘Human Rights in US Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect’, Political Science Quarterly, 105.3 (1990), 435–54. 9 G. W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), available online at: www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc= GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA407178. 10 For examples of this argument, see Van Veeren, ‘Interrogating 24’. 11 P. Rogers ‘The Myth of a Clean War – and its Real Motive’, openDemocracy, 13 March 2003, available online at: www.opendemocracy.net/democracy/ article_1041.jsp, accessed 20 August 2012; M. Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq (London: Polity Press, 2005), 84–5; M. L. R. Smith and S. Roberts, ‘War in the Gray: Exploring the Concept of Dirty War’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 31.5 (2008), 377–98. For the justification for ‘clean war’ see S. Sanderød, ‘The Use of Air Power Today: Have New Ethical Challenges Occurred?’, in J. Hayward (ed.), Air Power, Insurgency and the “War on Terror” (Cranwell: Royal Air Force College, 2009), 225–38. 12 E. Van Veeren, ‘Captured by the Camera’s Eye: The Shifting Frame of Detention in the Global War on Terror’, Review of International Studies, 37.2 (2011), 1721–49. 13 ‘20%: Gitmo Prisoners Treated Unfairly’, Rasmussen Reports (22 June 2005), available at: http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Gitmo.htm, accessed 26 August 2012. 14 J. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 15 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966 [2002]). 16 Ibid., 2. On dirt and ‘othering’, see for example, T. Cresswell, ‘Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions: A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87.2 (1997), 330–45. 17 K. Ashenberg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing (Clays, Suffolk: Profile Books, 2008). 18 I am indebted to the work of Aaron Belkin for inspiring this lens through which to view war. 19 C. Cohn, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs, 12.4 (1987), 687–718; Shaw, The New Western Way of War. 20 Though Vice President Cheney famously made the statements that the United States had to operate on ‘the dark side’ while fighting this dirty war, he was alone within the administration to voice these extreme views publicly. Others within the administration, including Bush and Rumsfeld, while arguing for

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21 M. Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 14.3 (2012), 423–40. 22 Shaw, The New Western Way of War. 23 J. Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 24 Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. See also P. Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Technology “Humanitarian” War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32.3 (2003), 595–616; see also J. Derrida in G. Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicide: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 25 Marine Brigadier General M. Lehnert in C. Rosenberg, ‘A New Alcatraz Rises: Guantanamo Ready for Taliban’, The Miami Herald, 12 January 2002, available online at: www.miamiherald.com/2002/01/12/279932_p2/ prisoners-arrive-in-cuba.html#ixzz0nhrW8SHb, accessed 12 May 2010. 26 D. Rumsfeld in G. J. Gilmore, ‘Rumsfeld Visits, Thanks US Troops at Camp X-Ray in Cuba’, Department of Defense News, 27 January 2002, available online at: www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817, accessed 23 November 2009; R. B. Cheney, ‘Cheney on Guantanamo Detainees’, FoxNews.com, 27 January 2002, available online at: www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,44082,00.html, accessed 1 June 2010. 27 R. B. Myers, Department of Defense News Briefing, 11 January 2002, available online at: www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript. aspx?TranscriptID=2031, accessed 28 October 2010. 28 V. Clarke ‘DoD news briefing – ASD PA Clarke and Rear Adm. Stufflebeem’, Department of Defense News, 14 January 2002, available online at: www. defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2085, accessed 12 May 2010. 29 D. Rose, Guantánamo: America’s War on Human Rights (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004). 30 Another important group at Guantánamo whose identities were carefully guarded were those of the ‘Third Country Nationals’. Employed as sub-contractors to clean the base and staff its shops, these men and women from the Philippines, St. Helens and other post-colonial spaces were forbidden from interacting with visitors to prevent their families from becoming targets for reprisals. These TCNs operate in the shadows of the base, cleaning up the messes that the US military leaves behind. They are therefore also intimately connected with the politics of soiling and cleansing of Guantánamo. 31 Until 2009, an entire camp was kept secret. Camp 7, the ‘Platinum Camp’, or Camp ‘No’, housed up to 15 ‘high-value detainees’, including, it is rumoured, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused of planning 9/11. Off-limits to everyone, Camp 7 detainees remain officially unidentified.

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32 Quotation from J. Ash, Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 156. 33 The base itself controversially occupies 45 square miles of Cuba as a result of a lease agreement signed with the Cuban Government in 1903, confirmed by treaty in 1934, and never rescinded. As a result the United States exercises ‘complete jurisdiction and control’ over the territory controlled by USNB Guantanamo, which remains the largest and oldest American base outside of the United States. D. Gregory, ‘The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88.4 (2006), 405–27; P. Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 34 K. Beckett and N. Murakawa, ‘Mapping the Shadow Carceral State: Toward an Institutionally Capacious Approach to Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology, 16.2 (2012), 221–44. 35 Over the years, the base has served a number of functions, including not just as a refuelling point, but also as a detention space for Cuban and Haitian refugees, most notably in the 1990s when up to 45,000 refugees were held at Guantánamo in similar conditions to those experienced by the first GWoT detainees. During that time, refugees were re-classed as ‘migrants’, ‘criminals’ and ‘bad guys’ by the US government, with HIV-positive refugees held illegally in a special isolation camp, Camp Bulkeley. 36 E. Van Veeren, Security Collisions (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 37 Ibid.; M. Ahmad, ‘Resisting Guantanamo: Rights at the Brink of Dehumanization’, Northwestern University Law Review, 103.4 (2009), 1683–763; M. Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle (New York: New York University Press, 2009); A.-M. Cusac, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); P. Scraton and J. McCulloch (eds) The Violence of Incarceration (London: Routledge, 2009); S. Shalev, Supermax: Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2009). 38 Alongside the redefinition of torture used at Guantánamo, the US administration also sought to present a clean image of the site through redefining its practices as legal. Although the Bush administration worked hard to reinterpret the geographical extent of law by erasing it as a legal space, under mounting pressure from human rights advocates and lawyers, including impending Supreme Court challenges, the US military established three new ‘legal’ mechanisms for assessing the guilt of detainees which are discussed extensively in the literature on Guantánamo and international law. 39 A. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006); M. Otterman, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (London: Pluto Press, 2007). 40 Popular imaginations of torture as physical brutality also created ‘an arena of acceptability for apparently less severe forms of violence’ where the absence of physical signs on the body was an indication of the absence of torture. J. Lokanetta, ‘A Rose by Another Name: Legal Definitions, Sanitized Terms, and Imagery of

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41 J. S. Bybee, ‘Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 USC §§ 2340–2340A’, Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 1 August 2002; Alberto Gonzales, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on the Nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be Attorney General, January 2005, available online at: www.humanrightsfirst.com/us_law/etn/gonzales/state- ments/gonz_ testimony_010604.htm, accessed 20 June 2011. 42 G. W. Bush, ‘Bush: Guantanamo Detainees Receiving Humane Treatment’, DefenseLink News, 20 June 2005, available online at: www.defenselink. mil, accessed 23 February 2008; Harrington in J. Jaffer and A. Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 8. 43 M. Sturken ‘Comfort, Irony, and Trivialization: The Mediation of Torture’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14.4 (2011), 423–40: 424. 44 Cheney in D. Eggen, ‘Cheney’s Remarks Fuel Torture Debate’, The Washington Post, 27 October 2006, available online at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601521.html, accessed 1 July 2012; Rumsfeld in Jaffer and Singh, 2007: A-83. 45 Cohn, ‘Sex and Death’, 691. 46 G. Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on the Terror (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2008); M. Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004); A. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006); M. Otterman, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (London: Pluto Press, 2007); UNHCR, Situation of Detainees at Guantánamo Bay, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 27 February 2006, E/CN.4/2006/120, available online at: www.unhcr. org/refworld/docid/45377b0b0.html, accessed 31 July 2011. 47 In E. Saar with V. Novak, Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 222. 48 M. Kurnaz, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 163; J. Yee with A. Molloy, For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 42. 49 Even body odor became a weapon. Detainees who did not cooperate with interrogators would have their access to showers limited, encouraging a feeling of uncleanliness, leading to nicknames such as ‘Bobs’ or ‘Bad-odour boys’. Operations involving detainees became ‘Operation Wash Bob (escorting to

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showers) and ‘Operation Sun Bob’ (to ‘recreation’). Saar with Novak, 2005: 51, 222–8; Yee with Molloy, For God and Country, 60, 111. 50 In HRW, ‘The Road to Abu Ghraib’, 8 June 2004, Human Rights Watch (2004), available online at: www.hrw.org/reports/2004/06/08/road-abu-ghraib, accessed 1 June 2011. 51 Van Veeren, ‘Captured by the Camera’s Eye’. 52 Rumsfeld in N. Haxton ‘Rumsfeld Defends Guantanamo Treatment’, AM, ABC News (Australia), 19 November 2005, available online at: www.abc.net.au/am/ content/2005/s1510400.htm, accessed 12 January 2010. 53 J. Butler, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25.6 (2007), 953. 54 Van Veeren, ‘Captured by the Camera’s Eye’, 1723. 55 In M. D. Kellerhals, ‘General Says Guantanamo Vital for Gathering Terror Intelligence’, America.gov, 29 June 2005, available online at: www.america. gov/st/washfile-english/2005/June/20050629162442dmslahrellek0.1163904. html, accessed 23 February 2008. 56 Mendoza in R. Mackey, ‘Miss Universe Visits Guantánamo Bay’, The Lede: The New York Times, 30 March 2009, available online at: http://thelede.blogs. nytimes.com/2009/03/30/miss-universe-visits-Guantanamo/, accessed 20 August 2012. 57 In S. Chaggaris, ‘Huckabee: Gitmo Is “too nice”’, CBS.com, 21 December 2007, available online at: www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/12/21/politics/ fromtheroad/entry3639318.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody, accessed 9 January 2010. 58 In S. Powers, ‘Boehner’s Alternate Reality: Gitmo Detainees Get “More Comforts Than A Lot of Americans Get”’, 22 January 2009, available online at: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/22/gitmo-boehner-detainees/, accessed 9 January 2010. 59 See L. A. Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); K. McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Management, and Release (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 60 Rhodes, Total Confinement, 45; A. Feldman, Formations of Violence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 115. 61 Craig Haney in Carol Rosenberg, ‘Waste Wars: Captives “Weaponize” Bodily Fluids’, The Miami Herald, 16 June 2011, available online at: www. miamiherald.com/2011/06/14/2269589/waste-wars-captives-weaponize.html, accessed 13 July 2011. 62 Rosenberg, ‘Waste Wars’. 63 In S. Goldenberg and H. Muir, ‘Killing themselves was unnecessary. But it certainly is a good PR move’, The Guardian, 12 June 2006, available online at: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jun/12/Guantanamo.topstories3, accessed 31 August 2010.

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64 A. Howell, ‘Victims or Madmen? The Diagnostic Competition over “Terrorist” Detainees at Guantánamo Bay’, International Political Sociology, 1.1 (2007), 29–47. 65 Sturken, ‘Comfort, Irony, and Trivialization’, 435. 66 Smith, Bad Men. 67 General James T. Hill, Commander US Southern Command, in Rose, Guantánamo. 68 Half the remaining 166 Guantánamo prisoners (as at March 2013) are currently cleared for release.

CHAPTER SIX

Invisible Violences, Interrogation and Representation in Post-War Germany Simona Tobia

British wartime interrogation structures are traditionally thought to be quite humane, as well as ‘legal, well-tried and highly successful’, as mentioned, for example, in a Report of the Committee of Privy Counsellors appointed to consider interrogation methods for suspected terrorists in Northern Ireland in 1972.1 But was the British system of ‘human intelligence’ collection in and after the Second World War really pristine and faultless? Recent episodes of violence in British military prisons and interrogation centres in the war in Iraq2 exhort us to reflect on the limits between military imprisonment in a harsh conflict and ill-treatment and brutality. What is acceptable in war? And most importantly, does it change at different times? This chapter concerns postwar interrogation as it took place at the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), especially focusing on the Bad Nenndorf facility in the British zone of occupation of Germany. It challenges the myth that the British system of interrogation is traditionally humane, by showing that even when visible forms of violence involving torture and ill-treatment are banned, the process leading to the collection of ‘human intelligence’ may be based on other, less visible, forms of violence, being conceived to exploit human emotions and quite inhumane in themselves. The chapter also addresses the issue of what is

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considered acceptable in the pursuit of valuable information and what is not. This borderline, though generally defined by visible violence, changes with time and with the historical context. Sixty-five years after the events considered here, we are less inclined to make excuses for the harsh treatment of detainees in CSDIC because we are more remote from the extreme context of the Second World War which at the time could be seen as justifying such treatment. The extremely harsh establishment of which this chapter provides an account was part of the complex system of post-war imprisonment of former enemy personnel and, later on, of suspected spies. Prisoners of war were retained in Allied countries for years after the end of the conflict, and their treatment continued to be quite harsh even after 1945. In many cases the prisoner-of-war status of these detainees was maintained and Britain was one of those countries which used them as forced labourers, consistently with the Yalta agreement. This issue was raised in Parliament by those who thought that according to the Geneva Conventions prisoners of war should be released.3 However, the process of denazification provided for in the Potsdam agreement was considered more urgent at the time and prisons like CSDIC also served to help the investigation and collection of evidence for the trial of war criminals. This was, nevertheless, a post-war rather than a wartime regime. None of the techniques described here could be justified by urgency, for example to save lives or to ensure the success of military operations which would shorten the war itself. The argument that extreme measures were justified by an extreme situation is therefore of limited relevance in any reflection on the acceptable aspects of a structure such as CSDIC. Visible violence such as torture is generally seen as an exception when it happens in liberal democracies, as for example in Bad Nenndorf shortly after the Second World War, or more recently at the US interrogation facility in Guantánamo Bay.4 Military prisons such as Bad Nenndorf, however, are characterized by a number of forms of invisible violence such as mental pressure and the gloomy structure of the place itself, which are conceived with the specific purpose of making the prisoners more malleable. We will also see that the acceptable level of violence depends not only on the historical circumstances, but also on the perceived brutality of the enemy in general and thus, by extension, of the prisoners. Van Veeren noted the same thing when analysing the facts of Guantanamo: violence is described as a form of security, and the ‘worst of the worst’ may be seen as deserving proportionate ill-treatment if detained.5 The story of the CSDIC camp in Bad Nenndorf is certainly one of those moments of misery6 which have remained at best under-publicized for almost 60 years. Its marginalization from conventional representations of the war was greatly facilitated by the closure of the relevant archives until 2005, by authorities with no interest in openness over this episode. Both historians and institutions obviously play a large part in the creation of

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collective narratives about the past, and ‘are complicit in constructing a collective memory of war that elides “our” violence’,7 in its visible forms, and even more so in its invisible forms. CSDIC, and the overarching issue of British interrogation in the aftermath of the Second World War, have thus far attracted little academic attention, with the exception of a few works on specific aspects such as Camp 0208 or on the American experience in the Pacific.9 In the most recently published works on intelligence, such as the histories of MI5 and MI6,10 interrogation enters the narrative, but is not specifically addressed. Whereas existing historiography has concentrated mainly on intelligence and war crimes, this research starts from the general issue of ‘interrogation’, and focuses on the specific case-study of CSDIC, and its German branch in particular, to offer an analysis of the different narratives. The chapter is based on three different types of sources: recently declassified archival material, newspapers from 1948 and 2005–6 which provide evidence for the contrast in the representation of the same events at different times, and an oral history interview with a camp warder, C. S., undertaken in 2009.

CSDIC Bad Nenndorf: ‘A brutally tough place’ The British detailed interrogation centre was established at Bad Nenndorf, a  town not far from Hanover which had been a spa resort for about 150  years, in June 1945. The bathrooms were easily converted into the prison, saving many months of construction work.11 The centre was modelled on MI5’s Camp 020; in fact Camp 020’s commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Stephens, was transferred to Bad Nenndorf, together with some of his staff, to run the new facility. However, the camp, formally known as N. 74 CSDIC Western European Area (WEA) fell under the authority of the War Office, not of MI5, and was staffed by armed forces personnel from various departments, including the Intelligence Corps and MI5 (Figure 6.1). The total number of personnel to be deployed in the new interrogation facility in Germany was 702, including 128 Intelligence Staff (81 of them officers). While numbers varied between April 1945 and 1947, it was initially decided that interrogation personnel would include 59 interrogators.12 During the period of its operation at Bad Nenndorf, 372 male detainees and 44 women were held at the centre; the highest number of prisoners detained at any one time was 152 males and 25 females.13 Although the other western Allies cooperated with and used the CSDIC (WEA), for example by sending prisoners from other internment camps throughout western Germany there, Bad Nenndorf was a purely British structure, conceived by the War Office together with MI5 and MI19. Initially its aim was to gather information on the German intelligence services, with the purpose of preventing any post-war Nazi revival.

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FIGURE 6.1  Map of CSDIC Camp, Bad Nenndorf (The National Archives, ref. FO1030/273).

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However, it appears that as the Nazi threat in Germany declined and as the Cold War approached, this CSDIC facility started to redirect its efforts towards Soviet spies in the British zone of occupation.14 Prisoners were held there for relatively short periods, usually not longer than 12 months, and after they had been fully interrogated, they were sent back to their original prisons. This description of Bad Nenndorf understates its terrors: these arose less from the place in itself, grim though it was, but from how it was run. Invisible forms of violence were there not only in the behaviour of its personnel, but even in its very policies and procedures, and were there to exploit human emotions linked to fear, and to make prisoners more pliable and more willing to give information during interrogation. During the discussions on the establishment of an interrogation camp in the Western European Area early in 1945, Stephens was very keen to become the commanding officer of the new centre, and believed in his own superior qualifications for the job.15 He had dedicated his life to interrogation and certainly considered himself to be one of those ‘breaker’ interrogators who are born and not made, able to establish guilt and obtain a confession.16 Well known with MI5 as temperamental and authoritarian, Stephens (whose nickname was ‘Tin Eye’) had intimidating manners, and with his glinting monocle and cigarette holder, he looked exactly like the caricature Gestapo interrogator who has ‘ways of making you talk’.17 But his most defining feature was his almost obsessive abhorrence of the enemy, and he wanted to instil the same sentiment into his staff, convinced as he was that this was also the most important characteristic for any interrogator: ‘There must be an implacable hatred of the enemy [. . .] the interrogator must treat each spy as a very individual case for that matter, a very personal enemy.’18 Stephens joined the Security Service in 1939, at the age of 39, with the rank of Captain. Once in MI5 he was instrumental in the establishment of a dedicated permanent interrogation camp: Camp 020 became operative in July 1940, under his command. The prison was divided into six blocks, all controlled by fully armed warders, and the Prison Standing Orders established that prisoners should ‘invariably be checked individually against the Daily State’,19 with at least four surprise checks and searches at night. When prisoners arrived, they were received by ‘Prison control’ and a ‘Personalia form’ was filled with all the detainees’ details, including physical features. After that, they were completely stripped and searched; all their belongings were taken from them and analysed to find any documents or other material of use for intelligence purposes. The prisoners were then medically examined to establish if they were fit for internment in the camp and for interrogation. Despite the presence of female prisoners, the Prison Standing Orders do not establish a specific procedure for women upon arrival, but only that a female clerk should be present both at that stage and during interrogation. Any type of conversation between detainees and the prison personnel was strictly forbidden, as the main duty of warders was to prevent escapes, as

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well as the entry of unauthorized personnel. This was a secret place: getting in without authorization was almost as difficult as getting out: ‘Nobody, irrespectively of rank or appointment, is allowed to enter the Prison, except the Commandant, Assistant Commandant, SIO, Duty Officer, MO, medical orderlies on duty and the prison staff on duty.’20 Intelligence officers needed special written authority to interrogate detainees and could enter only after having arranged for an interrogation room; interrogation could take place in these rooms only, and never in the cells, and they had to remain locked for the duration of the interview. The ‘Prison control’ section held complete power over detainees’ movements: it decided if they could leave their blocks for intelligence or medical reasons, and it gave consequent orders to the warders. Prisoners were exercised for one hour every two days, with the obvious exception of those in confinement, and communication among them was almost always forbidden when outside the cells. It was the interrogation officers’ duty to decide if detainees could exercise, how often and if they could do it alone or with somebody else. There was a strict division between the men’s and women’s prisons, involving detainees as well as warders and wardresses: the men’s prison was ‘out of bounds for wardresses’ and vice versa and a woman Deputy Chief Warder was in charge of the women’s prison, and the only male personnel who could enter it were the Chief Warder and the Deputy Chief Warder. Interrogation procedure for women was slightly different: it was the wardress on duty who had to ensure that no woman detainee was interrogated or medically inspected without the presence of another woman. Officers could, for example, bring a secretary with them when they had to interrogate female detainees. 21 One might infer at least that there were no female interrogation officers in the facility, despite the fact that interrogation was the sole purpose of the camp and that the camp had a female branch.22 Standing orders established that interrogation could take place between 9.15 and 12 noon and between 14.00 and 17.30, with permission available to extend hours in special cases. The most interesting point of the camp’s standing orders however, concerns the mode of interrogation: ‘All interrogations will be carried out in a humane fashion. It is a fundamental rule in British interrogation that no physical violence is ever employed.’23 This statement is contradicted by events recorded in official papers, by memories and testimonies of those who were there, and by the organization of the facility itself. All of these sources point to the fact that Bad Nenndorf was not humane at all. What is remarkable, however, is that even when it became the centre of a scandal from March 1947, with allegations of highly visible forms of violence including ill-treatment and even torture, the British press (and presumably its readers) seemed quite at ease with the use of such methods as long as they were employed against former Nazis. Nazi prisoners, captured in the course of a fierce war fought against exceptionally

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brutal enemies, were considered to deserve a treatment proportionate to their brutality – not to the humanity which the western Allies claimed to represent.

The Bad Nenndorf investigation, 1947 In 1946 a number of prisoners from the Bad Nenndorf camp ended up in nearby hospitals malnourished, dirty and with severe injuries, and in January 1947 two of them even died shortly after arriving at a hospital near Bremen. Some of the doctors there promptly reported these cases, initiating a scandal which continued into the twenty-first century. The Commander-in-Chief of the British zone of occupation, Air Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, decided to appoint a court of inquiry to investigate allegations of ill-treatment at Bad Nenndorf, which took evidence both at the camp and at the hospital and found that although physical torture was banned, the camp lacked adequate measures of supervision and guidance. It also emerged quite clearly that mental pressure was used extensively on prisoners, with methods which were quite extreme even for a harsh military prison holding suspected Nazi war criminals. When the possibility of legal proceedings emerged, the Commander-in-Chief suspended the camp Commandant, the medical officer and some of the interrogators, and ordered a full enquiry which was carried out by Tom Hayward, a former Scotland Yard inspector appointed by the Control Commission Germany. By June 1947 Hayward had amassed a huge amount of evidence in support of the allegations. His report would lead to the camp’s closure the following month, and to the court-martials of the camp Commandant, the medical officer and two interrogators in 1948, the news of which would also reach the press. Hayward’s report showed clearly that ‘mental pressure’ at Bad Nenndorf meant a form of violence which may have been invisible because it was not physical, but which pervaded the whole camp and was implemented with all means available. Hayward accepted that centres like CSDIC were necessary for British security, and that ‘interrogation methods must of necessity be more drastic than those permitted to police officers’, but he explicitly stated that the whole system involved forms of ill-treatment calculated to ‘make the prisoners more pliable when undergoing interrogations’. 24 Even in the context of the time, in which the need for a harsh regime in military prisons was widely accepted, what happened at CSDIC clearly blurred the lines between what was and was not acceptable. Crucial to Hayward’s report was the issue of personnel, and in particular numbers, experience and training. A centre like CSDIC aimed to extract viable intelligence from its prisoners even with inadequate resources. As funding reductions and postwar demobilization took their toll, the camp’s strength fell from the initial 702 staff to 330 in 1946, leaving Stephens

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struggling to run the camp. 25 Many interrogators there were inexperienced and failed to obtain intelligence because of their lack of skills, but ‘they still blamed the prisoners for their lies and punishment was awarded’. 26 Hayward found in his investigation that interrogators and the camp’s guards were not likely to be totally impartial towards prisoners, because of criteria involved in their selection. At the end of the conflict, British interrogation facilities including CSDIC had a huge need for personnel with two main qualifications: proven loyalty (e.g. having fought with the British forces) and speaking the enemy’s language (German in this case); a deep hatred of the enemy was also deemed very useful. These three characteristics were considered likely to ensure the best results from the point of view of military effectiveness. However, most officers from the Intelligence Corps who had joined the forces early in the war, and who had received thorough training and gained extensive experience in the field in both intelligence and interrogation, were gradually being demobilized and the prison in Bad Nenndorf had to employ a number of less experienced interrogators. The most likely new recruits, because of their fluency in the language, of their knowledge of the enemy culture and also for their hatred for the enemy, were German or Austrian Jewish refugees who had made a different journey to join the British forces and then become naturalized British citizens. As Hayward suggested, such interrogators might have particularly strong reasons not to be wholly impartial towards their prisoners. Lt Richard Oliver Langham, an interrogating officer at Bad Nenndorf court-martialled in 1948, was one such recruit. Born in Munich in 1921, Langham had joined the British Army in 1940, and was involved in several serious cases of ill-treatment of prisoners and ‘disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind’ while on duty at CSDIC in Bad Nenndorf. The Control Commission Investigation showed clearly that whenever Langham was on duty as ‘Prison Control’ officer, there was a corresponding increase in punishments and in use of the ‘cold cell’. Langham was only 25 years old when he had to face former SS men in Bad Nenndorf in 1946. Interviewed by the court of inquiry, he used something close to a word-for-word recital of Prison Standing Orders to describe the way he performed his job there as an interrogator: ‘I am not permitted to use any physical violence whatsoever. I cannot interfere with the men’s rations in any way because that is quite outside my job. I am not permitted to award any punishments to a prisoner. Anything in that line must be done through the Officer in Charge of the Section.’27 Hayward’s investigations, however, found conditions at Bad Nenndorf to be quite different from those described in the Prison Standing Orders and by Langham. First, prisoners were usually detained in cells for two or more people, with no heating and no mattresses, which ‘must have made cell conditions unbearable if not dangerous during the winter months’, and they were denied proper rest because of the very uncomfortable types of beds. 28 Some of the prisoners were found wearing filthy clothes which they had found

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difficult or impossible to dry in their cells after washing. As to exercise, the one hour in every two days stated in the standing orders was absolutely insufficient. Secondly, there was evidence that several forms of pressure actually amounted to mistreatment. Prisoners’ complaints in this area were ‘overwhelmingly corroborated’ by prison officers like orderlies and warders. 29 Prisoners had inadequate clothing. They were constantly intimidated by the guards, and generally denied sufficient medical attention during illness. Moreover, these forms of treatment were systematically employed to make prisoners more pliable when undergoing interrogations. Although Hayward was not able to find evidence that prisoners were actually struck during interviews, detainees alleged that during interrogations they were threatened with death, torture, life imprisonment and even assaults. Threats to execute, arrest, or torture the prisoners’ relatives, such as wives or husbands and children, were also part of the ‘mental pressure’ and they were allowed because they were never carried out. Thirdly, the use of punishment, which was not regulated by Standing Orders apart from solitary confinement, was the worst reality at the CSDIC camp. It took the form of periods of solitary confinement longer than those mentioned in Standing Orders, and of ‘punishment cells’. In practice, prisoners, including women, were confined for periods longer than 40 days: ‘It needs little imagination of feeling to understand the suffering inflicted upon the prisoners by long periods of solitary confinement. From enquiries made it appears that prisoners are put into solitary confinement on arrival as an automatic process, and left there for days – and often for weeks.’30 Hayward found that the ‘punishment cell’, also called ‘detention cell’ or ‘cold cell’, was used as a form of ‘mental pressure’ for prisoners considered to be withholding the truth. Here, prisoners were kept not only in solitary confinement but in freezing conditions with insufficient clothing. ‘The attitude of some of the officials is illustrated by Mr. Spiller who, when asked by the Court whether he considered it worthwhile practically to ruin a man’s health in order to obtain information from him, confidently replied “yes”.’31 The level of ‘invisible violence’ revealed by the investigation was astonishing, and Hayward himself found it quite difficult to draw a line to separate the different forms of violence and, most importantly, to establish what was acceptable for a harsh military prison. Langham, when asked what it meant to apply ‘mental pressure’ to a prisoner, candidly mentioned different types of threats involving the prisoner’s life and that of his/ her family. Although never carried out, these threats were arguably no less terrifying, especially because of the cumulative effects of being held captive in a very frightening place, without sufficient food and clothing, without basic hygiene or adequate medical attention, and with continuous intimidations by warders and guards.

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As Stephens pointed out during his court-martial, he had persistently stood against the use of ‘physical pressure’ during interrogations more than anyone else in the British intelligence community. But at the same time, he warned the court to make no mistake: ‘Bad Nenndorf was a brutally tough place, for brutally tough people. Its prisoners included Nazis who had been involved with implementing the Holocaust.’32 Once again, the defence was that the prison had to be very harsh because it held the worst kind of prisoners. The CSDIC commander had always explicitly prohibited physical violence, not only in Bad Nenndorf but in Camp 020 as well, but he was convinced that every kind of ‘mental pressure’ apart from physical violence, could be used to ‘break’ prisoners during interrogations. On his arrival at Bad Nenndorf, Stephens gave his interrogators his story of Camp 020, to instruct them on his rules and on his opinions regarding the use of violence. It must be stressed, however, that his opposition to violence and Gestapo-like measures arose, not from humanitarian concerns, but from a belief that violence was counterproductive. He was convinced that physical violence produced poor intelligence and that the purpose of interrogation was not to obtain quick answers to a few questions, but to induce prisoners to give all the information they possessed. This line was also adopted by the defence at his court-martial and it was successful as ‘Tin Eye’ was acquitted and was able to continue his career in the Secret Services. 33

‘Not guilty of cruelty to SS men’ Between 2 March and 21 July 1948, news of the court-martial of some of the Bad Nenndorf officers including Stephens and the Medical Officer, Captain John Stuart Smith, reached the pages of The Times. It was the first time that detailed accounts of conditions at Bad Nenndorf had reached the media, after considerable efforts by the military and security authorities to maintain secrecy. Even when the situation at Bad Nenndorf had been raised in the Commons, in March 1947, nothing had appeared in the press, and the camp remained unknown to the public. The Labour MP Richard Stokes had visited Bad Nenndorf a few days before delivering a speech in which he renewed his appeal to send back prisoners of war and implement what in his view was the true spirit of the Geneva Convention. But even though the events that led to an investigation and eventually to the court martial of some of the camp’s officers had happened immediately before his visit, in January and February 1947, Stokes apparently did not find that Bad Nenndorf was a secret torture centre: ‘I turned up there the other day and I thought there was something funny going on. It had been rumoured that it was third degree, but I am satisfied that there was no third degree of the body, though indeed there was of the mind. I do not complain of that. I understand that in cross-examining some of these fellows it may be

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necessary to indulge in forms of verbal persecution which we do not like, but there is no physical torture, starvation or ill-treatment of that kind.’34 Stokes did mention the freezing conditions of solitary confinement cells, but from his speech one could not infer the facts uncovered by the investigation that started shortly after, nor that he was denouncing conditions at Bad Nenndorf.35 In December 1947, when Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced that proceedings were to be taken following the investigation on the camp’s administration, the Daily Express published a short piece on the story.36 By this time Bad Nenndorf had been closed (in July 1947) and Stokes’s views had changed from the ‘I do not complain’ of March. Now he was prepared, in his first speech on the subject in the Commons since March, to ask Bevin how many people had died from ill-treatment at Bad Nenndorf before its closure, and how many had to be sent to hospital as a result of the third degree methods used there. It was the Foreign Secretary’s reply that announced the court case: ‘Following an enquiry into the administration of this camp, judicial proceedings are now pending. In these circumstances my hon. Friend will not expect me to comment further.’37 The Daily Express published a series of eight very short articles on Bad Nenndorf and the courts martial that followed the investigation between 18 December 1947 and 17 June 1948, when it gave the news that Captain Smith, the medical officer, had been dismissed from the service. Each of these pieces amounted to a very brief announcement without comment; nothing appeared in the Express about Stephens’s court martial. The Times gave more space to the issue, publishing a total of 19 articles about the trials, if we include minor ‘News in brief’ updates. The trial of Langham, accused of ‘disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind’, 38 was the first to open on 2 March 1948, and The Times gave quite a full coverage of the proceedings which lasted 21 days in total, before Langham’s acquittal. The Times told of a series of allegations of torture and ill-treatment made by two former inmates, Mahnke and Roeder, who claimed they had been badly beaten, stripped naked and forced to run up and down a corridor while being punched or kicked, and that lighted cigarettes were placed against their naked bodies. They also said that they were told their families had been arrested and that if they did not confess to being Nazi terrorists, pressure would be applied to their families. However, The Times only once mentioned this form of psychological pressure, which would not probably have made the news (nor a case for a court-martial) alone, without the other accusations involving physical violence. When Langham was acquitted at the end of March because the prosecution failed to present enough evidence, The Times did not report this detail, insisting instead that Langham had been found ‘not guilty of cruelty to SS men’. As to ‘the two former SS men’, the question as to ‘whether the court was willing to accept the story of these two charmers, trained liars, deceivers, these two Nazis’ had always been underlying throughout the coverage of the trial. 39 This was so even when it was reported that Samuel John Mathers, another officer who had

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made a deal in exchange for his testimony at the trial, had admitted that some violence had been used: ‘It is quite untrue that it was a horrifying attack which we had made on the two men. They were just pushed around for a few minutes.’40 As they were so used to fabricating stories, The Times said, the two former SS men’s testimony ‘clearly showed that [they] had touched it up to make it more attractive’.41 The thorough coverage of Langham’s trial in The Times betrays the hope on the part of its journalists that all the allegations of mistreatment were simply an outrageous exaggeration of the normal rigours of military prisons. The absence from The Times of any more in-depth analysis on the whole story of the Bad Nenndorf episode is surprising, especially in articles about the two most important court-martials: those of Smith and Stephens. Both trials, like Langham’s, opened in Hanover and were later transferred to London, but these two were covered less thoroughly in the British press because most sessions were conducted in camera. Officially, this was due to a fear that an open hearing could prejudice a fair trial. The more likely explanation, however, is a fear of too much information on British methods of interrogation being made public. The Times pointed out that Captain Smith, who was found guilty of five neglect charges (out of 16, including two charges of manslaughter), ‘was in the position of a medical officer responsible for the welfare of this “beastly place”, full of people who, unknown to him, were brutally treated. Someone was responsible for this bestial hole, and [the defence counsel] wondered whether that person would ever appear before a court’.42 For the first time there is an admission that the CSDIC prison in Germany really was a ghastly place where horrible things happened, but who was responsible for it? Certainly not the Commandant, who, as The Times clearly explains, was in charge of a place full of Nazis, and on 21 July was found not guilty on all charges and acquitted. In this representation, violence is characterized as one of those inevitable ‘costs of war’, a military necessity in a war against a vicious enemy – albeit one already defeated. The absence of certain information from articles published by The Times in 1948 is understandable, as some of the court sessions went on secretly, but what is quite remarkable is that all articles about Bad Nenndorf drew only on prisoners’ allegations made in court. All accusations are referred to as mere allegations made by former inmates, who were presented as Nazis. No reference is made to the Hayward investigation, although this preceded the trials and was the basis for judicial proceedings being started in the first place. Whatever was happening in the CSDIC prison must have been widely known among officers and warders, but not everybody understood its significance  – at least not at the time. Their attitude was in fact very similar to that of the The Times: the Bad Nenndorf camp was a gloomy place, but then Nazis and suspected war criminals could not expect five-star treatment when held captive. At the time, many did not seem to think that the lines between what is acceptable and what is not had

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been allowed to blur, and that what happened in that camp was just a part of conflict dissolution, as did The Times. Most of the warders were very young soldiers, barely out of their teens. Most had experienced harsh combat with the British Army of the Rhine and arriving in Germany. Some had to face even more war horrors in Bergen-Belsen. C. S. for example, had been an infantryman, and he had had all these experiences, including Belsen, which had shocked him deeply: ‘I shall never forget what I saw at Belsen. Worst thing ever, ever.’43 The selection of this type of personnel to staff the CSDIC prison was made for a reason: as personnel were chosen for their hatred of the enemy, those who had had such experiences in the field were preferred as warders. Hayward pointed out that individuals of this sort were ‘likely to resort to violence on helpless men’.44 This can be seen as another form of invisible violence, as the prison staff were told that ‘all the prisoners sent through this camp were thoroughly bad, and that no sympathy was to be shown to them’.45 These warders’ background and experience clearly had an impact on their attitudes towards the prisoners, especially because they were told that they were going to work in a camp full of Nazis and suspected war criminals of the worst kind, such as those who had conceived places like Belsen. C. S. was posted to Bad Nenndorf as a warder in 1945. When called to testify during the inquiry in 1947, he described the prison’s working system in detail, according to Standing Orders, and said that ‘the food supplied to the prisoners was good, and although I thought it was sufficient, the prisoners complained that it was insufficient’.46 Sometimes he was also involved in the management of the punishment cell: ‘When a prisoner went into confinement we asked what punishment he had to receive. These instructions were given to us by the Prison Control. The usual procedure was to throw a bucket of water into the cell and after the prisoner mopped it up, another bucket of water would be thrown in. In my case, I knew that if I did not keep the cell floor wet I would be reprimanded by the Duty Sergeant.’47 Later, in 1948, C. S. was called as a witness to the court-martials in London, together with other CSDIC staff: ‘we defended the CO because we had a great deal of respect for him, you know, and we couldn’t believe that these things were happening and he’d been responsible for [. . .] military prisons are quite harsh in any case’.48 C. S., like The Times, seemed to accept what happened at CSDIC Bad Nenndorf as a necessary part of military imprisonment in the aftermath of war.

A ‘clandestine torture programme’ in the British zone Almost 60 years later, the emaciated bodies and the terrified stares of some of the prison’s inmates published in The Guardian no longer looked like a

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normal part of war. They looked like ‘living skeletons’.49 In the twenty-first century this was no longer accepted as a natural part of conflict and its aftermath. When Patricia Meehan published her book on Germany under British rule, 50 she was the first to denounce the visible violences committed at Bad Nenndorf. In 2001, however, most files were still classified and it was only between 2005 and 2006 that the British press reported on these events of 60 years earlier, when the inquiry’s and court-martial’s official papers were released after a Freedom of Information Act application by The Guardian. Even after the first article on the matter appeared in 2005, the publication of photographs of some of the malnourished inmates was not a straightforward process because ‘many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year government officials were arguing that none should be published’. 51 It took The Guardian over six months to obtain the release of the photographs because they ‘were removed before the Foreign Office released the report’, 52 apparently because the Ministry of Defence did not wish them published. Only an appeal by The Guardian secured the reversal of this decision. 53 The British authorities’ unwillingness to release the files and especially the photographs even six decades after the facts suggests that what happened at Bad Nenndorf is no longer perceived as an acceptable treatment. The language used in the twenty-first century to tell the story of Bad Nenndorf is very different from that used by The Times in 1948: aversion and condemnation for what happened are very evident throughout. Words and phrases like ‘torture’, ‘Gestapo-like techniques’, ‘living skeletons’ and ‘clandestine torture programme’ are widely used throughout, and the unacceptability of those events is clear from the beginning. The recently declassified documents ‘lay bare the appalling suffering of many of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the centre’ in the 22 months in which it was operative. Ian Cobain’s story in The Guardian, however infused with sensationalism, is about a place ‘where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments [. . .] recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg’. It is not claimed, in justification of their ruthless treatment, that CSDIC Bad Nenndorf’s inmates were mainly Nazis. Indeed, Cobain alleges that many prisoners were not Nazis at all: ‘an increasing number were suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers – Russians, Czechs and Hungarians – but many were simply German leftists’. Indeed, many of the prisoners, according to Cobain, ‘were there for no reason at all’, or simply because they had ‘learned too much about our interrogation methods’. The camp Commandant, on the other hand, became ‘an authoritarian and a xenophobe with a legendary temper’. 54 Cobain’s story tends to give the impression that the whole system of British interrogation was secretly based on violence and torture. Such a view lacks the wider context of British ‘human intelligence’, which included several other centres and different methods of intelligence collection. But

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the publicity given to Bad Nenndorf in 2005 and again in 2006 were enough to make a major impact on at least one reader. C. S., after reading the story about the Bad Nenndorf camp in 2005 and then again in 2006, was shocked, disillusioned and disappointed about his whole CSDIC experience, because he had a chance to learn the whole story of the court of inquiry’s investigations and the courts-martial from the media. Looking back, he had to change his entire perspective on the ethics of the war and on his role within it: ‘we’d been told that these [. . .] the Germans that were housed in there, the worst and vilest Germans in the country, and [. . .] they led us to believe that these were Nazi criminals, you know, and we quite understood that perhaps they were being interrogated to find out their part in the German war crimes’. 55 While a harsh regime is to be expected in military prisons, C. S. recalled that this ‘was a pretty dire place, we were told that you know, if . . . if we . . . these Germans you know, caused us any trouble, we could hit them which you shouldn’t do that to prisoners [. . .] but the . . . the regime was pretty, pretty sort of . . . tough, really, you know’. This came as no surprise to C. S. at the time, because he knew he was working to enforce military discipline, but ‘if you think retrospectively, it was a bit diabolic, you know’. 56 He had to come to terms with both visible and invisible violence in a way which he had probably not understood at the time. Many years later, faced with the undeniable reality of a media portrayal based on documentary evidence C. S.’s reaction was of total disgust, of rejection for the whole war which he believed to have fought on the ‘right side’. For C. S., traumatized as he was by what he had seen at Bergen Belsen, the revelation of what went on at CSDIC Bad Nenndorf made him feel as if his own ‘imagined community’57 was not so different from that of the enemy. As we have seen, C. S. was called as a witness at Stephens’s court martial, together with his colleagues, and he says that they defended the CO, because they did not believe those things happened in their prison at the time. But it took him many years to realize that what happened was part of the war and of the way humans experience emotions when face to face with the enemy. What C. S. knew and what he did not at the time becomes mixed with what he learned in 2005: ‘looking back at it now, I feel I was also manipulated. By the authorities, by the . . . the MI5, you know . . . our officers . . . I felt we . . . we were duped into believing something, you know, or we were led to believe something, and we . . . we were used, this is my, this is what I felt’.58 Sixty years later these revelations, and his realization of having turned a blind eye to violence, if not having been one of the perpetrators, comes as a shock. His descriptions are similar to those of perpetrators of atrocities, such as the rapists analysed by Bourke elsewhere in this book, who become victims of psychological trauma: their narratives of violence become entangled with those of their own naivety and vulnerability and violence is often blamed on poor leadership, as in this case, where C. S. felt

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that he was manipulated and ‘led to believe’ that the prisoners were ‘the worst of the worst’ and deserved that type of treatment.

Conclusion What is seen as permissible behaviour towards internees is a highly situated phenomenon and depends on the context: although the regime at Bad Nenndorf could not be justified by the urgency of wartime because it was a post-war organization, all participants were still very much connected to wartime attitudes towards the former enemy. Sixty-five years after the events, time seems to have dulled the importance of some of the issues which were key at the time, such as the representation of the enemy as totally inhumane, endorsed both by the institutions, by the press and by the personal experiences of the soldiers themselves. In the twenty-first century governments are more sensitive to this kind of media revelation, and remain reluctant to release documents from archives. But the media and the former soldiers who had fought that war also seem less keen to see harsh treatment of prisoners as justifiable, as the extreme context which seemed to excuse such treatment is now quite remote. One example is the contrast between the media representation of the Bad Nenndorf events in 1948, when The Times minimized the gravity of the situation, limiting its account to claims made in evidence in court and stating that those who made those claims could not be relied on to tell the truth, and in 2005/6. Then, the Guardian gave a sensational account of the same events, using a wider range of evidence and making every effort to insist that the authorities release all available sources. C. S., on the other hand, recalled that he was not able to believe that horrible things could go on in CSDIC, despite the fact that he was witnessing them. Now, looking back in anger, he has strong emotions against those who fooled him into believing that what was going on there was part of a ‘just war’, and he feels manipulated, transformed into a being that is not entirely human. He describes himself as a victim of psychological trauma and of the poor leadership which placed him in that situation, in accordance with narratives of atrocities committed in war such as war rape. 59 What they were doing was meant to contribute to destroy the enemy, the worst of the worst or to punish the enemy’s heinous crimes, and they were trained into thinking that that was far more important than, for example, driving a tank. But what is the limit between what is acceptable in a ‘just war’, fought in service of a just and higher cause, and what is not? And in this case, what is the acceptable limit between military imprisonment and questioning on the one hand and torture and brutality on the other? Apparently, the limit should be defined by the levels

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of violence involved, but as we have seen that this is mainly identified with visible forms of violence. However, at the Bad Nenndorf centre a high level of other, less visible, forms of violence and cruelty were involved, and they were euphemistically referred to as forms of ‘mental pressure’, used to make the prisoner – the heinous enemy – more amenable to giving information in interrogation. This form of violence is invisible not only because it is largely based on inducing fear and does not necessarily leave any visible signs; it is invisible also because it is notably absent in shared narratives and written histories of the war. Are these limits acceptable? Although we have noted the contingent nature of any answer to such a question a (relative) constant has been that what is acceptable is mainly defined by the more visible aspects of violence, those that are tantamount to torture. We can argue, however, that it was the hidden, invisible violence, the fear induced by the level of psychological pressure authorized just because it was never carried out, that determined the general characteristics of Bad Nenndorf, really influencing the attitudes of inmates, interrogators and warders there. It is this aspect, the level of invisible violence, that still seems acceptable today, especially in military prisons which are still expected to be harsh in any case. The consequent risk is that of violence being normalized and accepted.

Further reading C. M. Andrew and S. Tobia (eds), Interrogation in War and Conflict. A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis (London: Routledge, forthcoming) brings together research on military interrogation, forensic interrogation and international justice, and intelligence and security, discussing issues related to these on the basis of detailed case studies from around the world. I. Cobain, Cruel Britannia. A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2012) is a fast-paced description of cases in which British forces were involved in torture, from World War Two, Kenya, Northern Ireland and the War on Terror. J. Sophie, British Interrogation Techniques in the Second World War (Stroud: The History Press, 2012). O. Hoare (ed.), Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies (Richmond: Public Record Office, 2000) is a first-hand account of interrogation as it took place at MI5’s Camp 020 during World War Two, with an introduction which contextualizes this historical file. W. Spracher (ed.), Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam and Iraq (Washington DC: National Defense College, 2008) examines how US military and civilian agencies have obtained information in conflict situations, and the lessons that can be drawn from this for the interrogation practices of a liberal democracy.

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Notes 1 S. Newbery, B. Brecher, P. Sands and B. Stewart, ‘Interrogation, Intelligence and the Issue of Human Rights’, Intelligence and National Security (Vol. 24, no. 5, October 2009, 640). 2 W. Gage, The Baham Mousa Public Inquiry Report (London: The Stationery Office, 2011), www.bahamousainquiry.org/report/index.htm. 3 See, for example, comments by Richard Stokes MP to the Commons in Hansard, HC Deb 24 March 1947 Vol. 435 1018–43. 4 Cf. E. van Veeren, ‘Clean War, Invisible War, Liberal War: The Clean and Dirty Politics of Guantánamo’, in this book. 5 Ibid. 6 M. Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), 5. 7 J. Bourke, ‘Remembering War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39.4 (October 2004), 484. 8 F. H. Hinsley and C. A. G. Simkins, British Intelligence in the Second World War (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1990), 339–42; O. Hoare (ed.), Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies (Richmond: Public Record Office, 2000). 9 W. Spracher (ed.), Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam and Iraq (Washington DC: National Defense Intelligence College, 2008). 10 C. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm. The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); K. Jeffery, MI6. The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 11 Hoare (ed.), Camp 020, 82. 12 The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew (henceforth TNA): KV 4/327, Proposal for WE CSDIC, 9 April 1945. 13 TNA, FO 1030/272, Report on CSDIC, 14 June 1947. 14 www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/the-cold-war/bad-nenndorf.html, accessed 5 September 2012. No archival material on the categories of prisoners held at the camp is available. 15 TNA, KV 4/327, Memorandum, R. Stephens, 14 April 1945. 16 Hoare (ed.), Camp 020, 18. 17 B. Macintyre, ‘The Truth that Tin Eye Saw’, The Times, 10 February 2006. 18 Hoare (ed.), Camp 020, 7. 19 TNA, FO 1005/1744, Prison Standing Orders, 5 November 1946. 20 TNA, FO 371/70829, Prison Standing Orders, 17 March 1946. 21 Ibid. 22 A reflection regarding the effects that this situation might have had on the female prisoners detained at CSDIC in Bad Nenndorf could be extremely interesting, but it is beyond the purposes of this chapter. 23 TNA, FO 371/70829, Prison Standing Orders, 17 March 1946.

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24 TNA, FO 1030/272, Report on CSDIC, 14 June 1947. 25 TNA, FO 371/70829, Prison Standing Orders, 17 March 1946; FO 1005/1744, Prison Standing Orders, 5 November 1946. 26 TNA, FO 1030/272, Report on CSDIC, 14 June 1947. 27 TNA, FO 1005/1744, Statement by witness, 7 April 1947. 28 TNA, FO 1005/1744, Conduct of the DIC and treatment of persons there, 17 April 1947. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 www.mi5.gov.uk/output/bad-nenndorf-page-3.html, accessed 4 May 2010. 33 Hoare (ed.), Camp 020, 1–30. 34 Hansard, HC Deb 24 March 1947 Vol. 435 1018–43. 35 In fact, Richard Stokes only said that he found that at a time when the temperature outside was 12 degrees below zero, in the cells it was 10 degrees below, because there was no coal for the heating, and prisoners were therefore given seven blankets each. Stokes indeed said that this treatment was unacceptable, but he was trying to support his argument on prisoners of war rather than making a case against the camp at Bad Nenndorf. 36 ‘M.I.5 Camp Probe: Action Pending’, Daily Express, 18 December 1947. 37 Hansard, HC Deb 17 December 1947 Vol. 445 337W. 38 ‘Alleged Cruelty to Germans. British Officer Charged’, The Times, 3 March 1948. 39 ‘Lieutenant R. O. Langham Acquitted. Not Guilty of Cruelty to SS Men’, The Times, 1 April 1948. 40 ‘Trial of British Officer’, The Times, 13 March 1948. 41 ‘Interrogation of Germans’, The Times, 16 March 1948. 42 ‘Army Doctor’s Defence’, The Times, 29 May 1948. 43 Personal interview, Isle of White, 23 September 2009. 44 TNA, FO 1030/272, Report on CSDIC, 14 June 1947. 45 TNA, FO 1030/276, Statements. Warders, medical orderlies, etc., 18 May 1947. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Personal interview, Isle of White, 23 September 2009. 49 I. Cobain, ‘The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden’, The Guardian, 3 April 2006; I. Cobain, ‘Britain’s secret torture centre. The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into living skeletons’, The Guardian, 17 December 2005. 50 P. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People. Germans under the British 1945–50 (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2001). 51 Cobain, ‘The Postwar Photographs’, The Guardian, 3 April 2006.

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52 Hayward’s report was released in December 2005, after The Guardian had obtained it through the Freedom of Information Act. 53 Cobain, ‘The Postwar Photographs’, The Guardian, 3 April 2006. 54 Cobain, ‘Britain’s Secret Torture Centre’, The Guardian, 17 December 2005. 55 Personal interview, Isle of White, 23 September 2009. 56 Ibid. 57 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edn, London: Verso 1991). 58 Personal interview, Isle of White, 23 September 2009. 59 Joanna Bourke, ‘Wartime Rape: The Politics of Making Visible’, in this book.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wartime Rape: The Politics of Making Visible Joanna Bourke

Sexual violence, perpetrated by armed members of liberal democracies, has not simply been ignored, but silenced. This chapter explores the politics of sexual atrocities within two so-called progressive societies. When members of the military services of the United Kingdom and United States carried out acts of spectacular cruelty in wartime, how were these acts subsequently narrated? Debates about sexual violence in the context of the two world wars and the conflict in Vietnam have become highly polarized. I will be arguing that British and American narratives of sexual violence in wartime have tended to emphasize three factors. Some simply contend that wartime sexual violence emerges ‘naturally’ out of human nature or the context of warfare itself; others emphasize the numerous ‘stressors’ that might lead servicemen to act in sexually aggressive ways; while yet other commentators link narratives of violence with those of vulnerability. This last factor has become increasingly dominant in the way sexual violence has been narrated, and tells us a great deal about broader changes in attitudes to sexual aggression within liberal democracies. One of the most striking aspects in interrogating acts of sexual violence carried out by British and American servicemen is the extent to which they diverge from scripts usually presented in studies of wartime rape. Indeed, in 2008 when a group of scholars working on sexual violence in combat zones throughout the world issued a call for papers, they received only a single paper in American history. As one of the organizers ruefully speculated,

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the ‘international sweep of the conference might have suggested to U.S. specialists that this conference was not for them’.1 This divergence in rape scripts focusing on British and American perpetrators from those elsewhere in the world is partly a consequence of the way ‘wartime sexual violence’ has been defined, enabling the armed forces of liberal democracies to avoid censure. Jonathan Gottschall’s definition is fairly typical. In an article entitled ‘Explaining Wartime Rape’, published in The Journal of Sex Research in 2004, Gottschall states that The term wartime rape, as it is employed in the literature, never indicates isolated examples of rape by individual fighters. Rather, the term is used interchangeably with mass wartime rape to indicate distinct patterns of rape by soldiers at rates that are much increased over rates of rape that prevail in peacetime. 2 By definition, then, wartime rape is restricted to a narrow category of acts: they only include ‘mass’ rapes and they must constitute an escalation on peacetime levels. Gottschall claims that wartime rapes are carried out by ‘fighters’ or combatants rather than by other members of the armed services, despite the fact that only a very small percentage of servicemen ever see combat. The definition also narrows perpetrators of sexual violence to ‘soldiers’, ignoring perpetration by men in the navy, air force or other civilian bodies mobilized in wartime. It is a definition that is much more relevant for scholars tackling the systematic, mass rapes carried out in places like Nanking, Berlin, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina;3 it works less well in the more dispersed acts of sexual violence that took place when British and American personnel waged war. The prominence of the ‘strategic rape theory’ (that is, that rape is a means of prosecuting warfare) in analyses of sexual violence in wartime has meant that researchers have struggled to include rapes carried out by liberal democracies in their analyses, even though the strategic rape theory does not actually require direct orders or even a coherent policy to constitute wartime rape. Writing about wartime sexual violence carried out by American or British servicemen is made particularly difficult because of veteran politics. Researchers risk being accused of sensationalism or lack of patriotism. Even serious scholars in the field often find themselves attacked for besmirching the ‘good name’ of ‘our men’. This was what Madeline Morris discovered after she published ‘By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture’ in the Duke Law Journal in 1996. According to John Corr, writing in Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems in 2000, Morris had recklessly libeled an entire generation of soldiers who offered enormous sacrifices in a terrible war that literally made the world safe from Hitler. She has done so half a century after that war ended, when so many veterans have succumbed to age and when survivors often lack the

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energy to fight such allegations, which will survive in print long after that generation of men has gone.4 Although Morris’s work is highly scholarly, Corr repeatedly accused her of possessing a ‘personal’ and ‘political agenda’. Sociologist Robert Lilly similarly found himself under attack after his account of sexual violence carried out by Americans in Europe near the end of the Second World War was translated into English. One internet posting even attacked his credentials, lambasting the fact that Robert Lilly guy isn’t an historian at all. He’s a fucking sociologist. Real historians check for chunks of sociologists in their stool and in their shoe treads. Sociology is a methodologically unsound, innately political, airy, unfounded, slippery and BS-laden field that, except for luminaries such as the late Robert Merton, deserves to slide into history as a blot on the face of ‘social science’.5 Lilly was initially unable to find a publisher in the United States, and his work was originally published in French.6 The sensitive nature of exposing atrocities committed by men serving within the armed forces of democracies also exacerbates the other, more general difficulties in researching sexual violence: that is, victims only rarely admit to their ordeal, witnesses are reluctant to testify and conviction rates are exceptionally low. During times of national crisis, not only individuals but the entire military establishment as well as the government itself might seek to avoid the consequences of revealing high levels of sexual violence. As a result, evidence about the extent of perpetration is patchy. We know how many prosecutions there were for sexual offences, but such statistics are practically worthless in judging its real extent. Some scholars have attempted some general calculations, however. Morris, for instance, estimated that American rape levels in France and Germany towards the end of the Second World War were between 300 and 400 per cent greater than rape rates in America in civilian contexts.7 Lilly deduced that between 14,000 and 17,000 women in the United Kingdom, France and Germany were raped by American military personnel between 1942 and 1945.8 Even data about levels of sexual coercion within the armed forces are unknown, although a telephone survey of 558 women who had served in Vietnam found that 48 per cent of the servicewomen had experienced violence during their military service. This included 30 per cent who mentioned that they had been raped, 35 per cent who accused fellow-service personnel of physically assaulting them and 16 per cent who claimed that they had been both raped and physically assaulted during their service.9 Rather than attempting to estimate the extent of the problem, this chapter seeks to explore the way sexual violence committed by British and American service personnel since the First World War has been narrated. It

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defines sexual violence as any sexual act involving lack of consent, coercion or violence. My focus is on narratives about perpetrators, not victims, and although for convenience I will use the male pronoun it is important to recognize that servicewomen have also participated in sexual abuses, albeit rarely.10

The ‘Thin’ narratives of sexual violence 1914–45 Sexual violence committed by servicemen during the two world wars has generated a very ‘thin’ narrative. The most common assumption is that perpetrators had reverted to some kind of animalistic or bestial life-form. In commenting on wartime rape, it was common to hear claims that sexually violent soldiers became ‘like animals’. As a British colonel admitted during the First World War, he had ‘seen my own men commit atrocities, and should expect to see it again. You can’t stimulate and let loose the animal in man and then expect to be able to cage it up again at a moment’s notice’.11 This naturalization of extreme violence was also the explanation given, in 1917, by two chaplains who witnessed an 18-year-old private who had found killing a German soldier so thrilling that he had been unable to resist firing round after round of bullets into the corpse (‘I was so excited I couldn’t stop’, the private told them). The chaplains concluded that what the young soldier had experienced was ‘the force in human nature which may make a soldier of any nationality bayonet an old man or rape a woman’.12In war, ‘mankind’ reverted to the ‘beasts’ or to a less civilized position in the evolution of humanity. This slippery slide into some less honourable abyss was often char­ acterized as one in which the man became ‘as bad as the enemy’ or ‘just like them’. This was the view of Allan S. Clifton, interpreter and member of the intelligence force serving in Japan, when he struggled to explain why Australian soldiers were raping Japanese civilians. He concluded that ‘brutes’ could be ‘found among all peoples, in all crimes. It is a question of proportions’. He informed a Japanese colleague that ‘there were so many more of them in your [Japanese] army’.13 Clifton believed that even the most civilized soldiers could succumb to ‘temptations’ if placed in an environment alongside a rapacious enemy. Of course, commentators who adhered to such arguments still insisted that British and American perpetrators remained intrinsically superior to their enemy (and, indeed, to their victims): the enemy raped more frequently, and they ‘started it’ in the first place. Processes of dehumanization and brutalization were always portrayed as aberrant: it was the environment of war that led men to act in such ways. There was something about the nature of war itself that was destructive of men’s morals. In 1945, for instance, the Queensland (Australia) government

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issued an official report on sexual violence. They explained the surge in number of sexual assaults of civilian women by American servicemen as being due to the ‘large floating population of servicemen removed from the inhibitory effect of their own home environment and living under conditions wherein their sexual impulses are likely to be abnormally stimulated’.14 In other words, sexual ethics were linked to ‘home environment’. Because these servicemen were ‘living under conditions’ in which their ‘sexual impulses’ were ‘likely to be abnormally stimulated’, they could be excused for their aggressive behaviour. Or, as historian John Costello put it in his history of Britain during the Second World War, Servicemen in World War II succumbed to the traditional peer pressure to prove their virility on the battlefield and in bed. . . . Rape, as throughout the history of warfare, was a sadistic consequence of the aggressive virility fostered in soldiers by the brutalization of civilized values and the stresses of military life.15 Yet other commentators shrugged their shoulders and simply reminded readers that all men possessed the germ of sexual violence and it was unsurprising that it thrived in times of war. Thus, in The Warriors (1959), philosopher J. Glenn Gray (who had served as a counter-intelligence officer close to the front lines in Italy during World War Two) argued that there was ‘enough of the rapist in every man to give him insight into the grossest manifestations of sexual passion. Hence it is presumptuous of any of us to scorn the practitioners of this lowest kind of passion as beings with whom we have no kinship’. He believed that ‘this kind of love’ was ‘intimately associated with the impersonal violence of war’. Ares (the God of War) and Aphrodite (the God of Sex) ‘attract one another as true mates’, he argued. Consequently, [c]opulation under such circumstances is an act of aggression; the girl is the victim and her conquest the victor’s triumph. Preliminary resistance on her part always increases his satisfaction, since victory is more intoxicating the harder the winning may be. Sexual violence thus became eroticized as something that might even ‘increase his satisfaction’.16 Finally, some went further than Gray would have been willing to go, arguing that raping enemy women served the important function of diverting violent passions from their comrades and senior officers onto the enemy, even facilitating male bonding within the unit. In the words of an author in the American Journal of Nursing (1953), rape was an expression of ‘pent-up aggressive feelings’ and ‘it may be more satisfactory . . . to have soldiers express their resentment and hostility by forcible rape against a conquered people than to turn the same feelings toward their officers’.17 Another way

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of making this argument involved insisting that sexual aggression against enemy women helped unite men with their comrades-at-war. It facilitated male bonding or, as feminist thinker Cynthia Cockburn put it, Sexual performance is an important measure of manhood in such a cultural context. A shared engagement in group rape can be an important bonding mechanism between men.18 This was also the view of historian Peter Schrijvers inThe GI War Against Japan. American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II (2005). Schrijvers was concerned about the mass rapes carried out by American troops in Okinawa. He argued that wartime rape ‘serves to sharpen the aggressiveness of soldiers’ and ‘helps to steel the male bonds between warriors’.19 It is unclear why witnessing atrocities carried out by one’s comrades should make servicemen keen to kill rather than disillusioned or politicized, or why the unequal and disproportionate rape of women by armed men should facilitate ‘bonding’, but these ways of commenting on sexual atrocities carried out by British and American servicemen were profoundly different to the narratives used in the context of German or Russian soldiers, for example. 20 They were narratives of individual deviance rather than national degeneracy.

Vietnam and after: The naturalization of rape and ‘Stressors’ The conflict in Vietnam saw the proliferation of wartime rape narratives. There were a great many reasons for this, including the particularly lawless nature of the conflict, the fact that it occurred at a time when technologies like cheap cameras were widely available, the feminist movement, the existence of anti-war protestors even within the armed forces and veterans’ movement and the greater willingness to exhibit sexual and violent images in public spheres. Interest in American perpetration was immense, and not simply among professional sociologists, psychologists and so on. Servicemen and women also contributed to the debates about what was going so wrong in the American military. In attempting to explain acts of sexual atrocity carried out by American servicemen in wartime, two major categories stand out: the ‘naturalization’ argument and socialization or contextual hypotheses. The first of these had appeared in earlier conflicts. It simply contended that wartime sexual violence emerged out of the nature of ‘mankind’ itself. It was inevitable and timeless. As Gottshall put it, ‘Historical and anthropological evidence suggests that rape in the context of war is an ancient human practice and

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that this practice has stubbornly prevailed across a stunningly diverse concatenation of societies and historical epochs.’21 In a more extreme form, women were written out of humanity altogether, as in anthropologist Ronald Littlewood’s article entitled ‘Military Rape’ (1997), where he stated that mass rape in wartime was a ‘normal part of what it is to be human’. 22 Captain Alexander Pickand made a similar assumption that ‘human’ equalled ‘male-human’ when he posited that rape occurred in wartime because ‘Human nature is such that where there is an opportunity to use an advantage, such as a difference in power, there will be some who attempt to use it illegitimately.’23 The ‘human’ in such accounts was masculine. One academic version of this argument took inspiration from various schools of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, in which male humans shared the propensity to rape with other animals, including scorpion flies and ducks. 24 Primatology was proffered as providing evidence that could be relevant to human warfare. Thus, when Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and other field researchers observed ‘forced couplings’ in primates (indeed, around half of all ‘couplings’ which occurred between orang-utans were forcible and brutal), it was seen as significant. 25 Such commentators explicitly used the language of warfare, claiming, for example, that chimpanzees carried out ‘search and destroy’ missions, during which they forced rival female chimpanzees to copulate. 26 In terms of explaining wartime rape, the most cited commentators in this field were Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, whose A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Forced Sex (2000) set out the most systematic case for rape as an adaptive act within animal and human cultures. 27 Thornhill and Palmer put forward two hypotheses: the ‘direct selection’ hypothesis (the idea that rape was a reproductive act that was directly adaptive) and the ‘by-product’ hypothesis (positing that rape was a by-product of other evolved mechanisms). Gottschall was one commentator who found such ‘genetic’ explanations useful in historical interpretations of wartime rape. He cited the work of Thornhill and Palmer, and although he did not deny the importance of socio-cultural explanations (especially in explaining the ‘variability of wartime rape’) he insisted that Without a genetic perspective, the ubiquity of wartime rape makes no sense nor does its disproportionate focus on victims at the ages of peak physical attractiveness. 28 The naturalization of wartime rape  – its appearance as something that emerged from the natural world – entered into common parlance, divorced from any direct relationship to socio-biology or evolutionary mechanisms. It was the chief explanation, for example, that an unnamed American soldier turned to when struggling to make sense of a gang-rape of an adolescent Vietnamese woman. ‘It was just like an animal pack’, he recalled. After all

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the men had raped the young woman, they killed her and then mutilated her body. The soldier continued: That’s what the hatred, the frustration was. After we raped her, took her cherry from her, after we shot her in the head, you understand what I’m saying, we literally start stomping [on] her body. And everybody was laughing about it. It’s like seeing the lions around a just-killed zebra. You see them in these animal pictures, Wild Kingdom or something. The whole pride comes around and they start feasting on the body. 29 According to this narrative, sexual atrocity was brutal, but it was also something ‘natural’  – something that might be filmed for a wildlife documentary on television. As Specialist 4 Arthur E. ‘Gene’ Woodley, Jr. (combat paratrooper with the 5th Special Forces Group) put it when explaining why he did not prevent the men under his command from raping Vietnamese women: ‘Why in the hell did I do that?’, he asked. The only explanation, he concluded, was that I basically became an animal. Not to say that I was involved in both incidents but I had turned my back, which made me just as guilty as everybody else. ‘Cause I was in charge. I was in charge of a group of animals, and I had to be the biggest animal there. I allowed things to happen. I had learned not to care. And I didn’t care. . . . I was some gross animal.30 Indeed, psychologist Laura L. Miller was struck by the frequency with which male infantrymen echoed this explanation for sexual aggression, even when it was directed against their own female colleagues in the forces. Male infantrymen, she discovered, were not willing to admit that they would rape their fellow-soldiers, but casually agreed that their male comrades might. ‘Now I don’t have a problem with women [soldiers]’, one infantryman declared, before continuing, ‘but some of these guys, I know them and they’re animals. They won’t hesitate to take what they want or let a woman get killed to get her out of the way.’31 Such explanations for rape tied into ideas in common circulation about ‘human nature’ and warfare: aggression and sexuality were part of man’s instincts. The two fused in war, creating a rape-likely environment. There was no point in feeling too guilty for what was inherent in ‘human’ (that is, male) nature. The naturalization of rape in wartime has generated a vast amount of criticism, especially for its ahistoricism, its tacit acceptance of sexual violence and the way it misstates evolutionary theory. 32 The other main type of explanation went to the other extreme. It took socio-cultural context very seriously indeed, and sought to identify the reasons why certain men acted in sexually aggressive ways in the context of war. The

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result, as we shall see next, was a vast list of situational explanations for sexual violence in wartime. It enabled servicemen and other commentators to present themselves in public as passive in the face of a huge number of ‘stressors’. Although interconnected, these ‘stressors’ can be conveniently summarized under three headings: institutional and peer-pressure, racism and retaliatory urges and environmental confusion. Institutional pressures to act in sexually aggressive ways were primarily a phenomenon of the conflict in Vietnam and after. According to many servicemen (and particularly those enlisting in elite units such as the Marines), sexual violence was explicitly promoted in military training camps. This occurred at two levels. First, military training camps were hyper-masculine environments, in which so-called feminine traits were routinely denigrated. This was what many feminist commentators focused upon, and it received a lot of support from servicemen themselves. ‘Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle’, soldiers would chant, referring both to frontal assaults glamorized by elite troops and to sexual activity. 33 ‘From the moment one arrives, the drill instructors begin a torrent of misogynistic and anti-individualistic abuse’, recalled one recruit from the Marine Corp Boot Camp. He observed that the good things are manly and collective; the despicable are feminine and individual. Virtually every sentence, every description, every lesson embodies this sexual duality, and the female anatomy provides a rich field of metaphor for every degradation. When you want to create a solidary [sic] group of male killers, that is what you do, you kill the women in them. That is the lesson of the Marines. And it works. The recruit went on to argue that even after leaving the camp, soldiers continued to treat women as ‘desirable only in the circuit of tension and release which is the most essential form of male erotic experiences’. 34 Secondly, sexual aggression was explicitly part of training regimes, creating an atmosphere in which sex and pain were intrinsically linked. As Wayne Eisenhart noted, servicemen in Basic Training would be issued with M-14 rifles in which the breech of the weapon was closed by a bolt, held in place by a large, heavy spring. Trainees who had not performed particular tasks correctly might be ordered to insert their penises into the breeches of their weapons, close the bolt, and run the length of the squad bay singing the Marine Corps hymn. This violent ritual ended as the drill instructor left and the three men sank to the floor, penises still clamped in their weapons. We helped them remove the rifles and guided them to their beds. There was considerable bleeding as the men cupped their wounded penises in their hands, curled into balls, and cried. 35

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The linking of punishment and penile trauma not only helped in the bonding processes between serving men, but also heightened aggressive urges that could later be projected against enemy soldiers and civilians alike. In even more direct ways, numerous servicemen recalled being told by their instructors that ‘we could rape the women’. They were given lessons in stripping women prisoners, and told how to ‘spread them open’, and ‘drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vaginas’ afterwards.36 Twenty-year-old Chuck Onan noted that troops training alongside him in the Marine Corps Special Forces ‘liked the idea’ of torturing, raping and killing prisoners: ‘Many volunteered to go to Vietnam’, he recalled, adding that the ‘sergeants made it seem attractive – in a sick way, you know – you’ll get a chance to kill and all this.’ The fact that Marines were allowed to rape women, he claimed, was ‘an inducement to encourage Marines to volunteer for Vietnam’.37 These institutional pressures were strengthened on arrival in the war zones. To many servicemen, it seemed that anything was allowed. For instance, Marine Ed Treratola described how his unit would slip into a village, kidnap a woman and gang-rape her. Depending on their mood, they either freed her afterwards or killed her. This might occur every night, Treratola admitted, and ‘the villagers complained’. When that occurred, the brass would say, ‘Well, look, cool it for a little while’, you know, ‘at least let it happen with little more time in between.’ But ‘we were never discouraged’, he added. 38 Military authorities officially disapproved of rape and pillage, but ‘turned a blind eye’ to such antics, accepting them as necessary for effective combat performance when the time came and, meanwhile, as essential in maintaining high morale. Indeed, this myth of sexual violence being supportive of high morale was so prevalent that it practically became a cliché in films based on the conflict in Vietnam. A typical example is the scene in Casualties of War (1989) in which Sergeant Tony Meserve (Sean Penn) is informed that his squad had been denied access to brothels off-base. He responded by saying ‘We’re going to requisition us a girl to break up the boredom and keep up morale’; grab ‘a little portable R&R for the men.’39 Poor leadership and peer pressure were other common public narratives used to justify men acting in sexually violent ways. As Michael McCusker of the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam reported after describing a horrific gang rape: The man who led the platoon, or the squad, was actually a private. The squad leader was a sergeant but he was a useless person and he let the private take over his squad. Later he said he took no part in the raid. It was against his morals. So instead of telling his squad not to do it, because they wouldn’t listen to him anyway, the sergeant went into another side of the village and just sat and stared bleakly at the ground,

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feeling sorry for himself. But at any rate, they raped the girls, and then, the last man to make love to her, shot her in the head.40 By blaming the act of sexual violence on poor leadership, the responsibility of the individual perpetrators could be diluted. And by calling the gang rape ‘making love’, even the victim was portrayed as partly complicit in her own violation. Poor leadership was not the only reason McCusker believed men committed atrocities: he regarded peer pressure as equally important. Group dynamics were said to contribute to the process of brutalization. In the words of Littlewood, writing in 1997, ‘even in peacetime men as a group seem more likely to engage in sexual provocation than they do as individuals’.41As one soldier explained, he was unsure how he would have reacted if his comrades began raping a woman. ‘I don’t think I would have taken part in it’, he noted, ‘but I also don’t think I would have tried to stop it.’ After all, attempting to stop the rape would have ‘been encouraging your own sudden death. These are the guys who get in the fire fights with you. It would have been too easy to get blown away’.42 This soldier was not alone in fearing the wrath of his peers if he protested. Fragging was a very real threat.43 Private First Class Michael Bernhardt had refused to take part in the massacre at My Lai but did not report it, deciding that ‘it was dangerous enough just fighting the acknowledged enemy’.44 Greg Olsen had been there, too, but was unprepared to talk about what had occurred to anyone in authority. He claimed to be unaware of any ‘avenue to do it’, yet his real concern was that ‘you certainly had second thoughts about taking that kind of stand. . . . You got to remember that everybody there has a gun . . . It’s nice to face your accuser, but not when he’s got a gun in his hands’.45 Or, as another man who participated in the rape and killing of a Vietnamese woman explained, he was ‘afraid of being ridiculed’. He was particularly terrified of being derided as ‘queer’ and ‘chicken’ – so he followed after his comrades in raping the woman.46 The threat of being derided as a homosexual, ‘queer’, VC sympathizer and so on was a theme reinforced in numerous war films and books.47 Hatred of enemy women – and willingness to harm them in extreme ways  –was further facilitated because the Vietnam conflict was one of extreme racism. ‘It wasn’t like they were humans’, one Marine admitted after describing particularly sadistic rapes of Vietnamese women. He explained that ‘we were conditioned to believe that this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and that anything we did was okay . . . . They were a gook or a commie and it was okay’.48 Indeed, in theatres of war where the enemy was regarded as ‘closer to us’, servicemen were more willing to engage in other forms of sexual abuse, that is, paying women for sexual services as opposed to raping them. In the words of one veteran,

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You take a group of men and put them in a place where there are no round-eyed women. They are in an all-male environment. Let’s face it. Nature is nature. There are women available. Those women are of another culture, another color, another society. You don’t want a prostitute. You’ve got an M-16. What do you need to pay a lady for? You go down to the village and you take what you want. . . . Being in that kind of environment, you give a guy a gun and strange things happen. A gun is power. To some people carrying a gun constantly was like having a hard on.49 Institutional pressures, fears of ones’ comrades, and racism were frequently posited as reasons for wartime rape; so, too, was environmental confusion. Men who would have regarded sexual violence as taboo in civilian contexts found that it was taken-for-granted once they donned a uniform. According to Sergeant Ed Murphy, one platoon leader he knew had formerly been a Mormon minister and a ‘high-character man’. However, By the time he got killed he was condoning everything that was going on because it was a part of policy. Nobody told you that it’s wrong. This hell changed him around. And he would condone rapes. Not that he would do them, but he would just turn his head to them because who was he in a mass military policy. 50 The gulf between home and military contexts was so wide that a Mormon minister had to be told that rape was wrong in order for him to do anything about it. Homeland ethics seem to have been easily jettisoned. There were even suggestions that rape in wartime was normal behaviour. This was the implication of a major article in the 1977 issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology where the author insisted that soldiers who raped and then murdered their victims were acting within norms shared by their peer group. According to the author, the soldier rapist-murderer . . . does not appear as a helpless neurotic plagued by uncontrollable urges to defend against incestuous wishes. His actions are rational, flexible with the circumstances, supported by his peers, deliberately executed, and thus show all the typical traits of ‘normal’ behavior – aggressive behavior, though. The crucial difference, the author insisted, was to distinguish between ‘normal’ soldier-rapists and abnormal ones. ‘Those forms of rape which are not culturally, societally, supported in which the rapist becomes truly deviant from the norms of his reference group’, the author suggested, were insane or criminal rapes: the rest were just ‘normal rapes’. 51 In such ways, wartime rapes were normalized.

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Such processes of normalization (in the context of war, that is) even infected the attitudes of medical personnel. For example, in 1975 Gavin Hart (a registrar at the First Australian Field Hospital in Vietnam) published his research entitled ‘Sex Behavior in a War Environment’. In it, he catalogued not only widespread consensual sexual activity, but also non-consensual sex. Hart did explicitly discuss questions of sexual ethics. ‘History continually relates how ethical and moral codes change radically under conditions of war’, be began, adding that ‘these altered standards together with absence from homeland and family, and ethical codes they represent, are conditions which favor promiscuity.’52 In other words, forced sexual acts carried out by soldiers were placed in the context of ‘promiscuity’. Ethics was firmly located as an attitude of ‘homeland and family’. Finally, psychological and psychoanalytical responses became incr­easingly dominant in attempts to explain why British and American service personnel in conflicts from Vietnam onwards engaged in sexually atrocious behaviour. Rape was frequently said to be a physiological response to danger. As Littlewood argued, men did not rape during battle because they had ‘other, more pressing biological concerns’. Instead, rape was committed afterwards, as part of the ‘spoils of warfare’. He drew attention to ‘psychophysiological studies’ which suggested that the period after sustained anxiety or exertion is frequently one of significant decreased anxiety and loss of inhibition. . . . . Soldiers themselves view sexual relations as countering battle anxiety. For Littlewood, sexuality and violence are inherently (that is biosocially) associated, or, if you prefer, aspects of the same male group interests. . . . Each may lead to the other, for men’s sexual relations are already in a sense aggressive, whilst violence may approach or facilitate sexual ecstasy. . . . . Both violence and sexuality are contingent and incremental, possibly in reaction to each other or related through psychophysiological (limbic) mechanisms of ‘arousal’. As a consequence, war should be seen as an ‘unusual biosocial situation’ that ‘increases the possibility of sexual violence against women, perhaps because sexual activity reduces anxiety and confers a sense of necessary autonomy in conflictual and overwhelming situations’. 53 In such ways of interpreting sexual violence of British and American servicemen, rape was an effective coping style. In the words of Hugh McManners in The Scars of War (1994), In psychological terms, rape in combat . . . must be part of the mechanism for easing fear  – a way for the frightened individual soldier to win

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and dominate. Rape is generally thought to be a form of domination practised by otherwise sexually inadequate men, their way of achieving some sort of victory over women. In a battlefield rape, a soldier reaffirms his maleness in the most undeniable fashion. 54 There were so many ‘stressors’ in wartime that rape easily became over-determined, leading many commentators to normalize such behaviour.

The victimization of perpetrators Justifications for sexual violence can be heard in every war fought by liberal democracies, but there was a shift in emphasis in the narratives from the war in Vietnam onwards. Seeking rational reasons for sexual atrocities were still loudly articulated, but another element was added: that is, perpetrators of violence become victims of violence. This argument appeared in two very different versions, the second of which is unique. The first way was to argue that perpetrators of sexual violence in wartime acted as they did because of traumatic events in their childhood combined with the psychological stresses of combat. We have already seen examples of this, but a particularly detailed example can be found in Theodore Nadelson’sTrained to Kill. Soldiers at War (2005). Nadelson is a psychiatrist who has spent much of his life working in the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Boston, caring for deeply traumatized men. In this book, he addressed the question of rape in wartime. One of the men he interviewed about the Gulf War confessed to raping an American woman soldier immediately after hearing the order to advance against the enemy. How did Nadelson explain this? According to him, The intense anxiety felt by the man initiated the need to reverse the terror of meeting a possibly over-powering force by subordinating another, thus proving that ‘I am not weak, you are. I am fucking you.’ This soldier had been sexually assaulted and shamed as a boy and spoke about the need for forceful assertion of sexual identity. The attack on the woman was the soldier’s recourse for assertion of personal strength in the midst of the terror of vulnerability. It was a declaration of dominance and mastery and a rejection of personal softness, of his passive position waiting for the attack himself.55 In other words, according to Nadelson, this soldier raped a fellow-soldier because he was anxious about battle, he had been sexually abused 20 years earlier and he needed to assert his dominance. These are taken as self-explanatory explanations for violence. But why attack a fellow-soldier (surely someone whose comradeship in the approaching fight would be

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beneficial)? Why doesn’t the ‘bonding’ argument work for all ‘warriors’, and not just male ones? Why dissipate energies against one’s own comrade? Why does rape confirm, rather than undermine, a man’s masculinity? How can a positive sexual identity be cemented through sexual violence? The second version of the argument that perpetrators of violence were victims of violence is a very recent one: there was a shift of emphasis from what caused servicemen to commit acts of sexual violence (the ‘stressors’ examined earlier) to exploring the effects of those acts of sexual violence on perpetrators themselves. Image-making around rape in wartime increasingly turned from the external event (what led up to the rape itself) to the internal consequences for the perpetrators. Of course, the causal narrative was not jettisoned, but a psychological dimension was appended to it, often becoming the dominant partner. This happened in two ways. First, combatants who committed atrocities became victims of their governments. In the context of Vietnam, for the first time widespread and institutionalized dismay over American involvement in the war enabled servicemen to deflect blame onto the state. The message that emerged during the Winter Soldier Investigation (an event run by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, which set out to expose American-led atrocities) was not ‘This is what I did and don’t you do this to any human being’ but ‘don’t ever let your government do this to you.’56 The true victims (the raped, tortured and murdered) were effaced, wiped out. The ‘real victims’ were the grunts, portrayed as victims of US government policy. Second, combatants who committed atrocities became victims of psychological trauma. When psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner first invented the term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) in 1941, he intended it to apply to war experiences generally. With the war in Vietnam and the admission of PTSD into the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of their Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, servicemen who engaged in rapes and other atrocities were portrayed (and were able to portray themselves) as casualties of war, rather than as aggressors. The invention of PTSD allowed men who had participated in atrocities to portray themselves as victims of trauma. The ‘trauma’ of being perpetrators of sexual violence had made them ‘ill’. And they should be ‘cured’. Increasingly, in the context of the military, psychological trauma experienced by service personnel in modern conflicts was used to justify abuse. The distinction between those holding safe desk jobs and those under fire was rarely made. In the words of Rush Limbaugh speaking on CBS News about the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib abuses, This is no different from what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort. . . . You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard [sic] of need to blow some steam off?57

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As perpetrators, men and women became victims of their own actions. The trauma trope collapsed acts into responses; acts of violence become indistinguishable from the perpetrators’ responses to violence. This was what was particularly invidious about perpetrator narratives: they flatten everything out, reduce it all to ‘the horror, the horror’, and erase victims from the narrative. The assumptions in drawing on PTSD in understanding perpetrators of rape went beyond the erasure of the victims. Sex crimes prosecutor Alice Vachss was particularly incensed by its assumption about wartime versus peacetime rape. She argued that it was one thing to use Vietnam vet syndrome to explain a shoot-out with the police, where there is at least some correlation between the wartime behavior and the crimes. But to say that [a man] raped because he had flashbacks of Vietnam was a fundamentally offensive idea. Implicit was the concept that he was raping a Vietnamese woman (and that it was OK) but when he got back over here he couldn’t adjust to it being culturally unacceptable to rape Americans – like some rap video where the targets of sexual violence always seem to be Asian women.58 However, there are other reasons why we must pay attention to the politics of perpetrator-victimhood, not least because it returns atrocity to inner worlds as opposed to outer events. The universal, suffering body sinks into oblivion under the weight of individualized perpetrator-psyches. The victim of atrocity is reduced to his or her animal substructure, to an undifferentiated identity as a body-in-pain. Ironically, the more emphasis is placed on the causal elements of racism, the more race is actually erased. The slain enemy are universalized, stripped of history and culture; they are the proverbial ‘Indians’. Instead of historical specificities, we are presented with an ahistorical narrative based on supposedly biological and psychological constants. Instead of history, we have a universalist notion of the body; the unnamed bodies; the porous identities of the tortured. The danger of this approach is that it blinds us to the fact that terror is always local. To universalize it is to remove the specifics of an individual’s history; it is to situate atrocity in the realm of moral edification. In other words, war becomes a morality tale as opposed to state-legitimized violence against vulnerable flesh. Thus, a powerful illusion is created: the ‘problem of atrocities’ is converted into one of individual choice rather than systemic, institutionalized violence. Empathy was accorded to the perpetrators who (it is admitted) made the ‘wrong choice’ (but who can blame them given the impressive list of excuses or ‘stressors’?). The problematic nature of such trauma-narratives is equally true for victims of atrocities committed by British and Americans troops. Interestingly, the military origin of PTSD was rapidly turned into a diagnosis that could be applied to rape victims as well. In 1974, a member of the

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Health Services Administration in Washington DC was able to compare rape victims to ‘soldiers after combat’, believing that both needed to ‘abreact the dramatic event . . . . with someone who can listen sympathetically’. 59 Ellen Dye and Susan Roth went even further, arguing in 1991 that Vietnam veterans and rape ‘survivors’ were ‘two paradigmatic trauma populations’ that were exceptionally similar and therefore could and should be discussed together.60 However, looking at rape victims through the lens of psychological trauma, as defined in the West, places unbearable demands on them. The trauma model implies that how people responded ‘inside’ to ‘bad events’ are somehow as important as (and, often, even more important than) what happened, the bad event. The victim’s emotional responses are as proscribed as those of perpetrators. The tyranny of emotional comportment kicks in: victims became victims through acting in particular ways. If they do not act in such ways, the harm can be minimized. In the aftermath of atrocity, memories of being brutalized became a ‘symptom’ of a psychiatric condition that must be spoken about in order to liberate the victim. Yet responses to cruelty are culturally constructed. Admittedly, the performance of ‘trauma speech’ can help transform passive victims into active survivors. But it is not necessarily so  – even within Anglo-American cultures. As feminists Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, argue in ‘Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?’ (1993), when breaking the silence is taken up as the necessary route to recovery or as a privileged political tactic, it becomes a coercive imperative on survivors to confess, to recount our assaults, to give details, and even to do so publicly. Our refusal to comply might then be read as weakness of will or as re-enacted victimization. Might it not also be the case, they continued, that ‘survival itself sometimes necessitates a refusal to recount or even a refusal to disclose and deal with the assault or abuse’? Disclosure could be more emotionally, financially and physically damning to victims of atrocity than silence.61 In other words, confessional discourse requires the adoption and framing of the experience along rigid lines shaped by Anglo-American legal doctrines and moralistic codes, which may not be in keeping with an individual’s process of self-creation. ‘Cure’ could be the ultimate betrayal.

Conclusion There has been a strong reluctance in the liberal democracies of Britain and America to discuss sexual violence perpetrated by ‘our side’. It has proved easy to accuse ‘primitive peoples’ (Rwandans) and ‘warring

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nations’ (Serbians) of sexual atrocity, but when perpetrated by British and American service personnel the tendency has been to individualize them (‘bad apples’) and to appeal to an impressive list of ‘stressors’. ‘We’ are judged according to realist principles while ‘they’ are judged according to moral ones. Our deeds could be understood according to the irrational nature of modern warfare, which placed unbearable pressures on immature individual soldiers; their deeds were simply unspeakably horrific, emanating from primitive, warring cultures. The increased application of models of psychological trauma further served to exonerate perpetrators of sexual violence or, at the very least, to render them ‘psychologically scarred’ or ill. In all these interpretations of wartime sexual violence, the shared assumption is that British and American perpetrators of sexual violence in wartime are somehow different from those carrying out similar acts in non-democratic nations. The politics of making British and American atrocities visible continues to be fraught with difficulties.

Further reading Joanna Bourke’s Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago, 2007) is an exploration of the way sexual perpetrators have been conceptualized in the past. She has a chapter on rape committed by British and American servicemen and women from the First World War to the present. She also explores female perpetrators. Raphaëlle Branche and Fabrice Virgili’s edited book Rape in Wartime (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) is a thoughtful volume about wartime rape in the twentieth century, including the Soviet Union, Chechnya, the Rhineland, Spain, Greece, India and Bangladesh, Columbia, Israel, Palestine and Nigeria. E. Heineman (ed.), Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the era of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) provides in-depth analyses of sexual violence in conflicts, including those in ancient Greece and Rome, the medieval West, seventeenth-century England, the Spanish conquest of Alta California, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, precolonial and colonial Tanzania, Uzbekistan in 1917, the two world wars and East Pakistan/ Bangladesh in 1971. J. R. Lilly, Taken By Force. Rape and American GIs in Europe During World War II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) is a detailed exploration of rape committed by American forces in Germany during the Second World War. It is largely based on military documents. M. Morris, ‘By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture’, Duke Law Journal, 45.4 (February 1996), is a systematic exploration of cultures of sexual violence in the military. Morris compared rape rates in wartime and peacetime, and offers policy suggestions to reducing the incidence of rape by military personnel.

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Notes 1 E. Heineman, ‘The History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: Conference Report’, Radical History Review, 101 (Spring 2008), 5–21: 10. 2 J. Gottschall, ‘Explaining Wartime Rape’, The Journal of Sex Research 41.2 (May 2004), 129–36: 129 (original emphasis). Cf. www.nlgmltf.org/ pdfs/11-Gottschal-wartime-rape.pdf. 3 For example, see C. Card, ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’, Hypatia, 11.4 (Fall 1996), 5–18; A. Stiglmayer (ed.), Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); A. Barstow (ed.), War’s Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes Against Women (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2000). 4 J. B. Corr, ‘Rape, Sex, and the U.S. Military: Questioning the Conclusions and Methodology of Madeline Morris’ By Force of Arms’, Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, 10 (2000), 191–218: 206. 5 Cited in J. R. Lilly, Taken By Force. Rape and American GIs in Europe During World War II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xxii. 6 J. R. Lilly, La Face cachée des GI’s (Paris: Payot, 2003). 7 M. Morris, ‘By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture’, Duke Law Journal, 45.4 (February 1996), 651–781: 672. 8 Lilly, Taken By Force, 12. 9 A. G. Sadler, B. M. Booth, Deanna Nielson and B. N. Doebbeling, ‘Health-Related Consequences of Physical and Sexual Violence: Women in the Military’, Obstetrics and Gynecology. 96.3 (September 2000), 473–80: 473. 10 For histories of female perpetrators of sexual violence see J. Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago, 2007); B. Ehrenreich, ‘Feminism’s Assumptions Upended’, in Abu Ghraib. The Politics of Torture (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004), 65–70; L. Rapaport, ‘Holocaust Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 22.1 (2003), 53–79. 11 Unnamed colonel, quoted by Rev. T. W. Pym and Rev. G. Gordon, Papers from Picardy by Two Chaplains (London: Constable and Company, 1917), 29–30. 12 Pym and Gordon, Papers from Picardy, 26, 30. 13 A. S. Clifton, Time of Fallen Blossoms (London: Cassell, 1950), 141–4. As rapes by Australian soldiers mounted up, he became less convinced by his own rationalization. 14 ‘Report of Committee of Inquiry Regarding Sexual Offences’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers 1944–1945, 942–3, cited by R. Campbell, Heroes and Lovers. A Question of National Identity (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 96. 15 J. Costello, Love, Sex, and War: Changing Values, 1939–45 (London: Collins, 1985), 140. 16 J. G. Gray, The Warriors (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959), 66.

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17 D. A. Bloch, ‘Sex Crimes and Criminals’, American Journal of Nursing, 53 (1953), 440–3, cited in R. S. Albin, ‘Psychological Studies of Rape’, Signs, 3.2 (winter 1977), 423–35: 425. 18 C. Cockburn, ‘“Why Are You Doing This to Me?” Identity, Power, and Sexual Violence in War’, in A. G. Jónnasdóttir, V. Bryson and K. B. Jones (eds), Sexuality, Gender, and Power. Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2011), 189–205: 197. 19 P. Schrijvers, The GI War Against Japan. American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 211–12. 20 For example, see J. Horne and A. Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and A. Beevor, Berlin: the Downfall, 1945 (London: Viking Penguin, 2002). 21 Gottschall, ‘Explaining Wartime Rape’, 130. 22 R. Littlewood, ‘Military Rape’, Anthropology Today, 13.2 (April 1997), 7–16: 8. 23 Captain A. N. Pickands, ‘Reveille for Congress: A Challenge to Revise Rape Law in the Military’, William and Mary Law Review, 45.5 (2004), 2425–60: 2453. 24 D. Barash, Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within (New York: Souvenir Press, 1979), 53–5. 25 R. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). For a discussion, see J. Bourke, What It Means To Be Human. Reflections from 1791 to the Present (London: Virago, 2011), 142. 26 Wrangham and Peterson, Demonic Males, 142. 27 R. Thornhill and C. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 28 Gottschall, ‘Explaining Wartime Rape’, 134. 29 Unnamed soldier interviewed in M. Baker, Nam. The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: William Marrow, 1981), 149–50. 30 Specialist 4 Arthur E. ‘Gene’ Woodley, Jr., cited in W. Terry, Bloods. An Oral History of the Vietnam War (New York: Random House, 1984), 256. 31 L. L. Miller, ‘Not Just Weapons of the Weak: Gender Harassment as a Form of Protest for Army Men’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 60.1 (March 1997), 32–51: 39. 32 P. B. Bart, ‘Theories of Rape: Inquires into the Causes of Sexual Aggression’, Contemporary Sociology, 20.2 (March 1991), 268–70; J. A. Coyne, ‘Of Vice and Men: A Case Study in Evolutionary Psychology’, in C. B. Travis (ed.), Evolution, Gender, and Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003), 171– 90; R. Lieb, V. Quinsey and L. Berliner, ‘Sexual Predators and Social Policy’, Crime and Justice, 23 (1998), 43–114; E. A. Lloyd, ‘Science Gone Astray: Evolution and Rape’, Michigan Law Review, 99.6 (2001), 1536–59;

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H. Rose, ‘Debating Rape’, The Lancet, 357 (3 March 2001), 727–28; H. Rose and S. Rose (eds), Alas, Poor Darwin. Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000); C. B. Travis, ‘Talking Evolution and Selling Difference’, in C. B. Travis (ed.), Evolution, Gender, and Rape (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 3–28. 33 P. Caputo, A Rumor of War (London: Macmillan, 1977), 15. 34 G. F. Gilder, Sexual Suicide (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 258–9. 35 R. W. Eisenhart, ‘You Can’t Hack It Little Girl’: A Discussion of the Covert Psychological Agenda of Modern Combat Training’, Journal of Social Issues, 31.4 (1975), 13–23: 15. 36 For example, see the testimonies of Chuck Onan and Jimmy Roberson, interviewed in M. Lane, Conversations with Americans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 28 and 60; and D. Lang, Casualties of War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 25–6. 37 Chuck Onan, interviewed in Lane, Conversations with Americans, 30. 38 Ed Treratola, interviewed in Lane, Conversations with Americans, 96. 39 Casualties of War (Film: 1989). 40 Michael McCusker of the 1st Marine Division, in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation. An Inquiry into American War Crimes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 29. 41 Littlewood, ‘Military Rape’, 8. 42 Unnamed soldier interviewed by M. Baker, Nam, 133. 43 Ronald Haeberle, quoted in M. Bilton and K. Sims, Four Hours in My Lai. A War Crime and Its Aftermath (London: Viking, 1992), 183. 44 Michael Bernhardt, quoted in a letter by Ron Ridenhour, in J. Goldstein, B. Marshall, and J. Schwartz (eds), The Peers Commission Report (New York: Free Press, 1976), 37. 45 Greg Olsen, in Bilton and Sims, Four Hours in My Lai, 82. 46 Lang, Casualties of War, 35. Also see George Ryan, in M. Polner, No Victory Parades. The Return of the Vietnam Veteran (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 40. 47 For example, see Platoon (1986) or Casualties of War (1989). 48 Sgt. Scott Camil of the 1st Marine Division, in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation,14. 49 Mark Baker, Nam, 206. 50 Sergeant Ed Murphy, in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation, 47–8. 51 M. Bauermeister, ‘Rapists, Victims and Society’, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 21.3 (1977), 238–48: 245. 52 G. Hart, ‘Sexual Behavior in a War Environment’, The Journal of Sex Research, 11.3 (August 1975), 218–26: 223. 53 Littlewood, ‘Military Rape’, 12–13.

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54 H. McManners, The Scars of War (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994), 115. 55 T. Nadelson, Trained to Kill. Soldiers at War (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 153–4. 56 This was an actual statement by one of the perpetrators giving evidence during the Winter Soldier Investigation. 57 D. Meyer, ‘Rush: MPs Just “Blowing Off Steam’’’, CBS News, 2 May 2004, in www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/06/opinion/meyer/main616021.shtml, accessed 4 October 2012. Also see J. Hitt, ‘The Diddly Award’, Mother Jones, September/October 2004, in www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/09–401. html. 58 A. Vachss, Sex Crimes (New York: Random House, 1993), 205. 59 F. P. Zuspan, ‘Alleged Rape: An Invitational Symposium’, The Journal of Reproductive Medicine, 12.4 (April 1974), 133–52: 143. 60 E. Dye and S. Roth (Spring 1991), ‘Psychotherapy with Vietnam Veterans and Rape and Incest Survivors’, Psychotherapy, 28.1 (Spring 1991), 103–14. 61 L. Alcoff and L. Gray, ‘Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18.2 (Winter 1993), 281.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Underside of ‘Occupation’ Hilary Footitt

They will break up boxes instead of opening them. . . . For years US military convoys sped through the streets of villages, running over small children, whilst shouting profanities and throwing water bottles at people . . . They curse constantly . . . They pee all over, right in front of civilians, including females.1 Cultural awareness is a force multiplier.2

These quotations stand in stark contrast to each other. The first comes from members of the Afghan National Security Forces, commenting on the behaviour of American soldiers with whom they were working in Afghanistan. The second, advocating cultural awareness, is from Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the four-star General/CIA Director who arguably became something of a poster boy for the recent ‘cultural turn’ in the US army, that is the view that the success of western forces will be largely dependent on what is known as ‘non-kinetic’ forms of engagement. The grievances exposed by the Afghans concern behaviour which in general stays well below the radar of military law and of media interest – disrespect for people and property, boorish and hooligan activity. Historically, such violence has been largely invisible, dwarfed in our traditional accounts of war by some of the more egregious violences committed by liberal democracies: torture, killing of civilians, rape or even such symbolically violent acts as the burning of the host nation’s holy book. 3 But if the Afghans are to be believed, this behaviour is still continuing despite Petraeus.

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This chapter argues that such day-to-day misconduct has been, and remains, an inevitable product of ‘occupation’, of the physical presence of troops in any environment which is foreign to them, irrespective of whether the mission that has brought them there in the first place is benign  – liberation, peace-building – or hostile. Whatever presumptive intimacy may be being mediated by Petraeus’s cultural turn in warfare, meetings between military forces and local civilians on the ground are determined by the same asymmetrical framing which produces those more visible violences of war: carpet bombing, torture and rape. If the twentieth-century western military imaginary has moved from an optically distanced and largely urban battle-space to one which appears to involve some form of personal encounter and empathy, this hidden underside of occupation has remained remarkably constant in military/civilian encounters in what Mary-Louise Pratt calls the ‘contact zone’: ‘the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect’.4 The chapter will examine the part played by the physical presence of an army, its ‘occupation’, in constituting this contact zone, using evidence from deployments by different forms of military forces, with contrasting types of mission: 1944–46 in which a vast conscript (largely male) army crossed continental Europe to liberate former Nazi territories and establish an occupying authority in Germany; 1995–2000 in Bosnia/Herzegovina where a small professional army was engaged in a UN/NATO peace-keeping/ peace-building mission; and the recent deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the forces of liberal democracies have been waging a counter-insurgency war. It will argue that the spaces created, physically and emotionally, by the military presence serve to legitimize conduct which, while not necessarily criminal, is certainly unacceptable in the home environments from which these troops come. These are the hidden moral undersides of occupation: a lack of respect for the dignity and property of an indigenous civilian population. The recent cultural turn5 in warfare will not address this invisible violence of occupation, the chapter concludes, until it begins to promote a more self-reflective approach, one in which military forces are encouraged to observe themselves and the world that they are creating, as much as the foreign ‘others’ they happen to meet on the ground of war.

Occupation Whatever the purpose of foreign troops entering a country  – liberation, occupation, humanitarian assistance, peace enforcement – they inevitably occupy its space, and in so doing impose their own geography on what is to them an unfamiliar territory. Military forces require bases, supply routes, and secure zones of responsibility, all of which may disregard, or even

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consciously cross-cut, domestic delineations. Whether armies construct new bases or reuse existing structures, they will adapt local space to their own purposes, accommodating hundreds or thousands of foreign soldiers who will normally know little or nothing about the local environment in which they find themselves. At one extreme, for example, American forces in Reims in early 1945 were occupying 17 factories, 41 garages, 5 cinemas, 4 dance halls, 3 barracks, 2 hospitals, 68 hotels, 12 restaurants, 174 private houses, 122 flats, 260 rooms in private houses, 5 schools and the Stade Municipal.6 At the other extreme, the much more limited British contingent in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 was initially sited in factories which had largely been abandoned in the previous struggle  – the Banja Luka Metal Factory, the Kiseljak Brick Factory, the Shoe Factory and Bus Depot in Mrkonjić Grad.7 In both cases  – a large-scale army presence as in liberated Europe, or a limited peace-keeping presence as in Bosnia/ Herzegovina – space was taken over and occupied. Military occupation, however, not only appropriates foreign space. It also remakes that space physically and emotionally to produce a home away from home for troops far removed from their own countries. In this process, a moral universe is created which is distinct, separate both from the world of home to which the soldiers will return, and from the foreign surroundings in which they now find themselves. Engagement with those outside the occupied space is mentally bounded by the walls of this newly created world, and temporally limited by the duration of the soldiers’ expected stay in the foreign country. In order to fulfil the operational obligations they have been given, military forces modify the landscape around their armies (Figure 8.1). In Cherbourg in 1944, American trucks and vehicles were being landed in huge numbers in the renovated port, so that roads within the town had to be widened – the Avenue Carnot, the Avenue François Millet – in order to accommodate them; departmental roads were commandeered, renamed – the Green Diamond highway (Cherbourg – St-Lô, Cherbourg – Dol), and the Red Ball Highway (St-Lô – Vire) – and plastered with large posters in English setting out penalties for speeding, not saluting and so on.8 Without prior consultation, one-way signs in English were put up on the urban streets of Cherbourg, in many cases in the opposite direction from the French ones they had replaced.9 In Bosnia/Herzegovina, the need of UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) to safeguard its communication routes resulted in notices nailed to telephone masts every one or two kilometres, describing the roads as Route Triangle (from Tomislavgrad to central Bosnia) or Route Bluebird near Mrkonjić.10 In the later military deployment in Iraq, streets near the bases and operational headquarters of the Coalition were lined with ‘enormous concrete blocks like giant tombstones’ (incidentally named by the manufacturers after American states – Arkansas, Wisconsin)11 which were designed to protect the forces from the growing threat of suicide bombers.

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FIGURE 8.1  Appropriating occupied space: A building in postwar Germany converted for the use of British troops. © Imperial War Museum (BU 8698).

Besides appropriating space, and altering the landscape around them in order to fulfil the specifics of their missions, occupying forces lay emotional claim to the spaces they occupy by owning them linguistically, renaming them in their own language, a fact perceived as much by those outside these spaces as those within. Alain Brossat noted that one of the very first acts of people in liberated France was to tear down German street signs and notices, the hated physical marks of the enemy’s former presence.12 In occupied Germany in the Second World War, the British administration renamed the buildings they were using, dropping the original German names in favour of ‘Lancaster House’ and ‘Stirling House’. Roads around their headquarters were signposted in English, with potentially common areas nearby, like bus shelters, designated ‘for British personnel only’.13 Accompanying the renaming, there is also a military remapping of the occupied territory. In Bosnia/Herzegovina, the anthropologist Kimberley Coles recalled that a fellow election monitor seeing English-language route names on a foreign map of the area initially thought the mapped territory was actually part of the United States.14 In Iraq, the Americans changed the

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name of the entrance to the Green Zone in Baghdad from its local name, Bab al Qasr (Palace Gate), to ‘Assassins Gate’: ‘Iraqis complained about the way the US military renamed their highways and buildings and redrew their district lines. It reminded them that something alien and powerful had been imposed on them without their consent, and that this thing did not fit easily with the lives they’d always known.’15 As well as the new nomenclature and remapping of foreign territory, soldiers often rename their spaces themselves with slang, abbreviations or corruptions of hard-to-pronounce toponyms. In Bosnia/Herzegovina for example, Bugojno was often ‘Bugonyo’ to the soldiers in the 1st Battalion Duke of Wellington’s Regiment stationed there in 1994. Gornji Vakuf, an important British base in the 1990s, became ‘GV’, and Mrkonjić ‘MG’. Local civilians noticed that, ‘if you ask the soldier “Do you know where Gornji Vakuf is?” he wouldn’t know, but if you ask the soldier, “Do you know of GV?” he says, “Yeah, man”’.16 The practice of renaming space has a clear moral and emotional dimension, creating a home away from home, and thus providing psychological sustenance to those living well outside their normal comfort zones. This ‘power of naming’,17 however, can easily elide into the perception that naming a space is tantamount to possessing it, that once a space is under one’s control, it then becomes unnecessary to strive to understand very much outside it. In soldiers’ accounts of military deployment, there is often a sharply perceived difference between the inside and outside of their occupied spaces. Men and women recalling the early occupation of Germany describe themselves as occupying spaces from which the Germans had been totally expelled: ‘They’d all been turned out of their houses. We were living in them.’18 A naval officer in Minden explained how the previous German owner of the house he was now living in had come to beg a favour: ‘The daughter of the crippled doctor who’d been moved out of his home came and asked for the wheelchair in the cellar.’19 In Germany, this spatial separation between occupied and occupiers rapidly produced what observers termed an inward-looking ‘compound atmosphere’ among the British.20 In Bosnia-Herzegovina, foreign troops operated in what seemed to be a totally separate universe, ‘Hyper-Bosnia, a parallel world of statelike practices and institutions laid out on top of Bosnia proper.’21 The retreat into an interior world of one’s own named and occupied spaces becomes all the more likely, of course, in zones of extreme personal danger. In Iraq, for example, critics noted the tendency for the occupying foreigners to operate from within the safety of their own areas, seeking to, ‘build the utopia of which they dreamed from units in the Green Zone’, whose shared specialist terminology – ‘governance capacity building’, ‘security-sector reform’ and ‘conflict reduction’  – was at striking odds with what was actually occurring beyond the walls of the barracks.22 Separated from the external foreign environment in a newly created emotional home away from home, troops perceive time very differently from those around them. Symbolically, American forces in the port of Cherbourg in the Second World War worked on a clock set one hour behind

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the time of the local population outside the port installations: ‘American Time’ and ‘French time’ as the mystified local press described it. 23 Soldiers necessarily operate within their own personal time frames. They deploy for limited periods – six-month rotations in Iraq, for example24 – so that their commitment to the country in which they are based is clearly temporary and limited. In every sense, soldiers are passing through, on their way to somewhere else. This privileged mobility of foreign troops involves two forms of power: the physical power to move across the country (embodied in armoured vehicles, caterpillar trucks, haulage equipment and priority to air space) and the notional power to leave the country once their tour of duty ends. On the ground, these privileged physical and notional mobilities come together in that most classic of civilian grievances, the vehicle accident, an event caused both by the size and weight of military vehicles, and by the reckless disregard with which they are often driven. In accounts of troop deployment from the 1940s till today, road accidents consistently stand as symbols of the perceived insouciance of the foreign military, and of their scant engagement with the local communities around them. In liberated Marseille, French authorities reported that Allied troops were wreaking havoc on the roads – in September 1944 alone, there were 294 collisions. 25 In this situation, casualties were overwhelmingly local civilians rather than American troops: ‘Every day, many of our citizens are paying the price for the carelessness of drivers, above all those who, perched on top of heavy lorries, are protected from the consequences of the accidents they cause.’26 In the early Cold War, French communists seeking to encapsulate the arrogance of Americans stationed in France did so via the classic road accident trope: André Stil’s elderly worker Léon is killed trying to save a child from being run over by an US army lorry which neither slows down nor stops. 27 Jovana Zorić, a young student from Belgrade working with the British forces in the late 1990s, was deeply upset by incidents of bad driving by young and inexperienced British soldiers: ‘For me it was more about . . . am I going to survive this patrol, because this idiot seventeen year old driver, he just learned yesterday to drive and he is driving like mad, and he doesn’t have a clue, and we’re going all to die, right now.’28 The sociologist Béatrice Pouligny found that ‘problems of driving on the roads and accidents caused by international staff’ were the most common complaints among local people she interviewed in several contemporary locations of peace operations, including Haiti and Cambodia: ‘People were shocked by some accidents, and still more so by the scant attention paid to them and the lack of respect too often displayed by international staff.’29 In Afghanistan today, much the same comments are being made about US soldiers: ‘they think they own all the roads’. 30 By virtue of their very mobility, foreign soldiers, although physically present, are in effect emotional outsiders to the local community. They will leave the territory on a known date and resume their personal lives in a different locality. A military presence – whether for liberation, occupation, humanitarian aid or

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peace keeping – typically produces its own interior emotional space abroad, markedly separate from the world outside itself, a silo which troops leave fleetingly for an outside contact zone, briefly visiting an exterior which is morally, as well as physically, set apart from them.

Frontier town morality The moral universe of the contact zone is in every sense ‘beyond’, ‘outside’ the prevailing norms of occupiers’ lives, both the lives they have in their own country, and those they are living in the newly constructed world abroad. In some ways, the exterior contact zone takes on the characteristics of an incipiently lawless area, one in which private justice and personal enrichment might temporarily take the place of more commonly held norms and shared laws (Figure 8.2). It is no surprise that the largest and most extreme manifestations of this alternative morality of military forces abroad are described in terms which recall the classic American frontier experience. ‘Reputedly the second biggest black market in the whole of Eastern Europe’31 was named Arizona Market after SFOR’s Route Arizona between Doboj and Tuzla. Initially set up by the US Army in 1996 as a means of encouraging local entrepreneurship and cross-ethnic reconciliation, the Market carried a large sign at the entrance proclaiming, ‘Our thanks to the US Army for supporting the development of this market.’32 Arizona Market rapidly came to resemble a frontier town in the early Wild West, well-known for the passing of smuggled goods and for the trafficking of sex, 33 practices in which members of the international community, including Russian and US soldiers, were undoubtedly complicit. 34 Situated close to an army headquarters of some 4,000 men, the site soon became a major centre of illicit trading and prostitution, a ‘lawless wasteland’, 35 attracting thousands of people (25,000 shoppers in one weekend in 1999) to what was in effect, ‘a smuggling paradise’. 36 The invasion of Iraq was the setting for economic corruption on an epic scale, with grotesquely large amounts of money in common circulation. ‘Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed $100 bills . . . It was the Wild West.’37 Patrick Cockburn heard that one American soldier put in charge of helping the Iraqi boxing team to re-establish itself gambled the money away. However, nobody knew if the sum he had wasted was $60,000 or $20,000 because no proper record had ever been kept. Rory Stewart, working in the East of Iraq near Basra, was given so much money that he was quite unable to spend it all: ‘. . . I was encouraged to spend 10 million dollars in a month with almost no restrictions. Auditing systems were primitive and the money arrived vacuum-packed in million dollar bricks.’38 While Arizona Market and the Wild West corruption of Iraq may be extreme examples of the moral flexibility of these outside contact zones, it remains true that whenever military forces leave the silos of their

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FIGURE 8.2  A struggle doomed to failure? Military police notice against black-marketeering, post-war Germany. © Imperial War Museum (HU 56718).

occupation spaces and encounter civilians, the relationships they establish are necessarily characterized by asymmetries, power imbalances between the two groups which are by no means related solely to the discrepancies in matériel between the armed and the unarmed. One of the most noticeable asymmetries is economic. When economic plenty stands alongside relative penury, the disparity tends to highlight what one observer described as, ‘. . . a difference of interpretation’39 over the value of goods and food. For local civilians, the military camps of Western democracies, whatever their ostensible missions, can appear as oases of thoughtless over-consumption. Thus French people living beside the bases of their recent liberators were struck by what they saw as ‘the daily spectacle of waste’.40 In Reims, local feelings ran so high that the French authorities had to ask the Americans to hold a full inquiry about the persistent reports they were receiving that US soldiers were engaged in destroying vast quantities of edible food and apparently usable goods: ‘. . . leaving bits of mortadello for the dogs, throwing coffee in the streams.’41 Outside their camps, soldiers used to western standards of living often conspicuously fail to take account of the value that local civilians may place on what appears to them to be a very meagre stock of goods and possessions; hence the complaints about military/ Afghan encounters in the 2011deployment: ‘These are poor people: they can’t afford to replace the things the US soldiers needlessly break.’42

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The combination of unbalanced power relations and the moral permissiveness of the outside contact zone tends to licence behaviour which is highly predatory. Beyond the spaces the military themselves occupy, notions of ownership are more flexible than they might be within the sanctity of home, or the home away from home which has been created in the foreign country. Thus civilian property in the contact zone can sometimes be acquired by soldiers, in essence being stolen and pillaged by them. French civilians living close to the landing beaches in 1944 soon grew weary of pilfering by Allied soldiers. Five days after 6 June, one inhabitant noted in her diary that liberating soldiers had just stolen jewellery from her bedroom: ‘In the village, enthusiasm is waning. Soldiers are pillaging and breaking everything, entering everywhere under the pretext of searching for Germans.’43 The fact that the protagonists themselves often mention these sorts of misdemeanours in post hoc accounts of the period suggests that thieving from civilians in war may be considered at worst as a small peccadillo, and at best as an activity which is broadly acceptable: ‘the golden rule of making a strict search of each new billet . . . continuously prodding the ground for hidden wealth and valuables . . . I never found anything myself, but that was simply because half of the army had been there before me’.44 This agnosticism about the property rights of local civilians persists in later accounts too concerning professional (as opposed to conscript) armies. Thus, a US soldier in Iraq described the process of searching a local house: ‘Pictures were being ripped from their frames and placed in pockets. Virtually anything small enough was carried out.’45 Patrick Cockburn recounted his meeting with a 75-year-old merchant who was trying to recover $16,000 in Iraqi dinars and $4,500 in gold taken from his house during a US raid: ‘He showed me an elaborate petition he had sent to Baghdad: an official had scribbled a curt note along the bottom saying the money was being permanently confiscated because a Fedayeen had been found in his house, something the merchant stoutly denied.’46 In this outside area beyond the armies’ occupied spaces, the restraints which govern behaviour at home are often relaxed. An assumption that civilians in the contact zone are ‘other’, outsiders beyond the emotionally comfortable spaces the military occupy, can easily be translated into permissible disrespect for the local environment and its peoples. In Northern France in 1944, French people complained loudly about the way that US soldiers were behaving in their localities: ‘We have more and more Americans in this region and it is a catastrophe for the country because they occupy the pastures. . . . the soldiers pillage everything, steal wood and even the potatoes in our field.’47 In Iraq, farmers in the fruit-growing village of Dhuluaya, north of Baghdad, reported that US soldiers, ‘driving bulldozers and with jazz blaring on loudspeakers’, had destroyed fruit orchards over 70 years old, apparently as part of a policy of collective punishment of farmers who would not give information about attacks on Americans.48 In a populated urban setting, this unrestrained freedom to dominate the

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local environment can produce behaviour which is highly aggressive. In Reims, where a large concentration of US troops was garrisoned for well over a year, there were daily reports of café brawls, and ‘acts of banditry’.49 Senior French officials found themselves harassed in the street by soldiers who became physically violent when the Frenchmen concerned refused to buy goods the Americans were trying to sell them. 50 In Mourmelon and Suippes, close to the US bases, soldiers knocked on the doors of anywhere lighted at night, and even marched into people’s homes demanding cognac: ‘they insist that we open up, and often this leads to fights, and the breaking of windows’.51 The frontier town atmosphere operating in contact zones is clearly one in which both sides – foreign military and local civilians – are presented with attractive opportunities for mutual exploitation and personal enrichment. At the macro level, a market develops around the presence of an army which drastically changes the fundamentals of the indigenous economy. With the injection of hard currency into an area, prices for property and salaries for employees are radically transformed. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, officers from UNPROFOR were typically being charged rents of 600DM, when the average monthly wage was 100DM, while interpreters employed by TRW Incorporated (Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc) to work with the incoming military forces had salaries of $1,000 a month, compared with an average wage in the Tuzla area of around $200. 52 The presence of a military force enables particular groups of local civilians to derive marked economic benefit, and de facto changes some of the balances in the local economy. Robert Barry, reviewing what lessons the Bosnian operations could usefully provide for a new deployment in Kosovo, argued that, ‘We should not let the international agencies and the NGOs coming to Kosovo do what they did in Bosnia  – bid against each other for qualified local staff. Doing so results in people who should be the judges and editors becoming the drivers and interpreters at wages higher than cabinet ministers receive.’53 On a micro level too, at those points where soldiers and civilians meet, the military’s occupation of space provides endless possibilities for profiteering by all sides. In Bosnia, Ukrainian troops became notorious for black marketeering activities, taking advantage of their mobility and access across the front lines in order to stock up with goods in the garrison town of Kiseljak which they could then sell at a profit when they had returned to Sarajevo.54 Press reports in the 1945 Parisian newspapers about the large concentration of American troops in Reims attracted a huge number of petty criminals and black marketeers to the areas immediately around the bases where they stood to make money from illicit trading. Gendarmes at Mourmelon, for example, intercepted a lorry which was regularly making the run from Paris to Reims, carrying 1,088 bottles of Armagnac, originally priced at 400 francs, and now retailing to the Americans at 850.55 Quite apart from these illegal operations, the US authorities complained bitterly about the excessively high prices that were being charged to their soldiers

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for goods outside the barracks, and argued that French civilians were stealing telegraph posts and American canteen food. 56

Fraternization One might assume, however, that more benign soldier/civilian relationships, unmarked by these undersides of occupation, might at least occur through what is generally known as ‘fraternization’, the meeting of military and civilians outside the silos of occupation. The word itself, ‘fraternization’, has of course become loaded with sexual meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘fraternization’ as ‘the cultivation of friendly relations by occupying troops with local inhabitants . . . used especially of relations with German women after the war of 1939–45’, with the further gloss, ‘frat: a woman met by fratting’, and ‘fratter: one who frats’. 57 The connection between the breaking of Allied non-fraternization orders in occupied Germany and sexual activity, the close identification between fraternization and consensual sex, was rapidly established at both an official and a popular level in 1945. The Judge Advocate General advised that American troops should not automatically be punished for suspected fraternization simply because they had to receive treatment for VD. 58 By July 1945, the New Statesman was explaining to its readers that, ‘fraternisation has become a word denoting sexual intercourse’, with the verb ‘fratting’, and the noun ‘frat’, as in ‘my frat’.59 Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, this sexual understanding of ‘fraternization’ has been widely accepted. Thus, for example, Vanessa Kent, discussing how military forces in peace operations have guarded against sexual exploitation and abuse, writes of ‘countries that have successfully implemented strict non-fraternization policies’.60 At the level of sexual criminality – rape – armies can have recourse to their internal legal systems to demonstrate the total unacceptability, the illegality, of such behaviour. Traditionally however, rape is one of our most unreported crimes, so that official figures produced by the military themselves are likely to under-represent the actuality of what has happened. J. Robert Lilly, in his exhaustive study of GI rapes committed during the Second World War, argues that the archived data – nearly 1,000 American soldiers accused of rape, half of whom were convicted – reflects, in all probability, a fraction of the number of crimes actually committed.61 Beyond this recognized, if under-reported, criminality of rape, however, there lies the uncomfortable problematic of consent, the nature of so-called consensual relations between military forces and local civilians, relationships popularly characterized by this portmanteau term ‘fraternization’. The cultural legacy of fraternization, at the opposite end of the relational scale from rape, implies a ‘normal’ relationship of mutuality and consent, as opposed to one of violence and criminal coercion. This manichean distinction between rape and fraternization was if anything reinforced in the

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Second World War by the judicial association between the perpetrators of rape and those who were generally considered to be marginal to US society and to its army, namely black soldiers.62 By indicting and condemning such a large number of black soldiers, the whole issue of criminal sexual relations was positioned on the periphery of what was considered to be the majority behaviour of the US military. In practice however, on the ground of war, the concept of consent, freely given or forced, has always been highly relative. As the Allies entered Germany in World War Two, most German males were absent from sight, either in the army or in Prisoner of War camps, so that the German towns and cities the troops encountered were virtually male-free zones, full of women, the old and the very young. As Petra Goedde argues, this landscape, ‘infused with gendered meaning (created) the perception both among those who held power and those who submitted to it, that the asymmetry between them was a natural phenomenon’.63 In the accounts of British soldiers, the issue of consent in sexual relations between the military forces and local women is generally discussed within this framing of naturalness: ‘fellas obviously wanted to go down the towns and fraternize, go out with girls as men do. . . . there was no way they were going to stop it’; ‘(non-fraternization) almost impossible to enforce. People being what they are. Nature being what it is’.64 In many such memories, sex is seen as part and parcel of an overall colonial transaction between highly unequal forces – ‘Amazing how well chocolate and bars of soap were used to good effect’ – with German women constructed as objects which can, when necessary, be carried off to different locations: ‘A number of NCOs did take German women with them . . . I had them smartly sent back . . . the German women had been transported in army transport.’65 Running through these soldiers’ narratives, there is the sense that it is invariably the woman who crosses the linguistic space, who is forced to speak the occupiers’ language: ‘The girl spoke pretty good English’; ‘She spoke quite good English’; ‘She used to turn up every night at the fence . . . she only had two words of English. “All right!”’66 Communication is overwhelmingly a one-sided affair: ‘as I didn’t know the language. . . . I would only really talk to anybody if they would speak to me in English’.67 In this perspective, mutuality, if gauged by an exchange of communication, is strictly limited, and the giving of consent is framed by the pre-existing inequality of the military/civilian relationship. An intrinsic part of the so-called naturalness of sex in these unequal situations has been what might be described as a sense of military entitlement, and with this an acceptance that hooligan activity associated with seeking out sex is broadly permissible. In the Reims area, where the American authorities had explicitly closed all those brothels formerly used by the Germans, local women were regularly and indiscriminately harassed for sex by groups of American soldiers: ‘they are accosting all the women they meet in the street, and not understanding when they are refused’.68 The aggression indeed grew so intense that a number of ‘indignant Fathers’ decided to form themselves into a vigilante

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group: ‘we can no longer tolerate the vulgarity and attacks perpetrated against our women and girls by the American soldiers’.69 Since the 1970s, this ‘natural’ identification of fraternization with sex has taken on a rather different dimension in response to media attention and to changes in the composition of the army itself. Liberal feminist pressure had persuaded western governments to open many jobs in the military to women, although women were still excluded from units which might have required them to engage in close combat with the enemy.70 By the 1980s, most national army contingents were no longer exclusively male. Indeed, an emerging discourse grounded in an equation of femininity equals peacefulness/ masculinity equals aggression claimed that female soldiers could specifically be an asset in peace operations which were based on consent rather than coercion.71 In addition to the presence of women in the armies of western democracies, the sexual activities of armed forces were now under much greater media scrutiny after incidents like the Tailhook case in the United States, and reports of the sexual exploitation of women by peacekeepers in Cambodia.72 Military authorities became more clearly aware of the possibly negative implications of fraternization with local civilians. As the Commander of the 1st Battalion, the Coldsteam Guards explained in Bosnia/Herzegovina: ‘I think we had a slightly different moral standpoint . . . we’ve left three hundred and fifty wives behind.’ 73 In this situation, the problematics of sexual fraternization have not disappeared, but have rather moved backstage to occupy a space behind the spotlight of official and media attention. During the Second World War, troops disembarking for service in France had been given French vocabulary specifically designed to help them strike up a relationship: ‘Vous avez des yeux charmants’; ‘Vous êtes très belle.’74 Fifty years later, when troops were being prepared for the Bosnia/Herzegovina exercise, such phrases were entirely absent from the official vocabulary lists, lists which would now of course be seen by female as well as male soldiers. Strategies for seduction in the foreign language appeared to be imparted informally. Soldiers often embarrassed female interpreters with their requests for advice in this area: ‘. . . I mean, soldiers, they would always ask, “How do you say good tits?”’75 Rather than incurring problems by engaging with the local civilian population, military forces increasingly displaced sexual fraternization to sites, and thus to women, outside the immediate theatre of war, to Rest and Recreation centres in neighbouring countries for example, or to tacitly approved brothels.76 In a sense, the burden of the crucial distinction between rape and consent, which had largely been borne by those marginal to American society (black troops), was now transposed to countries and groups which were newly marginal to both the army itself, and to the civilians of the country in which the military was operating. There is some evidence, for example, that contemporary armies benefited from the human trafficking of women from countries like Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, women who had generally little or no connection with the locality in which

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the military was operating, an arrangement incidentally which would avoid upsetting civilians in the theatre of operations, including local men who might have objected to even legitimate sexual fraternization. While there was no proof that SFOR (Stabilization Force) soldiers themselves trafficked women in the infamous Arizona Market,77 Human Rights Watch accused eight army contractors from the US firm DynCorn of purchasing and selling Moldovan women for prostitution.78 When there were moves to close Arizona Market down in order to stamp out the trafficking of women, one American colonel recommended that it should remain open as a sexual market, since Times Square in New York City, with its pimps and prostitutes, was after all similarly tolerated. The ‘natural’ framing of fraternization, what Haynes calls the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality,79 was thus displaced to an outside and marginal third party (women trafficked from Eastern Europe) whose ability to refuse consent was even more limited than that of the starving and frightened German women whom the Allies had met in 1945.

The cultural turn and the undersides of occupation These underside violences in contact zones – traffic accidents, the frontier town morality with its agnosticism about property rights, the lack of restraint in personal behaviour and engagement with the local environment and the problematic interpretations of fraternization and sexual consent – lie at the heart of any army occupation. This is violence which seldom results in media attention or criminal proceedings, and has traditionally been of little interest to historians. Despite this general occlusion, however, such behaviour has been a constant of military/civilian relations throughout the twentieth century, and remains equally central to today’s deployments, despite more recent attempts by the military to engage culturally with local populations. As Patrick Porter argues, the marked cultural turn in warfare is less a response to concerns about the quality of troop/civilian encounters, and more a means of addressing recent strategic failures on the part of the US military, a new panacea which can replace the former technology-driven approach to winning wars. Effective counter-insurgency, so the received wisdom now goes, demands above all an informed understanding of the foreign culture in which one will be operating. As David Kilcullen put it: ‘The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counter-insurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place . . . to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment.’80 One need not necessarily endorse the view that Western military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan are in essence cognitive failures81 in order to anticipate that some form of greater cultural awareness among

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the military might indeed help to modify the nature of soldier/civilian meetings on the ground, that this cultural turn could in effect change military behaviour so that the undersides of occupation detailed in this chapter might become a thing of the past. In practice, the cultural turn among the military has largely been framed by approaches drawn from anthropology, a disciplinary domination most famously embodied in the five-person social science teams (Army Human Terrain System) sent in to advise US military commanders in the field in Iraq, supported by data-sets of local information pioneered by the cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate.82 Anthropological models are now a central feature of pre-deployment training packages for the armies of liberal democracies. In perhaps the most developed of these training programmes, that of the US Air Force, the aim has been the generic rather than the specific, ‘culture-general’ competences, rather than ‘culture-specific’ ones: ‘The ability to quickly and accurately comprehend, then appropriately and effectively act, in a culturally complex environment to achieve the desired effect  – without necessarily having prior exposure to a particular group, region or its language.’ Overall, such courses try to ensure that students understand and engage positively with cultural diversity: ‘Cultures are different, not one better.’83 British training programmes similarly adopt this generic perspective. The MOD’s experimental cultural analysis template for instance asked soldiers to consider what historical and ideological impetuses had created the groups they would be meeting: ‘How does the group describe its history and where does it come from? What are the key formative events in the group’s history? . . . Do the group members share religious beliefs . . . What are the important rituals that the group uses?’84 At the root of this training is the desire to create an atmosphere in which military personnel can begin to think about the background of the people they are about to meet. While there is certainly an implicit suggestion that looking at the practices of others may serve to relativize some of our own, this gaze of understanding is resolutely directed outward to the foreign ‘other’, rather than back towards the nature of our own physical presence in the foreign country, and the effects that this might have. Overall, soldiers stand at the centre, with their sensitivities and needs being seen as the key problems which have to be addressed, a self-referencing therapeutic model which assumes that such training should primarily serve to mitigate the inevitable ‘culture shock’ which soldiers will have, enabling them to relax culturally, to become ‘comfortable with difference’.85 There are several problems in expecting this particular style of cultural training to inhibit some of the violences of occupation detailed in this chapter. To begin with, the explicit essentialism in this approach could easily suggest to soldiers that the cultures they meet are bounded artefacts, inescapably conditioned by their own peculiar histories, and hardly subject at all to outside influences or change, in effect a form of ‘military orientalism’ in which the foreign culture is positioned as irredeemably strange, exotic

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and different. For occupying troops who have appropriated land, altered the landscape and renamed their spaces in order to provide themselves with a home away from home, the suggestion that people beyond these spaces are utterly unlike them – an alien species with ‘their ancient hatreds’ and ‘primal urges’86  – does little to encourage greater engagement in the contact zones where both sides actually meet. Indeed, one might argue that constituting the outside space as being utterly different from anything soldiers already know further legitimizes the frontier town morality which is a constant of so many accounts of war. If the space of encounter is so completely different from one’s own home, or one’s occupied home away from home, then alternative behaviours and conduct can continue to be seen as broadly acceptable and permissible. Secondly, this sort of cultural training is entirely outward-facing, urging soldiers to observe others rather than to look back and observe themselves and their behaviour. By constructing an outside ‘other’, the cultural turn implicitly posits the invisibility of the military observers themselves, and the key fact that they are present, occupying a territory which is definitely not their own. At no point are students invited to train their gaze back on the way in which their own military presence is constituted by the appropriation of space, the alteration of landscape and the renaming and owning of the areas in which they are based. By failing to acknowledge the physical and emotional facts of a military presence, such training cannot address the ways in which the inside and outside of occupation are constructed, a construction which is key to creating the contact zones in which army and local civilians actually meet. As Derek Gregory has argued, in such cultural training, ‘The American military is not only redefined . . . but also rehabilitated and repositioned as an innocent and virtuous bystander.’87 In so doing, the undersides of occupation which this chapter has described remain steadfastly hidden and unnamed. A more productive approach to revealing and challenging these invisible violences of occupation may lie in what we might term a hermeneutics of self-reflection, one that is grounded in an assumption of similarity rather than of difference. For Frank Ledwidge, the fundamental point about the contact zone is that it is an area full of ordinary people who have the same sort of concerns as civilians in any other part of the world. He recounts, for example, the limitations of the cultural difference model during a raid in which he participated in southern Iraq: ‘When matters were reduced to their essentials, foreign soldiers had broken into a house and taken its male occupants away into a military base for questioning. Whether one of the foreign soldiers had displayed a modicum of “cultural sensitivity” would hardly matter to those whose home had been violated for, in their eyes, no good reason.’88 Key to this self-reflection is an understanding of the physical and emotional consequences which any military presence has on the landscape, on the reactions of surrounding civilians and on the attitudes adopted by the occupying army itself. Rather than concentrating on outward

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exchanges which are likely to be wordless, or at least clearly dominated by the language of the incoming occupier, self-reflection positions the military within the spaces they are actually occupying, and asks them to take the cognitive leap of imagining how their own alien presence has been created by themselves, and how it is perceived by civilians, by those outside the occupation silo. Attending to the nature of one’s own presence may prove to be infinitely more challenging to the invisible violences of occupation than any attempt to subsume the inevitable asymmetry of military/civilian relationships in cultural training packages. The recent ‘War Story’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London carried an example of one of the ‘Hearts and Minds’ flyers which the British Army had been recently using in Afghanistan. The flyer showed, with pictograms, soldiers rebuilding Afghan houses and schools which had been destroyed. Captain Doug Spencer, who provided the exhibit, commented: ‘If we could even get someone to talk to us, let alone give them a flyer, it would have been a miracle.’89 For both army and civilians, framed as they are by different geographies and distinct time zones, the military presence, no matter what the purpose of the particular mission, and how it may seek to engage constructively with the local population, is always and primarily an occupation of one’s own space by foreigners, an occupation which is emotional and moral as much as it is physical.

Further reading C. Aoi, C. de Coning, and R. Thakur (eds), Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping Operations (Tokyo: UN University Press, 2007) brings together field experience and academic analysis to examine the various effects which a large presence of military/police peacekeepers can have on a host community. Hilary Footitt’s War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) explores the dynamics of military/ civilian relationships ‘on the ground’ between Western armies and French civilians during the Liberation of France in the Second World War (1944–45). Michael Kelly and Catherine Baker, in Interpreting the Peace. Peace Operations, Conflict and Languages in Bosnia/Herzegovina (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), provide a wealth of participant testimony from military and civilians about their experiences of living together in the context of a major peace operation in the 1990s. Annica Kronsell’s Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense. Militarism and Peacekeeping (Oxford: OUP, 2012) explores the construction of sex and gender by the military, using the example of institutional practices and processes in the Swedish army during recent peacekeeping deployments. Patrick Porter’s Military Orientalism. Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst and Company, 2009) is a critical and detailed analysis of the ‘cultural turn’ in contemporary military thought, arguing for an

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understanding that ‘culture’ is a highly problematic term when used by the military in war making.

Notes 1 J. Bordin, A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility: A Red Team Study of Mutual Perceptions of Afghan National Security Force Personnel and US Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed Fratricide- Murders, 12 May 2011, www.michaelyon-online.com/images/pdf/ trust-incompatibility.pdf, accessed 27 January 2012, 14, 15, 19. 2 Lieutenant General D. Petraeus, ‘Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq’, Military Review, January–February 2006, 2–12: 2. 3 See, for example, the BBC News Asia report on this: www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-asia- 1723464, accessed 27 February 2012. 4 M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/New York: Routledge, 2008), 8. 5 For critical views of the genesis and operation of the ‘cultural turn’, see P. Porter, Military Orientalism. Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst and Company, 2009); D. Gregory, ‘“The rush to the intimate”. Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war’, www.maccom./ derekgregory/web/ site/the%/2, accessed 27 February 2012. 6 Archives Départementales (hereafter AD) Marne 3Z/874, Service d’Aide aux Forces Alliées de la Mairie de Reims to Sub-Prefect, 8 May 1945. 7 Interviews by Catherine Baker, 3 November 2009, 26 February 2009, quoted in H. Footitt and M. Kelly (eds), Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 143, 144. 8 A. Picquenot, Cherbourg sous l’occupation (Cherbourg: Ouest-France, 1983), 43. 9 National Archives (US) Rpt CA Detachment A1A1, June–August 1944, SHAEF files, G-5, 17.23, Hist. Rpts. Cherbourg, Jkt.1. 10 K. Whitteaker, ‘Romanian Engineers de-launch Perle Bridge’, SFOR Informer, 29 August, 2002, www.nato.int/sfor/indexinf/146/p04a/102p04a.htm, accessed 29 November 2010. 11 P. Cockburn, The Occupation. War and Resistance in Iraq (London/New York: Verso, 2007), 123. 12 A. Brossat, Libération, fête folle, 6 juin 1944- mai 1945:mythes et rites, ou le grand théâtre des passions populaires (Paris: Editions Autrement, Série Mémoires, no.30, 1994), 8. 13 The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA) FO 1014/26, Clegg Report, 31 May 1948. 14 K. Coles, Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 63.

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15 G. Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 202, quoted in Gregory, ‘“The Rush to the Intimate”’, 2. 16 Interview by Catherine Baker, May 2010, quoted in Footitt and Kelly, Languages at War, 146. 17 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 32. 18 Imperial War Museum Sound Archives (hereafter IWMSA) 20894, recorded 2000. 19 IWSA 20894, recorded 2000. 20 TNA FO 1014/26, Clegg Report, 31 May 1948. 21 Coles, Democratic Designs, 64. 22 R. Stewart, Occupational Hazards. My time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006), 170. 23 La Presse Cherbourgeoise, no.74, 26 September 1944. Trans. author. 24 F. Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars. British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York/London: Yale University Press, 2011), 85. 25 AD Bouches-du-Rhône 150W 178, 20 November 1944. 26 Midi-Soir, 27 November 1944. Trans. author. 27 A. Stil, Le premier choc (Paris: Les Editeurs réunis, 1951), 111. 28 Interview, Catherine Baker, 18 November 2009, quoted in Footitt and Kelly, 148. 29 B. Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from below: UN Missions and Local People (London: Hurst, 2006), 167–8. 30 Bordin, A Crisis of Trust, 19. 31 L. Jašarević, ‘Everyday Work: Subsistence Economy, Social Belonging and Moralities of Exchange at a Bosnian (Black) Market’, in X. Bougarel, G. Duijzings, E. Helms (eds), The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 273–93: 274. 32 P. Andreas, ‘Symbiosis between Peace Operations and Illicit Business in Bosnia’, International Peacekeeping, 16.1 (2009), 33–46: 42. 33 P. Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2007), 42–3. 34 D. Haynes, ‘Lessons from Bosnia’s Arizona Market: Harm to Women in a Neoliberalist Postconflict Reconstruction Process’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 158.6 (May 2010), 1780–829. 35 High Representative Wolfgang Petrisch, quoted in Haynes, ‘Lessons from Bosnia’s Arizona Market’, 1797. 36 Andreas, Symbiosis, 42. 37 Cockburn, The Occupation, 172, 173. 38 Stewart, Occupational Hazards, 72. 39 AD Marne 16W/266, Lt. Col. de Messy to Commissaire de la République, 19 September 1945. Trans. Author.

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40 AD Marne 132W/276, Renseignements Généraux, 25 June 1946. Trans. author. 41 AD Marne 130W/10, Renseignements Généraux to Paris, 16 January 1945. Trans. Author. 42 Bordin, A Crisis of Trust, 14. 43 Imperial War Museum (hereafter IWM), Mme. de Vigneral, 78/35/1. 44 IWM, R. F. Songhurst, 86/24/1. 45 J. Crawford, The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 47. 46 Cockburn, 124. 47 TNA WO219 1792B, Censorship Civil Communications, Record 1304, 9 October 1944. 48 Cockburn, The Occupation, 125. 49 See for example the list in AD Marne 161W 323, Note from Renseignements Généraux, 22 October 1945; Letter Sicre to Thrasher, 17 October 1945. Trans. Author. 50 AD Marne 130W 11, Regional Director of Information to Commissaire Central, 13 July 1945. 51 AD Marne 16W 268, Service Départemental des Renseignements Généraux to Commissaire de la République, 26 June 1945. Trans. author. 52 S. Hopkins, ‘Interpreter Translates for Peace’, Charlotte Observer, 28 January 2001. 53 R. Barry, ‘Lessons Learned from Bosnia’, Helsinki Monitor, 3 (1999), 100–2, 102. 54 Andreas, Blue Helmets, 36. 55 AD Marne 16W 323, Commissaire de la République to Ministère de l’Intérieur, 13 August 1945. 56 AD Marne 16W 266, Commissaire de la République to Sub-Prefect Reims, 20 October 1944; AD 16W 266, Commissaire de la République to Commander 6th Legion Gendarmerie, 23 January 1945; AD 130W 10, Renseignements Généraux, report on meeting of Syndicat du Bâtiment, 29 January 1945; AD 130W 10, 1 March 1945. 57 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1989, Vol. VI), 151, 152. 58 D. Browder, Americans in Post-World War II Germany (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 11. 59 New Statesman, 14 July 1945, 20/3. 60 V. Kent, ‘Protecting Civilians from UN Peacekeepers and Humanitarian Workers: Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’, in C. Aoi, C. de Coning, R. Thakur (eds),Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping Operations (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2007), 44–66: 53. 61 J. Lilly, La Face cachée des GI’s: les viols commis par des soldats américains en France, en Angleterre et en Allemagne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Payot, 2003), 40.

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62 See figures in Lilly, La Face cachée, 258–67. See also A. Kaplan, The Interpreter (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 63 P. Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations, 1945–49 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2003), xxi; also P. Goedde, ‘From Villains to Victims: Fraternization and the Feminisation of Germany, 1945–47’, Diplomatic History, 23.1 (1999), 1–20. 64 IWMSA 20202, recorded 2000; 20894, recorded 2000. 65 IWMSA 13420, recorded 1993; 17330, recorded 1997. 66 IWMSA 22370, recorded 2002; 24611, recorded 2002; 20370, recorded 2000. 67 IWMSA 18706, recorded 1999. 68 AD Marne 161W 323, Service des Renseignements Généraux, 6 July 1945. Trans. author. 69 AD Marne 16W 266, Unsigned letter to Mayor of Troyes, 8 August 1945. Trans. author. 70 R. Woodward and T. Winter, Sexing the Soldier: The Politics of Gender and the Contemporary British Army (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 53–6. 71 G. DeGroot, ‘A Few Good Women: Gender Stereotypes, the Military and Peacekeeping’, International Peacekeeping, 8.2 (2001), 23–38, 33–5. 72 C. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); S. Whitworth, Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004). 73 Interview, Catherine Baker, May 2009, quoted in Footitt and Kelly, 157. 74 Stars and Stripes, 15 September 1944; 13 February 1945, ‘You Have Lovely Eyes’, ‘You Are Very Beautiful’. 75 Interview, Catherine Baker, 18 November 2009, quoted in Footitt and Kelly, 157. 76 C. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 77 Haynes, ‘Lessons from Bosnia’s Arizona Market’, 2010. 78 Human Rights Watch, Hopes Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Bosnia and Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution (Washington DC: Human Rights Watch, 2002), 63–8. 79 Haynes, ‘Lessons from Bosnia’s Arizona Market’, 1797. 80 D. Kilcullen, ‘Religion and Insurgency’, Small Wars Journal Blog, 12 May 2007, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/religion-and-insurgency, accessed 16 September 2011. 81 Porter, Military Orientalism, 7. 82 M. McFate, ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary, Joint Force Quarterly, 38 (2004), 42–8; ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship’, Military Review, March–April 2005, 24–38.

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83 R. Sands, ‘The Importance of Culture General in Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence’, unpublished paper presented at Culture in Conflict Symposium, UK Defence Academy, 17 June 2009. 84 K. Tomlinson, ‘How Societies Operate’, unpublished paper presented at Culture in Conflict Symposium, UK Defence Academy, 17 June 2009. 85 D. Bosch, ‘A Cross-Cultural Training Model for the Dutch Military: A Possible Framework’, unpublished paper presented at Culture in Conflict Symposium, UK Defence Academy, 17 June 2009. 86 Quoted in Porter, Military Orientalism, 193. 87 Gregory, ‘“The Rush to the Intimate”’, 42. 88 Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, 201. 89 ‘War Story: Serving in Afghanistan’, exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, 28 October 2011–30 November 2012.

CHAPTER NINE

Writing War in the Enemy Tongue: Symbolism, Realism and Surrealism in Francophone Novels of Algeria’s War of Independence Sara Poole*

The fact of combat, and the arts of writing or of painting are, famously, far from incompatible. Goya’s El Tres de Mayo 1808 (1814), for example, or John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1919), or again Picasso’s Guernica (1937) are works iconic of the dehumanizing nature of war. Their painters created art out of horror and offer us unforgettable dramatic images that require no verbal elucidation. Within the confines of the written word, poetry is arguably the genre which, in its intimacy and immediacy, can claim best to lend itself to the evocation of the anguish, anger and bewilderment with which war confronts the individual; many readers who might otherwise never open a book of poems have memorized verses by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender, or again Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard or Jacques Prévert. This is not to suggest that novels depicting war or its aftermath do not abound; it is rather that, while other forms of écriture de combat such as memoirs, plays, chronicles and other such testimonies seem particularly suited to the task of conveying the impact of conflict, the novel can display more of a tendency to get enmeshed in patriotic didacticism or

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partisan stereotyping. Crane, Remarque, Hemingway, Boulle, Heller  – a few moments’ thought will of course cast up the authors of truly great exceptions. But the adjustment from peacetime to being ‘at war’ overnight; the sense of confusion that must always accompany this change of status; the suddenness with which a wounded friend becomes a corpse . . . such matters can be deemed the stuff of more spare, more concise genres. As Jan Goes has observed, in comparison with poetry, ‘it is doubtless true that the novel lends itself somewhat less to cries of distress or calls to arms’.1 And as Christiane Achour has stressed, ‘When conflict breaks out, novel-writing gives way to forms of writing that are more incisive, more alert, more immediate, more easily transmissible.’2 The 1954–62 Algerian War of Independence is one example among many of a conflict giving rise to some mediocre, but equally several memorable, novels which take the ‘war without a name’ – the eight-year conflict was officially recognized as a war in French law only in 1999 – as subject, as backdrop, or as both simultaneously. 3 The present essay seeks to juxtapose a selection of those written by indigenous Algerian novelists in order to explore the various strategies adopted by writers seeking to evoke that atmosphere of confusion, violence and sorrow against which combat plays out. In the early to middle years of the twentieth century, colonial Algeria boasted several distinguished French Algerian authors, of whom Albert Camus and Emmanuel Roblès are probably the best known. It was Roblès who launched publisher Le Seuil’s ‘Méditerranée’ collection in the 1950s, thereby offering native Arab and Kabyle writers of French expression a platform and introducing their work to a French readership. These indigenous writers  – members, by virtue in particular of the education they had received, of the elite of ‘les Français musulmans’ (the Muslim French, as Metropolitan France had it)  – were naturally concerned to portray, principally to a metropolitan French/Parisian readership, both the specific circumstances of this anti-colonial war of independence in their own country, and the more universal aspects of the effects of all prolonged armed conflict. Thus their various attitudes to, for example, the obligation they were under (as ex-pupils of the French education system) to write in the language of the oppressor – usually the only language they knew how to write in – constitute a phenomenon particular to this anti-colonial war as waged at this particular time. But the wider considerations to which their circumstances – that is the fact of war – gave rise could lead, for example, to an examination of the role or purpose of the intellectual in national revolution, and thereby extend the relevance of their literary exploration of conflict and its effects far beyond the single ‘case’ of the Algerian fight for independence. Possibly their major concern  – one whose significance and whose repercussions transcend their individual and their national circumstances to become universal – might best be formulated thus: How were they to

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convey the impotence of the exiled, the bewilderment and fear of the occupied, the horror of conflict to an as yet unhealed world for whom World War Two was ever present in the suffering, deprivation and ruin it left in its wake? Comparably, perhaps, to the issue of the role to be played by the educated elite in their country’s struggle, this particular question would have a direct bearing on the style and structure of the novels they would write, influencing not only what they wrote, but how they chose to write it. Published poet Malek Haddad, first of the three writers discussed here, would bring to his novel-writing a fondness for surreal imagery and a lyricism some critics found unsettling.4 Mouloud Mammeri, whose first novel The Forgotten Hill (La Colline oubliée), lauded by the French press was, in large part for that very reason, castigated as collaborationist by the influential critic of Le Jeune Musulman, would opt in his third for an unflinching realism some deemed wearying.5 And established author Mohammed Dib would plunge into a delirious nightmare which at least one reviewer would find excessively vertiginous.6 Each novelist, however, would leave his mark on a literature striving to reach – and specifically, to make its case to – the readers of the country that had colonized their own for over a century.

Symbolism: Malek Haddad What is often considered the first novel ‘of’ the Algerian War of Independence, Malek Haddad’s La Dernière Impression (The Last Impression; 1958; henceforth Impression), is the only one of his four novels whose action is situated in Algeria rather than in France, where he was exiled.7 In common with all his fiction and some of his poetry, Impression charts the coming to awareness of an intellectual protagonist  – in this case the Constantine engineer Saïd – who is trying to ascertain how he fits into the conflict developing around him. Shot through with lines of free verse and clusters of alexandrines, prone to a kind of frenzied filigree of word-play and metaphor, Haddad’s prose can disconcert, if not exasperate: Jacqueline Arnaud, for example, who wrote the first ever thèse d’état (higher thesis) on Algerian literature in French, disparages what she terms Haddad’s ‘lyrical juggling, more pretentious than it seems’.8 Len Ortzen, however, was of the opinion that on occasion his prose ‘sparkles like the desert sand’.9 What is incontrovertibly the case is that Haddad’s is a representational approach, in that he selects symbols to carry the weight of the dilemmas in which his main characters find themselves, allowing the multi-faceted significance of those symbols to percolate through the prose. As Impression opens Saïd, whose first major construction project was a bridge shortening a journey by 60 kilometres, is trying to come to terms with the knowledge that to further the fight for independence, it must be

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destroyed; the request has come from the FLN (National Liberation Front). Not that he will himself be required to blow it up: he had just been ‘consulted on technical matters; on how to do it, and where the most vulnerable points were’.10 Saïd, in love with Lucia, a teacher come to Constantine from France, is acutely aware of the symbolism of bridges: his own romantic relationship has formed another kind of bridge, this one between two cultures, or between colonizer and colonized. So too has the marriage of his uncle Idir, a doctor settled in Paris and whose French wife is pregnant, and also the success of his brother-in-law, Chérif, an official at the local tax office, and now pretty much become ‘your average Frenchman’.11 But as Saïd ponders the logic – the necessity, the morality – of blowing up a bridge that three men died building, other bridges crumble around him, casualties of the growing animosity and conflict. His dying grandmother’s last words to his uncle Idir reject her coming grandchild outright: ‘So you’re expecting a child? You can call him François and he’ll go to school in Paris’, she tells her son tartly.12 Chérif, ostracized by his French colleagues, is watching his carefully constructed assimilationist lifestyle break apart and failing to persuade Saïd’s sister, his wife, to come to France with him. And then Lucia, Saïd’s lover, is killed by a stray bullet, and her body is swiftly expatriated to Aix-en Provence. In a daze, Säid makes the journey to see Lucia’s grave and to meet her parents, and it is on the return boat journey, on yet another bridge – ‘the bridge of an old tub heading towards its fate’13 – that he makes his decision to act; to join the fight as his brother has. Shortly before he is shot dead and the novel ends, he learns that his own bridge has been destroyed. Haddad writes of the death of Saïd – and of the destruction of the bridge – in terms he will elsewhere use to describe his own generation of Algerian writers. A colonial aberration led to the existence of this literature written in the language of the colonizer, and new generations will have to write new texts in a new language – or in terms of bridges: Saïd’s generation was a generation that built bridges – bridges of goodwill. But bridges have to be blown up. They were blown up. Ali had told Saïd: ‘You’ll build others.’ But is not Saïds who will build bridges. All the Saïds have disappeared, or will disappear with the last bridges. Saïd’s generation was a very hot dream in a frozen desert.14 Haddad’s second novel, Je t’offrirai une Gazelle (I’ll bring you a gazelle; 1959; henceforth Gazelle), dealing with the war from the impotent, anguished viewpoint of the exiled, similarly revolves around a multiply charged totem, here the gazelle of the title, a ‘very famous symbol interpreted thousands of times’, as Doris Fetscher has it.15 Culturally and linguistically cleft down the middle in the ‘blue prison’ – ‘blue’ because of the revolving lights atop the police cars – that is Paris, Haddad’s unnamed protagonist,

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identified simply as ‘the author’, is confused, angry and more often than not inebriated in a nervous capital city bristling with identity checks and police round-ups. Even propping up a bar has become complicated: ‘Hey, you. I. D.’ People shouldn’t say ‘Hey, you’. People shouldn’t ever say ‘Hey, you.’ Because afterwards, things can go too far – much too far. Torture starts with ‘Hey, you.’ From a corner of the bar, a drunk announces: ‘I fought in the First World War.’ He’s drunk. But it is true that he fought in the First World War.’ ‘I don’t give a shit. I. D.’ ‘What do you do?’ a policeman asks the author. ‘I get drunk,’ explains the author. ‘That’s not a job. Don’t you get clever with me!’ Would he recognise clever if it hit him in the face? the author wonders.’16 The anonymous author submits a novel for publication, slipping his manuscript onto an unmanned desk, beside an eraser, next to a waste-paper basket. His book recounts a Saharan love-affair between star-crossed lovers. In it the 17-year-old Yaminata, promised to the rich Kabèche, has asked a single present of Moulay, the hero, her lover: ‘I’d like you to bring me a gazelle, a live gazelle. Gazelles are only gazelles if they’re alive.’17 This Saharan narrative alternates in the novel with that of the unnamed author, functioning rather as sanctuary for him. Moving between these two narratives Haddad, who like his protagonist is an Algerian writer exiled in France, seeks to bring Algeria to Paris, painfully aware that ‘between Paris and Algiers there aren’t 2,000 kilometres – there are four years of war’.18 In the Saharan tale Moulay, lost and dying of thirst in the desert, encounters what is ‘perhaps’ a real gazelle, which informs him: ‘It’s crazy to want to catch me, Moulay. You’ve got to believe in me, but not pursue me.’19 And it is for the reader to decide if the antelope represents liberty; free Algeria; the future – or a mixture of aims that Haddad, killing off his hero, presumably felt incapable of offering him during those middle years of a war whose outcome was decidedly uncertain. Meanwhile, in France, the nameless protagonist of the Parisian strand of this novel comes upon and purchases a stuffed gazelle, which he drunkenly offers to Gisèle, the publisher who has fallen in love with him. Paris, it would seem, unlike Algeria, can only offer dead gazelles. The author, crippled with self-doubt, then dreams about a friend of his who  – in his

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dream – is very scathing about his novel, deeming it superficial, a betrayal of Algeria and of the times in which they are living: ‘Our people, who are fighting a war, don’t give a damn about your gazelle.’20 As the novel closes, the anonymous author takes the decision, prefigured by the eraser and the waste-bin, to withdraw his book from publication. In Impression, Saïd’s, and all the figurative bridges echoing it, are destroyed. In Gazelle, one narrative is tragic, the other hopeless. Moulay dies on his quest to bring Yaminata a live gazelle, and in Paris the author brings to a close his romance with a young German girl, his relationship with his publisher, and the process by means of which his work would have reached a public readership. The poetic symbolism of both novels works to convey a sense of waste, of bewilderment, of lack of direction, against the background of a conflict to which no end was in sight. The first holds up to question the value of all links – or bridges – made between the colonized and the colonizer; the second challenges the integrity of a novel, as written in the language of the colonizer, if it is not openly engagé  – politically committed. Both are novels essentially of waiting; in Gazelle and two further novels, Haddad depicts alienated Algerian intellectuals, exiled to France by the ‘colonial authorities’ and looking on, frustrated, disempowered. These are novels less about than of war. Later, that war finally won, Haddad, unable to write in any language other than French, was incapable of reconciling the fact of writing in the language of the colonizer with his country’s hard-won independence. Believing in linguistic Arabization as a step towards distancing Algeria’s colonial heritage, but unable to write in Arabic, he chose instead to lay down his pen.

Realism: Mouloud Mammeri In contrast to Malek Haddad, and in common with many writers less talented than himself, Kabyle writer Mouloud Mammeri would choose to employ in his own war novel what Joan Monegro would qualify as ‘great realism’.21 Anthropologist, ethnographer, playwright and novelist, Mammeri witnessed first-hand the beginnings of his country’s fight for independence, being in the capital during the battle of Algiers. Hence the authority and authenticity of his L’Opium et le Bâton (henceforth L’Opium), which appeared in 1965, three years after the signing of the Evian accords which recognized Algeria as an independent country. In this his third novel Mammeri, like Haddad, selects as protagonist an educated man, Dr Bachir Lazrak. Lazrak, a Kabylian, leads a comfortable life in Algiers with his French mistress, and is keeping his head firmly in the sand as the conflict escalates, desperate not to have to make a decision or take a stand. However, circumstances will force Lazrak to acknowledge and then

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to participate in the armed struggle, from which he will emerge dissatisfied, embittered, but conscious that he has acted in the only way possible. Mammeri was concerned among other things to show the effect of the conflict on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people; veracity and accuracy were crucial. Indeed, it was to him axiomatic that ‘the novelist’s first duty is that of being truthful’. 22 Thus in L’Opium, genuine headlines from the daily Echo d’Alger and quotations from news bulletins broadcast on Radio Monaco and Radio Algiers are used from the first to plunge the reader into the reality of the conflict that Lazrak is trying not to think about. His friend Ramdane, a teacher disapproving of his lethargy, situates the action in 1957 in the opening pages, by referring to ‘what has been happening in this country over the past three years’ and commenting on events being played out at that precise time: ‘General Massu has been given full powers over the whole of the greater Algiers region’, he reads out from the Echo, pointedly. 23 Several thinly disguised portraits of recognizable individuals are also incorporated into this novel. Thus for example, as Marta Segarra (citing a paper by Annie Dayan-Rosenman) reminds us, the young French soldier George who, realizing the prisoner he has been ordered to guard, Ali, is due to be thrown from a helicopter, decides to liberate his captive and throw his lot in with the FLN, is drawn from a real-life example. 24 Sergeant Noël Favrelière had by his own account questioned his role from the moment he was sent to Algeria: ‘This time, I said to myself, it’s you who’ll be the Boche and be fighting the resistance’ – and following the actions fictionalized by Mammeri, would be sentenced to death twice, by the French Ministry of justice, and by a court-martial in Constantine. 25 Violence and torture are constants from the moment we witness French soldiers attacking the youngster who approaches Lazrak in a quest for help for a wounded FLN fighter. Prior to the saving of Ali by Georges we, and they, see another prisoner meet the fate promised him. Having been tortured, he has been pushed into a helicopter, described as ‘a flying banana’, which takes off and circles: ‘See,’ said Georges. ‘You lot kill us, and we lay on free plane trips for you.’ Suddenly there was a wild cry and the banana spat out a small round ball. First it was scrunched up, but then it grew arms and legs which writhed wildly against the sky. And Omar crashed to the ground. 26 We also witness a new-born baby taken from his freshly widowed mother and used as hostage. We observe the silent anguish of the villagers of Tala, Lazrak’s birthplace, as they are forced at gunpoint to chop down the ancient olive trees upon which their livelihood depends. And when Akli, an injured FLN fighter, has to cut off his own nearly severed arm to avoid capture, we

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are given a very vivid, clinical description of the medical treatment he later receives for the wound: The nurse took a hacksaw and began to cut the long bone. Akli didn’t cry out. The pain was atrocious. Large tears rolled down his cheeks; he swallowed some of them [. . .] The doctor whistled when he saw Akli’s stump. Akli looked down. Something long and whitish was hanging from his wound. It was round and stiff. ‘That’s the marrow’, said the doctor. He made a sharp cut with his scalpel. The marrow dropped to the floor. 27 Finally, as the deadly cat-and-mouse game the villages are forced to play gets ever more complicated, with firearms to be concealed, husbands to mourn, food rations in the control of corrupt informers and hungry children to nourish, we also witness the destruction of the village, shelled into nothingness around the body of one of its activist sons who is watched over till the end by the woman who loved him. The verisimilitude of Mammeri’s realistic depiction of combat, torture, injury and fear is indisputable. That L’Opium et le Bâton (unlike the film based upon it) was not a critical success is in part, it would seem, owing to precisely this aspect of the novel. Joan Monego feels that ‘the realistic concrete depictions of the evils wrought by war are somewhat repetitive’, 28 while Hédi Abdeljaouad is openly dismissive, writing that the novel ‘rarely transcends the documentation of reality, and when it does, it often falls into stereotypical characterization’. 29 As this and many lesser ‘war novels’ would seem to illustrate, remorselessly detailed verbal representation of reality, however vivid and dramatic the prose, does not suffice to produce a memorable and moving novel of conflict. This may have been something Mammeri himself grew to feel; the closing lines of L’Opium show Dr Bachir Lazrak picking up a newspaper in the aim of reassuring himself that Far from the hell we’re all living here, men take walks in woods, go dancing, go to work or to the local store. What a waste of effort! On each page of my newspaper, somewhere under the sun, tragedy was breeding tragedy. No need to dramatize, even; reality far outstripped mere words.30

Surrealism: Mohammed Dib For the distinguished critic of Francophone North African literature, Charles Bonn, neither Haddad nor Mammeri had quite contrived to write the novel the war deserved and required. This feat had, he felt, been achieved by a writer expelled from Algeria in 1959 after publishing a naturalistic trilogy portraying the poverty he had seen around him in his hometown of Tlemcen. ‘Only Mohammed Dib’s Qui se souvient de la mer [Who remembers the

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sea, 1962] seems to me to give the conflict its true stature’, wrote Bonn of Dib’s short, startling and disconcerting fifth novel. 31 Qui se souvient de la mer (henceforth Qui) is an apocalyptic nightmare of a novel. It depicts life, with its daily violence and confusion and fear, in an anonymous North African town, which is under siege during an unspecified period. Where Haddad opted for a few select symbols couched in poetic prose, and Mammeri chose to employ brutal realism, Dib produced a multi-layered, fantastical allegory-cum-hallucination that bewilders as it intrigues. Or as Naget Khadda has neatly summed up, Dib ‘seeks to give an account of the real by disregarding the verisimilitudinal’. 32 Thus the town around which the protagonist wanders is characterized by division and, essentially, psychosis. The ‘original’ city is under attack, and another town, that of the enemy, encroaches upon it, the two places seeming to occupy the same space and thus recalling the opening pages of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth; 1962) where we learn that the settlers’ town, made of iron and stone, contrasts with that of the colonized people, constructed of hovels, a town brought to its knees. Both, of course, occupy the same space. Dib’s town is the scene of strange phenomena: beneath it, we learn, a giant mole is burrowing; within and around it, clandestine construction projects are taking place: The new buildings keep on erupting, breathing over us day and night. They advance, arrogant and lethal, crushing everything in their path. How many bodies have been absorbed in their foundations, digested by the air of their walls! A horrifying number. Not to mention those displayed on their roofs every day at dawn. 33 With this constantly shifting cityscape-cum-power-struggle as background, Dib constructs a terrifying vision which has inspired Louis Tremaine to observe that no-one else has ‘captured the Algerian revolution with as much intensity or immediacy’.34 He establishes a double-stranded narrative wherein his anonymous male narrator, dreaming ever more frequently in these troubled times about his mother, periodically recounts episodes from a childhood spent in the ruined family château, where life was lonely, but much safer and predictable than the present. Solitary son of an unemotional, distant father, he lived ‘in the unconfessed fear that the world would turn over, back to front’, which indeed in several senses it has. 35 He further complicates this dual structure by changing tenses within the narratives and having his protagonist’s wife assume towards him a much more obviously maternal role than has his mother. At the same time, Dib creates a network of archetypal symbols (the sea of the title; the underworld; labyrinths, minotaurs, statues) much of it redolent of Jungian imagery, simultaneously mixing his metaphors to obliterate living/dead, mechanical/natural, abstract/concrete dichotomies, so that words turn to stone, the sea appears and disappears, walls move

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to trap petrified inhabitants and stars disintegrate. Snatches of song, for example, become both visible and tangible, equating to lamentation, to rumour, but perhaps also to resistance – or to the cries of the tortured: A little babbling song could be heard on the lips of the wind. Crying, they went to see the Hospodar, while the song ingenuously wrapped itself around their legs, and the women, entreating, fell to their knees in front of the minotaurs posted there as sentinels, kissing their hands and holding out the infants they were carrying. A faint but persistent melody on a flute butted stubbornly against their legs and stomachs. In the distance can be heard a chorus of men’s voices, whose singing, in turn, ends up drowning out the percussion [. . .] But suddenly a terrifying silence descends, and the ranting starts up again, this time dominated by the vocalises of the deceased star, which from this moment climb higher and higher.36 And in addition, this poet-novelist who had never read any works of science fiction plunges instinctively into that genre (as would Kurt Vonnegut with his own novel of war, Slaughterhouse Five) by inventing monstrous machines – one of which apparently consumes time, and also the narrator, later regurgitating him reformed from a previously unknown material. Humpty Dumpty-like, Dib also spikes his text with neologisms and with re-appropriated words – ‘spyrovir’, ‘iriace’, ‘minotaur’, ‘Hospodar’ – which he then endows with multiple, and multiply confusing, significance. Hassan El Nouty was the first critic to put his finger on precisely why this mix works so well: It would doubtless have been possible to obtain the same amazing effect by replacing the machine that kills time with a magic wand, Aladdin’s lamp or some other accessory from ye olde magic shoppe. But that would have been to turn to out-of-date fantasy. The marvellous, as formulated in the modern vernacular, is science-fiction.37 Thus Dib’s anonymous protagonist  – an Everyman caught up in the bewilderment of this besieged city where words turn literally to stone as they leave mouths, and where walls take on lives of their own to create instantaneous labyrinths – is constantly trying and failing to impose some kind of order on his ever-shifting surroundings. Husband to a woman who is evidently working, ‘underground’, towards the destruction of the invasive ‘new constructions’ threatening the petrified inhabitants, he is, as Araceli Hernández-Laroche has it, bearing witness ‘to the trauma of a population’, a population that is gradually ‘radicalizing for its survival’.38 He takes long walks to try to distract himself from the horrors surrounding him and turns instead to observing, in minute detail, the activity of the air-born ‘iriaces’. We cannot of course be sure

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precisely what ‘iriaces’ are – helicopters? spies? a sinister amalgam of enemy threats? – but the fact that all identification must remain conjecture allows us to burden them with many different interpretations simultaneously (the word is for example, among other things, an anagram of the French for Icaria  – Icarie – the island in the Aegean off which flying, sun-besotted Icarus crashed into the sea . . .). But we do know that they form part of the enemy force, and are thus a logical target of the somewhat inconclusive surveillance the narrator undertakes, and which he describes in what we sense is comforting detail. ‘I’m trying to lay the foundations for a new sort of scientific study I could call the Theory of Iriace Behaviour’, he reveals, trying to give sense to his days of fear and helplessness. ‘I’m keeping a record of the direction, frequency and times of their departures and returns.’39 Inevitably, to the twenty-first-century reader, as Hernández-Laroche observes, these ‘bizarre creatures terrorizing from the skies urban dwellers in Dib’s novel eerily foreshadow our own drone attacks’.40 Around the narrator, people and structures disappear or are disappeared without rhyme or reason. His neighbour Ismaël is one; his grieving wife becomes ‘a stream of blood that poured out of the house, through the hall, under the padlocked door’, and now ‘each time we come in and out we have to step over it’.41 And behind, beyond or around this beleaguered town can on occasion be glimpsed the sea of the title, no simple expanse of tidal water, but a Bachelardian, powerful, living force, seen both drawing back from, and making progress into, this chilling urban labyrinth. With regard to so major a repeated symbol, the reader grasps at significance where (s)he can, picking up references, homing in on analogies. Thus, writing warmly of his wife Nafissa, mother (la mère) of his children, who is likely to be called on for assistance, the narrator goes on to evoke the sea (la mer) in the sentence following on from his description of her, thereby linking the two over and above their homophonic bond: Nafissa will ‘have to offer care, cure, comfort. The sea, contrary to what we may think, is not sorrowful when it is waiting for the night; stars are already moving within it’.42 Sometimes the sea can make no progress: ‘This morning’, we are told at one point, ‘the sea can’t see how to penetrate the heart, whichever way it rolls in.’43 Towards the end of the novel, however, as some of the ‘new buildings’ are blown up, the sea is powerful, triumphant: The sea! It was back, in a dizzying burst of laughter: the walls tied themselves together, slithering as fast as they could, and then suddenly reared up, meeting above the town, creating a new night within the nights that was lit up by a storm of spyrovirs.44 And when the narrator too goes underground, the sea is ever-present in his thoughts, as is evinced by the last line of the novel: ‘I consider, and I remember the sea.’45 Critics have of course hazarded various interpretations of many of the symbols woven into the mesh that is Qui se souvient de la

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mer, but it seems logical to assume that the sea is a manifestation of the collective soul, or unconscious, or thirst for freedom, of the Algerian people, waxing and waning, ebbing and flowing according to their circumstances, and dependent upon the outlook for their future. Dib’s famous epilogue explains his rejection of any form of writing that would merely have contributed a further description of horrors and atrocity. He had asked himself the bald question: How do you talk about Algeria after Auschwitz, after the Warsaw ghetto, after Hiroshima? and sought to answer it in this novel: ‘Dreamlike and apocalyptic visions were the only lamps capable of shedding some light on such abysses.’46 Via his anonymous protagonist, who may or may not be entirely sane, he succeeded, as Louis Tremaine indicates, in exploring ‘the deformation that the human psyche undergoes by way of adaptation to uncontrollable violence and chaos’47 and in doing so, offers a haunting evocation of the brutal and traumatic experience of war in a terrorized urban landscape which extends imaginatively far beyond an anonymous town in North Africa. In her wide-ranging study of the twentieth century (principally Anglophone) approach to writing war, Margot Norris suggests that, after World War Two, ‘the scale and intensity of the violence threatened to sever art’s expressive connection to war altogether’.48 One specific challenge of war writing, she notes, is how to make ‘its sense of experienced “unreality”, real’. Each of the writers discussed here chose a different approach to this dilemma. The hyper-realist flavour of Mammeri’s L’Opium was in fact thought by some critics to lend itself less to the written than the visual medium; the film version met with a more positive critical response than did the novel, despite a truncated opening and consequent shifting of focus.49 Conversely, Dib’s Qui, and Haddad’s Gazelle if not his Impression, might constitute evidence of their author’s vulnerability to what Norris chooses to see as ‘the temptations of genres of the unreal, the abnormal, and the extreme’. But while they may thus have to shoulder what she terms the ‘ideological freight’ of ‘pathology, and irrationality’, they do not do so gratuitously. By their use of a network of rich, mythological symbols, by their subversion of single, linear, chronological narratives, by the blurring of temporal indicators and of boundaries between the real, and the imagined or dreamed, such works function on multiple levels, and present the reader with the most unsettling of scenarios to negotiate. A fitting attribute of writing seeking to evoke the havoc wreaked by war and occupation, specific and general, in their traumatized century? To Mammeri, novelist but equally one time Director of the Algiers Centre for Anthropological, Prehistoric and Ethnographic Research and founder of the Center for Amazigh (Berber) Studies and Research in Paris, the last word: When historians write the history of the Algerian war, it will be a history that has already been reduced to set formulas, to events suitable for inclusion in textbooks – events that will, in a sense, have lost the flesh

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and blood that made them important. But novelists restore all the life, the drama, the living experience to this war of liberation. And that’s something only novelists can do.50

Further reading Much of the critical material devoted to the novels of the Algerian War of Independence is in French. However, Joan Monego’s Maghrebian Literature in French (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984) provides a good introduction to this literature in general, and Ena C. Vulor’s Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000) is of particular interest with regard to Dib and Mammeri. S. Poole, ‘Commuting the “sentences” of Malek Haddad’, in L. Ibnlfassi and N. Hitchcott (eds), African Francophone Writing, (Oxford: Berg, 1996) explores the Haddadian style across all his prose works; Louis Tremaine’s seminal article ‘Psychic deformity in Mohammed Dib’s Qui se souvient de la mer’, (Research in African Literatures, 19.3, 1988: 283–300) remains an excellent introduction to Dib’s surreal novel. More general explorations of the evocation of conflict in fiction include Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Virginia: Virginia University Press, 2000) while Denis Boak’s essay ‘The Mimetic Imperative: War, Fiction, Realism’ (Romance Studies 30.3–4, July 2012: 217–28) includes an interesting discussion of the value of realism in literary reactions to war. *This chapter takes as springboard a shorter and less wide-ranging essay that appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, vol.9, no.1, Spring/Summer 1997.

Notes 1 ‘Il est sans doute vrai que le roman se prête un peu moins au « cri » de détresse, à l’appel aux armes.’ J. Goes, ‘Littératures francophones du monde arabe’, Romaniac 86 (2002), 20–31: 26. (www.vlrom.be/pdf/022goes.pdf: All translations from the French are by the present writer). 2 ‘A l’heure de la lutte, l’écriture romanesque cède la place aux écritures plus incisives, plus alertes, plus immédiates, plus aisément transmissible’. C. Achour, Anthologie de la littérature algérienne de langue française (Paris: ENAP- Bordas, 1990), 79. 3 While this is not the place to explore the question, it is of interest to note that the Algerian War is cited by many present-day academic historians as providing major points of comparison with the Iraq War, begun 40 years after it ended. As Matthew A. Kemp, puts it, ‘an increasing volume of academic and media commentary has drawn parallels between American ideology and military tactics in its so-called war on terror, and those employed by the French during the Algerian War’. ‘Re-readings of the Algerian War During the US “War on Terror”: Between Recognition and Denial’, Journal of European

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Studies, 38 (2008), 157–75: 160 (www.uk.sagepub.com/martin3study/articles/ Kemp.pdf). 4 Jacques Givet, for instance, reviewing Je t’offrirai une Gazelle (Les Temps Modernes, 167–8 (1960): 1420) disparaged what he saw as an aping of poet Jacques Prévert’s style (‘ce prévertisme à la mode’) and trusted Haddad’s subsequent writings would be more disciplined and less fragmentary (‘plus de discipline et moins de dispersion’). 5 Writing of The Forgotten Hill in Le Jeune Musulman, 2 January 1953, Mohammed Chérif Sahli would ask ‘what dishonour must characterize a novel so lauded by our worst enemies?’ (‘Qu’y a-t-il de déshonorant dans La Colline oubliée pour mériter les éloges de nos pires adversaires?’). For reviews of L’Opium et le Bâton, see note 28 below. 6 Pierre-Henri Simon would write: ‘The miserable (doubting) Cartesian that I am would like not entirely to lose trace of himself in this labyrinth [. . .] The vertigo is too overwhelming’ (‘Le malheureux cartésien que je suis voudrait parfois se reconnaître dans le labyrinthe [. . .] Le vertige est trop fort’), Le Monde, 10 October 1962, 11. 7 The title of the novel is taken from the line ‘Mourir ainsi c’est une façon de tourner la page, c’est une façon d’écrire sa dernière impression’ (‘Dying thus is a way of turning a page, a way of writing one’s last impression’). La Dernière Impression (Alger: Bouchène, 1989 [1958]), 137. 8 ‘Jongleries lyriques, plus prétentieuses qu’elles n’en ont l’air’, Recherches sur la littérature maghrébine de langue française (Paris: ENAP- Bordas, 1990), 110. 9 L. Ortzen, North African Writing (London: Heinemann, 1970), 12. 10 ‘On lui a seulement demandé des précisions techniques, la façon de s’y prendre, les endroits de grande vulnérabilité’, Impression, 37. 11 ‘Devenu un Français moyen’, Impression, 69. 12 ‘Tu attends un enfant? Tu l’appelleras François et il ira à l’école à Paris.’ Impression, 36. 13 ‘Le pont d’un petit rafiot qui partait vers son destin.’ Impression, 125. 14 ‘La génération de Saïd était une génération de faiseurs de ponts, de ponts de bonne volonté. Mais les ponts doivent sauter. Ils ont sauté. Ali avait dit à Saïd : « Vous en reconstruirez d’autres ». Ce ne sont plus les Saïd qui construiront les ponts. Les Saïd ont disparu ou disparaîtront avec les derniers ponts. La génération de Saïd a été un rêve très chaud dans un désert glacé.’ Impression, 137. 15 ‘Contre une théorie du déchirement: l’intertextualité dans l’œuvre romanesque de Malek Haddad’, in C. Bonn and A. Rothe (eds), Littérature maghrébine et littérature mondiale (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann 1995), 59–68: 63. 16 Tes papiers . . . Il ne faut pas tutoyer un homme. Il ne faut jamais tutoyer un homme. Parce qu’ensuite – ça va très loin, très loin. La torture commence par le tutoiement. Dans un coin de bistrot un poivrot proclame: – J’ai fait la guerre de 14. Il est saoul. Mais c’est vrai qu’il a fait la guerre de quatorze.

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– Je m’en fous, tes papiers . . . Un agent de police demande à l’auteur: – Qu’est-ce que tu fais? L’auteur explique: Je me saoule. – Ce n’est pas un métier ça! Faudrait pas se payer de ma tête . . . L’auteur se demande: « Combien peut bien coûter une tête pareille? »’ – Je t’offrirai une Gazelle (Paris: [Julliard, 1959]; réédition 10/18, 1978), 18–19.

17 ‘Je voudrais que tu me rapportes une gazelle, une gazelle vivante. Les gazelles ne sont des gazelles que lorsqu’elles sont vivantes’. Gazelle, 25. 18 ‘Entre Paris et Alger il n’y a pas deux mille kilomètres. Il y a quatre années de guerre.’ Gazelle, 98. 19 ‘Il faut être fou, Moulay, pour vouloir m’attraper. Il faut croire en moi, mais il ne faut pas me poursuivre.’ Gazelle, 112. 20 ‘Notre people qui se bat se fiche pas mal de ta gazelle.’ Gazelle, 120. 21 J. Monego, Maghrebian Literature in French (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 40. 22 ‘Le premier devoir du romancier est le devoir de vérité.’ C. Achour, Anthologie de la littérature algérienne, 68. 23 ‘Ce qui se passe dans ce pays depuis trois ans’ and ‘Le général Massu a reçu les pleins pouvoirs sur tout le territoire de grand Alger.’ L’Opium et le Bâton (Paris: La Découverte, 1965), 9 and 11. 24 M. Segarra, ‘La femme et le féminin dans deux « classiques » de la guerre d’Algérie’, Francofonia, 12 (2003), 165–80: 178. 25 ‘Cette fois, me disais-je, tu seras le Boche et tu te battras contre les résistants’. Noël Favrelière, Le Désert à l’Aube (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000), 31. 26 ‘ – Tu vois, dit Georges, vous nous tuez ; nous, on vous paie des voyages en avion à l’oeil. Soudain, dans un cri sauvage, la banane cracha une petite boule ronde ; elle était d’abord recroquevillée, puis des bras, de jambes lui poussèrent qui se mirent à gigoter follement dans le ciel. Omar s’écrasa.’ Opium, 133. 27 ‘L’infirmier prit une scie à métaux et se mit à couper l’os long. Akli ne criait pas. La douleur était atroce. De grosses larmes lui coulaient sur les joues et il en avalait quelques-unes [. . .] Le docteur siffla en voyant le moignon d’Akli. Akli regarda: une grosse mèche blanchâtre pendait de sa blessure, elle était raide et ronde. ‘C’est la moëlle’, dit le docteur. Il donna un coup sec de son scalpel. La mèche tomba par terre.’ L’Opium et le Bâton, 104. 28 Monego, Maghrebian Literature, 40. 29 H. Abdeljaouad, ‘Relecture: L’Opium et le Bâton’, CELFAN Review, 3.2 (1984), 15–17: 17. 30 ‘Loin de cet enfer où nous vivons ici, des hommes vont au bois, au bal, à l’usine ou chez l’épicier du coin. Peine perdue ! A chaque page de mon journal, sous chaque ciel du monde, la tragédie éclosait d’elle-même. Il n’y avait même pas besoin de forcer avec des mots : la réalité dépassait les phrases de si loin.’ L’Opium et la Bâton, 279 (author’s italics). 31 Charles Bonn, Lecture présente de Mohammed Dib (Alger: ENAL, 1988), 79.

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32 ‘Cherche à rendre compte du réel en faisant fi du vraisemblable’. N. Khadda, ‘Mohammed Dib’ in C. Bonn, N. Khadda and A. Mdarhri-Alaoui (eds), La littérature maghrébine de langue française (Paris: EDICEF-AUPELF, 1996), 50–63. Available on the LIMAG (Littérature du Maghreb) site: www.limag. refer.org/Textes/Manuref/DIB.htm, accessed 7 October 2012. 33 ‘Les nouvelles constructions n’en finissent pas d’éclater et de nous envoyer, de jour comme de nuit, leur souffle. Arrogants, meurtrières, elles avancent en broyant tout devant elles. Que de cadavres sont passés sous leurs fondations, ont été digérés par l’air de leurs murs ! Un nombre effroyable. Sans compter ceux exposés sur leurs toits à chaque lever du soleil.’ Mohammed Dib, Qui se souvient de la mer (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 176. 34 L. Tremaine, ‘Psychic Deformity in Mohammed Dib’s Qui se souvient de la mer’, Research in African Literatures, 19.3 (Autumn 1988), 283–300: 283. 35 ‘Dans la crainte inavouée que le monde ne se retournât sens devant derrière.’ Qui, 72. 36 ‘Une petite chanson, un babil errait sur les lèvres du vent. Ils s’en furent voir l’Hospodar. Ils pleurèrent tandis que la chanson s’enroulait ingénument autour de leurs jambes, supplièrent, et les femmes tombèrent à genoux devant les minotaures placés en sentinelles. Leur baisèrent la main, leur tendirent les mioches qu’elles avaient au bras. Un air de flûte donnait des cornes contre les jambes, contre les ventres. Frêle mais têtu. Lointain, monte un chœur d’hommes, dont le chant finit par couvrir à son tour la percussion. [. . .] Cependant, d’un coup, un silence affolé s’abat, et les aboiements reprennent, dominés cette fois par les vocalises de l’étoile éteinte, qui croissent sans fin à partir de ce moment.’ Qui, 41. 37 ‘Il eût été sans doute possible d’obtenir le même effet prodigieux en remplaçant la machine à tuer le temps par une baguette magique, la lampe d’Aladin ou tel autre accessoire puisé dans le vieux magasin du merveilleux. C’eût été recourir à un imaginaire périmé . . . Le merveilleux formulé en termes modernes, c’est la science-fiction.’ Hassan El Nouty, ‘Roman et révolution dans Qui se souvient de la mer de Mohammed Dib’, Présence Francophone 2 (1971), 142–52 : 150. 38 A. Hernández-Laroche, ‘Totalitarian Threats and Colonial Geography: The Politics of Defining Terrorism in Beauvoir, Camus, and Dib’. Paper delivered 9 September 2011 at the ‘Re-visioning terrorism’ Interdisciplinary and International Conference at Purdue University, 8–10 September 2011, 6. Paper available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context= revisioning. 39 ‘J’essaye de jeter les bases d’une nouvelle sorte de science que j’appellerais la théorie du comportement des iriaces. Je note la direction, le nombre, les heures de leurs sorties et de leurs retraites.’ Qui, 133. 40 Hernández-Laroche, ‘Totalitarian Threats’, 8. 41 ‘Un flot de sang qui franchit la maison, gagna le vestibule, passa sous la porte cadenassée. [. . .] chaque fois que l’on rentre ou sort, on doit l’enjamber.’ Qui, 148. 42 ‘Il lui faudrait soigner, guérir, bercer. La mer n’est pas triste quand elle attend la nuit, comme on le croit : déjà, des étoiles bougent en elle.’ Qui, 21.

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43 ‘Ce matin, la mer ne sait par où pénétrer le cœur de quelque côté qu’elle roule.’ Qui, 23. 44 ‘La mer! Elle revenait dans un rire vertigineux ; les murs se nouèrent, glissant à toute vitesse, et d’un coup, se cabrèrent, se rejoignirent au-dessus de la ville, élevant une nouvelle nuit dans la nuit éclairée par une tempête de spyrovirs.’ Qui, 182. 45 ‘Je songe, je me souviens de la mer.’ Qui, 187. 46 ‘Comment parler de l’Algérie après Auschwitz, le ghetto de Varsovie et Hiroshima.’ ‘Des visions oniriques et apocalyptiques [sont] les seuls projecteurs capables de jeter quelque lumière sur de tels abîmes.’ Qui, 191. 47 Tremaine, ‘Psychic Deformity’, 285. 48 M. Norris (2000), Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Virginia: Virginia University Press), 2 and 24 49 A. Rachedi (dir.), L’Opium et le Bâton (1969), Myrha Films, Algeria. 50 ‘Quand les historiens écriront l’histoire de la guerre de l’Algérie, ce sera une histoire déjà réduite en formules, en événements susceptibles d’entrer dans un manuel, d’événements qui auront perdu en quelque sorte la chair et le sang qui en faisaient la valeur, alors que les romanciers restituent toute cette part de vie, cette part de drame, cette part de vécu dans cette guerre de libération. Et ça, seuls les romanciers peuvent le faire.’ Mammeri interviewed by André Payette, Liberté 13.3 (75) 1971, 58–68: 62–3.

CHAPTER TEN

‘We Teach Life, Sir’: States of Siege, Youth and Filmed Testimony Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr

The notion of a liberal war would seem to depend on the stating of its motives. This question is a particularly fraught one in the case of the Israel–Palestine conflict, which constitutes the focus of this chapter. A key consideration here is whether or not Israel, as a racial or ethnic state, may be claimed to operate in terms of a state of exception, as theorized by Agamben1 and as critically applied to an understanding of the Israel–Palestine conflict in a collection of essays entitled ‘Thinking Palestine’. 2 Y. Shenav, contesting Agamben’s concept of the state of exception as lacking a postcolonial elaboration argues: ‘In Israel there is a constant state of emergency. The state inherited the British Mandate’s “Emergency Regulations” under which it continued the anomalous suspension of the law, within the law . . . We must remember what this system enables: one rule (life) for the majority of the state’s citizens, and another (death, threat of death, threat of expulsion) for the state’s subjects, whose lives have been rendered “bare”.’3 On the one hand, Raef Zreik, drawing attention to the ‘dark side of the modern liberal constitutional state’,4 considers Israel to be an intensified case of this dark side, stating: ‘What surfaces in other countries only from time to time, in cases of national emergency, appears in Israel on an almost daily basis.’5 On the other hand, Ilan Pappé argues that ‘the inclusion of Israel within the state of exception debate is wrong’, where such an inclusion can function to ‘reinforce the global immunity

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Israel receives for its membership in the camp of democratic states’.6 Pappé maintains this position on the basis of his perception of Israel as a settler state, that is, a state of oppression. If Israel has always been in a state of emergency, its legitimacy coinciding with a suspension of the law, this cannot be a state of exception to an otherwise peaceful state. Nonetheless, it is performatively included within, in Pappé’s phrase, ‘the western democracy framework of analysis’ 7 (begging the wider question of the relationship between performativity and legitimacy). Given this, we are concerned in this chapter with how Israel’s state of emergency is performed and mediatized, and with how certain artworks attempt to contest the denial of a Palestinian future through the agency of children and young people. Beyond representing the imperiled future, these young subjects are placed in the position of refusing the impositions on them of ‘bare life’, with the untimely responsibility of teaching an adult world how to care about the effects of violence that they suffer. That is, the term ‘bare life’, as used by Shenav above, should not be applied too literally in that it is first and foremost a label or the categorical effect of a system, where Palestinian artists are able to reveal the gap between terminologies of conflict and a poetic language of human experience.

Mediations of testimony After the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, the Israeli Kahan Commission produced ‘The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events [our italics] at the Refugee Camps in Beirut – 8 February 1983’ that mentions inter alia: In the afternoon hours his soldiers spoke with a Phalangist who had arrived at the spot, and at the request of Grabowsky, who does not speak Arabic, one of the soldiers asked why they were killing civilians. The answer he received was that the pregnant women will give birth to terrorists and children will grow up to be terrorists. Grabowsky left the place at 16:00 hours.8 The title of the report, which considers it an ‘inquiry into the events [our italics]’, combines a pretense of democratic liberalism that is presumably based on an official system of legal and moral accountability with a great degree of disavowal of the reality of the massacres (the report cites ‘atrocities’ but minimizes the number of casualties and lays the criminal responsibility on the Lebanese Phalangists). More disturbingly, the rep­ orted sequence of questioning the motives of killing civilians, implicitly accepting the brutal and irrational justification, then leaving the scene has far-reaching implications as far as witnessing, documenting and testifying after a war are concerned. In this context, the report goes on to indicate the

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troubling impact of witness testimony and the role of the media in bringing international attention to the massacres: After the Phalangists had left the camps, Red Cross personnel, many journalists and other persons entered them, and it then became apparent that in the camps, and particularly in Shatilla [sic], civilians – including women and children  – had been massacred. It was clear from the spectacle that presented itself that a considerable number of the killed had not been cut down in combat but had been murdered, and that no few acts of barbarism had also been perpetrated. These sights shocked those who witnessed them; the reports were circulated by the media and spread throughout the world. Although for the most part the reports said that the massacre had been executed by members of the Phalangists, accusations were immediately hurled at the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) and at the State of Israel, since, according to the reports published at that time, the Phalangists’ entry into the camps had been carried out with the aid and consent of the IDF. On Saturday and the days following, the IDF refrained as far as possible from entering the camps, for fear that should any IDF soldiers be seen there, accusations would be forthcoming about their participation in the massacre.9 The importance of being there, seeing, and finally articulating an acceptable narrative of the event has had various repercussions with respect to the political, legal and psychosocial aftermaths of suspected crimes committed by the Israeli army against civilians in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. The erasures and distortions in this respect are oftentimes reinforced not only by pro-Israeli organizations but also by other sides. After the violent Israeli incursion into the Jenin camp in 2002, the Anti-Defamation League published its report ‘Anatomy of Anti-Israel Incitement: Jenin, World Opinion and the Massacre That Wasn’t’ which concluded that: a massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Israel was widely alleged, reported and condemned, but did not in fact occur. The tendency of groups and governments to speak prematurely  – and of the media to report those comments uncritically – reminds us that, in reporting the news, freedom from bias, seeking context and examining all sides is essential for everyone, especially those with voices that carry weight internationally.10 Across two tragedies that are separated by two decades, the ‘voices that carry weight internationally’ have only exacerbated the distrust and radical violence that have continually marked the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In this respect, official or semi-official voicing has entailed a great extent of silencing since it represents either the discursive co-optation of the many

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by the few (or the weak by the powerful whether politically or militarily) or the erasure of individual witnesses from the collective historicization of the event and hence the foreclosure of a productive process of mourning, commemoration, justice and forgiveness across divided communities. Amid the din of contested reports by liberal democracies that wage war, colonize, brutalize and silence their victims and the contradictory histories by which political groups, journalists, and sometimes non-governmental organizations claim to report and document conflict as ‘a TV’d massacre’,11 the ‘counter-voice of victims’ emerges as the territory where a documentation of, and ethical engagement with civilian losses are potentially possible. Documentary films form an influential medium for propagating these counter-voices or counter-narratives through their ‘cultures of telling’. In this context, human rights abuses committed during wars have been documented in films that variously represent witness testimony at the crossroads of ethics and politics, and across a spectrum of production goals that range from accurate and nuanced framing to subtle propaganda, appeasement to incitement, a visionary message of hope to an apocalyptic doomsday scenario. In ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering (1)’, Wendy S. Hesford writes that: Within the context of human rights documentaries, victims’ testimonies bear witness to incommensurable events, and also function rhetorically as empathetic markers in an effort to create the viewer as witness. Human rights testimonies play a key role in rebuilding civil institutions, in formulating movements for reparation and restitution, and in advancing the international human rights agenda. But, we must ask, what kinds of witnesses do human rights testimonials construe? To what degree are testimonial subjects romanticized as transnational artifacts (Kaplan), and/ or turned into opportunistic spectacles for self-positioning or for certain political agendas? If one of the prominent rhetorical features in human rights documentaries is to create a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity – of bearing witness – how to account for ruptures in identification?12 In this study of documentary film mediations of Palestinian testimony with respect to a people’s tribulations across two decades and two camps (from Shatila to Jenin), we will approach and try to answer some of these questions especially in relation to the representational limits of incommensurable events, the ethics of witnessing and the politicization/romanticization of testimonial subjects particularly in the case of youths and children. The focus will be on two documentary films that possess strikingly different relationships to human rights campaigning due to their distinct ethical stances and ideological positionings. The two films are Mai Masri’s Children of Shatila (1998) and Mohamed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002). Beyond the films, we will look at a range of poetic counter-narratives of conflict by youths whose alternative testimonies are widely disseminated on

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YouTube. These include Palestinian-Canadian Rafeef Ziadah’s ‘We Teach Life, Sir’13 and Syrian-American Omar Offendum’s reading of Darwish’s ‘On this Land, There’s What’s Worth Living’ at the same event in London in 2011.14 The two recorded performances are especially significant as they re-imagine Palestine from the perspective of an activist youth sub-culture. As will be discussed later in this chapter, Ziadah and Offendum deconstruct the humanitarian claims of liberal war and the biased and sometimes voyeuristic filmic reportage that besiege a people’s struggle while reaffirming the victim’s voice in two different but related forms: original spoken word poetry and the hip-hop artist’s appropriation of the national poet’s words. More importantly, the two poems and their performances mediate both life-affirming and defiant ‘cultures of telling’ that are the counterpart of the documentaries that we approach in this chapter. Jenin, Jenin depicts the human cost of the Israeli Operation ‘Defensive Shield’ in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in April 2002 that killed both militants and civilians (some Israeli and NGO sources set the number at 50 while some Palestinian sources estimate that up to 500 people were killed). Bakri offers us a visually violent representation of the atrocity through multiple interwoven testimonies that combine sheer despair (the first witness says ‘They killed our hope’ and an ex-prisoner says ‘They shattered all our dreams’) with repeated statements of a collective will to seek revenge that is most disturbingly expressed by children. There have been many Israeli campaigns against Bakri for his documentary film on the Jenin ‘massacre’ including a lawsuit for libel brought by five Israeli soldiers in 2007 and rejected by the Israeli lower courts. Following an appeal, the Supreme Court suggested ‘a compromise in which Bakri would agree to recategorize his movie to “nondocumentary” and apologize to the reservists. The reservists refused to compromise, demanding that Bakri reedit the film and compensate them for damages caused’.15 The Supreme Court eventually ruled the film not libelous. According to Jerusalem Post, Among the more contentious scenes in the film is one that is edited to suggest that an Israeli Armored Personnel Carrier was used to flatten a group of bound Palestinians forced to lay in the dirt. Bakri also presents unsubstantiated claims of one interviewee, who says that IDF soldiers used Palestinian children as human shields, forcing them to go from house to house breaking holes in walls and then executing them when their work was done.16 The last criticism captures the disruptive impact of Bakri’s representation of Jenin’s children on a liberal democracy that purports to protect children amid its wars with the Arab world. Notwithstanding some controversial aspects in Bakri’s film (for instance, a middle-aged witness makes anti-Semitic statements), what makes it ‘dangerous’ on a representational level is the way in which children are featured as not only the traumatized

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victims of the actual violence but also as violently divested of their innocence and prematurely emotionally invested in the future of the conflict. In this context, a boy shows where his father is buried while a young girl says that the message she carries is not one of hope but rather of forceful pride, arguing that she can beat the then Israeli Prime Minister Sharon through her willpower. Two young girls are asked what they would do if they were given money; they answer that they would donate it to reconstruct the camp and secure blood units. We also learn that children were made to help destroy walls and then we see a group of children marching and chanting ‘Jerusalem is ours’. Perhaps the most moving but also most frightening testimony is that of the same previously mentioned young girl who says that although she is a good person she would not make peace with the Israelis. It has remained debatable whether or not the film comprises explicit anti-Israel incitement and hence serves a specific political agenda in its positioning of its selected witnesses, especially given the fact that Bakri cannot be described as a partisan Palestinian filmmaker and his investment in the Palestinian–Israeli civil rights movement has been praised by the opposing sides. Nevertheless, the more important ethico-political question seems to relate to Bakri’s choice of vivid children’s testimonies that he incorporates into the framing of the wider panorama of the Jenin ‘massacre’. The Anti-Defamation League’s ‘Anatomy of Anti-Israel Incitement: Jenin, World Opinion and the Massacre That Wasn’t’ goes to great lengths in describing the Israeli operation as responsible and moral with respect to its treatment of civilians, especially children, citing statements by IDF soldiers and medics who were present in the camp: ‘There was always a soldier who approached the family and tried to calm them, asking about the names of the children, offering them candies, checking if they are in need of anything. A child I smiled at was confused. I’m sure he was raised believing that I’m the devil’ – Shlomi Laniado, field fighter. ‘The soldiers fought without harming civilians. This was noticeable in every place and on every level. I was moved by the sight of soldiers conducting themselves in such a dignified and moral manner. Many of us are reserve soldiers; we are not hotheaded people, and we were all very careful. I was impressed by the great care exercised by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) in avoiding civilian casualties – especially in regard to children’ – Dr. David Zangen, lead accompanying medic.17 Aspects of this statement serve to highlight the potential oxymoron contained in the term ‘liberal war’: the soldiers tenderly offering children sweets while carrying out a military operation against members of the community. Particularly, the statement ‘A child I smiled at was confused’

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indeed speaks volumes. Bakri’s film deliberately and assertively contradicts the Israeli narrative generally while specifically refracting violent images and sounds of psychologically and physically violated childhood and youth. For Mai Masri, the impetus to initiate a culture of telling in the face of misrepresentation, erasure and silence is as strong as for Bakri. However, her mediation of the counter-voices of the victims seems more ethically nuanced, imaginatively powerful and potentially positive in terms of the future reconstruction of lives and nations through the dreams and energies of children. In an interview, she explained to us the paradoxical dynamics of children’s testimonies and their framing in her films: Much of my work is built around contrasts. It all started with an image I saw in Shatila refugee camp a few years after the 1982 massacre of Sabra and Shatila. I was walking through one of the bombed out alleyways and heard the sound of children’s laughter coming from behind a bullet ridden wall. I looked closer and noticed smiling faces of children peering at me like photographs framed by the jagged holes in the wall. It was a magical moment of joy in the midst of so much death and destruction. As I watched the children play, I felt as if the spirits of the massacred were coming to life. It was both eerie and beautiful. It inspired me to make Children of Shatila (1998). In this film I focused on the imagination of children and their perceptions of home, memory and identity. One of the most poignant scenes for me is when 12 year-old Issa is riding a battered old horse out of the camp and imagining that he’s a prince riding a magnificent white horse. Issa takes us with him in his dream, we imagine the horse transporting him from his miserable camp through the fancy streets of Beirut to the seashore that leads to Palestine.18 Masri’s magical realist rendering of children as both dispossessed refugees and empowered wanderers, and her poetic envisioning of corpses coming alive, not only evoke the philosophical and political complexity of Jean Genet’s Four Hours in Shatila, but also succeed in achieving a greater imaginative impact than Genet’s piece by channeling the complex and multi-faceted apocalyptic dreamscape of ‘death and destruction’ through a documentary representation of particular, named children’s nightmares, everyday life, laughter and hope. In Children of Shatila, Masri communicates a Palestinian political imaginary that transcends the self-positioning with which political parties may restrict the imagination and aesthetic integrity of an activist artist. It is a political imaginary articulated by children who dream of a Palestine that is unconstrained by the stale metaphors of political rhetoric and the aggressive imagery of propagandistic films that ‘kill’ the complexity of their present and future lives. Children of Shatila seems as spontaneous as its characters but it is also as moving and imaginative as they are. In a classroom of young children, we see their homeroom teacher asking them how they would paint

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Palestine. Their answers are both fantastic and fresh: Palestine is a bird, banana, blue, dream . . . In contrast to the combative language of liberal war and militancy, they ‘teach life’ through their vivid imagination. Yet Masri’s children are not ‘romanticized as transnational artifacts’ since they are portrayed within the specific social-historical framework of the Shatila camp that is materially inflected by the memories of 1982 and its aftermath: bullet-scarred walls, young adults carrying wounds from their early childhood and traumatized women who have lost father, brother and/ or husband. Masri’s children of Shatila, like Bakri’s children of Jenin, are made prematurely aware of a violent past that psychologically and materially overwhelms the present as well as a future that is burdened by devastating socio-economic circumstances and terrifying political challenges. While Children of Shatila is punctuated with stories of parents and relatives who were brutally killed in the camp, its greater poignancy seems to emerge from the montage of scenes of material destitution in the everyday lives of the portrayed youth. As refugees, the youth have as little hope of socio-economic advancement as the elderly since they are doubly victimized by external and internal deadlocked political debates. Farah says that she is aware that her father’s hopes have been dashed since he cannot leave his job as a street cleaner in order to realize his dream of investing in a few computers. Issa tells us that he lost much of his ability to concentrate and learn when he was hit by a car and that he now struggles to master a craft. These stories reflect the effects of silent wars waged though the socio-economic deprivation of refugees whose basic rights to healthcare, proper education and job opportunities are lost in the hinterlands of poisonous political feuds across Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and beyond. Masri not only represents this socio-economic tragedy that particularly victimizes children and young adults but also personally invests in changing this vicious cycle through a commitment to improving the lives of children like Issa and Farah. She says: I am also driven by the commitment to give something in return to the people who have shared their experiences with me in the hope that I can create positive changes in their lives. By committing to the education of the children in my films, I am hoping to provide them with the tools they need to make a better future for themselves. I feel that this is the least I can do. It gives me immense satisfaction to know that my films have made a difference in the lives of the people they are about and the people who have seen them.19 Continued commitment and responsibility are hugely important ethical issues in the context of representing children whose lives have been jeopardized in multifarious ways by liberal democratic governments that claim to protect them and respect their rights. In this context, the questions of Who Represents the Victims of Liberal Wars? How? and

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Why? become highly urgent. Near the beginning of Jenin, Jenin, we see children approaching the director with the stunning request: ‘Film me’. This has wide implications with respect to the medium and the subject/ object of the filmic representation. It begs the question Can the children of the Palestinian camps represent themselves? But it also relates to Rafeef Ziadah’s reflection on the burden of becoming an object of voyeurism, a packaged ‘TV’d massacre’ that is sanitized to give the world an apolitical ‘human story’. It is a question with which Masri deeply and subtly engages when she lets Issa and Farah use her video camera to film their lives, families and friends, uncensored. One of the most charged scenes in this respect is when Issa films and interviews his grandfather who answers his question as to whether he would like to return to Palestine. The conversation prompts reflections on war, massacre, displacement and resistance channeled through the camera that the young Issa holds. On the one hand, the mediation of the grandfather’s haunting recollections through Issa’s/Masri’s camera strongly evokes what Darwish’s poem (recited by hip-hop artist Offendum) describes as ‘the invaders’ fear of memories’. On the other hand, it creates a striking representational mirroring of youth and old age, violated innocence and violent experience, oral history and official historicization. As such, holding the camera becomes an affirmative and empowering act of participation in representation. Masri’s closing lines in our interview with her present the act of documentary filming as a performative and creative engagement in the national struggle against historical, existential and material states of siege: ‘It is the tool we use to reclaim our existence, our memory and our humanity. It is the mirror we hold up to our society to criticize and change. It is the weapon we carry to defend ourselves and make our voices heard.’20 Deciding to make a documentary is thus a political and moral choice especially when filming is done as the war is taking place and the siege is imposed. In this context, Masri describes the entanglement of personal and professional, emotional and ethical factors during her experience of making one of her earliest documentaries Under the Rubble (with Jean Chamoun who later became her husband) during the 1982 Siege of Beirut. She says: One of the most difficult moments for me was when a building in our neighborhood was targeted with a vacuum bomb killing 107 inhabitants. We rushed to the scene. At that moment we didn’t know whether to film or help search for survivors under the rubble. We chose to film. It was a difficult and troubling decision. 21 This is a choice that she had to make again 24 years later when Beirut came under Israeli attack during the second Siege of Beirut in July and August 2006 after two Israeli soldiers were captured by Hizbollah. Masri filmed 33 Days while the events were unfolding in the fiery summer of 2006. This documentary is particularly significant because it focuses

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on the interrelated roles of filming war crimes and helping survivors, especially children, to cope with the traumatic impact of displacement, destruction and the death of loved ones. Masri’s main characters are the news director of a Lebanese TV station (New TV), a reporter for the station, and two young men who worked as volunteers with the refugees from the bombed South of Lebanon and the Beirut suburbs. We see Mariam al-Bassam and Fadia Bazzi, news director and reporter respectively, juggling the roles of mothers who are afraid for the lives of their children, and journalists who are keen on conveying the brutality of the 2006 war on Lebanon to a wide audience. Mai and the  two women refract each other as they face continued risks while filming and disseminating images of flattened neighbourhoods, banned weapons and disfigured children. Bazzi recounts a terrible experience when she found a dead child, its foot hanging by the skin to the rest of the body; she says that she was incapable of appearing on camera to report this finding. Al-Bassam is seen nursing her baby in the New TV studios while she recalls being displaced with her family to the Sanayeh public park in Beirut during the 1982 Siege of Beirut. In 2006, this park became the ‘Samidoun’ centre for volunteers working with the displaced men, women and children. The Arabic term ‘Samidoun’ means ‘resilient’ and it became the slogan of the besieged Lebanese state in 2006. Specifically, the emblematic image of a hand-shaped fist in tandem with the defiant expression ‘Samidoun’ became the wartime logo of New TV. The two ‘Samidoun Centre’ volunteers Sharif Bibi and Sharif Abdunnur are the counterparts of al-Bassam and Bazzi. Abdunnur directed children in the leftwing al-Madina theatre that became a refugee hub in Beirut during the 2006 war. We see him in 33 Days helping children come to terms with their traumatic experiences through therapeutic theatre. His experimental theatrical piece, ‘Laughing Under the Bombs’, allowed the children to explore the possibilities of hope, defiance, art and resilience in states of siege. On camera, he tells the children with whom he works that he experienced the 1982 Siege when he was a child and was able to survive and overcome the tragedy. His message is similar to Masri’s whose films extend between two sieges and two contested nation-states while mediating displaced youths’ testimonies that have a double significance on the levels of human rights and international relations. It is a powerful message that can be summed up in the concluding lines of two generations of Palestinian poets-activists, Darwish and Ziadah: ‘A people’s cheers for those going up/to their doom, smiling/and the tyrants’ fear of songs. [. . .] I deserve life’ because ‘We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.’ This chapter will now go on to consider what it means for filmic testimony as poetry and poetry as filmed testimony ‘to teach life’.

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Countering ‘Verbicide’ What is at stake in the battle between sanitizing media and the testimony against such is not merely a case of two competing narratives, both equally ‘constructed’, but differing only in terms of what is rendered ‘official’, through economic and political empowerment, and what is rendered a ‘counter-discourse’, in its fight against invisibility through economic and political disempowerment. That is to say, what needs to be further addressed is a certain rupture with postmodernist frameworks of intelligibility, both aesthetic and ideological, those privileged by late capitalist democracies. Whereas the factual in postmodernist terms concerns the literalizing of constructions, the factual in terms of testimony necessarily pertains to the reality of lived experiences and the search for a language capable of approximating, standing by and affirming the reality at stake or in question. This question of the postmodernist framing of competing versions of history is reflected on at length in Jean Luc Godard’s Notre Musique, his intellectual documentary on what may be termed ‘war interminable’, with specific reference to the Siege of Sarajevo and the Israel–Palestine conflict. 22 This film puts forward the familiar thesis that what counts as ‘history’, the accredited version of events, is the story of the victors where the fictionality of this history is shown up and thrown into relief when we become aware of the fact that the victor’s version of history only counts as such through its power to marginalize and eclipse other stories, specifically those of the victimized. What this implies is that historical veracity, in a world of ongoing wars, amounts to nothing other than a power struggle over competing narratives. What is striking about Israeli politics on an international stage is that it is precisely this postmodernist view of enforcing your own narrative at the expense of the alternative ‘versions’ of others that constitutes the prevalent strategy. It is as if you have won the battle if you can commandeer the media to be on your side and represent your case. It is for this reason that Zionist lobbies work to present Israel in a positive light and to discredit the Palestinian story. The key term in the current phase of this endeavour may be said to be ‘legitimacy’: if Israel as a Jewish state can performatively be said to be legitimate, then it is legitimate. From this perspective, the Palestinians and their supporters, are constantly accused of trying to ‘de-legitimize’ Israel, this serving to render their testimonies categorically unacceptable particularly when the term ‘de-legitimize’ is made to imply ‘eradicate’. What Masri and Ziadah may be said to be engaged in is not a battle to usurp the other’s claims to ‘legitimacy’ in a politics of mirrored oppositionalism, as if history were but a dialectics of reversal between

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usurpers and the usurpers-of-usurpers. Rather, what is being contested is the very depiction of history in such terms of engagement: those of interminable mimetic rivalries. This is a challenge that entails seeing justice as irreducible to the performative strategies of legitimacy, accordingly entailing a refusal of the reduction of human suffering to a textual battle of competing representations: ‘we teach life, sir’. On the one hand, this constitutes a rejection of a certain politics (mirrored oppositionalism); on the other hand, it constitutes a rejection of the aestheticization of politics, the passing off of politics as but a question of representations. Returning to the Israeli response to Jenin, Jenin, it is very telling that the film was deemed by the Israeli court to be potentially acceptable for viewing if it could just classify itself as a quasi-fiction. What was perceived to be unsettling about the film was the fact that it was precisely not offering itself as a story, as a construction. What was considered unfair about the film was that it was not playing the postmodernist game of flagging itself up as mediatized, with nothing outside of this. Therefore, most of the evidence, so to speak, against the film tried to assert that while Bakri was clearly filming the rubble of a razed camp and filming traumatized children, this had to be seen as an act of aesthetic manipulation: categorically so. Put another way, the perceived transgression of Bakri’s film is that it points to the existence of realities outside of the frame of the film: to lived realities outside of their framed representation. The controversy over the testimonial nature of Bakri’s film has been heightened by the fact that some scenes from it have been excerpted and placed on YouTube: especially, the scene of the young girl speaking of her violated innocence, ‘I saw dead bodies . . . indescribable atrocities’, and of her contempt towards Sharon and IDF, ‘cowards’, together with her resolve to remain forever resilient in her resistance. The comments on these sites are starkly opposed: THIS MOVIE IS A LIE 23 Thanks so much for the upload, i hope people will learn what is going on there, Jenin is a shame on us as human, Gaza, Palestine24 You are all being fed cheap propaganda 25 Israel got the Nazi disease26 You (Palestinians) should make peace27 The placing of scenes from the film on YouTube serves to intensify the stakes of the debate as to whether it is ‘Palestinian propaganda’ put out against ‘Israeli propaganda’ in a media war of slurs and insults, or whether it constitutes something akin to citizen journalism, a means of bypassing media control to get the truth across. Problematically, it is as if the film can only be seen as either ‘a constructed lie’ or ‘the objective truth’. What

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the lie/truth question elides is the reality of subjective experiences: seeing through the eyes of another, the art-work effecting such (as opposed to ad hoc video clips): art as a form of understanding the perspectives of others. As response to the inadequate dichotomy mentioned above, taking the scene with the young girl, what comes across as undeniable is the strength of her feelings together with the fact that her utterances are not scripted but spontaneous. You can see her searching for the words to convey her sense of outrage, the words struggling to catch up with and articulate her emotions. Angry as she is, there is what may be termed a poetic truth to her act of utterance. This question of poetic truth may be explained as a matter of how certain uses of language are able to convey subjective realities as opposed to objective realities. Even though we may be watching a film, a moving image, something that is therefore not alive as such, the representation is undeniably of a living child full of an intensity that is of the moment. The argument cannot be made that this is only a representation, only the image of a girl, and not really a living human being. Accordingly, while historical interpretations of what really happened in the IDF and Jenin encounter may be open to debate, it would be difficult to deny that the girl’s experience is her experience. The poem ‘We teach life, sir’ is a poetic utterance in the above respect. For a start, it makes the point that a representation of a massacre cannot simply be treated as just a representation of a massacre, as if the image in being an image were purely self-referential. ‘Today my body was a TV’d massacre’. In the YouTube clip that presents Ziadah’s live performance of her poem, she explains how she came to write it. She tells her audience that during the Siege of Gaza, she was part of a team preparing press releases to get the story of what was happening out to an international audience, and she speaks of how on one occasion she stayed up all night to prepare her copy, rehearsing in particular the Western transliteration of ‘Palestine’: there being no ‘p’ in Arabic, ‘p’s’ are often pronounced as ‘b’s’. Thus geared up for the interview, the question that the foreign press put to her was one of: when will Palestinians stop teaching their children hatred?28 While Ziadah restrained her outrage over such a question at the interview, the poem came to her as the uncensored, unstoppable expression of her authentically felt response to the sound-bite journalists. What is striking about the form of the poem, together with the filmed performance of it, is the way in which it offers us an embodied, subjective experience that is played off against the jargon of postmodernist reportage. It achieves this through its use of rhythm and the emphasis it places on an ethics of aurality. The poem generates itself through listening to its response to the journalist, the opening phrase thus generating a further phrase, these phrases then repeated to generate further phrases. While the journalist can only recycle learnt-by-rote platitudes, the poem on the other hand gives us its own process of composition as the antithesis of the ready-made sound-bite. And what we are able to hear in this process of composition is a voice

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finding itself, tentatively yet with a confidence that builds throughout the poem so that the final effect is one of a triumphant refusal to be intimidated by the voice-denying manipulations of the media. The audience reaction to the delivery of the poem, one of delighted cheers and whoops, could arguably be translated as ‘Yes! You’ve done it! You’ve put into words what they are trying to silence!’ And, in turn, with this audience response, what the camera captures is Ziadah’s facial expression of joy at the success of her performance. But in fact the success of the performance is that it is not just a performance: it succeeds precisely because it comes across as for real, meaning as a genuine, heartfelt response. It would perhaps be more accurate to speak of a delivery than a performance here, with all the connotations thereby entailed: arrival; conveyance; manner of speaking; release; birth; deliverance. It may be claimed that it is the authenticity of the work that conveys a spirit of resistance that will not be crushed so that ‘We teach life, sir’ emerges as a poem that will survive. It will surely survive as an anthem of Palestinian resistance in the same way that Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi’s poem, ‘To the Tyrants of the World’, does of Tunisian resistance, the poem beginning: ‘If a people desires to live one day, fate is bound to respond.’29 And we might even think of a poem such as Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’30 that survives its heated moment of composition precisely because written for a certain spirit of defiance—samidoun—to survive. The importance of Ziadah’s poetry may be further understood with reference to an essay entitled ‘Verbicide’ by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Barghouti writes: The Israeli occupation would impose a double, triple, endless redefinition of the Palestinian. Call him militant, outlaw, criminal, terrorist, irrelevant, cancer, cockroach, serpent, virus—the list becomes endless. [. . .] Be the one who makes the definitions. Define! Classify! Demonize! Misinform! Simplify! Stick on the label! Then send in the tanks! [. . .] Can verbicide lead to genocide? Oversimplification has always been one factor in the failure of poetry and prose – indeed, of any discourse – but when it is the dominant characteristic of the language of politicians it ends in fanaticism and fundamentalism. Coupled with invincible superiority and a sense of sanctity, simplification might be, as history teaches us, a recipe for fascism. That’s why the rhetoric of them/we and either with us or with evil is not just irresponsible jargon – but an act of war.31 Barghouti begins his essay with examples of Israeli hate speech against the Palestinians, going on to say that it is necessary to heed the Nietzschean advice not to become a monster in the process of fighting monsters. Put another way, if there is an Israeli hate speech, this should not generate a

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Palestinian hate speech in turn. What Jenin, Jenin tragically shows us is that whatever the Israelis did in Jenin, whether it would be controversial to term it ‘a massacre’ or not, the violence experienced by the Palestinians served to generate a hatred of Israelis in both the young and the old equally. When Ziadah is asked about the Palestinians teaching their children hatred, she could have retorted ‘if anything, it is the Israelis who teach us to hate them’, but the fact that she does not respond in such a manner indicates that she refuses to be drawn into the mimetic accusations of hatred. And it is by refusing to hate, when you have reason to hate, that you are able to teach life. Mai Masri’s work conveys a similar understanding. This is also to be found in Darwish’s poem, a protest poem devoid of anger and hatred, its tone mild, its rhythm calm yet assertive—as conveyed in Offendum’s readings of it in both Arabic and English—and its message an open-hearted one. Against a backdrop of war in the name of religious identities, Darwish’s poem affirms a seeming sacredness in everyday life, for instance: ‘There’s on this land/what is worth living,/The recurring of April,/the smell of bread at dawn’. Barghouti puts forward the argument that the way to confront the verbicide of simplistic sound-bites and of hate speech is through the attentiveness of poetic speech, stating: One of its charming miracles is that through its form, poetry can resist the content of authoritarian discourse. It breaks with existing certainties and their official representatives. By resorting to understatement, concrete and physical language, a poet contends against abstraction, generalization, hyperbole and the heroic language of hot-headed generals and bogus lovers alike. [. . .] poetry remains one of the astonishing forms in our hands to resist obscurantism and silence. And since we cannot wash the polluted words of hatred the same way we wash greasy dishes with soap and hot water, we, the poets of the world, continue to write our poems to restore the respect of meaning and to give meaning to our existence. 32 Earlier we mentioned an ethics of aurality effected by ‘We teach life, sir’. It may be said that the poem not only practises ‘self-listening’ as a matter of avoiding the strident abstractions of ideologies of hate, but also teaches the journalists to listen to themselves, as in these lines: ‘And just give us a story, a human story./You see, this is not political./We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story./Don’t mention that word ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’./This is not political./You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story.’ This may be placed alongside the following statement from Barghouti’s essay: ‘Israel took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land. But our poem’s horizon expanded far beyond this confined duality to

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embrace the universal, the human, as well as the intimate and personal.’33 On the one hand, it may be said that poetry teaches life in enabling us to see past the labels to the human being on a personal level; a universality of subjective dignity. But, on the other hand, Ziadah’s poem presents us with the dilemma of a quasi-liberal press that seeks to depoliticize the human story. Regarding this, the Palestinian experience is subject to what may be termed a double dissociation. First, as Ghada Karmi has argued, while Israel (unlike apartheid South Africa) does not institute an Israeli apartheid through legislative acts, it nonetheless is a Jewish state that routinely practices discrimination against the Palestinians especially as regards freedom of movement (from denial of the right to return to zoned habitation to the Wall, and so on). 34 And, in order for Palestinians to be subject to apartheid-like discrimination, they are treated as inferior, a sub-species as a means of justifying the lack of democratic conditions. Therefore, the political discourse around Palestinians is sometimes one that fails to recognize their humanity. However, this discourse is compensated for by a humanitarian discourse that recognizes Palestinian humanity as long as Palestinian suffering is given no political context. Therefore, the double dissociation is: you can address the Palestinians as human beings if you are silent about the political situation; or, you can address the political situation if you suppress the consideration of Israelis and Palestinians as equal in their human needs. This is not to call for a conflation of the human with the political (as happens in the case of bio-politics), but to call for acknowledgement and analysis of the problematic of their intertwinement: that is, an understanding of how politics determines human suffering and of how human suffering fuels the political. What some of the YouTube footage, such as Ziadah’s spoken word performances together with rap songs, serves to convey is what it feels like to witness suffering, with the ideological impasse of Israel’s sense of security dependent on Palestine’s loss of liberty and self-determination. And it may be said that the viewer of such material is faced with a certain ethical invitation in turn, that is, invited to become part of a life-affirming chain of witnessing against the suffering of others, where the alternative would seem to be to deny that the suffering is real, if not to maintain the hatred of positing the suffering as justified. Beyond the question of narratives and counter-narratives is that of avowed or disavowed realities. Here, it may be said that the reality of suffering cannot ultimately be framed – ‘today my body was a TV’d massacre’ – yet may be conveyed through the very positing of what is irreducible to its objectification; Ziadah speaking here of her indivisibility from those whose deaths are on show. That sense of undeniable suffering can take, as we have discussed, the form of righteous hatred, or it can take other forms. It is a question of how the de-subjectified ‘bare life’, as a reduction to a category,

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is to be re-subjectified. Richard Kazis presents Walter Benjamin’s response to this dilemma: In 1923, Benjamin’s response to the crisis of postwar Germany was for the individual to ‘discipline himself (sic) until his suffering no longer opens onto the precipitous road of hate, rather onto the ascending path of prayer’. By 1928, when Travels Through German Inflation (in which this sentence appears) was actually published, the wording had been changed and the last phrase read: ‘until his suffering no longer opens onto the precipitous road of grief, but instead onto the ascending path of revolt’.35 While it may be said that Darwish’s poem resembles a prayer, and that Ziadah’s poem offers us a path of revolt, their poems, together with Masri’s films, present us with an art of documenting beyond the frames, framings and frameworks of hatred.

Further reading Poems by Rafeef Ziadah, written in the context of international youth activism and protest, appear in the special issue, dedicated to global youth cultures, of Wasafiri (no. 72, Winter 2012). A special issue of the Journal of Cultural Research (16.2–3, 2012) serves to define the emerging field of Arab cultural studies, with particular reference to conflicts in the Middle East: the articles by Rebecca Stein, Anna Ball and Anna Bernard relate specifically to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. A geographically broader frame is offered by K. Laachir and S. Talajooy (eds), Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures: Literature, Cinema and Music (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), which includes chapters on Turkey and Iran as well as the Arab Middle East and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. C. Rooney and R. Sakr (eds), The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut 1982 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) explores how writers, journalists and artists confront the question of how to bear witness to traumatic events through attending to the ethical parameters of representation.

Notes 1 G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2 R. Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008). 3 Y. Shenav, ‘The Imperial History of “State of Exception”’, Theory and Criticism, 29 (2006), 206–7.

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4 R. Zreik, ‘The Persistence of the Exception: Some Remarks on the Story of Israeli Constitutionalism’, Thinking Palestine, 132. 5 Ibid., 144–5. 6 I. Pappé, The Mukhabarat State of Israel: A State of Oppression is not a State of Exception’, Thinking Palestine, 149. 7 Ibid. 8 Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vol. 8: 1982–84, ‘The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut – 8 February 1983’, www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign+Relations/Israels+Foreign+Rela tions+since+1947/1982–1984/104+Report+of+the+Commission+of+Inquiry+in to+the+e.htm?DisplayMode=print 9 Ibid. 10 Anti-Defamation League, ‘Anatomy of Anti-Israel Incitement: Jenin, World Opinion and the Massacre That Wasn’t’, June 2002, www.adl.org/israel/jenin/ jenin.pdf. 11 R. Ziadah, ‘We Teach Life, Sir’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM. 12 W. S. Hesford, ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering (1)’, Biography 27.1 (2004): 104–44. 13 www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM.‘Today, my body was a TV’d massacre./Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits./Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response./And I perfected my English and I learned my UN resolutions./ But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children?/ Pause./I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza./Patience has just escaped me./ Pause. Smile./We teach life, sir./Rafeef, remember to smile./Pause./We teach life, sir./We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky./We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies./We teach life, sir./But today, my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits./And just give us a story, a human story./ You see, this is not political./We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story./Don’t mention that word ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’./This is not political./You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story./Today, my body was a TV’d massacre./How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication?/How about you?/Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun?/Hand me over your dead and give me the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits./Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits and move those that are desensitized to terrorist blood./But they felt sorry./They felt sorry for the cattle over Gaza./So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject./And these are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied./And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead./ And between that, war crime and massacre, I vent out words and smile ‘not

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exotic’, ‘not terrorist’./And I recount, I recount a hundred dead, a thousand dead./Is anyone out there?/Will anyone listen?/I wish I could wail over their bodies./I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do./Today, my body was a TV’d massacre/And let me just tell you, there’s nothing your UN resolutions have ever done about this./And no sound-bite, no sound-bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite, no sound-bite will bring them back to life./No sound-bite will fix this./We teach life, sir./We teach life, sir./We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.’ This transcription is from YouTube. This poem, together with other poems by Rafeef Ziadah, will appear in Wasafiri, Special Issue on ‘Global Youth Cultures’, ed. Blake Brandes and Caroline Rooney (2012, forthcoming). 14 www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUNGlVfqgWs&feature=related.‘There’s on this land/what is worth living,/The recurring of April,/the smell of bread at dawn,/A woman’s amulet for men,/Aeschylus’s writings,/the beginning of love,/ Grass on a stone,/mothers standing on the thread of a flute,/and the invaders’ fear of memories./There’s on this land what is worth living,/The end of September,/A lady leaving the forties/with all its apricot,/The hour of sunlight in prison,/Clouds imitating a flock of creatures,/A people’s cheers for those going up/to their doom, smiling/and the tyrants’ fear of songs./There’s on this land what is worth living,/There’s on this land,/the lady of lands,/the mother of the beginnings/and of the ends./It was called Palestine/Its name later became Palestine/My lady: I deserve,/since you’re my lady,/I deserve life.’ The YouTube performance is taken from: M. Darwish, ‘On This Earth’, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, ed. M. Akash, C. Forche, S. Antoon and A. El-Zein (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 6. 15 ‘Soldiers Face “Jenin, Jenin” Director in Court’, Jerusalem Post (3 July 2011),www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=211130. 16 Ibid. 17 Anti-Defamation League, ‘Anatomy of Anti-Israel Incitement.’ 18 Interview with Mai Masri in C. Rooney and R. Sakr (eds), The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Notre Musique, dir. J.-L. Godard (2004). 23 www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=ZE2-KfY25Xw. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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28 See J. Massad, ‘Are Palestinian Children Less Worthy?’, Al Jazeera, 30 May 2011,www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201152911579533291. html. 29 Al-Shabi, ‘To the Tyrants of the World’ http://arablit.wordpress. com/2011/01/15/to-the-tyrants-of-the-world/. 30 P. B. Shelley, ‘Mask of Anarchy’ in D. Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 1164–74. 31 M. Barghouti, ‘Verbicide’, New Internationalist Magazine, issue 359, www. newint.org/columns/essays/2003/08/01/. For a different translation of this article, see also Essays, www.mouridbarghouti.net/blog/tag/verbicide/. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 G. Karmi, ‘Is Israel an Apatheid State?’ (February 2002) www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2DAXyZIQhIM. 35 R. Kazis, ‘Benjamin’s Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC15folder/ WalterBenjamin.html#n9.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Femininity, Feminism and the Representation of Torture Sue Malvern

And it still goes on. and I wonder how this can possibly be.1

Amnesty International’s landmark Report on Torture 1975 ran to 242 pages and surveyed some 62 nations. It noted a marked rise in the use of torture, particularly in the military regimes of South America. The Report was the culmination of an Amnesty International worldwide campaign to abolish torture begun in 1972 which led to a conference in 1973 and a United Nations resolution denouncing torture.2 Amnesty International argued that the worldwide increase was mostly a consequence of states using torture as an integral element in their political system of government.3 A feature of modern torture, however, was its invisibility. Modern states that tortured its citizens in order to maintain control needed to obscure evidence that torture was taking place and thus also render its victims mute and invisible. As the 1975 Report noted, ‘once one group of citizens has been set on one side as licensed to torture, and another as a group so far beyond consideration as human beings that any brutality can be inflicted on them, the fatal step has been taken’.4 The torture victim is a form of excluded life, most recently described in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Originally found in Roman archaic law, ‘homo sacer’ or bare life is characterized by Agamben as someone so devoid of value that they can be killed without the perpetrator being punished, while at the same time homo sacer is also excluded from divine law and cannot be sacrificed.5 The counterpart to the invisible victims of torture is the anonymity of those who torture, protected by states from punishment and also from discovery. The prime purpose of Amnesty’s Report was to

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make visible the existence of torture by bearing witness to its contemporary existence through gathering testimony from those who survived it. Amnesty’s 1975 Report was a major source for a work by American artist, Nancy Spero, titled Torture of Women, 1976. The Report’s definition of torture opens the first of the 14 panels in this very large and complex work. The text begins ‘. . . . the nature of torture assumes the involvement of at least two persons, torturer and the victim, and it carries the further implication that the victim is under the physical control of the torturer. The second element is the basic one of the infliction of acute pain and suffering . . .’6 Spero typed Amnesty’s definition onto a fragment of paper with one small but not insignificant amendment – where Amnesty referred to the victim as ‘him’, Spero inserted ‘her’. In this chapter I will discuss Spero’s Torture of Women at some length. However, I will also juxtapose this to a later work by another American artist, Coco Fusco, titled A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, 2006–8. Both these artists have made their commitment to a feminist art explicit. Where Spero’s work aimed to make women visible as the victims of torture, Fusco’s project followed the disclosures of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Her work explores the involvement of American women military personnel in abuses of power and the victimization of US detainees seized as part of its war on terror. In contrast to Spero, Fusco’s women are the agents not the victims of torture. Fusco’s performance A Room of One’s Own was part of a series that culminated in a book she published in 2008 titled A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. My chapter will therefore ask what these two works enable us to explore about the shifts which have taken place in questions of femininity, feminism and violence between the 1970s and the twenty-first century. In particular, I will ask how these shifts might have challenged feminist questions about agency and violence. When Spero made Torture of Women, 1976, she was already an established artist in the avant-garde in New York, where, along with her husband, the artist Leon Golub, she had been active in protests against the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s she had painted The War Series, a set of images in gouache and ink on paper. With titles such as ‘Sperm Bomb’, ‘Androgynous Bomb’ and ‘Victims, and Female Bomb’, these works made explicit the parallels between war violence and sexuality. Her Codex Artaud, 1973, had introduced her trademark format of fragile friezes of painted images collaged onto paper with typewritten and printed text. Torture of Women was anticipated by Torture of Chile, 1974, a response to the September 1973 coup which deposed Salvador Allende and initiated a lengthy period of repression and violence. This work also marked the point when Spero elected ‘to represent “man” only through images of women’. Woman would be ‘the protagonist, an independent and positive force even when she is trapped in extreme repression in a male-controlled world’.7 She also wanted to move away from the introspection and internalized victimhood of Artaud to produce work which directly engaged with the world. She described Torture of Women as her first explicitly feminist work.8 It is also the first occasion when she began to use stencils to handprint figures onto her friezes.

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The work consists of 14 panels, each about 20 inches × 9 foot, giving a total length of around 125 feet (50.8 × 3810 cm). It was originally shown in 1976 at the A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run gallery in the United States for women artists which Spero had co-founded. At A.I.R. Torture of Women was installed in three rows around the gallery walls so that the work enveloped the spectator. The form of the frieze was not hierarchical and assumed no privileged viewpoint. The spectator encountered the work in a way that emphasized its fragmentary nature. Viewing Torture of Women was, as Christopher Lyon, Spero’s most recent biographer puts it, like reading a newspaper pasted to a billboard in a public place.9 A poster for its first showing at A.I.R., laid out by Spero and written by the art critic Lucy Lippard, voiced the work’s feminist resilience (Figure 11.1 a,b):

FIGURE 11.1 (a, b)  Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976, (Photo © NGC. © Estate of Nancy Spero. DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2012).

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Words as sperm. Tongue and mouth as penis. Woman-talk, recipes for resentment spread to the politics of prurience. . . . Long scrolls like an attenuated grid, the tension of being drawn out, strung out, angles and curves stretched into opposites, spewing out with uncontrollable violence but making patterns  – awkwardly and shrewdly comprehensible. No such things as women’s art or feminine? Well, a man never could.10 The artist herself explained that the format enabled her ‘to disperse images, text, leave blank stretches of paper – silences, in direct or layered messages. The work is a visual manuscript laid out on the wall.’11 Alongside Amnesty’s definition of torture and testimony from women who had been tortured, selected from the Amnesty Report and the New York Times, which Spero typed up herself on a bulletin typewriter, leaving errors and slips to testify to her anger as she retyped these accounts, the first panel also has the words ‘Explicit Explanation’ handprinted in large yellow letters. The words derive from the eighth century Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus which Spero knew well. The printed yellow text then recurs in the last panel where the words ‘Knife Cut’ and ‘Fascist Pig’ are pasted along with a duplicated and rotated print of Spero’s Sky Goddess which appears first in Panel IX. Some panels, such as Panel II, IX and XI consist only of images painted and collaged onto the fragile paper frieze. Others, such as Panels VIII and XII, combine imagery with typed text, quoting testimony about specific cases of torture, almost all taken from the Amnesty Report and nearly unbearable to read. The texts are typed onto torn fragments of paper, and the uneven spacing, slipped letters and hand-written corrections slow down the reading of the text, sometimes making it difficult to decipher, thus emphasizing the vulnerability of the narratives and their subjects, the victims of torture. The text is distressed as a metaphor for the distress it tells and provokes in the reader (Figure 11.2). Two panels enlarge individual accounts in black block-printed letters. In Panel X the block of text appears adjacent to a collaged image of a winged multi-headed Hydra with a veiled female figure pointing a gun creeping along its back towards a seated and vulnerable naked woman. Three panels

FIGURE 11.2  Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976, (Photo © NGC. © Estate of Nancy Spero. DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2012).

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introduce a different perspective from the witnessed testimonies given elsewhere, enlarging the narrative of torture with references to literary and mythological sources. Panel III reproduces a text printed in dark red ink from the Amnesty Report which gives the history of torture deriving from Roman law as it was resurrected in thirteenth-century Europe: . . . . torture was considered to produce probatio probatissimi, ‘the proof of all proofs’, and its practice was meticulously regulated and codified . . . the ‘question’ was divided into different degrees, ordinary, extraordinary, preparatory, and preliminary, and torture was administered in a special chamber by a civil servant, who also served as the public executioner.12 The printed text appears to imprison a vulnerable female figure. The penultimate Panel XIII reprints lines from a Summarian myth about the goddess Inanna’s descent to the underworld: ‘At their word, the word which tortures the spirit,/ the sick woman was turned into a corpse,/ The corpse was hung from a stake.’ It is quoted from a highly influential book of comparative mythology, Hero with a thousand faces, by Joseph Campbell. Panels IV and V have enlarged printed texts which run across both panels and tell the very violent Summarian myth of Marduk and Tiamat (Figure 11.3). When Spero showed Torture of Women in 1983 she typed up a list of citations for the texts on the panels and added a short introduction to the work. The introduction begins by quoting the Marduk and Tiamat text: ‘Marduk caught Tiamat in his net, and drove the winds into her body, and whilst her belly was thus distended he thrust his spear into her. . .’13 Spero explained that this ancient myth with its horrifying imagery demonstrates ‘the timeless fear, hatred of and cruelty directed towards women’. Tiamat, she wrote, was still attacked in the prisons of the world, but while men were also sexually abused, ‘woman is the prime example and desired object of this avid attention’.14 The text and the myth is the key to the work as a whole. In the Tiamat myth, after Marduk had eviscerated and split the primordial goddess, he made a covering for the heavens with her body

FIGURE 11.3  Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976, (Photo © NGC. © Estate of Nancy Spero. DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2012).

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which for Spero suggests how violence towards women is absolved by the idealization of women as nature, resurrection and sublimation. The typed accounts in Torture of Women refer to the sexual abuse of women, occasionally to rape, and to the impregnation of women prisoners. The tale of Tiamat and Marduk, magnified over two panels, makes explicit the distinctive form of violence against women as violation. Some feminist writers have argued for a need to redress the gender blindness of Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’. Ronit Lentin invents the term ‘femina sacra’ as a means to describe the specific experiences of women in the Holocaust, and a vehicle for ethnic cleansing in the rape camps of former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. Femina sacra is ‘she who can be killed, but also impregnated, yet who cannot be sacrificed due to her impurity’.15 When Spero reproduces Amnesty’s definition of torture but amends it to include women she creates a femina sacra to make visible the specific experiences of women. Torture of Women attempts to expose the obscenity of torture without itself becoming obscene. It is an act of witnessing, testifying to the existence of torture as well as mourning its victims. It acts as a memorial to women who have been tortured but at the same time, the scattered groups of female figures who dance across the frieze also suggest resistance and hope. By making women the protagonists of her work she also aimed to restore a selfhood that torture had destroyed.16 Lyon calls the work a, ‘hagiography, collecting, memorializing, and committing to memory the sufferings and sacrifices of “exemplary individuals” or “martyrs for a cause”’.17 When Spero seeks to make visible violence against women and insists on speaking about the specificity of women’s experiences she does so in a form that both acknowledges and resists patriarchal language. On one level, as Cathy de Zegher has noted, Spero extends Amnesty International’s strategy to communicate the reality of pain to those who are not in pain in order to bring about an end to torture. Intensely private descriptions of physical cruelty attempt to bring personally experienced pain into a public and shared realm because to give verbal form to pain is to contribute to the collective task of reducing and eventually stopping that pain.18 Amnesty’s Report on Torture, however, adopts a neutral voice to confirm the objectivity of its evidence and also uses the masculine subject to stand for all human victims of torture. On another level, the form of Spero’s work resists masculine language by being horizontal, decentred and fragmented. The work is deliberately fragile and elusive, searching for a feminine voice to speak that which is customarily repressed. Spero shares this endeavour with other women artists in this period who also sought to expose evidence of violence against women in a way that would grant women victims agency. One example would be Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord, 1993–4, best known through the version printed in the colour supplement of Süddeutsche Zeitung. Holzer’s project bears witness to the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia-Herzegovina through a set of texts voiced by three participants  – a perpetrator, a witness and the women themselves.

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These texts were inscribed like tattoos onto skin and photographed close-up. In Spero’s Torture of Women and in Holzer’s Lustmord the stereotyped view of women as essentially victims is redressed by restoring the power of agency to such women.19 The works are acts of restitution, and it is by this means that they can claim to be feminist works. The issue of torture is also investigated in Coco Fusco’s A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, first performed in New York, 2006 and presented in London, Oslo and New Zealand. The performance takes the form of a military briefing given by the artist herself, dressed in military uniform and using powerpoint to construct an argument about the value of female military personnel in interrogations of Muslim men detained by the United States. The second image projected behind the artist is a close-circuit television view of a cell where an interrogation takes place during the performance. The briefing begins: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it was the great British writer Virginia Woolf who argued that every woman had to have a room of her own in order to manifest her strengths.’ The performance then proceeds to make a case for women’s unique contribution in the war on terror as military interrogators: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the strategic deployment of female interrogators represents a giant leap for womankind.’ The performance, which obviously follows the disclosures of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, argues that the sexual abuse of Muslim men by female military interrogators, using their femininity, represents an advance for women finally able to make an equal contribution to the army. The performance rehearses the arguments about why abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay were not torture, as well as supplying the American rationale for detention and coercion, alongside its well-known justification for the war on terror as a means to liberate Muslim women according to Western norms.20 Fusco prefaced A Room of One’s Own with two other works (Figure 11.4). In the first, Bare Life Study #1, 2005, the artist, acting as a military policewoman, ordered a group of volunteer drama students dressed in the orange jumpsuits of military detainees to clean the street with their tooth brushes, outside the US embassy in Sao Paolo. The artist called it ‘a form of disciplinary choreography’. 21 Fusco had participated in a training course for military interrogators, and used this experience to make a video work, Operation Atropos, 2006 (Figures 11.5). She discovered that ex-military personnel often offered courses in interrogation techniques to private citizens. She and six other women signed up with an organization called Team Delta. The organization had contributed to a Channel 4 production ‘Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook’, 2005, which reconstructed techniques used by the United States. On the first day of their course, the women acted the part of prisoners with a secret to hide and were subjected to interrogations. The last two days were spent learning interrogation techniques. What they uncovered is that interrogation is a performance or piece of theatre, and that soldiers adopt the persona of an interrogator as part of a method for maintaining objectivity and control. What was

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FIGURE 11.4  Coco Fusco, ‘A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, 2006–2008, Performance’, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

FIGURE 11.5  Coco Fusco, Operation Atropos, 2006, single channel video, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

particularly shocking, or revealing, is that the most successful woman in the group, in that she did not divulge the secret, succeeded because she feigned feminine weakness so successfully that the interrogators actually called a doctor and cancelled her interrogations. She used a stereotype of femininity in order to win.

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In 2008, Fusco summarized these projects in a book A Field Guide for Female Interrogators. The first part of the book is an extended essay: ‘Invasion of Space by a Female’. It begins: Dear Virginia I have thought of you nearly every day since the war began. Obviously, I am not the only one – many feminists have turned to you to refine their thoughts on war and its effects on those who do not fight. But I also feel a little guilty about turning your best known title inside out by using it for my own performance about the dark side of advancing women’s rights through warfare. 22 The author that Fusco is addressing is obviously Virginia Woolf, and the title she turns inside out is A room of one’s own, first published in 1929. Fusco also refers to Woolf’s other polemic Three Guineas, 1938. Three Guineas takes the form of a letter to a man who has written to Woolf, as a woman, asking her to answer the question ‘How can war be prevented?’ Woolf tells her correspondent that she is looking at photographs of dead bodies, including children, sent out by the Spanish Republic fighting the Spanish Civil War. The text itself, however, is illustrated by a small selection of photographs of men in uniform – military, academic and legal. Woolf argues that because women are excluded from the professions, from the army and from universities, war is therefore a male problem. Femininity and women are not implicated in war. The purpose of Fusco’s letter to Virginia Woolf is to tell her that the arguments of Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own have been superseded. A consequence of feminist struggles for equality is that women have won the right to serve as soldiers. Moreover, what the evidence from Abu Ghraib demonstrates is that femininity itself has been recruited as a weapon. In one version of A Room of One’s Own, which Fusco presented to a conference held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, called The Feminist Future, 2007, she opens her performance with the following statement: Good Morning and God Bless America. For the past several months I have been briefing the civilian community on the subject of female interrogators and their use of sexual innuendo as a crucial weapon in the fight against global terrorism. I do so to make it more widely known that the War on Terror offers women an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate our strength and charm by providing us with an enemy for whom sexuality is a key weak point. We exploit the vulnerability that is common to Islamic fundamentalists in order to get them to cooperate with us. The sexual freedom women

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gained in the course of the twentieth century has turned out to be a highly effective means of disarming our enemies. 23 The Feminist Future conference coincided with a well-known exhibition, WACK! Art and the feminist revolution, showing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in its Queens space, P.S.1. Wack! celebrated feminist art in the 1970s, and included Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women, which by 2007 had been purchased by the National Gallery of Canada. In this version of her performance, Fusco took issue with the self-congratulation and complacency which had accompanied the exhibition of WACK! At the conference, she writes, she appeared, ‘as a visitor from the US Army who had arrived to congratulate my peers in the art world for their strategic containment of feminism and their effective use of women’. 24 In her essay ‘Invasion of Space by a Female’, Fusco explained to Virginia Woolf that she had grown up in the Vietnam Era and subscribed to the anti-war sentiments common in the circles of intellectuals and artists with whom she associated. Like Woolf and most feminists she knew, as a young woman, she assumed that war had very little to do with women. When she compared Woolf’s demand for a room for a woman’s creative life to a torture chamber she intended to challenge outmoded ideas about women’s relation to power. ‘Invasion of space by a female’ was a Pentagon approved tactic of interrogation at Abu Ghraib. 25 Moreover, she did not want to contribute to the usual stance of opponents to America’s war on terror because ‘identifying exclusively with the victims of the violence carried out in our name’ was ‘to suppress acknowledgement of ourselves as Americans’. 26 The imagery of Abu Ghraib is most commonly discussed as a matter of national shame. 27 Mobilizing shame has hitherto also been a dictum of human rights campaigns. Thomas Keenan, in an article titled ‘Mobilizing Shame’ published in 2004, writes that the human rights movement assumes that institutions such as governments, armies and militias share the attributes of individuals and are ‘vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment, disgrace, or ignominy’. 28 Keenan dates the earliest citation of mobilizing shame to 1979 in relation to war crimes in Vietnam, and also refers to a campaign on behalf of Soviet Jews and dissidents dating from 1983. He writes, ‘Mobilizing shame is the predominant practice of human rights organizations, and the dominant metaphor through which human rights NGOs understand their own work . . . The pervasiveness of this consensus cannot be overstated . . .’29 Amnesty International is a key human rights NGO and its 1970s campaign to abolish torture was a prime example of mobilizing shame to effect change. Spero’s Torture of Women, by quoting individual testimony, aimed to bring to light evidence of torture, to refer to the specificity of women’s experiences of being tortured and to trace torture’s gendered roots in longer mythologies of violence against women. A consequence of

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its participating in a culture of mobilizing shame in a campaign for human rights is that Torture of Women witnesses torture both as an ethical act of solidarity with all victims of torture, and as a political intervention to bring about change. The issue for Keenan, writing in 2004, is that the political effectiveness of mobilizing shame is in crisis. His case studies are Somalia in 1992–93 and Kosovo in 1999, and his point is that human rights abuses and war crimes are now shamelessly performed in front of cameras. It is, he writes, ‘the effective erasure of a fundamental axiom of the human rights movement in an age of publicity: that the exposure of violence is feared by its perpetrators, and hence that the act of witness is not simply an ethical gesture but an active intervention.’30 As he points out, dark deeds no longer take place in the dark. Fusco’s project, with its performances, video and publication, is in a different register to Spero’s and it also has to deal with the failures of the politics of mobilizing shame. The images of Abu Ghraib used shame as an instrument of intimidation and control, and soldiers displayed their participation in the humiliation and sexual harassment of prisoners shamelessly. Some of the perpetrators of abuses at Abu Ghraib were women. And yet Fusco’s text with its address to Virginia Woolf, and her complex performances and projects where women are the protagonists does mobilize shame by shaming feminism, specifically its Anglo-American variant, for its failure to address the question of women’s participation in violence. When Spero made Torture of Women in 1976, the Amnesty Report that formed its basis had declared that, despite evidence of mistreatment, for example, at Attica prison in 1971 and possible abuses in Vietnam, ‘it would be incorrect to suggest that there is an administrative practice of torture by the law enforcement authorities of the United States within their own domestic jurisdiction’.31 Although Spero had been active in anti-war protests against American involvement in Vietnam, Torture of Women produced evidence of torture in regimes elsewhere in the world. The work makes visible women as victims of torture but she also grants these women agency by indicating resistance and survival. The work endeavours to restore subject-hood to the women it represents that the experience of torture, including sexual abuse and rape, had destroyed. By contrast, Fusco adopts the position of an interrogator and abuser; consequently, as Karen Beckman has phrased it, her work disrupts, ‘a version of feminist discourse that has persistently placed women in the role of victim’. 32 For Beckman, the power of Fusco’s work lies in the way it blurs the distinction between activists and the institutions they oppose. In doing so, it exposes the ways in which activists are also implicated and therefore responsible for actions of the state. She suggests that in viewing these works by Fusco the role of the critical viewer begins to overlap uncomfortably with that of the interrogator.33 The vision of feminism that Fusco presents has lost its innocence.

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It is not possible to leave my argument quite like this, however. It might seem that Spero’s work belongs to a simpler feminist age when women were not implicated in violence. To argue this might risk suggesting that a consequence of women’s emancipation, which Spero, along with other women of her generation, was so active in promoting, is the right for women to join the military and to torture on equal terms with men. But it cannot be the case that women’s participation in violence and even their involvement in sexual abuse is solely an invention of the twenty-first century. As Fusco points out, however, we lack a political vocabulary with which to talk about women as perpetrators of sexual violence.34 Spero’s project aimed to make the obscenity of torture visible without producing a work that was in itself obscene; Fusco’s performance also aimed to reveal the obscenity of torture in ways that disconcerted the audiences of her piece, to suggest that they too may be implicated. Both artists aim to give agency to women, that is to have women represent and speak for themselves. Accomplishing this means recognizing that women are culprits as well as victims.

Further reading The best single source on Nancy Spero is the volume in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series edited by John Bird, Nancy Spero (London and New York: Phaidon, 1996). The Phaidon volume on Jenny Holzer (1998, ed. David Joselit) is also worth consulting for the essay by Renata Salecl on Holzer’s Lustmord project, which discusses the representation of rape. The richest and most recent biography of Spero is by Christopher Lloyd (New York: Prestel, 2010). Coco Fusco has published her writings in English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), and maintains a website of projects and sources at www.thing. net/~cocofusco/. Although there are numerous sources on art and feminism, to date there has been very little writing on feminism, art and the representation of war. Rosalind Deutsche’s Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) is a useful starting point. Events at Abu Ghraib have inevitably given rise to a very large literature on the question of women and violence: Dora Apel’s ‘Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib’ (Art Journal, 64.2, 2005, 88–100) is a pathfinding article on its visual representations. Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina Duganne: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) documents a photography exhibition that discussed decorum and gender in visual representations of violence. It includes an important essay by Mieke Bal, ‘The Pain of Images’.

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Notes 1 N. Spero, Torture of Women (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2010). 2 See J. H. Burgers and H. Danelius, The United Nations Convention against Torture: A Handbook on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Dordrecht, London: Nijhoff, 1988), 14–15, and D. Nemiroff, ‘Fourteen Meditations on Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women’ in Torture of Women (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2010), 123. 3 Amnesty International, Report on Torture (London: Duckworth in association with Amnesty International Publications, 1975), 21. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). See for example, 12. 6 Amnesty International, Report on Torture, 31. 7 C. Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work (Munich/London: Prestel, 2010), 195. 8 J. Bird, ‘Inscribing Woman between the Lines’ in Nancy Spero, (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1987), 29. 9 Lyon, Nancy Spero, 196. 10 Quoted in ibid., 185. 11 Spero, Torture of Women, 109, quoted from an interview, 1987. 12 Amnesty International, Report on Torture, 28. 13 See Spero, Torture of Women, 103. 14 Ibid., 103. 15 R. Lentin, ‘Femina Sacra: Gendered Memory and Political Violence’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 29.5 (2006), 463–73: 465. See also R. Lentin, ‘Palestinian Women from Femina Sacra to Agents of Active Resistance’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 34.3 (2011), 165–170, and C. Masters, ‘Femina Sacra: “The War on/of Terror”, Women and the Feminine’, Security Dialogue, 40.1 (2009), 29–49. 16 Bird, ‘Nancy Spero’, 30–1. 17 Lyon, Nancy Spero, 201. 18 C. de Zegher, ‘Torture, Tongue, and Free Rein in Spero’s Explicit Series of Paintings’ in E. Macgregor (ed.), Nancy Spero (Birmingham, 8: Ikon Gallery, 1998). 19 See S. Malvern, ‘Hidden Spaces and Public Places: Women, Memory and Contemporary Monuments – Jenny Holzer and Rachel Whiteread’ in F. Lloyd and C. O’Brian (eds), Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 247–60. 20 The full transcript of A Room of One’s Own is published in C. Fusco and J. E. Munoz, ‘A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America’, The Drama Review 52.1 (2008), 136–59.

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21 C. Copeland, (2008), ‘Art, Gender, Power, and the F Word: An Interview with Coco Fusco’, Afterimage 35 (2008), 5. 22 C. Fusco, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, (London: Seven Stories; New York 8, Turnaround [distributor], 2008). 23 Ibid., 97. 24 Ibid., 93. 25 Ibid., 41. 26 Ibid., 27. 27 John Limon writes, ‘One day in June 2005, I typed the words “shame of Abu Ghraib” into Google, and I was referred to 139,000 sites; by early July, there were twenty-five thousand more.’ J. Limon, ‘The Shame of Abu Ghraib’, Critical Inquiry 33.3 (2007), 543–72: 549. 28 T. Keenan, ‘Mobilizing Shame’. South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004), 435–49, 436. 29 Ibid., 437–38. 30 Ibid., 446. 31 Amnesty International, Report on Torture, 194. 32 K. Beckman, ‘Gender, Power, and Pedagogy in Coco Fusco’s Bare Life Study #1 (2005), A Room of One’s Own (2005), and Operation Atropos (2006)’, Framework 50.1 (2009), 125–38: 127. 33 Ibid., 131. 34 Fusco, Field Guide, 49.

Index Abdeljaouad, Hédi  188 Abu Ghraib (detention centre)  90 abuses  97, 149, 225, 229 imagery of  228 national shame  228 scandal of  97, 99 tactic of interrogation  228 Achour, Christiane  182 Afghanistan  9, 89–90, 93–4, 157–8, 162, 170, 173 Agamben, Giorgio  199, 219, 224 Alcoff, Linda  151 Algeria  Algerian revolution  189 Francophone novels of  see Algerian War of Independence writers  10–11 Algerian War of Independence  182–3 French Algerian authors  182–3 realism: Mouloud Mammeri  186–8 surrealism: Mohammed Dib  188–93 symbolism: Malek Haddad  183–6 Alphabetical Register for Censorship (Germany)  19 al-Shabi, Abu al-Qasim  212 American Declaration of Independence  1 American Journal of Nursing  139 American Psychiatric Association  149 Amnesty International  219, 224, 228 Anderson, Paul  58 Anti-Defamation League  201, 204 Antietam, battle of  3 Apollinaire, Guillaume  181 area bombing  56 defenders of  57 policy  57 Arizona Market  163 asymmetric warfare  102 atrocities  57, 81, 129, 135, 137–8, 140, 145, 148–50, 152, 200, 210

images of  3, 6, 11, 15–17, 20, 29, 73, 77, 81–2, 92, 102–3, 229 public attitudes towards  29, 81, 123, 126–7, 130, 135, 182 Baby Blitz over England  45 Bad Nenndorf  CSDIC  117–20 British detailed interrogation centre  117 Camp 020 (MI5)  117, 119 conversation, forbidden  119–20 cooperation from other western Allies  117–18 division between the men’s and women’s prisons  120 Interrogation procedure for women  120 Map of CSDIC Camp  118 mode of interrogation  120 ‘Prison control’ section  120 investigation, 1947  8, 115–16, 121–4 cases of ill-treatment of prisoners  122 court of inquiry  121 forms of pressure  123 Hayward’s report  121 ‘mental pressure,’ form of violence  121–3 ‘physical pressure’  124 psychological pressure  125 use of punishment not regulated by Standing Orders  123 Baedeker raids  51 Bakri, Mahamed  11, 202–6, 210 Barghouti, Mourid  212–13 Bean, Charles  32 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken)  41 Beckman, Karen  229 Beirut  200, 205, 207–8

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Belden, A. D.  54 Bell, George, Bishop of Chichester  55 Benjamin, Walter  215 Bergen Belsen  127, 129 Berlin  9, 40, 47–9, 51, 55 Bernhardt, Michael  145 Best, Geoffrey  40 Bevin, Ernest  125 Billancourt works  46 black marketeering  166–7 bombing  52–8 area bombing policy  56–7 cartoons  52 Christianity Calling  52, 54 defenders of area bombing  57 disapproval of the moral critics  52 human consequences of  49 ‘the new bombing policy’  52–3 raid on Kassel  56 reporting  Baby Blitz over England  45 losses of aircraft  47 numerical triumphalism  45 operations, details of  46 raids, coverage and realities of  46 ‘Wings for Victory’ campaign  54 Bombing Restriction Committee  43, 52, 57–8 Bonn, Charles  188 Bosnia-Herzegovina  9, 72, 136, 158–61, 166, 169, 224 Bracken, Brendan  41 Brest  46 Britain  ‘decency’ versus realism in  25–34 absence of challenging photos  33 characteristic of the British press  26 dead soldiers, photographs of  25 decency and self-censorship  33 dull and failed to express emotions  25 epic drawings  27 French counter-model  32 Imperial War Museum  32 Le Miroir’s photographic sequence  26 No Man’s Land  30–1 War Propaganda Bureau  28

reporting of German raids on  51 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  5, 40–2, 46, 47, 49–50, 57 British interrogation centre  9, 117 British media, allied bombing offensive in  aftermath of Dresden  60 bombing  52–8 censorship and complicity  40–4 public opinion polls  58 record of reporting  40 reporting bombing  45–7 reporting devastation  47–51 Brittain, Vera  43, 57–8 Brooks, Ernest  28 brutalization  138 Bryant, Arthur  57 Bush, George W., President  7, 89, 91, 94, 96, 99, 103–5 ‘by-product’ hypothesis  141 Bystanding  172 Caen  49 Calley, William  affair  6 conviction  78, 80 court-martial  78–82 prosecution of  78–82 public support for  80 Camp 020 (MI5)  117, 119 Camp Delta  99, 100 Camp ‘No’  95, 108 Camp X-Ray  94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 108 Campbell, Joseph  223 Camus, Albert  182 Canadian War Photographs Exhibitions  30–1 Capa, Robert  21 carceral state  96 Cardew, Basil  42 cartoons  52 Castle, Ivor  28 Casualties of War (film)  144 censorship  23 and complicity  40–4 Air Ministry as propagandist  41–2 ‘D-notices’  41 freedom available to the news media  42–3

INDEX idea of out-bombing the Luftwaffe  43 maximum publicity, reasons  43 model of liberal censorship regime  41 record of technical and operational failures  42 Charles I, King  1 Children of Shatila (film)  11, 202, 205–6 Christianity Calling  52, 54 Churchill, Sir Winston  41, 43–4, 47, 52, 60 City of London Corporation  43 Civil War, American  1–2 Civil War, English  1–2 ‘clandestine torture programme’  127–30 C. S. as witness at Stephens’s court martial  129 Freedom of Information Act  128 language used to describe  128 clean (concept)  93, 102–5 see also Guantánamo clean war  body fluids, weapons in the ‘battle for Guantánamo’  101 clean construction of Guantánamo  103 dirt, part of resistance  101 Freedom of Information Act  103 Guantánamo Icon, performances of  103 ‘safe, legal, humane, transparent’ facilities  101 shit throwing  102 Tipton Three  103 TOWs and SOWs  102 U.S. technologies to limit the spread of waste  102 Clifton, Allan S.  138 ‘Club Gitmo’  100–1 Cobain, Ian  128 Cockburn, Cynthia  140 Cohen, Stanley  72–3 Colline oubliée, La (novel)  183 Cologne  45, 48, 50, 56 Colonisation  2, 10, 183–4, 186, 189, 202 Combined Bomber Offensive  39–40

235

Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC)  115–23, 126–30 Commentary on the Apocalypse (Beatus)  222 concealment  40, 92–7, 99, 104 clean and dirty as linguistic and visual metaphors  93 cleanliness  92 detention for sex offenders and juveniles  96 identities of detainees  94 revolving door of prison guards  96 terrorists associated with 9/11 and the GWoT  93 US Naval Base at Guantanamo  96 Conditions to apply to censorship of pictures (Germany)  19 Constitution of the United States  1 ‘contact zone’  158 Corr, John  136–7 corruption  161, 163 cost of war  47, 70, 99, 126 Cranborne, Lord  55–6 ‘credit card swipe’ (body cavity search)  98 Crimea  2 cultural training  172 ‘cultural turn’, US Army  170–3 ‘cultural sensitivity’  172 cultural training  172 effective counter-insurgency  170 form of ‘military orientalism’  171 MOD’s experimental cultural analysis  171 in western strategies  9 Daily Express (London)  42, 45, 49 Daily Mail (London)  49 Daily Mirror (London)  29, 41, 45, 48, 52–5, 57, 60 Daily Telegraph  5, 29 Daily Worker  41 Dams raid  48, 49 Darwish, Mahmoud  203, 207–8, 213, 215 dead soldiers in Das, photographs of  17, 20, 25 Dehumanisation  101, 138–9, 181

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democratic peace theory  2 denazification, process of  116 Dernière Impression, La (novel)  10, 183 devastation, reporting  Dams raid  48, 49 destruction of Lewisham primary school  51 destruction of the built-up area  48 devastation in Italy and France  49 human consequences of bombing  49 offensive against Berlin  49 reporting of German raids on Britain  51 reports of civilian deaths  50 V-weapon offensive  51 de Zegher, Cathy  224 Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders  149 Dib, Mohammed  11, 183, 188–93 Algerian revolution  189 interpretations of symbols  191 neologisms and re-appropriated words  190 Qui se souvient de la mer (Who remembers the sea)  188–9 Theory of Iriace Behaviour  191 dirty war  93 ‘D-notices’  41 Documentary  129, 142, 202–3, 205, 207, 209 ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering’  202 Douglas, Air Marshal Sir Sholto  121 Douglas Home, William  42 Dresden  45, 49, 60 aftermath of  60 Dreyfus Affair (France)  2 Duc, Thich Quang  self-immolation of  74–5, 77 Duke Law Journal in 1996  136 Dye, Ellen  151 écriture de combat  181 Eisenhart, Wayne  143 Eksteins, Modris  29 El Tres de Mayo 1808 (painting)  181 Eluard, Paul  181

enhanced interrogation techniques  97, 103 epic drawings  27 Essen  48 ethics  10, 52, 129, 139, 146–7, 202, 211, 213 Evening Standard (London)  41–2, 46, 50–2, 57 evolutionary psychology  141 Exceptional, exceptionalism, critique of  96 Executive Order, EO 13492  105 Executive Order, EO 13567  105 Falls, Cyril  58 Fanon, Frantz  189 Faulhauber, Michael, Archbishop  48 Favrelière, Sergeant Noël  187 Fetscher, Doris  184 Field Guide for Female Interrogators, A  10, 220, 227 Filipacchi, Daniel  22 Fossey, Dian  141 France  devastation in  48 Dreyfus Affair  2 shock and emotion in  19–25 bans on front-line photography  21 censorship  23 civilian’s access to violent images  20 counter-model to German  19 denied access to full trauma  19 illustrated press  24, 25 limits  22 Nightmare Vision for the Kaiser’s Nights, A  21 offers of cash prizes  22 organization chart of French censorship  24 photographs representing dead soldiers  20 press and censor’s decisions  24 sensationalism  23 sensational photographs  20 war’s new style of combat  20 Frankland, Noble  40 fraternization  9, 167–70

INDEX and consensual sex  167 cultural legacy of  167–8 Human Rights Watch  170 identification with sex  169 rape  167 sexual activities of armed forces  169 trafficking of women  169–70 Freedom of Information Act  103, 128 French censorship, organization chart of  24 ‘frequent-flier programme’ (sleep deprivation)  98 frontier town morality  163–7 Arizona Market  163 black marketeering activities  166–7 invasion of Iraq  163 mutual exploitation and personal enrichment  166 notions of ownership  165 property rights of local civilians  165 relationships with civilians  163–4 Wild West corruption of Iraq  163 front-line photography, bans on  21 Front de Libération Nationale (Algeria: FLN)  183–4 Fuller, Major-General J. F. C.  52 Fusco, Coco  10–11, 220, 225–30 Gallup polls  58–9 Gardner, Alexander  3 Gassed (painting)  181 Gaza  10, 210–11, 216 Geller, Sergeant Harry  46 Geneva Conventions  91, 94, 97–8, 100, 116, 124 Genoa  48 genocide  72, 212 German censorship of pictures, organization chart of  18 Germany  Bad Nenndorf  117–23 see also Bad Nenndorf Camp 020  117 ‘clandestine torture programme’  127–30 C. S. as witness at Stephens’s court martial  129 Freedom of Information Act  128 language used to describe  128

237

complex system of post-war imprisonment  116 conditions of solitary confinement cells  123 justifications  128 process of denazification  116 Report of the Committee of Privy Counsellors  115 silence, sublimation and authority in  15–19 dead soldiers in Das, photographs of  17 denial of reality  18 fighting  17 idea of chaos  17 organization chart of the german censorship of pictures  18 psychological potential of the photographs  19 violence depicted through heroism  17 visible violence  116 Gervais, Thierry  16 GI War Against Japan. American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II, The  140 Global War on Terror (GWoT)  7, 89 as ‘clean war’  104 legitimation of  91–2 terrorists associated with  93 Godard, Jean-Luc  209 Goodall, Jane  141 Gottschall, Jonathan  136, 141 Goya, Francisco de  181 Gray, J. Glenn  139 Gray, Laura  151 Great Britain  15–16, 28, 32, 34 group dynamics  145 Guantánamo  CIA ‘ghost sites’  90 ‘clean’ language and imagery  92 clean war  101–3 concealment, practices of  92–7 Executive Order, EO 13567  105 GWoT  89, 91–2, 104 national security-human rights nexus  90

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National Security Strategy of 2002  91 NDAA  89 redefinition, practices of  97–8 redirection, practices of  99–101 USA PATRIOT Act  89 US detention and interrogation site at  90 Guantánamo Icon  103 Guantanamo, opening, closure  97 Guernica (painting)  181 Haddad, Malek  10–11, 183–6, 188–9, 192 Je t’offrirai une Gazelle (I’ll bring you a gazelle)  184, 192 La Dernière Impression (The Last Impression)  183 linguistic Arabization  186 lyrical juggling  183 Saharan narrative  186 Haley, W. J.  51 Hamburg  45, 48–50, 55 Hanover  117, 126 Harris, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur  39, 45 Hart, Gavin  147 Hayward, Tom  121–3, 126 Heller, Joseph  182 Hemingway, Ernest  182 Hernández-Laroche, Araceli  190–1 Hero with a thousand faces  223 Hesford, Wendy S.  202 Hiley, Nicholas  28 Hitler, Adolf  6, 43–4, 52, 136 Holocaust  72–3, 124 Holzer, Jenny  224–5 Homo Sacer  219 hope  see youth and filmed testimony, states of siege human intelligence  115, 128 human nature  135, 138, 141–2 human rights  7, 72, 90–1, 98, 103, 170, 202, 208, 229–9 human rights-national security nexus  90–1, 105 Human Rights Watch  170 humane treatment of detainees   100 Hurley, Frank  32

Illustrated London News, The  17, 25–6, 33 Illustrierte Blatt, Das  16 Imperial War Museum  32 Instructions on the censorship of pictures (Germany)  19 International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology  146 ‘Invasion of Space by a Female’ (essay)  227, 228 Iraq  deployment in  158–9 GWoT  90 invasion of  163 U.S. intervention  72 War  193 Wild West corruption  163 Israel  apartheid  214 attack during the second Siege of Beirut  207–8 incursion into the Jenin camp in 2002  201 Israeli Operation ‘Defensive Shield’  203–4 Israel–Palestine conflict  199 state of emergency  199–200 Israeli Defence Forces (IDF)  201, 203–4, 210–11 Israeli Kahan Commission  200 Japan  138 Jenin  201–2, 204, 206, 210–11 Jenin, Jenin (film)  11, 202–3, 207, 209, 213 Jerusalem  203 Je t’offrirai une Gazelle (novel)  184, 192 Johnson, President Lyndon B.  70, 77 Journal of Sex Research, The  136 just war  90, 93, 130 Kant, Immanuel  67 Karmi, Ghada  214 Kazis, Richard  214–15 Keenan, Thomas  228–9 Kenya  2 Khadda, Naget  189 King, Cecil  41, 60

INDEX Kriegspresseamt  18 Krupp works, Essen  48 Lancaster (aircraft type, built by Avro)  40, 46 landscape modification  159 Lang, Cosmo Gordon, Archbishop  55 Langham, Lt. Richard Oliver  122–3, 125–6 Lebanon  11, 201, 206, 208 L’Echo d’Alger  187 Le Creusot  46 legitimacy  70, 90–3, 97, 200, 209–10 Le Havre  42, 46 Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung  16 Lentin, Ronit  224 Lerner, Melvin  72 Lewisham  51 liberal universalism  2, 74, 80 Liddell Hart, Captain Basil  52 L’Illustration  25–6, 31 Limbaugh, Rush  149 Loan, Nguyen Ngoc Loan  execution of Vietcong suspect by  74–5, 77 L’Opium et le Bâton (novel)  186, 188, 192 Lübeck  51, 56, 58 Lüdenscheider Zeitbilder  16 Luftwaffe  5, 43, 45, 46, 51, 56, 59, 60 Lustmord (1993–4)  224–5 Lynch, Charles  3 Maidenhead Advertiser  42 Mammeri, Mouloud  11, 183, 186–9, 192 L’Opium et le Bâton  186, 192 portraits of recognizable individuals  187 violence and torture  187 Manchester Guardian  45, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56 Mannheim  45 Manser, Flying Officer L.T.  47 Map of CSDIC Camp  118 Masri, Mai  11, 202, 205–9, 213, 215 massacres  My Lai  77–9 Sabra and Shatila  200

239

‘mass’ rapes  136 McCusker, Michael  144–5 Meehan, Patricia  128 ‘mental pressure,’ form of violence  121, 123–4 MI5  117–19, 129 MI6  117 Milan  46 military orientalism, form of  171 Military Rape (1997)  141 military training  8–9, 143 Miller, Laura L.  142 Ministry of Information (UK)  41, 43 Miroir, Le  21, 23, 24, 26 mobility  162, 166 Mobilizing Shame (article)  228–9 Morgen Tidningen (Stockholm)  49 Morris, Madeline  136–7 Morrison, Herbert  41, 43 Murphy, Sergeant Ed  146 Murrow, Ed  50 Mussolini, Benito  6, 52, 57 My Lai massacre  77–9 national debate about  80 photographs of  74–6, 79 press revelations of  82 public responses to  81 Nadelson, Theodore  148 Nanking  9, 136 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)  89 national security-human rights nexus  90 National Security Strategy of 2002  91 Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Forced Sex, A  141 Nettleton, Squadron Leader J. D.  47 new bombing policy  52–3 News Chronicle (London)  42, 46–50, 52 Nightmare Vision for the Kaiser’s Nights, A  21 9/11  93 Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel)  60 Nixon, Richard  6, 68–70, 78, 80, 82 NKVD  128 No Man’s Land (photograph)  30–1, 33 Norris, Margot  192

240

INDEX

‘no-touch’ approaches  7 Notre Musique  209 numerical triumphalism  45 Nuremberg  6, 47, 81 Obama, Barack H., President  7, 105 Oberzensurstelle (Oz)  18–19 Observer, The (London)  42, 46, 58 occupation of space  166 Bosnia/Herzegovina, peace-keeping in  159 ‘contact zone’  158 ‘cultural turn’ (US Army)  170–3 ‘cultural sensitivity’  172 cultural training  172 effective counter-insurgency  170 form of ‘military orientalism’  171 MOD’s experimental cultural analysis  171 fraternization  167–70 and consensual sex  167 cultural legacy of  167–8 Human Rights Watch  170 identification with sex  169 rape  167 sexual activities of armed forces  169 trafficking of woman  169–70 frontier town morality  163–7 Arizona Market  163 black marketeering activities  166–7 invasion of Iraq  163 mutual exploitation and personal enrichment  166 notions of ownership  165 property rights of local civilians  165 relationships with civilians  163–4 Wild West corruption of Iraq  163 landscape modification  159 ‘non-kinetic’ forms of engagement  157 personal time frames  162 power, notional  162 power, physical  162 renaming space, practice of  160–1 road accidents caused by military  162

threat of suicide bombers  159 UN/NATO peace-keeping/ peace-building mission  158 UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force)  159 visible violences of war: carpet bombing, torture and rape  158 ‘War Story’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum  173 Offendum, Omar  203, 207, 213 Onan, Chuck  144 ‘On this Land, There’s What’s Worth Living’ (Darwish)  203 Operation Atropos, 2006  225–6 Ortzen, Len  183 Orwell, George  57 Owen, Wilfred  181 Palestine  203, 205–7, 210–11, 214 Palestinian–Israeli civil rights movement  204 Palmer, Craig  141 Pappé, Ilan  199–200 Paris-Match  22 patriotism  3, 5 peer pressure  139, 143–5 performing Guantánamo  103 ‘perpetual peace’ (Kant)  67 Petition of Right  1 Phalangists (Lebanon)  200–1 photocombattants  22 photography passim  and atrocity  72–3, 150–1 concerned  72–3 front-line  21 Holocaust  73 Phuc, Kim  74, 76–7 physical pressure  124 Picasso, Pablo  181 Pickand, Captain Alexander  141 Pickles, Wilfred  50 Picture Post  48–9, 51, 56, 58 Pidsley, Reg  40 pillaging  165 Poetry  10–11, 181–3, 203, 208, 212–14 Poland  5 Portal, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles  42

INDEX Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)  149 assumptions in drawing on  150 Potsdam agreement  116 power relations  162, 165 Prévert, Jacques  181 Primatology  141 ‘Prison control’ section  120 prison practices  96 professional motivation  3 profiteering  166 provincial liberalism  68 psychiatry  148–9, 151 psychology  19, 125, 141 public opinion polls  58, 78 Queensland (Australia)  138–9 Qui se souvient de la mer (novel)  188–9, 191–2 racism  143, 145–6, 150 Radcliffe, Cyril  41 Rademeyer, Sergeant  46 rape  167 mass  136 nature of exposing atrocities  137 politics of sexual atrocities in progressive societies  135 rape scripts, divergence in  136 scripts, divergence in  136 strategic rape theory  136 ‘thin’ narratives of sexual violence 1914–45  138–40 dehumanization and brutalization  138 fuction of uniting men  140 naturalization of extreme violence  138 sexual assaults of civilian women  139 victimization of perpetrators  148–51 perpetrators as victims of violence  149 traumatic events in childhood and psychological stresses  148 victims of psychological trauma  149 Winter Soldier Investigation  149

241

Vietnam and after: the naturalization of rape and stressors  140–8 acts of sexual atrocity  140 assumptions in drawing on PTSD  150 ‘by-product’ hypothesis  141 hyper-masculine environments  143 Military Rape (1997)  141 ‘naturalization’ argument  140 peer pressure  144–5 performance of ‘trauma speech’  151 poor leadership  144–5 primatology  141 processes of normalization  147 ‘search and destroy’ missions by chimpanzees  141 sex and pain  143 socio-biology or evolutionary mechanisms  141–2 state-legitimized violence  150 stressors  143 realism  186–8 L’Opium et le Bâton  186–7, 192 portraits of recognizable individuals  187 violence and torture  187 Red Cross  98–9, 201 redefinition, practices of  abuses synonymous with Abu Ghraib  97 ‘battlelab’ for interrogations  97 ‘credit card swipe’ (body cavity search)  98 ‘frequent-flier programme’ (sleep deprivation)  98 ‘package’ (detainee)  98 programme of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’  97 ‘reservations’ (interrogation)  98 ‘self-inflicted’ pain  98 soiling practices  98 terminology of violent practices  97–8 ‘three-piece suit’ (shackles)  98 violent practices  97 redirection, practices of  99–101 Camp Delta  99

242

Camp X-Ray  99 ‘Club Gitmo’  100–1 description by as Miss Universe, Dayana Mendoza  100 description by House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA)  100 visual record of Guantánamo  99 renaming space, practice of  160–1 Report of the Committee of Privy Counsellors (1972)  115 ‘reservations’ (interrogation)  98 resistance  74, 92, 101–2, 139, 187, 190, 207, 212, 224, 229 Rider-Rider, William  32 Robinson, Squadron Leader J. R.,  57 Roblès, Emmanuel  182 Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, A (2006 –8)  10 –11, 220, 225– 6 Rose, Group Captain  42 Rostock  48–51, 56 Roth, Susan  151 Royal Air Force (RAF)  4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald, Secretary of Defense  94–5, 97, 99 Rwanda  9, 72, 136, 151–2, 224 Rwandan genocide  72 Sargent, John Singer  181 Sassoon, Siegfried  181 Scales, Thomas  32 Schneider Trophy  46 Schrijvers, Peter  140 Segarra, Marta  187 self-censorship, British model of  5 sensationalism  20, 23 sexual violence  138–40 dehumanization and brutalization  138 fuction of uniting men  140 naturalization of extreme violence  138 sex and pain  143 sex offenders and juveniles, detention for  96 sexual activities of armed forces  169

INDEX sexual assaults on civilian women  139 sexual atrocity, acts of  140 Sharon, Ariel, Israeli Prime Minister  204, 210 Shenav, Y.  199–200 Shepherd, E. Colston  42, 49, 57, 59 Siege of Sarajevo  209 Simpson, B. F., Bishop  51 Sinclair, Sir Archibald  39, 48, 59 Slaughterhouse Five (novel)  190 Smith, Captain John Stuart  124–6 socio-economic deprivation  206 Somme, the (battle)  5, 29–30, 32–3 Sontag, Susan  72–4 Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)  58 Spender, Stephen  181 Spero, Nancy  11, 220–5, 228–30 Sphere, The  26–7, 33 Standing Orders, use of punishment not regulated by  122–3 state-legitimized violence  150 state of exception (Agamben’s concept)  199 Stephens, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin  117–19, 121–2, 124–6, 129 Stewart, Major Oliver  42, 50 Stokes, Richard  42, 57, 124–5 Strachey, John  42, 45, 50, 56–9 ‘strategic rape theory’  136 stressors  143 Süddeutsche Zeitung  224 suffering  71–4, 102 ‘concerned photography’  72–3 genocides  72 Holocaust  72–3 humanitarianism, defeats of  72 social evils  72 suicide bombers, threat of  159 surrealism  188–93 Algerian revolution  189 interpretations of symbols  191–2 neologisms and re-appropriated words  190 Qui se souvient de la mer (Who remembers the sea)  188–9 Theory of Iriace Behaviour  191 symbolism  10, 183–6

INDEX Je t’offrirai une Gazelle (I’ll bring you a gazelle)  184, 192 La Dernière Impression (The Last Impression)  183 linguistic Arabization  186 lyrical juggling  183 Saharan narrative  185 testimony, mediations of  Anti-Defamation League, report  201 culture of telling (Masri)  205 documentary filming, act of  207 documentary films  202–3 Israeli attack during the second Siege of Beirut  207–8 Israeli incursion into the Jenin camp in 2002  201 Israeli Operation ‘Defensive Shield’  203–4 Palestinian–Israeli civil rights movement  204 political, legal and psychosocial aftermaths of crimes  201 politicization/romanticization of testimonial subjects  202 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut  200 role of media  201 socio-economic deprivation of refugees  206 Tet offensive  68–9, 77 Theory of Iriace Behaviour  191 ‘Thinking Palestine’ (essay)  199 Third Amendment to the United States Constitution  1 Thornhill, Randy  141 Three Guineas, 1938 (essay)  227 ‘three-piece suit’ (shackles)  98 Times, The (London)  46, 57, 124–8, 130 Tipton Three  103 torture  90, 91, 97, 98, 103 feminism and  11, 219–30 Amnesty International  222, 228 Feminist Future, The  227 Field Guide for Female Interrogators, A  227 imagery of Abu Ghraib  228

243

‘Invasion of Space by a Female’ (essay)  227, 228 ‘Mobilizing Shame’ (article)  228 Operation Atropos, 2006  225 rape of Muslim women in Bosnia-Herzegovina  224–5 Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, A  220, 225–6 Three Guineas, 1938  227 Torture of Chile, 1974  220 Torture of Women  220–5 ‘Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook,’ 2005  225 typed accounts in Torture of Women  224 WACK ! Art and the feminist revolution (exhibition)  228 violence and  187 Torture of Chile (1974)  220 Torture of Women (1976)  11, 220–5, 228–9 ‘Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook,’ 2005  225 ‘To the Tyrants of the World’ (poem)  212 ‘TOWs’ and ‘SOWs’ (Turd Offensive Weapons and Semen Offensive Weapons)  102 Trade Topical Committee  28 traffic accidents  9, 170 trafficking of woman  169–70 Trained to Kill Soldiers at War  148 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems in 2000  136 trauma  events in childhood and psychological stresses  148 ‘trauma speech,’ performance of  151 victims of psychological  149 Tremaine, Louis  189, 192 Treratola, Ed  144 Tribune (London)  43 Under the Rubble  207 United Kingdom  1, 26, 29, 60, 135, 137

244

INDEX

United States  detention and interrogation site at  90 foreign policy  89 intervention in Iraq  72 Naval Base at Guantanamo  96 technologies to limit the spread of waste  102 UN/NATO peace-keeping/ peace-building mission  158 UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force)  159 USA PATRIOT Act  89 Vachss, Alice  150 Vaughan Thomas, Wynford  40, 46–7 Velletri  49 verbicide  209–15 act of aesthetic manipulation  210 controversy over testimonial nature of Bakri’s film  210–11 ‘de-legitimize’ Israel  209 ethics of aurality  213 Israeli apartheid  214 media and the testimony  209 Siege of Sarajevo  209 strategies of legitimacy  210 ‘To the Tyrants of the World’ (poem)  212 ‘We teach life, sir’ (poem)  211–12 YouTube footage  214 Verdun  20–1 victimization of perpetrators  148–51 perpetrators as victims of violence  149 traumatic events in childhood and psychological stresses  148 victims of psychological trauma  149 Winter Soldier Investigation  149 Vietnam  140–8 acts of sexual atrocity  140 assumptions in drawing on PTSD  150 ‘by-product’ hypothesis  141 hyper-masculine environments  143 Military Rape (1997)  141 ‘naturalization’ argument  140 peer pressure  144–5 performance of ‘trauma speech’  151 poor leadership  144–5 primatology  141

processes of normalization  147 ‘search and destroy’ missions by chimpanzees  141 sex and pain  143 socio-biology or evolutionary mechanisms  141–2 state-legitimized violence  150 stressors  143 Vietnam Veterans Against the War  149, 151 Vietnam War  anti-war movement and  68–9, 78 Calley’s court-martial  79 case of the My Lai massacre  77–9 civilian deaths during  74–82 composition of popular attitudes  81–2 Duc’s self-immolation  75, 77 historiography of  68–71 anti-war movement  69–71 consequences of American military intervention  71 invasion of Cambodia  70 media on violence  69 post-colonial revolution  71 Tet offensive, failure of  68–71 ‘hypodermic’ model of communication  82 iconic images of violence  77 killing of innocents  67–8 national debate about My Lai  80 news media and  68–9, 77–8 opinion polls and  74 ‘perpetual peace’ (Kant)  67 photographs of 1968 My Lai massacre  74–6 picture of Kim Phuc  76–7 provincial liberalism  68 public support for  80 slow follow up of media  81 suffering  71–4 ‘concerned photography’  72–3 genocides  72 Holocaust  72–3 humanitarianism, defeats of  72 social evils  72 surveys of public opinion  78 victim status to soldiers who had done killing  81

INDEX violence  carpet bombing, torture and rape  158 depicted through heroism  17 images, civilians’ access to  20 invisible  12, 97, 115–16, 123, 127, 129, 131, 158, 172–3 practices  97 terminology of  97–8 visible  116, 158 visual  ‘conspiracy of silence’  15 ‘extreme violence’  16 liberal societies and shock of war news, relationship between  16 media’s portrayal of the violence  15 model 1: silence, sublimation and authority in Germany  15–19 model 2: shock and emotion in France  19–25 model 3: ‘decency’ versus realism in Britain  25–34 Von Dewitz, Bodo  20 Vonnegut, Kurt  190 Vulnerability  129, 135, 148, 192, 222, 227 V-weapons  51 WACK! Art and the feminist revolution (exhibition)  228 Walker, Ronald  42 War Propaganda Bureau (Wellington House, London)  5, 28 Warriors, The  139 ‘War Story’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum  173 wartime censorship  41

245

Waterboarding  7, 98 Western Front in 1914–18  4 Westmoreland, General William  68, 70 ‘We teach life, sir’ (poem)  211–12 Williams, Francis (later Lord Francis-Williams)  41 Wings for Victory week  41, 54 Winter, Jay  33 Winter Soldier Investigation  149 witness  children as  11 C. S.  127, 129–30 eye  48, 81 prisoner  11 Woodley, Arthur E. ‘Gene’  142 Woolf, Virginia  10, 225, 227–9 World War One  2–3, 41, 43 World War Two  3–5, 7, 40–1, 58, 90, 96, 139, 168, 183, 192 writing war  see Algerian War of Independence youth and filmed testimony, states of siege  countering ‘verbicide’  209–15 Israel–Palestine conflict  199 Israel’s state of emergency  200 mediations of testimony  201–7 state of exception (Agamben’s concept)  199 Zec, Philip  52–6 Zeit im Bild  16 Zelizer, Barbie  73–4 Ziadah, Rafeef  203, 207–9, 211–15 Zreik, Raef  199