they were celebrating the conquest of something — the conquest of another person’s dignity, the violation of another person’s bodily integrity and privacy; and making that other person perform the act herself just adds to the sense of conquest, as it means they have exacted obedience, not merely inflicted defeat. it is exactly the same thrill of domination experienced by the teacher or parent who forces a child to go and fetch the belt w/which s/he will be beaten, then forces the child to say “thank you” afterwards. it is the thrill that Graner and his friends felt when they forced the Iraqi prisoners to pose in pornographic tableaux, to form human pyramids.

to make another person humiliate him or herself in obedience to one’s command is a far more complete victory than merely to beat them up, commit forcible rape, etc. bullying sergeants in the British army are reputed to shout at their recruits, “You are a Horrible Little Man. What are you?” and the recruit is supposed to answer obediently, “I am a horrible little man, Sir!” pimps ask their “girls” “Who’s your Daddy,” and the girl is expected to answer obediently, “You’re my Daddy.” sullen silence is evidence of defiance. total obedience requires parroting the master’s BS back at him, betraying oneself. that betrayal of the self is the master’s ultimate success.

the ultimate success of colonialist occupation comes when the occupied people start enforcing the colonial master’s rules against each other and themselves…

Three teenage boys pooled their money to make a stripper press the heel from one of her stiletto shoes into her vagina, after which they laughed uproariously, gave each other high-fives, and generally spoke and acted as if they were celebrating the conquest of something. It reminded me of deer hunting men in my childhood who shot a beautiful buck and then congratulated each other on the shared kill, only with more laughter.

The last paragraph of the post where you bring up the question of why documenting conquest appears to be an integral part of the conquest brings the point home in the simple asking of the questions in this context.

TomPaine.com can run an article with the title “Against the Climate Pornographers” and it’s all kewl and grewvy.

what would happen if they ran an article by a radical feminist with the title “Against the Pornographers”?

do we need three guesses?

why is it that pornography is a handy metaphor for media which are in some way complicit/disinformational/corrupt/damaging, and yet pornography itself — complicit in violence against women, disinformational about human sexuality, corrupt as hell, and damaging to women’s social standing and safety — remains sacrosanct? how can the word be used in a context which clearly indicates it is a tainted meme, and yet the next minute be a valorised and defended meme?

Climate Porn

Apocalyptic visions of climate change used by newspapers, environmental groups and the UK government amount to “climate porn”, a think-tank says.

Story made it to the US Librul blogosphere by way of Tom Paine: Against the Climate Pornographers

now, what on earth does this phrase “climate porn” mean? we’ve already been told by the experts in the MSM that the purpose of pornography is to “titillate”. so “climate porn” is pornography-like because it titillates? because it appeals to emotion rather than reason? (why not then call it polemic or propaganda or agitprop, grandstanding or ‘circus’ or flimflam?) or because it misleads? or because it somehow disempowers its consumer?

we’ve also seen in recent years the label “eco porn” describing (a) grossly misleading green-hog-wash from the Filth Industries, and (b) slick Nat Geo type coffee table travelogues for rich people, and (c) the genre of “SUVs rampaging through beautiful pristine nature” car ads. again, why do liberals who allegedly approve of actual porn slap the label [fill-in-the-blank]-porn onto media of which they disapprove?

this metaphor seems to capture an uneasy, unofficial acknowledgment that pornography is not, in fact, charming or harmless (much as colloquial phrases like F— You and “that sucks” reveal masculinist ideologies of gender, sex, and power). what aspects of it are highlighted in each of these uses of “porn” to describe propaganda, advertising, and sensationalist journalism? I’m still thinking it over.

one more disturbing suspicion… isn’t Nat Geo trophy pictures for rich Anglos? evidence that their media, their wealth, their (popularised science) penetrates (ahem) the entire ecosphere and every last human culture? next disturbing question: is at least some of “climate porn” trophy pictures for industrial humanity? “you wouldn’t believe what we did to this planet”…

Trophy pictures, indeed.

Anyways, just some more of my pre-coffee rambling.

During the Gulf Coast March early this year, I was involved in helping with a cleanup crew made up mostly of veterans (that particular day–mostly awesome non-vet volunteers other days). My personal minor epiphany came when I ran into a former Army captain who was also working the mucking crew. To my everlasting horror the first thing out of my mouth was “Hi–you’re an officer, so why don’t you tell us where you want us.” To his credit he DIDN’T punch me in the face for inserting him into a no-longer-existant hierarchy that he was desperately trying to forget.

Point is I have been out of the military for twenty years and I am successful, and mildly authoritarian, in my own right now as a business owner ( ). I HATED the military hierarchy while I was in, but relished hating all officers, as I was forever a member of the “real” working class of the military–the enlisted.

BUT THAT’S HOW DEEP THIS SHIT GOES! It NEVER goes away, ever. I see a set of silver Captains’ bars and I start to itch with a need to disrespect the person wearing them while simultaneously asking her/him “How high, sir?” SICKSICKSICK! Arghhh.

As I said, just a supporting anecdote.

Randy

As De has pointed out more than once, trophies are a male icon of conquest (remember the hguge photo of a dead Zarqawi’s face behind the Centcom press briefer); and transgression (celebrated by the pomo “sex positive” porn apologists as liberatory) is not forbidden, but reserved as the prerogative of the ruling class, be that an economic, racial-national, or a sex class.

In correspondence with two writer-collaborators, I was asked to explain the Ranger Code of Silence in the Army; and this seems pertinent to the discussion here. I am pasting this in below, and will also direct readers to http://www.ogrish.com for a peek at one very popular site that highlights everything De says here.

From the note to my collaborators on Rangers, the Army, and codes of silence:

(1)

All bureaucratic organizations have an unofficial code of silence that is intrinsic to bureaucracies, as part of a phenomenon called “overconformity.” It is the result of “a defensive informal organization which tends to arise whenever there is an apparent threat to the integrity of the group.” Both Veblen and Dewey have spoken to this at some length. In addition to silence to maintain stability, there is a corollary bureaucratic effect that I talked about in my series that sociologists call “precautionary overestimation.” Durkheim has also written on how technical norms become rigidified and “sacralized,” and as part of the insular nature of the bureaucracy, the “client” (n the case of the military, the public) becomes the antagonist, a threatening presence against those sacred norms… which then are kept secret as a way of protecting them.

The United States Armed Forces is a bureaucracy. Do the math.

(2)

All class solidarities are characterized by codes of silence.

The officer corps and the enlisted troops have a keenly developed and institutionally reinforced sense of class, and at some level see one another as antagonists.

There are, then two codes of silence in the military that operate out of this “unity of opposites”.. based on what officers do not want enlisted people to know, and what enlisted people do not want officers to know.

These complimentary codes of silence are sometimes those based on material antagonisms, i.e., officer VERSUS enlisted. (An officer gets caught by another office in an adultrous affair… mum’s the word.) (A junior NCO conceals a problem from a senior NCO, and the officers find out before the senior NCO does… the senior NCO then holds the junior NCO accountable for not letting it get handled among enlisted people.)

There is another separation of silences that reinforces a division of labor, and this code operates with a wink and a nod, i.e., I want it done, and I don’t necessarily want to know how it gets done. (This one is also very class-based, because it insulates officers from consequences when actions are brought under any form of legal review.)

A fault line in this case is that when XXXXXXX needed to conceal his role in XXXXXXX death, there were enlisted men who were still in legal harm’s way. XXXXXXX was then vulnerable to any enlisted person with a hard grudge. He had to remove the basis for the hard grudge by downscaling the charges from criminal charges to the military equivalent of misdemeanors. XXXXXXXX, unless he is even more stupid than I believe him to be, would not directly collude with the enlisted men to change the investigation (cross the class line). The offer of reduction of charges was probably made obliquely; and we don’t know exactly how.

(3)

Gender is also a kind of class system.

Males are socialized early into a masculine (male sex-class) code of silence. We can see the socializaton early with boys who don’t maintain male prerogative as speech and action inside the sex-class being called fag, pussy-whipped, etc etc. This applies partcularly in the arena of social transgressions. Transgression is violation of norms, and it is typically valorized by the thrill of transgression and consolidated within privileged groups, ie, the aristocracy routinely violated all the norms they imposed on the plebes. Men typically violate the norms they would impose on women (ergo, the double standard). Men share their transgressive sexual and even criminal behaviors with each other with the shared understanding that confidences will be kept inside the male group.

The most destructive male group behaviors are examples of this, be it binge drinking, gang rape, vandalism, or warfare.

(4)

Fraternal organizations amplify the demand for omerta.

As one ascends the status hierarchy within the military, the units become more and more fraternity-like (in the sense of being EXclusive).

One phenom I contend has been inadequately studied in these units is described by Object Relations Psychoanalysis as “projective identification.” Wiki notes:

“Wilfred Bion (1961) described projective identification in the following way: “the analyst feels he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in someone else’s fantasy” (p. 149). This ongoing link between internal intra-psychic process and the interpersonal dimension has provided the foundation for understanding important aspects of group and organizational life. Bion’s studies of groups examined how collusive, shared group phenomena such as scapegoating, group-think and emotional contagion are all rooted in the collective use of projective identification. In fact, sociologists often see projective identification at work on the societal level in the relationship of minority groups and the majority class.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Bion

This describes the culture of elite units in many ways, though all members are not equally susceptible to it. It certainly reinforces the need to maintain silences in at a deeply affective psychic level, making the phenom resistant to change.

Something seldom mentioned (as part of the code of silence about Rangers) is that the Rangers have fewer per capita Black troops in the line companies than any unit in the army. The Ranger Battalions have always been a hotbed of subterranean white supremacy, tho many groups (like Asian-Pacific and Latino) are accepted as honorary Aryans… what I call negrophobia is endemic in Ranger units.

Here is an article by Todd Ensign, who is a lawyer working with military resisters: http://mediafilter.org/caq/CAQ57Racism.html

This does not imply that all Rangers are racist. It reflects the fact that Ranger UNITS are racially exclusive, and there is a structural default that creates this situation. Exclusivity and codes of silence go hand in hand.

(5)

So we have this synergy of silence, bureaucratic silence, male silence, and fraternal-elite silence, with every one of these dimensions operating in the Ranger Regiment. Combine that with the threats implicit and explicit in statements signed and directives received to never talk about this, and you have doubly-reinforced silence… except that could backfire. One of the sensibilities inculcated into these kids is also the idea that they are straight-shooters who don’t need hypocrisy. Those who smell the hypocrisy in this, and resent the fact that the truth is being concealed about one of their own (as well as a fellow enlisted man, being figuratively buried by officers), and there may be someone who comes out of the cold.

***end clip***

Thanks to De for putting this up. Extremely important conversation.