It is incredibly depressing to realise that I have been asking the rulers of the state I live in to refrain from bombing Iraq for my entire fucking life.
There's an extent to which the 'it won't work' critique is entirely
valid as an objection to waging yet more war upon the Middle East.
Because the surface aim of the politicians is almost certainly to impose
'stability' on 'the region'. They like stability. No threats to
embarass them, no revolts to topple their friendly dictators, no threat
to Israel, no danger to neoliberal exploitation of local resources and
markets, etc. And, as has been shown, it doesn't work. They try and
try to bomb the Middle East into passive compliance, and all they
succeed in doing is generating more troubles for their empire.
This is,
of course, what empires have always done. Create the problems of
tomorrow by viciously conquering the problems of today.
But there's
another sense in which the 'it won't work' argument is fatally flawed,
because there's a sense in which it does work. It may never achieve
'stability' but it does keep the machinery of empire chugging, and the
fuel of empire flowing. Because the fuel of empire is as much war
itself as the resources extracted via war. The neverending war keeps
the military-industrial complex in work, the contracts coming, the
factories producing, etc. It keeps the corporate media busy and happy,
reporting yet more incomprehensible strife from 'over there' and 'our'
attempts to make things better. It keeps the endless circular debate
about intervention circling (the system can tolerate a tortuous and
muddled debate, what it doesn't want is clarity). It keeps the public
money flowing into the vast state run apparatus of military spending,
and into all the R&D that is done under the aegis of this and then handed
over (free) to private enterprise. It keeps the empire's power and
prestige in the ascendant, with the machinery of death inspiring the
fear - and projecting the apparent invincibility - that every empire needs.
No, the war never 'works' in the sense of achieving a stable imperium,
but it does 'work' - at least in the short term - in achieving a
powerful empire. One of the paradoxes of empire is that its power relies upon it never being stable. So even when the bombing doesn't work, it actually does.
Meanwhile, of course, people die. And die and die and die.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Friday, 26 September 2014
Sunday, 7 September 2014
Good Soldiers (Into the Dalek)
'Into the Dalek' is about good soldiers vs bad soldiers.
The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.
But, of course, what do we mean by terms like 'good' and 'bad'?
For the army, a 'good' soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn't let themselves be haunted.
A 'bad' soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior... perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.
In a soldier, morality is a malfunction. A good soldier is a 'bad' soldier. Because good people can't do a soldier's job, which is to fight and kill.
At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way. The Doctor doesn't like soldiers. As in 'The Sontaran Stratagem' he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course. He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she's a soldier.
But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels. They are specifically described as rebels. Rebels against the Daleks. The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil. This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type. He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die. Because he's a Dalek, and that's how Daleks think. So, contrary to the Doctor's hopes, there's no saving the Daleks... which makes Rusty pretty much right: they're beyond saving, so they must be fought. Which is what the rebels are doing. So Rusty kills all the Daleks... which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor's defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn't happened escapes me).
So, once again, as in 'A Good Man Goes to War', we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another. Soldiers are scary and irredeemable... umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.
See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle. They're rebelling against the imperialists of the universe. I'm supposed to think they're wrong or suspect for shooting to kill? When you're in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you'd better obey orders and shoot to kill. That's what the soldiers of the International Brigades did. That's what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites. If the Whites, or Franco's troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that's 'good' at what it does to come and fight them.
Of course, Danny is a former soldier... and Clara doesn't reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey. She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.
So there's some nuance, right? Taken with the fact that the Doctor's prejudiced hatred of Daleks is what turns Rusty into a Dalek-killer, and Rusty's remark that the Doctor is a good Dalek (however we want to take that), a considerable amount of ambiguity has been created, yes?
And anyway, the Doctor has a bloody cheek being so arsey with soldiers, considering that he ended the Time War by... oh no, hang on, that got fixed last year didn't it.
It really isn't possible to just talk about 'soldiers' as if all soldiers are the same, as if all armies and their objectives are morally equal. This is obvious. It's a commonplace of our cultural discourse actually... trouble is, it sits alongside the assumption that 'we' are always the ones with the moral superiority, which is sadly rarely true. But it could be true, theoretically. It isn't logically impossible to have soldiers who are both 'good' and good. It's just that, by a morally and politically realistic evaluation of the world, that doesn't apply to 'our' soldiers. Our rulers pretend it does. 'Our' media pretends it does. But it doesn't.
Presumably, Danny was fighting for the British Army in Iraq or Afghanistan. Which makes him a soldier in the army of a technologically-superior imperialist aggressor.
He's a good soldier because he cries when he thinks of the people he killed. Maybe he's even good because he stopped being 'good', i.e. he became 'bad' at his job because he found a moral objection to it (I guess we'll see) but he isn't anything like the soldiers on the Aristotle, the ones I had no problem with. He wasn't a rebel. He wasn't in the Iraqi resistance. He wasn't someone exercising their moral right to use violence against the people attacking them and occupying their country. He was, presumably, in the occupying force. He claims that there is a "moral dimension" to soldiering as he practiced it. In other words, there is a moral dimension to being an aggressor, invader and occupier on the orders of an imperialist hegemon.
So, as always, 'we' are the good guys, by definition. The ambiguous investigation of the ethics of warfare collapses back into bog-standard liberal hand-wringing over the niceties of what we do in the course of being the goodies. How terrible it is the bad things happen when we try to help.
The truth is, we in the aggressive neoliberal imperialist countries... we are the Daleks.
And we're not good. Though we are 'good'.
The pain of being a good soldier, the pain of the memories which a good soldier has, vs the anaesthetised mind of the bad soldier.
But, of course, what do we mean by terms like 'good' and 'bad'?
For the army, a 'good' soldier is a soldier who obeys orders without question, kills without hesitation, and doesn't let themselves be haunted.
A 'bad' soldier is a soldier who thinks about, and makes decisions based upon, things other than the orders of a superior... perhaps leading to their inability, or refusal, to kill on command.
In a soldier, morality is a malfunction. A good soldier is a 'bad' soldier. Because good people can't do a soldier's job, which is to fight and kill.
At least, that might be how the Doctor would put it, in his simplistic way. The Doctor doesn't like soldiers. As in 'The Sontaran Stratagem' he is rude and patronising to the soldiers he meets as a matter of course. He refuses to take Journey Blue with him because she's a soldier.
But the soldiers on the Aristotle are rebels. They are specifically described as rebels. Rebels against the Daleks. The Daleks, who are, for whatever reason, inherently evil. This is fuzzy (it still may be because of technological control of the brain) but, at the end of the day, Rusty reverts to type. He realises that life is beautiful and unstoppable, that the Daleks are the enemies of life, and his response is to decide that all Daleks must die. Because he's a Dalek, and that's how Daleks think. So, contrary to the Doctor's hopes, there's no saving the Daleks... which makes Rusty pretty much right: they're beyond saving, so they must be fought. Which is what the rebels are doing. So Rusty kills all the Daleks... which is a BAD THING judging by the Doctor's defeated frown (though quite how any of them would have survived if that hadn't happened escapes me).
So, once again, as in 'A Good Man Goes to War', we have an episode which says one thing about warriors while showing us another. Soldiers are scary and irredeemable... umm, even the ones who rightly rebel against unappeasable and unsalvageable aggressors.
See, I have no problem with the soldiers on the Aristotle. They're rebelling against the imperialists of the universe. I'm supposed to think they're wrong or suspect for shooting to kill? When you're in an army fighting aggressive imperialists or fascists, you'd better obey orders and shoot to kill. That's what the soldiers of the International Brigades did. That's what the Red Army did when they drove back the proto-fascistic West-sponsored Whites. If the Whites, or Franco's troops, or the Nazis, are advancing on you, you want an army that's 'good' at what it does to come and fight them.
Of course, Danny is a former soldier... and Clara doesn't reject him the way the Doctor rejects Journey. She, despite her copy of the Guardian, rises above the kind of knee-jerk, right-on disdain for soldiers that (supposedly) so many people have, like the Doctor.
So there's some nuance, right? Taken with the fact that the Doctor's prejudiced hatred of Daleks is what turns Rusty into a Dalek-killer, and Rusty's remark that the Doctor is a good Dalek (however we want to take that), a considerable amount of ambiguity has been created, yes?
And anyway, the Doctor has a bloody cheek being so arsey with soldiers, considering that he ended the Time War by... oh no, hang on, that got fixed last year didn't it.
It really isn't possible to just talk about 'soldiers' as if all soldiers are the same, as if all armies and their objectives are morally equal. This is obvious. It's a commonplace of our cultural discourse actually... trouble is, it sits alongside the assumption that 'we' are always the ones with the moral superiority, which is sadly rarely true. But it could be true, theoretically. It isn't logically impossible to have soldiers who are both 'good' and good. It's just that, by a morally and politically realistic evaluation of the world, that doesn't apply to 'our' soldiers. Our rulers pretend it does. 'Our' media pretends it does. But it doesn't.
Presumably, Danny was fighting for the British Army in Iraq or Afghanistan. Which makes him a soldier in the army of a technologically-superior imperialist aggressor.
He's a good soldier because he cries when he thinks of the people he killed. Maybe he's even good because he stopped being 'good', i.e. he became 'bad' at his job because he found a moral objection to it (I guess we'll see) but he isn't anything like the soldiers on the Aristotle, the ones I had no problem with. He wasn't a rebel. He wasn't in the Iraqi resistance. He wasn't someone exercising their moral right to use violence against the people attacking them and occupying their country. He was, presumably, in the occupying force. He claims that there is a "moral dimension" to soldiering as he practiced it. In other words, there is a moral dimension to being an aggressor, invader and occupier on the orders of an imperialist hegemon.
So, as always, 'we' are the good guys, by definition. The ambiguous investigation of the ethics of warfare collapses back into bog-standard liberal hand-wringing over the niceties of what we do in the course of being the goodies. How terrible it is the bad things happen when we try to help.
The truth is, we in the aggressive neoliberal imperialist countries... we are the Daleks.
And we're not good. Though we are 'good'.
Thursday, 21 November 2013
5
"I know it sounds mad," says Martha, "but when the Doctor became human, he took the
alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It's not
really a watch, it just looks like a watch."
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
"And 'alien' means 'not from abroad', I take it," enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.
"The man you call John Smith... he was born on another world."
"A different species."
"Yeah."
Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she's not having any of this nonsense.
"Then tell me," she presses, "in this fairy tale, who are you?"
"Just a friend. I'm not... I mean, you haven't got a rival, as much as I might... Just his friend."
"And human, I take it?"
She humouring the deranged girl. As John said earlier, it must be culture shock. Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher... an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.
"Human," confirms Martha, "Don't worry. And more than that: I just don't follow him around. I'm training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine."
This is too much. Aliens... that's one thing. But this? Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation. This is more than just silly, this is... indecent.
"Well that certainly is nonsense," she snaps, "Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour."
Martha stops.
"Oh, do you think?" She holds up her hand. "Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row...." she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, "Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal."
She is as irritated as Joan. The two face each other across a chasm.
"You read that in a book," says Joan weakly.
"Yes," snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, "to pass my exams!"
I have issues with this story. There's the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start. Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire. The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England. Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something). It shows most directly in the Doctor's donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as 'respect for the fallen' and 'help for heroes' and all that dishonest guff. It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he's on the right side, the side of assumptions that 'we' supposedly all agree on. There's also what I call (rather facetiously) the Nice-But-Then syndrome, where characters in costume dramas are there to espouse anachronistic values which rewrite history in the image of modern liberal assumptions, thus robbing real history of context, and comforting our assessment of our own present-day moral elevation by projecting it back onto 'progressives' in the past, etc.
But the scene above is great because it actually bucks that very trend. Unlike several Who stories of recent years that are set in the past, in 'Human Nature' / 'Family of Blood' the issues of racism and sexism are not just totally effaced so that we can all get on with having fun. Joan is a Nice-But-Then character in many ways, but she's also allowed to evince sexist, 'classist' (not a term I'm fond of, but it'll do for now) and racist attitudes. And this isn't just done so that we self-satisfied modern liberals can feel superior to all those backward numpties in the past. Joan's attitudes are shown to be contested within the same period by other contemporary characters, most especially Martha's friend and fellow-maid Jenny. (Though, of course, that does tend to make Jenny a bit of a Nice-But-Then character herself... it's a fine line because, if you label every character in a costume drama as a NBT if they happen to have progressive values, you efface the existence of people in the past who really did contest widespread prejudices of their time, and thus end up back where you started, with the "condescension of posterity".)
Best of all is the fact that Martha answers back angrily, displaying her annoyance unashamedly and eloquently making mincemeat of Joan's thoughtless assumptions. Okay, Martha could be seen as accepting the onus of having to 'prove herself' to the white woman, which would be problematic... but that isn't how Agyeman and Hynes play it. Their version of the scene is more like Joan getting a deserved ritual humiliation. Okay, Martha has the advantage of a middle class background and an education in modern Britain, so she's not really in the same situation as a real black, working class woman in the England of 1913, but even so... if the Doctor buggered off and left her there, she'd effectively be in the same situation, her education notwithstanding.
The scene depicts intersectional prejudice, and from an otherwise deeply sympathetic character, thus nixing the simplistic idea (surprisingly prevalent today, in the wake of partial and piecemeal social changes) that racism and sexism are Big Bad Bogeys that only Bad People do. It tacitly recognises intersectionality, along with prejudice as structural and socially constructed - something surprisingly rare in pop-culture. And it also depicts the only way prejudices ever get addressed: by those on the sharp end - the women, people of colour, the 'skivvies' - getting seriously pissed off and talking back.
Tuesday, 19 November 2013
11
Adric has found the Doctor sulking in the TARDIS cloisters. The Doctor has lost Romana and K9. He's feeling his age. His ship seems to be falling apart too. The stone pillars, overrun with vines, crumble under his fingers. And, to cap it off, Adric wants to be taken back to Gallifrey.
"I sometimes think I should be running a tighter ship," he says sadly.
"A tighter ship?" gasps Adric, as though this is a threatening notion.
"Yes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is taking its toll on the old thing. Entropy increases."
"Entropy increases?"
"Yes, daily. The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart. That's the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."
It's only fitting that the Doctor should fight one of his most elemental battles against omnipresent entropy. The Doctor has encountered entropy many times on his travels. The Tribe of Gum were dangerous because their world was dying in the cold, all heat drained away. The Moroks froze entropy in an attempt to freeze their own declining imperial history. Skaro was a petrified jungle, everything "turned to sand and ashes". Later, the same planet was depicted as a wasteland, with technology evolving in reverse as the Thals and Kaleds fought a backwards war of attrition. The Exxilons built a city that sucked all life and vitality out of their civilisation. Skagra tried to fight entropy by subjecting all life to his will, thus turning the universe into a machine for constructing more and more structure. The Argolin were sterile, living on a desolated world. The Melkur came to the Keeper's walled garden and started breeding blights and weeds. The Doctor even comes from a world that has stalled entropy forever, only to find itself socially entropic. Entropy has always been implicitly unbiquitous in the Doctor's universe. Just as he notices it nibbling away at the TARDIS, it becomes explicitly unbiquitous.
SF is obsessed with entropy because SF is one of the cultural products most peculiar to modernity. Modernity is, essentially, the condition of the rise and triumph of capitalism. Capitalism is entropic. Like the Master, it 'generates' entropy.
SF expresses the dizzying possibilities of modernity in terms of space travel and time travel. It is not 'scientific' but it would be unthinkable without science. The language of science is the language it uses to reiterate the old myths and legends of death and decay and eternity. It is, perhaps, the quintessential genre of modernity. It is how fiction tackles the "relationship of man to his tools" in a modern, capitalist age when the tools have become powerful enough to destroy worlds and (seemingly) think for themselves. SF keeps coming back to the hyper-destructive violence of high-tech war. It keeps coming back to the end of the world, the post-apocalyptic wasteland. It keeps coming back to stalled and tottering dystopias. It keeps coming back to the malfunctioning of technology, its unintended by-products, the machines that kill and ruin.
Capitalism invented the concept of entropy. It is an insight from the Industrial Revolution, concerned with the functioning of engines. Capitalism adapted entropy to information; Information Theory began in the Rand Corporation. Capitalism creates more and more commodities, which depreciate in real terms or get superseded in relative terms. They break and run down, or they get overtaken by new models. Either way, capitalism creates wastelands of spent and useless commodities, junkyards, massive landfills, island-sized rubbish tips. Capitalism surrounds us with broken machines and sputtering engines, and the packaging they come in, and the spent batteries that made them work. Capitalism is a forest of belching chimneys. Capitalism is a panorama of old cars with flat tyres, beached on great stretches of motorway covered in the grime of exhaust pipes. Battered old police boxes by the side of the road, sat next to litter bins and abandoned bicycles.
Capitalist industry creates smoke that turns buildings black. It creates awesome machines that end up rusting. It creates warehouses that get boarded up. It mass-produces chaos by making more and more things. It does this by raising the productive forces to levels unprecedented in previous history. The more you put things together...
Capitalism cannot help creating economic crises. They are built into its structure. It needs them. These crises entail overproduction of things for profit, which will then be left unbought by people who can no longer afford them. Bankruptcies and busts litter the land with empty shops and empty houses and people living in cardboard boxes. Capitalism can only clamber out of such crises by destroying huge amounts of capital.
Capitalism generates destruction anyway. Capitalism generates imperialism and war. It fuses with nation states, and these fused blocs then compete for resources. It creates massive industries catering to war, mass-producing more and ever-greater machines of destruction... and then those machines either sit uselessly until they are replaced, or they are sent to pulverise the other side's machines into fragments, along with their people and buildings and roads...
This is the universe the Doctor lives in. This is Argolis and Zolf-Thura and Skaro and Uxaerius; laid waste by high-tech warfare. This is Karn, littered with crashed ships because apparently everyone on the planet is trying to fend off death using some kind of occult science. This is the Tharil empire; a feudal world reduced to haunted ruins by a revolution in trade. This is Paradise Towers; modernity (Modernism, even) in decay. This is Frontios, with its failure proof technology that fails. This is New New York, stuck in a social moebius loop by a runaway commodity. This is, unquestionably, the Time War.
Things have always decayed, but the ubiquity of entropy that we now take for granted is a phenomenon of modernity. The condition of modernity is the condition of being surrounded by entropy. It is the condition of living in a world in which entropy is kept barely in check.
It is the condition of constantly inflating a punctured tire.
"I sometimes think I should be running a tighter ship," he says sadly.
"A tighter ship?" gasps Adric, as though this is a threatening notion.
"Yes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is taking its toll on the old thing. Entropy increases."
"Entropy increases?"
"Yes, daily. The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart. That's the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."
It's only fitting that the Doctor should fight one of his most elemental battles against omnipresent entropy. The Doctor has encountered entropy many times on his travels. The Tribe of Gum were dangerous because their world was dying in the cold, all heat drained away. The Moroks froze entropy in an attempt to freeze their own declining imperial history. Skaro was a petrified jungle, everything "turned to sand and ashes". Later, the same planet was depicted as a wasteland, with technology evolving in reverse as the Thals and Kaleds fought a backwards war of attrition. The Exxilons built a city that sucked all life and vitality out of their civilisation. Skagra tried to fight entropy by subjecting all life to his will, thus turning the universe into a machine for constructing more and more structure. The Argolin were sterile, living on a desolated world. The Melkur came to the Keeper's walled garden and started breeding blights and weeds. The Doctor even comes from a world that has stalled entropy forever, only to find itself socially entropic. Entropy has always been implicitly unbiquitous in the Doctor's universe. Just as he notices it nibbling away at the TARDIS, it becomes explicitly unbiquitous.
SF is obsessed with entropy because SF is one of the cultural products most peculiar to modernity. Modernity is, essentially, the condition of the rise and triumph of capitalism. Capitalism is entropic. Like the Master, it 'generates' entropy.
SF expresses the dizzying possibilities of modernity in terms of space travel and time travel. It is not 'scientific' but it would be unthinkable without science. The language of science is the language it uses to reiterate the old myths and legends of death and decay and eternity. It is, perhaps, the quintessential genre of modernity. It is how fiction tackles the "relationship of man to his tools" in a modern, capitalist age when the tools have become powerful enough to destroy worlds and (seemingly) think for themselves. SF keeps coming back to the hyper-destructive violence of high-tech war. It keeps coming back to the end of the world, the post-apocalyptic wasteland. It keeps coming back to stalled and tottering dystopias. It keeps coming back to the malfunctioning of technology, its unintended by-products, the machines that kill and ruin.
Capitalism invented the concept of entropy. It is an insight from the Industrial Revolution, concerned with the functioning of engines. Capitalism adapted entropy to information; Information Theory began in the Rand Corporation. Capitalism creates more and more commodities, which depreciate in real terms or get superseded in relative terms. They break and run down, or they get overtaken by new models. Either way, capitalism creates wastelands of spent and useless commodities, junkyards, massive landfills, island-sized rubbish tips. Capitalism surrounds us with broken machines and sputtering engines, and the packaging they come in, and the spent batteries that made them work. Capitalism is a forest of belching chimneys. Capitalism is a panorama of old cars with flat tyres, beached on great stretches of motorway covered in the grime of exhaust pipes. Battered old police boxes by the side of the road, sat next to litter bins and abandoned bicycles.
Capitalist industry creates smoke that turns buildings black. It creates awesome machines that end up rusting. It creates warehouses that get boarded up. It mass-produces chaos by making more and more things. It does this by raising the productive forces to levels unprecedented in previous history. The more you put things together...
Capitalism cannot help creating economic crises. They are built into its structure. It needs them. These crises entail overproduction of things for profit, which will then be left unbought by people who can no longer afford them. Bankruptcies and busts litter the land with empty shops and empty houses and people living in cardboard boxes. Capitalism can only clamber out of such crises by destroying huge amounts of capital.
Capitalism generates destruction anyway. Capitalism generates imperialism and war. It fuses with nation states, and these fused blocs then compete for resources. It creates massive industries catering to war, mass-producing more and ever-greater machines of destruction... and then those machines either sit uselessly until they are replaced, or they are sent to pulverise the other side's machines into fragments, along with their people and buildings and roads...
This is the universe the Doctor lives in. This is Argolis and Zolf-Thura and Skaro and Uxaerius; laid waste by high-tech warfare. This is Karn, littered with crashed ships because apparently everyone on the planet is trying to fend off death using some kind of occult science. This is the Tharil empire; a feudal world reduced to haunted ruins by a revolution in trade. This is Paradise Towers; modernity (Modernism, even) in decay. This is Frontios, with its failure proof technology that fails. This is New New York, stuck in a social moebius loop by a runaway commodity. This is, unquestionably, the Time War.
Things have always decayed, but the ubiquity of entropy that we now take for granted is a phenomenon of modernity. The condition of modernity is the condition of being surrounded by entropy. It is the condition of living in a world in which entropy is kept barely in check.
It is the condition of constantly inflating a punctured tire.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
33
Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends. They now look human. A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew. Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable. They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde. The Jet Set.
Persuasion hands round drinks. Nothing more persuasive than that.
Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess. She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.
"We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe," she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.
She was kissed by technology.
"The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear," says Persuasion suavely. Yes, that's always how the 'natives' look to the 'explorers'. Fearful little things. "When last we were there, our reception was hostile."
Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of 'natives' by 'explorers', is not fooled.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she sneers.
"Well, we must read your history books," says the Doctor. There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books. You can read a lot between the lines.
"You will be welcome to do so," says Enlightenment, "but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages."
There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.
"One couldn't wish for a more enchanting teacher," says the Doctor. He almost seems to be flirting with her.
"A very elevated one," adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.
"Enlightenment," says the Doctor.
"Minister of Enlightenment," Persuasion corrects him. Just so you know where you stand.
"Yes, of course," replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, "And you must be Minister of Persuasion."
Of course, every 'civilised' nation that ever set about conquering the 'primitives' always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their 'advancement', always said they were helping the child-races to grow... or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.
And such 'civilised' nations always aimed for 'hearts and minds', always brought their greater 'wisdom' with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved.
And they always needed - need - their Ministers of Enlightenment. And Persuasion.
Persuasion hands round drinks. Nothing more persuasive than that.
Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess. She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.
"We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe," she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.
She was kissed by technology.
"The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear," says Persuasion suavely. Yes, that's always how the 'natives' look to the 'explorers'. Fearful little things. "When last we were there, our reception was hostile."
Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of 'natives' by 'explorers', is not fooled.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she sneers.
"Well, we must read your history books," says the Doctor. There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books. You can read a lot between the lines.
"You will be welcome to do so," says Enlightenment, "but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages."
There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.
"One couldn't wish for a more enchanting teacher," says the Doctor. He almost seems to be flirting with her.
"A very elevated one," adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.
"Enlightenment," says the Doctor.
"Minister of Enlightenment," Persuasion corrects him. Just so you know where you stand.
"Yes, of course," replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, "And you must be Minister of Persuasion."
Of course, every 'civilised' nation that ever set about conquering the 'primitives' always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their 'advancement', always said they were helping the child-races to grow... or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.
And such 'civilised' nations always aimed for 'hearts and minds', always brought their greater 'wisdom' with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved.
And they always needed - need - their Ministers of Enlightenment. And Persuasion.
Tuesday, 5 November 2013
45
In a bunker filled with stacks and stacks of munitions shells, Millington is demonstrating his secret weapon. He breaks a capsule inside a sealed glass box. Green fog pours out. The doves inside slowly choke to death.
"Just think what a bomb full could do to Dresden. Or Moscow," says Millington. "It could mean the end of the war," he says perfunctorily. The old, eternal justification.
But Millington isn't trying to end a war. He's trying to start a new one. In his twisted mind, the final battle of Norse mythology has become entwined with the final battle between his way of life and the "revolution" that Sorin believes in.
(Just like Churchill, who asked his generals to come up with a plan for a surprise attack on the USSR, using German troops, after Allied victory over the Nazis. Learning of the American success with the atomic bomb he grew even bolder, saying "We can tell the Russians if they insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Sevastopol".)
Millington's green fog, harvested from a well of ancient evil beneath the ground, has been sealed inside the Ultima Machine, which Millington will allow the Russians to steal.
"And Whitehall thinks the Russians will be stupid enough to let you detonate one of those things inside the Kremlin?" asks the Doctor.
"Oh that's the beauty of it," says Millington, "we won't detonate it. They'll do it themselves. The machine will be programmed to self-destruct when it tries to decrypt a particular word. And when the political climate is appropriate..." by this he means when there is peace... "then we will include the word in one of our cyphers."
The Doctor asks what the word is.
"What else could it be Doctor? Love."
The word rings through the story. Jean and Phyllis love men in uniform. Ace says baby Audrey is lovely. Wainwright so doubts God's love for a nation that drops bombs on German children that he can hardly bear to say the word "love" in church.
"Just think what a bomb full could do to Dresden. Or Moscow," says Millington. "It could mean the end of the war," he says perfunctorily. The old, eternal justification.
But Millington isn't trying to end a war. He's trying to start a new one. In his twisted mind, the final battle of Norse mythology has become entwined with the final battle between his way of life and the "revolution" that Sorin believes in.
(Just like Churchill, who asked his generals to come up with a plan for a surprise attack on the USSR, using German troops, after Allied victory over the Nazis. Learning of the American success with the atomic bomb he grew even bolder, saying "We can tell the Russians if they insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Sevastopol".)
Millington's green fog, harvested from a well of ancient evil beneath the ground, has been sealed inside the Ultima Machine, which Millington will allow the Russians to steal.
"And Whitehall thinks the Russians will be stupid enough to let you detonate one of those things inside the Kremlin?" asks the Doctor.
"Oh that's the beauty of it," says Millington, "we won't detonate it. They'll do it themselves. The machine will be programmed to self-destruct when it tries to decrypt a particular word. And when the political climate is appropriate..." by this he means when there is peace... "then we will include the word in one of our cyphers."
The Doctor asks what the word is.
"What else could it be Doctor? Love."
The word rings through the story. Jean and Phyllis love men in uniform. Ace says baby Audrey is lovely. Wainwright so doubts God's love for a nation that drops bombs on German children that he can hardly bear to say the word "love" in church.
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
A Town Without Context
On 'A Town Called Mercy'
Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier. His motive is to end a war which is killing his people. But were his people the attackers or the attacked? That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story. It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant. Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one... with the answer being, of course, "yes". But I'd argue that the wider social context of Jex's actions (beyond just saying that 'it was war') is as important as it is obscure.
The notion - that war is, as Jex puts it, "a different world" in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy - is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism. Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. "Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people... but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!") or ignored (i.e. "Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!! Why do they hate us???") according to ideological needs and preferences.
'A Town Called Mercy' actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time). Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling 'Our Boys and Girls', since it is assumed that they deserve 'our' support whatever they do). 'Mercy', by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best. Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations... and the omissions are interesting.
As I say, it's not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things. Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn - written during the Blitz - with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him. The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, "is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."
Jex is, of course, serving his 'country', so to speak. But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis? To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian? Or is the situation more complex than that? Is it more like America vs Japan? Two rival empires clashing. One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.
It matters. War crimes are never excusable, of course... except that they are excused. All the time. They're excused as long as they're 'ours', whoever 'we' happen to be. In fact, if they're 'ours', they tend to not even be noticed, let alone excused. When they cannot be ignored or straight-facedly excused (i.e. the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib) they are ideologically neutralised as aberrations, quickly corrected by the putatively aggressive questioning of a Media who are actually pussycats sitting on the laps of the powerful and purring for bellyrubs. The odd playful scratch does not a ferocious tiger make... and anything more than the odd playful scratch might endanger the reliable supply of Kit-e-Kat.
However, it is simply not enough to know that a horrible act was committed, to condemn it and leave it at that. Atrocities are never excusable, but context must make us view violence committed in defence, or in the cause of liberation, differently to how we view violence committed by the aggressors... if only so that we can make intelligible sense of what is actually happening.
International law draws distinctions, at least formally:
People have the moral right to use violence against their occupiers, to use any means available to rid themselves of those who have invaded their territory. There is, of course, no such thing as 'legal terrorism' (though terrorism is subject to definition)... except that, once again, there is. Terrorism is, generally, legal when it is committed by the powerful against the powerless. State terrorism is so legal, it isn't even seen as terrorism at all. 'Terrorism' is something done by people with bolt-cutters or homemade bombs or hijacked jumbo jets. Worse atrocities carried out by states (and/or their hired thugs) are called 'counterterrorism' or 'counter insurgency', etc. The US government can organise genocidal levels of violence against those regimes of which it disapproves and this doesn't count.
Again, our culture tends to see these sorts of issues clearly enough when looking at the French Resistance, but runs into difficulty acknowledging the exact same principle with regards to the Iraqi Resistance. It all comes down to who's side 'we' are on... or rather, who is on 'our' side. Since 'we' are, by definition and by common sense, the goodies, then our friends must, ipso facto, be goodies too... goodies don't ally with baddies, after all... and so those who attack 'our' friends must, logically, be baddies. This is what responsible journalists call 'living in the real world'.
Israel, for instance, is 'our' ally, ergo Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East', constantly fighting for its life against evil-minded Arab aggressors... despite the fact that Israel is a war-starting, avowedly racist, settler-colonial Apartheid state, existing in clear breach of international law (it holds territory it acquired through aggressive war) which is capable of nuclear devastation that Iran can only daydream about. (By the way... it is sometimes argued that the attitude of the Western left towards Israel - i.e. obsessing over it while paying less attention to equally bad or worse states elsewhere - is a mirror image of the hypocrisy of the Western establishment... but this ignores the fact that one has a greater moral obligation to protest the actions of ones own state than those of others, and Israel simply could not do what it does without the funding and support of the US and UK. One wouldn't pay much heed to the wife of a serial killer who said "well, it's all very well, all these people going on about my husband... but what about Robert Mugabe?!" We would rightly construe this as a distraction.)
Terrorism is never excusable, but it always has context... and the context is usually one of power relations. It would be a travesty (as purblind as it is common) to simply wag a moralising finger at atrocities like suicide bombings by Palestinians in Tel Aviv without properly contextualising and historicising them, i.e. without properly explaining why they occur. It's terribly easy to condemn things. It's much harder to historicise them, especially when history doesn't support our ideological convictions. Contrary to myth, it's not just people like me who have ideological convictions. Even those who trumpet their own supposed scepticism are usually riddled with unexamined and unacknowledged ideology. People like Sam Harris, for instance, would have us believe (using anecdotal examples of individual cases) that such attacks occur simply because of the intoxicating effects of Islamic dogma... leaving out the evidence which shows that suicide bombing is almost invariably a product of political anger in response to tyranny, despair, injustice and helplessness... say, in the face of the continued, illegal, violent, occupation of Palestine by the Israelis, or of the American occupation of Iraq. This doesn't 'excuse' suicide bombing (whatever 'excuse' could possibly mean in this context) but it does historicise and contextualise it... in a way that shows the historical and political culpability of those moralisers who do so much to create the conditions for it.
Part of the problem with talking about this issue is what we might call the make-the-foundation-of-this-society-a-man-who-never-would fallacy: that to make moral judgements is the same thing as to moralise. The assumption is one of moral absolutes, which are generally decried while being tacitly employed (including, of course, by me)... in much the same way that we tend to think of 'situational ethics' as lacking integrity, despite the fact that ethical judgements always depend upon situation. Making moral judgements doesn't need to involve expressing categorical disapproval. (The 'Thou Shalt Not!' model of ethics is far from the oldest and most venerable.) Nor is the flipside true; to make moral distinctions is not to excuse. People who'll tell you that it was 'moral relativism' to equate US/UK aggression against Iraq to, say, German aggression against Poland, are themselves the real moral relativists, because they see crimes committed by 'us' as being somehow less immoral than the same crime committed by another. As I've implied, similar crimes are not always morally equivalent... but the key issue for parsing this is the issue of power. Who has it and what are they using it for? For instance, domestic violence is sometimes committed by women against men, and this is inexcusable... but it would be intellectually and politically dishonest to forget the context. We live in a patriarchal society soaked in rape culture; males still have enormous social, financial, cultural, political advantages; domestic violence (and violence generally) by men against women is much more common; etc.
The moral status of unprovoked aggression by states is very clear according to international law going back to the Nuremberg trials. It is the supreme war crime because it contains within itself all the crimes that always follow from invasion and occupation: theft, torture, rape, murder, etc. That's why, as Chomsky observed, every US President in the post-WWII era would have been hanged if such tenets of international law were applicable to the most powerful empire of the post-war period. As it happens, they were inapplicable from the start. Axis criminals were simply not charged with crimes that were also committed by the Allies (i.e. indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civillians) precisely because the framers of the Nuremberg laws didn't want to set dangerous precedents.
The Doctor sometimes does the things that his enemies are portrayed as evil for doing. Genocide, for example, in 'Remembrance of the Daleks'. There is an extent, however, to which any attempt to put the Doctor's actions in 'Remembrance' into real world terms is always going to fail politically... since only the fantastical scale of the Dalek threat can possibly justify what he does. In the real world, there is no level of threat or oppression which could justify genocide... the key point here being that any force in the real world capable of genocide on that scale would be, by definition, an immensely powerful political/economic/military imperialism. By posessing the Hand, the Doctor becomes powerful himself. In reality, the victims are never as powerful as the victimisers. The reason 'we' want to attack Iran rather than, say, North Korea, is precisely because 'we' know that 'they' can't chuck nukes at us.
It's likely that anybody capable of supplying Jex with the technical, technological, monetary and 'human' resources to create the Gunslinger would have to be pretty powerful. It would've been nice to know for sure one way or the other, but my bet would be on Jex being from an imperialist power of some kind. Modern warfare is always imperialistic when it isn't defensive. So should Jex be killed? I certainly wouldn't want to preach to the Gunslinger about morality. I'd be much more inclined to think he had the right to decide than the Doctor. Thing is, I just don't find this question particularly interesting. Neither a 'yes' nor a 'no' answer changes anything or achieves anything real. It gets us nowhere. The question is strangely empty. Debating the morality of hanging the Nuremberg defendants doesn't help us understand the rise of fascism or the imperialist nature of the European conflagration they helped oversee. Hanging Blair in Fallujah wouldn't stop the system he represents creating any more Fallujahs. Does he deserve to swing? I don't really care. It's a fundamentally uninteresting question. We end up back with that old question about whether the ends justify the means? Well, that's a no-brainer, obviously. Yes, possibly, sometimes - it depends on the context. That's assuming, of course, that the question is asked honestly... which it usually isn't. Usually, all that needs to be ascertained by the commissar to whom the question has been posed, is who did what. It's like that other cliche, about how "I was just following orders" is no defence. In real-world ideological discourse, when 'we' (whoever 'we' are) were just following orders, then that's fair enough... and it constitutes extremist lunacy to even think otherwise.
I'd like to know about the context of the orders Jex got, and the context in which he obeyed them. The episode, however, neglects to mention any of that. It is clearly considered that a debate about the ethics of war can be carried out without such context. I disagree. I want to know. Not because I want to know if Jex is 'good' or 'bad' (unlike the writer/s, I don't think these things can be settled so easily... certainly not by an act of self-sacrifice which doesn't actually change anything from the past one iota) but because I want to understand the political meaning of what transpires. Sadly, like so much of 21st century Doctor Who, particularly under Moffat, 'Mercy' simply doesn't possess an interior political context.
'A Town Called Mercy' actually does comparatively well in its awareness that morality depends upon context, that the social context of an act can alter its meaning, that the social context of a person can alter his or her moral status, etc. It permits Jex to be both a 'war criminal' and to be capable of more than that. Moreover, it allows the Gunslinger to do much the same. Having been a victim, he becomes an attacker (the point is not that he attacks his tormentors but that he then attacks the town of Mercy) and then, later, to become the town's protector.
However, ultimately, the story flounders on lack of context. What, one feels like demanding, was the context for Jex's actions? The Doctor's initial enthusiasm for his people doesn't mean they were necessarily the victims of aggression (he's enthusiastic about America during the Vietnam war, when Nixon was dropping more tonnage of bombs than were dropped during WWII on the peasants of South East Asia). It isn't that there may be some justification for having mutilated and murdered people, but that there may be some wider political and moral context which will help us to understand how he came to do such things. Even if he was on the attacking side, I'd like to know about the culture which created a situation in which he got caught up in such a venture. Was he an enthusiastic volunteer, like so many of the doctors who formed the single largest professional group within the SS? Was he one of those 'ordinary men' who found themselves committing extraordinary atrocities out of an inability to resist social pressure? Was he propagandized into accepting a pernicious ideology that he now rejects? I'd really like to know this stuff. This interests me, far more than a scene where the Doctor lectures the assembled townspeople (most of whom are, natch, fickle moral cowards) about non-violence.
This leads me to another issue. The Doctor straps on guns when he becomes the Sheriff. Well, I'm not a pacifist so I don't have an objection to that per se. I'm not one of those people who wants the Doctor to be inherently non violent. However, it does make me think of The Prisoner episode 'Living in Harmony' (you know, the Western one). This episode was not shown on American TV at the time. The official reason was that it featured mind-altering drugs... but this is unconvincing, given how many episodes which did make it onto US TV also featured mind-altering drugs. The real reason, as Robert Fairclough has argued, is probably the anti-war subtext of the episode in the context of the Vietnam war and the protest movement against it. It was just too near the knuckle. An episode which evokes the primal myth of America (the Wild West), in which the hero refuses to strap on a six-shooter. Now, context changes things. I'm not, as I say, a pacifist, but 'Living in Harmony' acquires a political charge that is thrilling in the context of that moment of history, in which a generation were marching for peace. So it's disappointing that, in the context of British and US troops still engaged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, Doctor Who does a Western in which the Doctor straps on his six-shooter without a qualm.
He also pins on that sheriff's badge eagerly too... which is a sign of the times, like his unworried acceptance of the Tesselecta's assertion that, like them, he stands for 'law and order'. Who's law? Who's order? And are the two things necessarily linked, or even desirable. Lots of laws are pretty fucking awful, precisely because of who's interests they serve. There's that missing political context again. What a gaping hole its absence leaves in a story that specifically tries to examine these issues!
Of course, blaming Steven Moffat or Toby Whithouse for this would be to miss the point rather. They're not there to make political statements but to make fantasy TV. That the fantasy TV they make seems depressingly conformist and apolitical (meaning, in practice, apologetical for powerful interests and prejudices) is, to a large extent, the fault of a society that has, by and large, abandoned anti-war activism and protest. That's not to say that protest has disappeared, but we're a long way from the big march against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If people don't mind their country being engaged in murderous imperialism, then their fictional cultural heroes are not going to reflect any unease about it. Like everything good, such anger and protest must flow upwards from the bottom. Steven Moffat - and the media culture he embodies - isn't going to be pushed to the left by its own conscience. Some hope. Meanwhile, in the absence of any countervailing tendency, capitalist media culture drifts ever rightwards.
You know, a recent survey has suggested that most British people think the invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of under 10,000 people. The evidence seems to show that the actual figure is probably between 600,000 and a million... which is without calculating the death toll of the first Gulf War or the sanctions regime that Britain supported. This fact alone should shame the British out of producing or watching any televisual morality fables about war ever again. Really... just who the bloody hell do we think we are, swaggering around the globe, annihilating people for the convenience of the American imperium and for neoliberalism's access to markets, and then entertaining ourselves (and improving our children's morals) with comfortingly smug little homilies about war?
The anodyne smugness is a function of the lack of context. And it gets everywhere, into even the most frivolous bits of narrative culture. Leaving out the context and the history is an essential ideological tool of the capitalist media. This is how the Israel/Palestine 'conflict' is portrayed as being about 'two tribes' who can't get on. Every news report that tuts over 'conflict' in the West Bank or Gaza takes, essentially, the same tack as 'A Town Called Mercy' (and other Doctor Who texts, including many from the classic series) in the way it presents us with a tragic drama about the horror of war, etc., while neatly and discreetly editing out any context which will help us make moral sense of it all. The moral sense is always inextricably bound up with the political and historical sense. That's why the capitalist culture industry usually thinks we don't need to know the context.
The ends can justify the means, but there needs to be something which justifies the ends.
- Trotsky
Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier. His motive is to end a war which is killing his people. But were his people the attackers or the attacked? That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story. It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant. Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one... with the answer being, of course, "yes". But I'd argue that the wider social context of Jex's actions (beyond just saying that 'it was war') is as important as it is obscure.
The notion - that war is, as Jex puts it, "a different world" in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy - is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism. Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. "Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people... but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!") or ignored (i.e. "Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!! Why do they hate us???") according to ideological needs and preferences.
 |
| Kryten would find it easier to get rid of the Apocalypse Boys now that he'd been assimilated by the Borg. |
'A Town Called Mercy' actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time). Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling 'Our Boys and Girls', since it is assumed that they deserve 'our' support whatever they do). 'Mercy', by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best. Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations... and the omissions are interesting.
As I say, it's not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things. Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn - written during the Blitz - with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him. The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, "is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."
Jex is, of course, serving his 'country', so to speak. But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis? To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian? Or is the situation more complex than that? Is it more like America vs Japan? Two rival empires clashing. One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.
It matters. War crimes are never excusable, of course... except that they are excused. All the time. They're excused as long as they're 'ours', whoever 'we' happen to be. In fact, if they're 'ours', they tend to not even be noticed, let alone excused. When they cannot be ignored or straight-facedly excused (i.e. the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib) they are ideologically neutralised as aberrations, quickly corrected by the putatively aggressive questioning of a Media who are actually pussycats sitting on the laps of the powerful and purring for bellyrubs. The odd playful scratch does not a ferocious tiger make... and anything more than the odd playful scratch might endanger the reliable supply of Kit-e-Kat.
However, it is simply not enough to know that a horrible act was committed, to condemn it and leave it at that. Atrocities are never excusable, but context must make us view violence committed in defence, or in the cause of liberation, differently to how we view violence committed by the aggressors... if only so that we can make intelligible sense of what is actually happening.
International law draws distinctions, at least formally:
2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle
- United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978
People have the moral right to use violence against their occupiers, to use any means available to rid themselves of those who have invaded their territory. There is, of course, no such thing as 'legal terrorism' (though terrorism is subject to definition)... except that, once again, there is. Terrorism is, generally, legal when it is committed by the powerful against the powerless. State terrorism is so legal, it isn't even seen as terrorism at all. 'Terrorism' is something done by people with bolt-cutters or homemade bombs or hijacked jumbo jets. Worse atrocities carried out by states (and/or their hired thugs) are called 'counterterrorism' or 'counter insurgency', etc. The US government can organise genocidal levels of violence against those regimes of which it disapproves and this doesn't count.
Again, our culture tends to see these sorts of issues clearly enough when looking at the French Resistance, but runs into difficulty acknowledging the exact same principle with regards to the Iraqi Resistance. It all comes down to who's side 'we' are on... or rather, who is on 'our' side. Since 'we' are, by definition and by common sense, the goodies, then our friends must, ipso facto, be goodies too... goodies don't ally with baddies, after all... and so those who attack 'our' friends must, logically, be baddies. This is what responsible journalists call 'living in the real world'.
Israel, for instance, is 'our' ally, ergo Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East', constantly fighting for its life against evil-minded Arab aggressors... despite the fact that Israel is a war-starting, avowedly racist, settler-colonial Apartheid state, existing in clear breach of international law (it holds territory it acquired through aggressive war) which is capable of nuclear devastation that Iran can only daydream about. (By the way... it is sometimes argued that the attitude of the Western left towards Israel - i.e. obsessing over it while paying less attention to equally bad or worse states elsewhere - is a mirror image of the hypocrisy of the Western establishment... but this ignores the fact that one has a greater moral obligation to protest the actions of ones own state than those of others, and Israel simply could not do what it does without the funding and support of the US and UK. One wouldn't pay much heed to the wife of a serial killer who said "well, it's all very well, all these people going on about my husband... but what about Robert Mugabe?!" We would rightly construe this as a distraction.)
Terrorism is never excusable, but it always has context... and the context is usually one of power relations. It would be a travesty (as purblind as it is common) to simply wag a moralising finger at atrocities like suicide bombings by Palestinians in Tel Aviv without properly contextualising and historicising them, i.e. without properly explaining why they occur. It's terribly easy to condemn things. It's much harder to historicise them, especially when history doesn't support our ideological convictions. Contrary to myth, it's not just people like me who have ideological convictions. Even those who trumpet their own supposed scepticism are usually riddled with unexamined and unacknowledged ideology. People like Sam Harris, for instance, would have us believe (using anecdotal examples of individual cases) that such attacks occur simply because of the intoxicating effects of Islamic dogma... leaving out the evidence which shows that suicide bombing is almost invariably a product of political anger in response to tyranny, despair, injustice and helplessness... say, in the face of the continued, illegal, violent, occupation of Palestine by the Israelis, or of the American occupation of Iraq. This doesn't 'excuse' suicide bombing (whatever 'excuse' could possibly mean in this context) but it does historicise and contextualise it... in a way that shows the historical and political culpability of those moralisers who do so much to create the conditions for it.
Part of the problem with talking about this issue is what we might call the make-the-foundation-of-this-society-a-man-who-never-would fallacy: that to make moral judgements is the same thing as to moralise. The assumption is one of moral absolutes, which are generally decried while being tacitly employed (including, of course, by me)... in much the same way that we tend to think of 'situational ethics' as lacking integrity, despite the fact that ethical judgements always depend upon situation. Making moral judgements doesn't need to involve expressing categorical disapproval. (The 'Thou Shalt Not!' model of ethics is far from the oldest and most venerable.) Nor is the flipside true; to make moral distinctions is not to excuse. People who'll tell you that it was 'moral relativism' to equate US/UK aggression against Iraq to, say, German aggression against Poland, are themselves the real moral relativists, because they see crimes committed by 'us' as being somehow less immoral than the same crime committed by another. As I've implied, similar crimes are not always morally equivalent... but the key issue for parsing this is the issue of power. Who has it and what are they using it for? For instance, domestic violence is sometimes committed by women against men, and this is inexcusable... but it would be intellectually and politically dishonest to forget the context. We live in a patriarchal society soaked in rape culture; males still have enormous social, financial, cultural, political advantages; domestic violence (and violence generally) by men against women is much more common; etc.
The moral status of unprovoked aggression by states is very clear according to international law going back to the Nuremberg trials. It is the supreme war crime because it contains within itself all the crimes that always follow from invasion and occupation: theft, torture, rape, murder, etc. That's why, as Chomsky observed, every US President in the post-WWII era would have been hanged if such tenets of international law were applicable to the most powerful empire of the post-war period. As it happens, they were inapplicable from the start. Axis criminals were simply not charged with crimes that were also committed by the Allies (i.e. indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civillians) precisely because the framers of the Nuremberg laws didn't want to set dangerous precedents.
The Doctor sometimes does the things that his enemies are portrayed as evil for doing. Genocide, for example, in 'Remembrance of the Daleks'. There is an extent, however, to which any attempt to put the Doctor's actions in 'Remembrance' into real world terms is always going to fail politically... since only the fantastical scale of the Dalek threat can possibly justify what he does. In the real world, there is no level of threat or oppression which could justify genocide... the key point here being that any force in the real world capable of genocide on that scale would be, by definition, an immensely powerful political/economic/military imperialism. By posessing the Hand, the Doctor becomes powerful himself. In reality, the victims are never as powerful as the victimisers. The reason 'we' want to attack Iran rather than, say, North Korea, is precisely because 'we' know that 'they' can't chuck nukes at us.
It's likely that anybody capable of supplying Jex with the technical, technological, monetary and 'human' resources to create the Gunslinger would have to be pretty powerful. It would've been nice to know for sure one way or the other, but my bet would be on Jex being from an imperialist power of some kind. Modern warfare is always imperialistic when it isn't defensive. So should Jex be killed? I certainly wouldn't want to preach to the Gunslinger about morality. I'd be much more inclined to think he had the right to decide than the Doctor. Thing is, I just don't find this question particularly interesting. Neither a 'yes' nor a 'no' answer changes anything or achieves anything real. It gets us nowhere. The question is strangely empty. Debating the morality of hanging the Nuremberg defendants doesn't help us understand the rise of fascism or the imperialist nature of the European conflagration they helped oversee. Hanging Blair in Fallujah wouldn't stop the system he represents creating any more Fallujahs. Does he deserve to swing? I don't really care. It's a fundamentally uninteresting question. We end up back with that old question about whether the ends justify the means? Well, that's a no-brainer, obviously. Yes, possibly, sometimes - it depends on the context. That's assuming, of course, that the question is asked honestly... which it usually isn't. Usually, all that needs to be ascertained by the commissar to whom the question has been posed, is who did what. It's like that other cliche, about how "I was just following orders" is no defence. In real-world ideological discourse, when 'we' (whoever 'we' are) were just following orders, then that's fair enough... and it constitutes extremist lunacy to even think otherwise.
I'd like to know about the context of the orders Jex got, and the context in which he obeyed them. The episode, however, neglects to mention any of that. It is clearly considered that a debate about the ethics of war can be carried out without such context. I disagree. I want to know. Not because I want to know if Jex is 'good' or 'bad' (unlike the writer/s, I don't think these things can be settled so easily... certainly not by an act of self-sacrifice which doesn't actually change anything from the past one iota) but because I want to understand the political meaning of what transpires. Sadly, like so much of 21st century Doctor Who, particularly under Moffat, 'Mercy' simply doesn't possess an interior political context.
'A Town Called Mercy' actually does comparatively well in its awareness that morality depends upon context, that the social context of an act can alter its meaning, that the social context of a person can alter his or her moral status, etc. It permits Jex to be both a 'war criminal' and to be capable of more than that. Moreover, it allows the Gunslinger to do much the same. Having been a victim, he becomes an attacker (the point is not that he attacks his tormentors but that he then attacks the town of Mercy) and then, later, to become the town's protector.
However, ultimately, the story flounders on lack of context. What, one feels like demanding, was the context for Jex's actions? The Doctor's initial enthusiasm for his people doesn't mean they were necessarily the victims of aggression (he's enthusiastic about America during the Vietnam war, when Nixon was dropping more tonnage of bombs than were dropped during WWII on the peasants of South East Asia). It isn't that there may be some justification for having mutilated and murdered people, but that there may be some wider political and moral context which will help us to understand how he came to do such things. Even if he was on the attacking side, I'd like to know about the culture which created a situation in which he got caught up in such a venture. Was he an enthusiastic volunteer, like so many of the doctors who formed the single largest professional group within the SS? Was he one of those 'ordinary men' who found themselves committing extraordinary atrocities out of an inability to resist social pressure? Was he propagandized into accepting a pernicious ideology that he now rejects? I'd really like to know this stuff. This interests me, far more than a scene where the Doctor lectures the assembled townspeople (most of whom are, natch, fickle moral cowards) about non-violence.
This leads me to another issue. The Doctor straps on guns when he becomes the Sheriff. Well, I'm not a pacifist so I don't have an objection to that per se. I'm not one of those people who wants the Doctor to be inherently non violent. However, it does make me think of The Prisoner episode 'Living in Harmony' (you know, the Western one). This episode was not shown on American TV at the time. The official reason was that it featured mind-altering drugs... but this is unconvincing, given how many episodes which did make it onto US TV also featured mind-altering drugs. The real reason, as Robert Fairclough has argued, is probably the anti-war subtext of the episode in the context of the Vietnam war and the protest movement against it. It was just too near the knuckle. An episode which evokes the primal myth of America (the Wild West), in which the hero refuses to strap on a six-shooter. Now, context changes things. I'm not, as I say, a pacifist, but 'Living in Harmony' acquires a political charge that is thrilling in the context of that moment of history, in which a generation were marching for peace. So it's disappointing that, in the context of British and US troops still engaged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, Doctor Who does a Western in which the Doctor straps on his six-shooter without a qualm.
He also pins on that sheriff's badge eagerly too... which is a sign of the times, like his unworried acceptance of the Tesselecta's assertion that, like them, he stands for 'law and order'. Who's law? Who's order? And are the two things necessarily linked, or even desirable. Lots of laws are pretty fucking awful, precisely because of who's interests they serve. There's that missing political context again. What a gaping hole its absence leaves in a story that specifically tries to examine these issues!
Of course, blaming Steven Moffat or Toby Whithouse for this would be to miss the point rather. They're not there to make political statements but to make fantasy TV. That the fantasy TV they make seems depressingly conformist and apolitical (meaning, in practice, apologetical for powerful interests and prejudices) is, to a large extent, the fault of a society that has, by and large, abandoned anti-war activism and protest. That's not to say that protest has disappeared, but we're a long way from the big march against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If people don't mind their country being engaged in murderous imperialism, then their fictional cultural heroes are not going to reflect any unease about it. Like everything good, such anger and protest must flow upwards from the bottom. Steven Moffat - and the media culture he embodies - isn't going to be pushed to the left by its own conscience. Some hope. Meanwhile, in the absence of any countervailing tendency, capitalist media culture drifts ever rightwards.
You know, a recent survey has suggested that most British people think the invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of under 10,000 people. The evidence seems to show that the actual figure is probably between 600,000 and a million... which is without calculating the death toll of the first Gulf War or the sanctions regime that Britain supported. This fact alone should shame the British out of producing or watching any televisual morality fables about war ever again. Really... just who the bloody hell do we think we are, swaggering around the globe, annihilating people for the convenience of the American imperium and for neoliberalism's access to markets, and then entertaining ourselves (and improving our children's morals) with comfortingly smug little homilies about war?
The anodyne smugness is a function of the lack of context. And it gets everywhere, into even the most frivolous bits of narrative culture. Leaving out the context and the history is an essential ideological tool of the capitalist media. This is how the Israel/Palestine 'conflict' is portrayed as being about 'two tribes' who can't get on. Every news report that tuts over 'conflict' in the West Bank or Gaza takes, essentially, the same tack as 'A Town Called Mercy' (and other Doctor Who texts, including many from the classic series) in the way it presents us with a tragic drama about the horror of war, etc., while neatly and discreetly editing out any context which will help us make moral sense of it all. The moral sense is always inextricably bound up with the political and historical sense. That's why the capitalist culture industry usually thinks we don't need to know the context.
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