[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> "Violence, old and new"

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Yes, the logic in attacking one of the few countries never 'successfully' colonised to eradicate a threat, the threat of 'terrorism', that could reverse the processes of globalisation of the market is clear, especially when one considers the liklihood that States in their new confederate relations (the EU, NAFTA) are likely to react with 'fortress' legislation to inhibit free flow of goods and labour and 'garrison' mentalities to inhibit freedom of thought, association and religion. 

Its the contradiction that ends the American century. 

Its probably a mistake to attack Afghanistan. Neither the British Empire nor the Soviet Empire did well in that terrain. Why does America only learn about the world through tourism and warfare, or warfare as tourism? Its a geography and anthropology of terror. 

Lachlan Brown

http://third.net
lachlan@third.net







-----Original Message-----
From: John Armitage <john.armitage@unn.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 12:15:30 +0100
To: nettime <NETTIME-L@bbs.thing.net>
Subject: <nettime> "Violence, old and new"


> [Hi all, I came across the text below by Zygmunt Bauman, written in 2000. 
> It may be useful for some in thinking about war, technology and where it 
> looks like we are currently headed. Full reference below. John.]
> ====================================================================
> [Extract from Zygmunt Bauman, "Violence, old and new"]
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "The aim of the new type of global war is not territorial aggrandizement,
> but throwing any remaining closed doors wide open for the free flow of
> global capital. To paraphrase Clausewitz, we may say that this war is
> primarily the 'promotion of free global trade by other means'. For this
> reason, the aims of such a war could hardly be served by such old-fashioned
> measures as confrontation, engagement and combat, which inevitably imply
> entering commitments and bearing the consequences. Ideally, one would leave
> the selection of targets entirely to computers and smart, self-guiding
> missiles. Short of that ideal, the war planners tried to reduce the tasks of
> the army professionals to running the software programs and monitoring the
> computer screens. The new, global era wars are wars at a distance,
> hit-and-run wars: the bombers leave the scene before the enemy can manage
> any response and before the carnage can be seen.
>           Richard Falk has compared this new war with torture: like the
> torturer, the attacker is fully in charge and free to select any violent
> methods of pain infliction which he deemed effective and so 'rational'. Such
> a comparison is not fully correct: torture, unlike the new war of the
> globalization era, made and encounter and, indeed, interaction between the
> torturer and the victim both unavoidable and 'productive'. The new global
> wars, unthinkable without the electronic technology which renders time
> instantaneous and annihilates the resistance of space, are won by the
> avoidance of encounter and by denying the adversary any chance of
> responding. This difference, to be sure, only magnifies the privileges which
> the attackers in a hit-and-run global war share with the torturer. Their
> freedom of manoeuvre is nearly absolute and so is their impunity. Casualties
> are counted only 'down there' on the ground - but the attackers never touch
> the ground if they are lucky; and all the odds are that luck will be on
> their side.
>           In this, I suggest, lies the most sinister potential of wars which
> the military arm of the globalizing forces is able and willing to launch.
> The prospect of utter impunity, coupled with the redundancy of
> time-consuming, costly and risk-fraught ideological mobilization and the
> irrelevance of 'patriotic capital', as well as with freedom from the need to
> clean up the mess and devastation caused by the assault, combine into a
> temptation which may be not just difficult to resist but all too easy
> (indeed, 'rational') to surrender to. All those who pursue the politics of
> global free trade and global capital flow find that this particular 'other
> means' has a lot to recommend it, and there is very little to advise them
> against taking this option, let alone to prevent them from taking it once
> that is what they have resolved to do.
>           A century likely to go down in history as one of violence
> perpetrated by nation-states on its subjects has come to a close. Another
> violent century - this time a century of violence prompted by the
> progressive disablement of the nation-states by free-flowing global powers -
> is likely to succeed it.
> 
> Zygmunt Bauman, "Violence, old and new" in his _The Individualized Society_
> (2001), Polity Press.:Cambridge. Pages 218-219.
> 
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> 

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