The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession

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This has been going on all year. When in January I apologised to German friends for the impending avalanche of anti-German memorabilia, I little realised how great that avalanche would be. A Martian might think Britain was a country of demented warmongers, not able to get through a day without a dose of appalling battle scenes from past national victories. On Monday the fact that Britain went to war with Germany in 1914 actually led the morning news. Was this on government instruction? Were this North Korea or Maoist China we would ridicule such craven chauvinism. Rights activists estimate that, of the tens of thousands of prisoners that have been recruited, half of them have already been killed or wounded in action.

It seems that that which cannot be represented (or is excluded from the realm of the visible) simply does not exist. Such an attitude to war and to the space of war, I argue, poses an interesting question about the relationship between not only war and the media, but most importantly between war and ‘reality’. What war in fact is: is it real, virtual or is it a simulation?; and is the state of war at all a worthy research question? Video games or simulations of war on the one hand and real-time broadcasting and TV images of ‘real war’ suffering on the other hand both mediated directly into the living room of an every day person constitute what James Der Derian (2003) calls the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment (MIME) complex. As the question of whether war is a game or a reality loses its edge this paper aims to interrogate the simulative power of war. With the focus on Baudrillard’s short text War Porn the paper explores the intricacies of war, law, desire and their excess(es) through the logic of simulation, which permeates modern production of war. In the eye of danger, where there might be nothing more or new to see, the desire to see is taken to its extreme; the spectre of visibility no longer uncovers, but begins to create. It ‘creates’ reality, it creates that which can later be exposed. The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectics of Desire’: in: Écrits (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006a).Mohammad Bouyeri’, Lacan. Com, 2007, http://www.lacan.com/zizbouyeri.html; accessed: January 31 2014. (no longer available 2018)

Clive Stafford Smith, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prison (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). Accused collaborators photographed after being punished by the French resistance. Funnily enough, the resistance punished collaborators in the same manner that only years early the Nazi party had used on perpetrators who had been perpetrators of “race crimes” (i.e., having sex with the wrong people) in Germany and Austria. Memo 11, ‘Humane Treatment of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban Detainees, from President George Bush to Vice-President et al, 7 February 2002. To the British forces, anti-American leaflets attempted to drive a wedge between the allied forces, playing on the ‘over-sexed, overpaid and over here’ reputation of the American troops. One example of this type of leaflet shows an American sergeant in bed with a British girl, and the words ‘You Americans are so different’. On the reverse is a brief message stating ‘The Yanks are putting up their tents in merry old England. They've got lots of money and loads of time to chase after your women’. The man who was afraid of telling his “macho” son about his experiences in Auschwitz recounts what happened to him as a “piepel.”tomorrow there will be nothing but the virtual violence of consensus, the simultaneity in real time of the global consensus: this will happen tomorrow and it will be the beginning of a world with no tomorrow (Baudrillard 1995: 84). Educators like Mr Principe, as well as schools, parents and community groups have been largely abandoned by governments, left to go it alone in “an unfair fight”. there is no way to really know how extensive this phenomenon was for the simple reason that the victims…never spoke about what had happened to them An American propagandist once told me that he did not like to disapprove these strange and exotic concepts because it tended to stifle the creativity of his artists. It seems that on the Allied side at least, sex leaflets were produced mostly because the bosses thought it was a good way for their people to stretch their imaginations and remain creative. These survivors—both men and women—describe having been sexually abused, raped, gang raped or witnesses to prostitution at a young age