OFF: Fast War/Slow Motion

[hijinks at UTARLG.UTA.EDU]

Here's a spin on the bombing in Yugoslavia that's dead on. Veteran of the
Psychic Wars as virtual-telematic ephemeral flesh war connections
abound...

thomas
>
> Is there blood in cyberspace....?
>
> Forwarded from:
> __________________________________________________________________
>  CTHEORY          THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE        VOL 22, NO 1-2
>
>
>  FAST WAR/SLOW MOTION
>  ====================
>
>  ~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~
>
>       "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a
>       hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell
>       Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps
>       the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the
>       United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
>
>       "...Americans are in the odd position now of being held
>       responsible for everything, while being reluctant to die for
>       anything. That's why in the globalization era, counterinsurgency
>       is out; baby-sitting is in. House-to-house fighting is out;
>       cruise missiles are in. Green berets are out; U.N. blue helmets
>       are in."
>            -Thomas L. Friedman, "A Manifesto for the Fast World"
>            _The New York Times Magazine_, March 28, 1999
>
>  It's Friday night in Washington and Clinton has taken to the Internet
>  for a direct cyber-pitch to the citizens of Belgrade. He bites his
>  lower lip in that poll-tested, focus-grouped facial gesture and looks
>  into the eye of the cyberball, courtesy of real video-streaming. With
>  mock sincerity, he says it's too bad about the bombs, laser missiles,
>  stealths and electronic pulses in the Serbian night, but America's
>  got a mission and NATO is on its side. Nothing personal. Just get rid
>  of Milosevic or force him back to the bargaining table and things
>  will be all right. Maybe Clinton has read an advance copy of
>  Friedman's "A Manifesto for the Fast World" because that's exactly
>  what he's preaching: a little Buchanan-style war fever nationalism
>  mixed up with high tech cyberwar gaming strategies as the winning
>  formula as America takes up its "new burden" of enforcer to the
>  world.
>
>  Meanwhile, the major networks have plugged into the energies of the
>  war machine with all the desperation of parched-out desert walkers
>  wandering around the electronic void without aim after the fatal
>  implosion of the impeachment story-line. Manic media anxiety
>  field-reverses immediately into a bogus war spirit.
>
>  CNN comes on the air every minute to announce that "It's only two
>  hours to bombing time." CBS trumps the all-news networks by actually
>  taking a cyber-ride in a B-2 bomber simulator, telling us with
>  unabated enthusiasm that it's all so realistic that "you can actually
>  feel the simulated rocking of the B-2 when it has fired off its
>  (simulated) payload of sixteen independently targeted missiles," just
>  eugenically delivered from Whiteman Air Force Base safe in Missouri
>  to a Belgrade suburb. Local weather stations, catching the drift,
>  start patching in weather forecasts for Belgrade and Pristina and
>  Sarajevo, with American weather patterns, giving opinions grave and
>  military-sober whether it's "good bombing weather or not." AMC does a
>  quick program change, rushing Patton to the air, complete with George
>  C. Scott railing against the forces of fascism and communism, and
>  speaking bitterly of the future of techno-war as a "war without
>  heroes." And even MTV gets into the killing game, matching Patton
>  with images of KISS singing of a future without heroes as a "world
>  without the sun."
>
>  And still Stealths take off from Aviano and cruise missiles burst
>  from the deep waters of the Adriatic in the morning's clear air and
>  General Clark does a rant from NATO headquarters about "degrading and
>  destroying" and arrests by the Serbian security police intensify and
>  killings, by knife, rope and sometimes by guns, accelerate in
>  Kosovo.
>
>  But the DOW is almost at 10,000 and sun-bathers in Boca Raton,
>  Florida tell reporters that "oh well, I guess we should know
>  something about this" and just once in every great while the media
>  blah-blah quiets down, and you can almost hear those other silent
>  intimations of a war machine running on cyber, whispering in the
>  camera's eye, that this is all about beta testing: systematic program
>  testing of virtual warriors in their virtual flying machines in
>  "real" battlefield conditions, of futurist scenarios of "degrading
>  and destroying" command, control and communication structures, of
>  testing the newly upgraded computer systems of the B-2s on a night
>  flight to the Balkans.
>
>  And so, you sit there in a no-name coffee shop on a no-name day in a
>  no-name street, trying to find some satisfactory moral meridian but
>  finding only ambivalence instead. The cyber-war machine has
>  system-installed itself for the day, but when the virtual testing is
>  over, you just know it'll all be shut down immediately.  Not another
>  word about "moral imperatives" or "degrading or destroying" and not
>  even any more local weather reports from Belgrade and Pristina. And
>  even KISS will go back to their one true moment of bewilderment at
>  being a 4th order simulacra when in the same MTV docu-feature they
>  look out at their audience and suddenly see families - Mommy and
>  Daddy and babies most of all - dressed up in face paint and
>  slithering tongues and beautiful drag, and sigh to themselves where
>  did it all go wrong. Now, some members of KISS went numb for survival
>  with drugs and alcohol and always lots of jaded, hard-assed sex, but
>  those that didn't still are out on the road living the life of the
>  new regime of signs without referents. And maybe the fate of KISS is
>  an AWACS warning of the destiny of the cyber-war machine in the
>  spectacle of Operation Allied Force - war as a cybernetic testing
>  procedure always running on (moral) empty. A sign without a referent,
>  a world with only virtual heroes. A double triumph of cyber-skies
>  (without casualties) and ethnic slaughter (with flesh) as the
>  ambivalent sign of Allied (moral) Weakness.
>
>  Because the one real-time truth of the cyber-war machine is that it
>  is allergic to casualties on the ground. Never flesh, never blood,
>  never human, cyber-war is fast war. Always in motion, always
>  approaching the speed of light, always war at a telematic distance,
>  virtual war is one perspectival remove from experiencing the actual
>  consequences of violence. The end of war, and the beginning of the
>  arming of the vector. The end of (face-to-face) conflict, and the
>  beginning of the virtualization of violence. At least, that's the
>  illusion of Operation Allied Force.
>
>  And why? Because Operation Allied Force is really about making the
>  skies safe for NATO, and the ground a killing field for Milosevic.
>  The more complex the diplomatic games of using NATO planes to nudge
>  Milosevic back to the negotiating table, the greater the actual
>  slaughter on the ground. The more sophisticated the cyber-apps of
>  all those high tech, high velocity NATO planes, the more accelerated
>  the genocide on the ground. Thus, in effect, Operation Allied
>  Weakness with NATO trapped in a new field of (virtual) blackbirds. If
>  NATO remains faithful to the air war, the more irrelevant it becomes
>  to the actual fate of human beings in Kosovo. But if NATO were to
>  take Milosevic's bait, responding to the genocide of ethnic Albanians
>  in Kosovo with a ground war, what happened to those nineteen American
>  marines in the streets of Mogadishu will be amped up Balkan style.
>  Smelling the Serbian trap, one Texas senator stated on Sunday morning
>  news that maybe the time has come for a ground war, but not with
>  American troops.
>
>  Allied Force is in the air. Allied Weakness is on the ground.
>
>  Unfortunately for NATO, one intractable lesson from the diary of life
>  is that in war as in politics the only thing that really matters in
>  the end is what happens on the ground. The images and sounds of those
>  Kosovo refugees, then, as simultaneously a human sign of NATO's
>  failed (virtual) strategy, and an invitation to a return to a form of
>  primitive (ground) war that NATO for all its technicity had thought
>  itself liberated from forever.
>
>  Meanwhile, folks are munching chips and sunning on the beaches,
>  students are rioting in Michigan because of the loss of a basketball
>  game to Duke, and the Orioles are playing baseball in Havana. AMC is
>  recycling some old Western flics, Jon Waters is talking Divine on
>  MTV, and still the killing and the knifing and the shooting and the
>  burning and the refugeeing goes on in Kosovo.
>
>  You can almost hear NATO planners wishing that Kosovo Albanians would
>  mutate into stealth flesh and fly away from the scene, leaving NATO
>  free to play its aerial games of B-2 tech.
>
>  Fast War/Slow Motion.
>
>  _____________________________________________________________________
>
>  * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology
>  *   and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews
>  *   in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
>  *   theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
>  *
>  * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
>
>

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