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January 25, 2005
"Atrocity Porn" and its Purveyors
The horrific experience of Iraqi woman Jumana Hanna -- supposedly imprisoned, raped, and tortured for years on the orders of Uday Hussein -- was cited by the Bush administration and its supporters as "reason alone" for the war. But Hanna's story -- like the rest of the administration's case -- was a tissue of fabrications.
So begins this excellent piece by William Norman Grigg on what he calls "atrocity porn," phony stories of atrocities by the Hitler du jour invented to drum up pro-war sentiment among Americans. Grigg covers current as well as historical instances of atrocity porn and shows how it is used to convince Americans to support wars against their better instincts.
Grigg concludes:
Atrocity porn plays a critical role in the process of mobilizing mass hatred on the part of the state’s designs. Like its sexual equivalent, atrocity porn (especially, and obviously, in the case of stories describing rape and other sexual abuse) appeals to prurient interests to manipulate base impulses. In this case, the appetite being exploited is what Augustine called the libido dominandi – the lust for power. Once that appetite is aroused through atrocity porn, the consummation is usually a state-sanctioned orgy of bloodshed.
The authors of atrocity porn also cynically exploit the predictable reactions it will provoke from decent people. Sometimes this can be accomplished through a selective – and obsessive – focus on outrages committed by a distant regime. And it’s certainly true that there is no shortage of genuine atrocities for the propaganda mill. This is why an obsessive focus on a specific regime – particularly one that, like Saddam’s Iraq, posed no plausible threat to the United States – should provoke immediate suspicion, rather than receiving immediate and unqualified support.
All warfare is based on deception, including the crude and ephemeral deceptions embodied in atrocity porn. But war involves subtle deceptions, as well. The subtlest and deadliest is the idea that the state is conducting a war to protect the people from foreign enemies, rather than exploiting foreign conflicts to wage war on the rights and prosperity of the people.
(Thanks to the Antiwar.com blog for the link.)
Posted by Mike Tennant at January 25, 2005 11:27 AM
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