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Chapter 2 (Part 8)
Cultural Excursus I: The Mohawk Refusal
It is appropriate to reflect on Virilio's Pure War in the context of Montreal, a city which in the early 1990s was the scene of the violent application of the Canadian war machine against its aboriginal population, the Mohawks. A city, that is, which in the summer of 1990 experienced as part of its cultural politics the invasion of the Mohawk reservations surrounding Montreal by all the policing strategies chat could be produced by the state: 6000 soldiers of the Canadian army, complete with tanks, armoured personal carriers, and even TOW missiles, the greater part of the Quebec provincial police, and the RCMP. All of this array of power belonging to the state was set against, in the end, less than 50 Mohawks who only wished to prevent the destruction of a sacred pine grove of their ancestors by developers intent on extending a golf course to eighteen holes. (In a perfect Virilian gesture, the Mohawks not only reclaimed the sacred pine grove at Oka, but also took physical control of the Mercier Bridge - one of the main traffic arteries between the South Shore suburbs and the Island of Montreal.) If in cultural politics we should be able to read the universal in the particular, to decipher a larger war logic in local applications, then Oka is Pure War in Virilio's sense.
First, it is about an urban space, not as a site of commerce, but as defined in relation to war. That's Montreal, which has always been a site of war first, and of commerce second. A city of two founding exterminisms the original genocide of aboriginals by French colonizers who, speaking the language of Christian salvation, imposed the spatial logic of "enlightenment" on the northern tier of North America; and then the attempted exterminism of the local French population by English colonizers, for whom the "conquest of Quebec" was most of all about suppression of a Catholic French America by a Protestant mercantilist logic. Montreal, then, as a Virilian space an intensely urban zone as a spatial vector for the war machine: a site of maneuver, negotiation and conquest-a violent scene of sacrificial power.
Second, in the summer of 1990 Oka is a matter of tactics, strategy and, most of all, logistics. Just as Virilio has theorized in Pure War, it is about an indefinite preparation for war, involving the colonization ("endocolonization") of local populations. Thus, for example, the Canadian military stated that this "conflict" could be over in two or three minutes, but the real war was a "media war" to win over the consciousness of the civilian population. Here, logistics could be an endless preparation for war control of food, communications, space. And all of this accompanied by constant armed helicopter flights over Montreal as if to demonstrate symbolically the state's control of the local population. Is this not whet Virilio has described as "state terrorism"-the act of war without a declaration of war, so chat there is no formal protection of civil rights, and no political rights for international agencies to intervene on behalf of the Mohawks? And is the indefinite occupation of Oka and the ceaseless police raids into other aboriginal territories not an indefinite preparation for war in another way: not really about the Mohawks at all, but a violent warning to all the First Nation peoples, most of all to the Cree in Northern Quebec, not to intervene physically (by blocking roads) or legally (by court actions) in the future construction of James Bay II, the Great Whale project (the state driven plan for a vast extension of hydro-electrical development on aboriginal lands in Northern Quebec)? Oka, then, as a pure technological war between the energy requirements of the high intensity market society and the irrepressible demands of aboriginal peoples for control of their territory end culture. A technological war, that is, where the war machine has come inside of us and taken possession of our identity. Virilio is correct "All of us are already civilian soldiers. We don't recognize the militarized part of (our) identity, of (our) consciousness." [41] And anyway, what is so dangerous about the Mohawks, about the sovereignty claims of the First Nations? Virilio states that the war machine is the crystallization of science as the language of power, of the depletion of the energies of society, and their draining away into the war machine. Maybe this is what is so threatening about the struggles of the First Nations. It violates and refuses the genetic logic of the technological dynamo.
Consequently, a politics of remembrance of twenty-five thousand years of aboriginal history versus whet Virilio describes as the extermination of time (in favor of a purely spatialized power) in technological societies. Here, real tribal consciousness and real grounded sovereignty - duration and a vital sense of sedentariness - militate against the pure mobility of the war machine. And not just memory, but the cultivation of a dynamic ecological relationship with land, economy, and culture on the part of the Mohawks now stands opposed to the disappearance of territory into abstract vectors of speed in consumer culture. This is perfectly captured by the bitter political struggle between the peoples of the First Nations of Labrador and NATO over low level training flights by fighter jets. In Virilio's war machine, it is always land without history, people without remembrance, space without a sense of duration, the abstract control of territory against the loss of history of territory.
Finally, what makes the Mohawks really dangerous for the Canadian state is their creation of a model of democratic politics based on matriarchal principles of rule. Here, the traditional form of the Longhouse society militates against rule by the technocratic specialists of the war machine. Virilio says that in the war machine, there are no longer any priests who could mediate death. Now, the leaders of the war machine can speak triumphantly of mega-deaths, because death is also total release from the earthly constraints of gravitation. In this sense, the Mohawks are like gravity, a fall into real time, whose very communal existence militates against the pure speed, the will to endless circulation, of the war machine. If the peoples of the First Nations can be so oppressed, not only in Montreal but also in all of the Americas, from the United States to South America, maybe that is because they are the bad conscience of what we have become in the society of speed and war: perfect sacrificial scapegoats for feelings of anxiety and doubt about that which has been lost in the coming to be of the technological dynamo.
Cultural Excursus II: The Gulf War as the World's First Virtual War
Not a hot war, but a new form of cold war. At least in its first phase, fought with cruise missiles that are heat seeking, but which themselves give off no traces of heat; seen not with normal ocular vision but with optical scanners which magnify star light from the cold depths of outer space, filled with surgically green images of laser guided missiles with fighter pilots themselves telematic spectators to their own acts of destruction. A scopophiliac war fought without depth, always on the surfaces of the screen and the network, and always under the sign of the ecstasy of catastrophe.
This is not a war of association, but something radically different. What the American psychologist, Robert Jay Lifton, has said is the first war typified by the generalized neurosis of "dissociation" - radical distancing - between anachronic viewers and the material consequences of the bombing. First, the mental dissociation of weapons from their virtual operators in the form of jet fighter pilots, who were reported flying into combat listening to heavy metal music, with Van Halen as the band of choice. Second, the dissociation of the dark and missing matter of the TV audience from the material history of the war. An informational war which was presented in its opening stages as one with no political history, no casualties, no sound, only the fascinating video games of laser guided bombs. An image dissociation between war and its social consequences that was so complete that even cruise missiles became boring. Three "mach" is too slow, and already the army has to think up new promotional ruses to reawaken interest in an always censored media coverage. The problem, then, of "re-enchanting the simulacrum" in the Saudi desert.
Really, the Gulf War was a war of disappearances. The disappearance of the civilian population of Iraq, vanished by a perfect complicity between the Pentagon (who did not want images of the bodies of Iraqi civilians to ruin the cerebral sublimity of "The Plan," and the Iraqi military who immediately wrote off their own population as a casualty of war). The disappearance of the mass media who could proclaim loudly that this was the first of the all TV wars, because it was the first war in which the mass media were completely shut out, forced into the role of second-order simulacra. The disappearance of American public opinion, this under the guidance of George Bush who proclaimed that "this won't be another Vietnam," because the military opened a second, and very real, front of war, a liquid war for public opinion which was overwhelmed by a violent and seductive assault on all the rhetorical signs of American martial velour.
A final war in which as Virilio has said in Pure War there is a conjunction of the Holy War (of religious fundamentalists) and the Just War (of nuclear technicians). A war which can be fought at the geographical meeting point of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as if to emphasize that this is an epochal drama: the imminent reversal of the always forward-looking logic of the West, back to its primal origins in Mesopotamia. A religious war between the dromocratic war machine, the most intensive expression possible of the rationalist eschatology of the West, and, in however distorted a form, the "Other" of Arab nationalism.
The world's first purely designer war: a promotional war machine which scripts the whole metastasis of violence as an advertising campaign for the technological invincibility, and thus political necessity, of the "new world order."
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