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Scene 11 Post-11
From the book Theatres of Capitalism
By David M. Boje
December 12, 2001
Act 2, Scene 11, Post-11
9-11 is the postmodern megaspectacle. We have turned war into celebratory mass
entertainment. Leaders have speech and dialog coaches. Time, Space, and Causality are
shattered in the events of the September 11th devastation of World Trade Center (WTC)
and Pentagon. Post-11 is a postmodern war and it is theatrical. The post-11 spectacle that
emerged from the events of September 11, three months hence, continue to send shock
waves throughout capitalism and popular culture. Spectators are educated, terrified and
entertained by the theatrics of post-11. The education is a means of social control,
manipulation of spectator feelings of pity and fear, used to reinvoke the Cold War. The
new antagonists and protagonists struggle to dominate the global center stage, and the
media extravaganza. The terror of the extravaganza has a dark side, the repeated terror of
seeing the collapse of WTC towers, sent American audience into post-11 traumatic stress
syndrome. Post-11 as entertainment draws more audience than the OJ Simpson trial, the
funeral of Princess Dianna, and the Survivor TV sequels. This chapter is a systematic
analysis what makes post-11 an “Event” of postmodern war.1 After explaining what is
postmodern about post-11, the chapter is organized into post-11 (and pre-11) trilogy:
spectacles of power, carnivals of resistance to the war, and festive respites from the war.
Why is the war of post-11, postmodern? Just using the word “postmodern” does not
add anything to our exploration of Theatres of Capitalism. We must be quite clear about
what makes post-11 a postmodern war, as opposed to just one more high-tech modern
war, with the usual spectacle of business and state propaganda to enlist spectator support
for war. Postmodern war is defined, by philosophers Best and Kellner (2001), as the
implosion of human and machine in cyber and bio technology.
The Gulf spectacle was “postmodern” in that, first, it was a media event
that was experienced as a live occurrence for the whole global village.
Second, it managed to blur the distinction between truth and reality in a
triumph of the orchestrated image and spectacle. Third, the conflict
exhibited a heightened merging of individuals and technology, previewing
a new type of cyberwar that featured information technology and “smart”
weapons (Best & Kellner, 2001: 73).
To this definition I will contribute an analysis of theatrics of postmodern war, and extend
the analysis to include the post-11 war. We will examine theatrics of post-11 as
postmodern war, which makes military confrontation and collateral damage (civilian
casualties), mere digital abstractions.
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Postmodern war combines theatre of operation with new cyberwar digital theatre
technologies, the media megaspectacle of instant replays, interactive simulations, and all
the theatrics necessary to conduct and legitimate the carnage and commerce of war.
Postmodern war also revitalizes and continues the co-construction of science, technology,
state, and military capitalism that is the very “madness of modernity” we experienced in
the Cold War era since 1945 (Best & Kellner, 2001: 60). Except that in post-11, the War
on Terror, our new Cold War is a rivalry between post-modern western capitalism and
eastern 13th century premodern tribalism (opposed to modernity and postmodernity). Best
and Kellner’s definition goes beyond other attempts to define postmodern war, since it
focuses on what is different about the relation of humans and technology, in this versus
other wars, such as the Vietnam War (actually, I was told it was an insurgency, hours
before I boarded a TWA troop plane).2
Frederick Jameson (1991: 45), on the other hand (and many who cite his critique), asserts
that Vietnam is the first of the postmodern wars since it is a “breakdown of all previous
narrative paradigms” in ways that promote a “whole new reflexivity.” Actually, I don’t
think the issue is reflexivity or narrative, it is theatrical, and the infusion of cyber tech
that makes a war postmodern. Theatre (and narrative) has been radically reflective about
modern wars. For example, the WWI movie, The Eagle and the Hawk staring Frederick
March and Cary Grant has reflexivity and theatrical irony. March, playing the part of
Captain J. H. Young, an ace pilot, is being showered with medals, as a way for the war
office to motivate and recruit youngsters to enlist in the war (so they to can become
heroes). Consider March’s critical reflection, during a festive celebration of the spectacle
of his heroic adventure. He turns the festive and spectacle occasion into carnival, then
goes off stage to commit suicide. His monologue at the event brings the gore of war to
the fore.
They set me up as a shining tin god. A hero! An ace! They expect me to
act like a hero. So you can all play at being heroes. So you can go and
shoot other kids down, burning, and get killed yourself. They’ll decorate
you for it; give you medals just like they did me. I got these for killing
kids. They’re all chunks of torn flesh and broken bones and blood. And for
what? I give you war!
Cary Grant develops a cover story for Captain Young’s (March’s) suicide, and the
closing shot of the tombstone reads, “Captain J. H. Young who gallantly gave his life in
aerial combat to save the world for democracy - June 14, 1918.”
There is more than narrative going on in The Eagle and the Hawk; this is a radical
critique of the theatrics of war that substitutes heroic romanticism for the tragedy of war;
it is critical of our hegemonic enrollment into heroic adventure via theatrics. But, this
alone does not make a war postmodern.
My contribution to the on-going debate, between Best and Kellner versus Jameson, over
what is and is not a “postmodern war” lies in exploring the new theatrics of war. To be
postmodern war, I think the theatrics must be decidedly different than prior wars. The
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difference I see between the new Eagle versus Hawk War and prior wars is more than the
breakdown of narrative or the insertion of critical reflection. I shall argue that it is new
technologies (cyber and biotech) that transform the theatres of capitalism in ways that
make post-11 a postmodern war. The new technologies of cyber war infect and thereby
controls and disciplines the social body, transforming its commerce and life style.
Technological innovations in warfare from biotechnology, cyber war, and infotainment
have fused with state, military, and corporate capitalism to transform the theatrics of
capitalism into a social corporeality more postmodern than Vietnam or WW1 and WWII.
What is postmodern, is the materiality of the interactive cyber theatrics affects our social
corporeality, to the extent of turning soldiering into a more robotic and cyborg
performance directed on digital battlefields, and selling spectators via interactive
participation in digital infotainment. Here we explore these and other postmodern
theatrical transformations, particularly, virtual technologies of simulation, hyperreal, and
cyborg warriors that are related to the business, technologies, and disciplines of war. I
have a name for this.
“McWar” - I will call this nexus of postmodern war and megaspectacle theatrics simply
“McWar.” McWar is also a term used by the military, a reference to the Marine Corps
War College (or McWar College).3 McWar, here will mean the McDonaldization, Las
Vegasization, and Disneyfication theatrics that transform war through cyber and biotech
into something postmodern infecting the social body. McWar incorporates some aspects
of the theatres of capitalism we have explored in previous chapters; it is also more. It is
not the first McWar; Kosovo and Gulf wars were also postmodern. Post-11 is just one
more McWar that relies upon the Disneyfication-theming of good and bad on the global
and digital stage, the McDonaldization-scripting of the mechanistic-scripting of war as
romantic, and the Las Vegasization-disciplining of individual passions, the management
and control of spectators and actors (or just spect-actors) by directors.
The chapter is organized into main sections of spectacle, carnival, and festival. These
definitions are our starting points.
Spectacle (and megaspectacle) can be total manipulation of meaning-making
processes through theatrical events to serve the production of power and
managerial needs to control spectator and actor emotions and behaviors.
Carnival refers to strategies of theatric-resistance to spectacles of power and
hegemony; carnivals postmodern form is culture jamming, street theatre, and
varied forms of parody and satire of state, military, and capital forms of power.
Festival is respect for all species, all life; it is the ultimate Ahimsa (practice of
non-violence). Festival is also a respite from the spectacle of power and the
sideshow of carnival resistance.
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Behind interactive trilogy of spectacle, carnival, and festival, just off stage is the
methodology of theatrics. For spectacle it is a repertoire of illusions, for carnival it is the
task of bringing the back stage on stage, and for festival, life is theatre. Post-11 is a
multiplicity and hybridity of spectacle, carnival, and (here and there) festive theatrics.
PART I: Megaspectacle
Spectacle can be total manipulation of meaning-making processes through theatrical
events to serve the production of power or just entertainment for sale. Sometimes these
spectacles celebrate the benevolence and progress of power with affirming theatrics and
other times the spectacle theatrics sells us on the idea that technological, humanistic or
ecological progress is being realized.
Megaspectacles sensationalize war and patriotism in media extravaganzas (Best &
Kellner, 2001). Beneath Megaspectacles is the rest of the iceberg, the other three types of
spectacle (concentrated, diffuse & integrated). Pst-11 Megaspectacles are interactive,
with media competing to provide websites where cyber-spectators can replay simulations
on the new stage of the spectacle.
Spectacle is based on the work of Guy Debord (1967, Society of the Spectacle) who has
something important to say about how spectacles of production and consumption relate to
war. Megaspectacle goes a step further. The postmodern theatrics of the Gulf, Kosovo,
and post-11 wars are glaring expression of the megaspectacle. Megaspectacle is the
means of control in previous war, but it was done with different technologies.
Theatre began as a “place for seeing,” with spectators seated on a hillside overlooking a
hollow, or in a circle of some sacred forest. During war, theatre is a tool for motivating,
correcting, controlling, and mollifying the social body. We purge the body of all tragic
flaws; in the megaspectacle of war, all dissent is a tragic flaw.
In the Middle Ages, clergy and nobility tightly controlled theatrical production. During
World War I and WWII, theatre counter to the interests of the state and wealthy interests
or governing classes would not get produced (Boal, 1985:54). The Eagle and the Hawk is
therefore an interesting exception (see introduction). Mash, was the first exception to that
rule in Vietnam. Though staged in Korea, its release during the Vietnam War, made the
film highly controversial. I recall, as Nam survivor, being in Saigon (now Ho Chi Min
City), and told that Mash would not be shown in Vietnam. But finally, in 1969, the
military command gave up its resistance, and a sheet was nailed to the back of our supply
building, and we watched the movie, as real tracer bullets flew above our “place for
seeing” and puffs of strange smoke mingled with the gun smoke and other strange smoke
in Mash. The juxtaposition was surreal and absurd, but not entirely postmodern.
During postmodern megaspectacle wars, such as Kosovo, Gulf, and post-11, theatre and
its establishment celebrities (in movies, sports, and Broadway) are recruited to fight the
war on terror, but the technologies uniting actors and spectators is quite different. For
example, the line between military combat and entertainment gets blurred:
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During the Gulf War the commentary of military and football analysts -and the methods deployed to illustrate and explain sports and the war -became almost indistinguishable. During ABC's broadcast of Super Bowl
XXV, an important part of the rhetorical [I’d say theatrical] strategy was
to turn the event into much more than a game in order to justify playing
the contest. Indeed, the Super Bowl and its viewers became important-even essential--participants in the war effort.4 [additions in brackets,
mine].
This McWar continues the trends of fusing technology and human with sanitized media
that characterized the Gulf and Kosovo wars identified by Best and Kellner (2001). We
can contrast the sanitized images of the spectacle of McWar, played as a video game, or
football spectacle, with hard reality of collateral damage (chunks of civilian torn flesh,
bones broken by shrapnel, and the blood mist:
What the U.S. public does remember from the Persian Gulf War is a just
and successful military operation with few casualties -- a sanitized,
quickie technowar in which laser-guided missiles destroyed buildings not
bodies. In his October 2, 1997, letter to the UN Security Council,
however, Ramsey Clark offers the sobering reminder that U.S.-led
sanctions against Iraq "have now killed more than 750,000 human beings,
perhaps twice that many, the great majority, infants, children, older
persons and those who suffered serious chronic illnesses." 5
During the Gulf War, the sanitized media coverage became complicit in
the killing by adopting an uncritical, self-censored position toward the
conflict which facilitated the slaughter of Iraqis and the destruction of
Iraq's infrastructure (including the leveling of the historic city of
Baghdad).
There are continuities between modern and postmodern war. U.S. corporations, as in
WWI and WWII, are being asked and required by the federal government to retool from
civilian to war production. The budget of the military-industrial complex is no longer in
decline. The cold war is back on Broadway, the plot is the same, but the characters have
changed, the former Soviet Union have been replaced by tribes of terrorists.
During McWar, sanitized media coverage is complicit in the collateral damage, since the
production of war as digital theatre is uncritical, self-censoring the more gory aspects of
the victor’s slaughter.
All three postmodern wars depend upon high-tech forms of combat as well as sanitized
media spectacle that changes the relation of human to technology (be they soldier,
general, statesperson, or spectator) and cloaks the torn flesh, broken bones, and blood of
war in digital imagery.
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All three wars, more than the Vietnam insurgency or the great World Wars, rely upon
hyperreality and interactive simulation cyber technologies. WWI and WWII had gas
attacks, WWII had its missiles, but this is nothing what is new to post-11. Post-11
unleashed the Anthrax terror (perhaps on itself) and then reduced war to a commodified
McWar on CBS, CNN, ABC, Fox, and BBC online interactive simulation; new
technologies to play and win the ratings game. The president and first lady chimed in
with infomercials about the War on Terror.
For example the CBS web site includes a primer for bioterror biological agents, chemical
warfare agents, suspicious parcels, clues on bioterror crime scenes, and preparing for
bioterror attack.6 Other CBS simulations include “Terror Hits Home,” “Retaliation,”
“America On Guard,” and an interactive site just on Anthrax (covering Anthrax, its
history, maps of the infection and points of bodily exposure, testing, Cipro, and what to
do).7
We are moving rapidly from virtual reality training to living in an interactive computer
simulation that is postmodern in its theatrics. The social body is becoming theatre. In
McWar, we can actually log into Time.com or CNN.com, and participate in an interactive
spectacle, such as the exploration of the “Tora Bora Caves of Afghanistan.”8 CNN
maintains extensive interactive libraries including 3D animations of the Sept. 11 attacks
(called the Interactive attacks Explainer), and experience the battlefield deployment of
U.S. weapons.9 TV and web networks compete for audience-share by offering better
simulations and digital interactive experiences to spectators, who want a digital
interactive experience of the War on Terror. The digital experience is less terrifying than
looking at actual bodies, the blood and gore of war. Now, I can surf the web and call up
the collapse of the towers, a play them again and again. It is harder to find images of war
casualties. In McWar, spectators view cartoons and digital figures (and less often see the
real thing).
The differences between the modern and postmodern theatrics of warfare include current
uses of robot drones, satellites, digital battlefields, and other high tech technologies that
change both the theatre of operations, the game of war, and its theatric strategy and forms
of resistance (i.e. carnival) as well as its fickle festival.
McWar megaspectacle dominates the social body. “In all its specific forms, as
information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the
spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life” (Debord, 1967: #6).
Every tragic play, says Aristotle (1954: 231) has “Spectacle, Character, Fable (plot),
Melody, and Thought (theme)” (as we reviewed in the last chapter. For Aristotle (1954:
232), “the Spectacle, though an attraction is the least artistic of all the parts and has the
least to do with the art of poetry.” He saw plot (fable) as the most important dramatic
element. In the postmodern poetics of McWar, it is spectacle that becomes more
important than plot or any other Aristotelian element.
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Consequences can be marginalized in the interactive poetics of the postmodern war
spectacle. It can do what Aristotle (1954) asked of tragedy; use public performances of
fear and pity to control the spectators. The instant replay images, Internet simulations,
and other e-spectacles of the collapse of the WTC towers stoked our ‘fears’ to the point
of panic and they called forth our ‘pity’ for the victims. Our vicarious fear was that the
same fate happening to we the spectators, and our pity was that the horrific fate that
befell those innocent victims could happen to us.
Aristotle (1954: 239-240) does admit that “fear and pity may be aroused by the
Spectacle,” in the spectator, as well as can be done by the poet’s plot, but to do so with
spectacle is far less artistic. In postmodern war, spectacle dominates in a more profound
war that Aristotle did not anticipate. The tragic flaw of the character that brings him or
her to an unhappy ending, a reversal of fortune and loss of life, is a way to instruct the
spectators to purge their own tragic flaws or suffer the same fate (Boal, 1985: 106). This
is the oppressive side of postmodern spectacles of war.
Alternatively, the McWar megaspectacle can be stages in ways that minimize the effect
of blood and gore done by the West on non-combatants. The double “Nintendo effect” of
postmodern war spectacle is (1) digitized and sanitized images substitute for the blood
and guts of war on digital hyperreal stages, and (2) repeated viewing of gory violence
makes you forget its real counterpart. As McWar continues to emerge, the separation of
military, corporate, State, and theatre blurs into co-constructions and co-evolutions of
postmodern war. The addictive effect of postmodern war is that the stage heroes
(politicians, generals, and terrorists) seek new wars to sustain spectator adoration and
control. Heroes get reelected.
The media also runs its spectacle theatrics. The media hypes the war, like a Broadway
play. CNN’s logo is like a Broadway marquee, that traces the succession of spectacles,
the "Showdown with Iraq," "Showdown in the Gulf" and this postmodern “War against
Terror.” McWar is “Event” not “event.”
The collapse of the two WTC towers is a horrific and tragic “event” with a small “e.”
But, the pre-11 and the post-11 theatre is “Event” with a capital “E,” whose
interpretations redistribute and ignite many small “e” events (Deleuze, 1990). Both sides
of this McWar of Jihad versus McWorld are antagonist and protagonist at various points
in the post-11 “Event” which redistributes the meaning and conduct of many “events.”
Post-11 has important consequences.
First, and foremost is the off stage carnage of McWar. Pre-11 (preparing for the 11
attack) is also theatrically an “Event,” of which 11 is an event-moment; it is the post-11
“Event” that uses the horror of the 11-event, to unleash a grand spectacle that may
consequently legitimate even more carnage events on innocent people, the collateral
damage of the expanding War on Terror. “Nothing justified the killing of innocent
people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people
anywhere else” (Pilger, 2001).10 Yet, the consequence of the Post-11 event is more
carnage.
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A second consequence is “the Cold War” spectacle of post-11 McWar is centered on the
pomp and pageantry of the Event-system (a celebration of itself), as much as the game of
war is vengeance in global theatres of operation.
Third, (while not the total explanation) this McWar is about oil. September 11th kicked
off America’s third postmodern war, the first being the Persian Gulf postmodern war and
the second the 78-day Kosovo postmodern war.
Diffuse and Concentrated spectacles - Debord posits two types of spectacle: diffuse and
concentrated. In post-11 the ‘diffuse spectacle’ of McWar (the interactive and digital
spectacle of Disneyfication, McDonaldization, & Las Vegasization) is opposed by the
‘concentrated spectacle’ of tribalism.
An example of concentrated spectacle is Osama bin Laden (OBL) and the Taliban require
since 1996 that the Afghanistan people witness Friday night spectacles of torture and
execution in national stadiums. This is a strategic use of concentrated spectacle to
condition spectators to identify with the omnipresent image of a charismatic leader and
traditional Islamic faith as compensation for being deprived of the more diffuse spectacle.
The Taliban also continue the use concentrated spectacle and dramatic theatrics in the
torture and execution ritual events to elicit what Aristotle saw as the two essential
emotions of tragedy. Fear that if you the spectator break the rules, you too will be
tortured on the stage, and pity that your friends and relatives have met such a horrific
fate. The spectators are being controlled, trained, and educated by the Taliban. They saw
the fate of characters on stage, with their tragic flaws; spectators feared these same flaws
were in themselves and unless exorcised would result in the same fate.
It parallels similar concentrated spectacles of the public torture and execution rituals mass
audiences attended in the public squares of America and Europe, favorite entertainment
and means of social control (until quite recently). What is interesting about post-11 is
how a concentrated spectacle is used to oppose the diffuse spectacle of spreading
Americana, a perceived slow terror, seen as subverting tribalism.
I hypothesis that the concentrated and diffuse spectacle of post-11 is a struggle for
domination and control over the global center stage and over the local spectators. And it
is the play for power performed strategically by both sides of this war. There is
concentrated and diffuse spectacle by both sides of McWar.
Ironically, in the U.S., the real war on terrorism is also a concentrated spectacle. The War
on Terror rages in the American psyche, the exorcism of any tragic flaws, that might be
responsible for spectators experiencing the same fate as those burned bodies in the planes
that struck the towers or bodies crushed in the collapse. The psychic war on terror is
correcting one’s tragic flaws. If only we had allowed wiretaps on attorneys, ease dropped
on others’ email, not subcontracted airport security to the lowest bidder, not discouraged
ethnic profiling, and not carried those lethal nail file weapons on the plane, September 11
would never have happened (so goes the illogic). Finally, it is a concentrated spectacle
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in which our civil liberties are being voluntarily surrenders, lest the fate of 11 be wrount
on our own life.
In America, there are “concentrated” methods of spectacle control — censorship,
orchestration of patriotism, suppression of dissent. Attorney General John Ashcroft has
detained over 1,000 suspects with little hard evidence, reintroduced wire tapping without
court order, and initiated Military Tribunals. Transnational corporate interests also
monopolize mass media and the scripting of McWar.
McWar is partly a diffuse spectacle, people lost amid the variety of competing
entertainment spectacles, commodities, life styles, themes, and ideologies that are
presented for their consumption. Instead of economic power concentrated in the state (or
nation), in the diffuse spectacle it is now concentrated in the transnational corporation
and in the concentrated spectacle of bin Laden, in tribes whose boundaries and networks
transcend national boundaries.
McWar recruits Hollywood -McWar enlists Hollywood in the War on Terror to enact a
more diffuse spectacle of control. It is not the first time. During World War II,
Hollywood directors such as Frank Capra, were drafted to craft government propaganda,
making a series of movies for the War Department, in sanctioned release in movie
theatres everywhere. Yet, there is something more postmodern about the post-11
enlistment of Hollywood than their service to modern wars.
On September 14, the Secret Service closed down Rage Against
the Machine's website.11
Post-11 is more about making this war’s digital imaging and battlefields look like themes
from Star Wars and Star Trek, minimizing the gore of war with sanitized digital images,
and letting us participate in the war through interactive simulations. Post-11 has jumped
from integrated spectacle to megaspectacle status.
For example, in post-11, the military called upon the Institute for Creative Technologies,
a collaboration the government invested $45 million to synergize elements of Hollywood,
Silicon Valley, and academia. The military asked the institute to think outside the usual
box of modern war, to use science fiction writers, directors, and executives, such as Larry
Tuch, a writer, a designer-consultant of Walt Disney theme parks as well as Herman
Zimmerman, the production designer for five "Star Trek" movies and the television
series, "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and included Richard Lindheim, the former
executive vice president of Paramount Television Group and the founder of its Digital
Entertainment division. It was necessary that the military, state, and the commerce of
Hollywood think out of the box.
Cozy in the pre-11 box, the U.S. military, CIA, and Secret Service did not dream that
hijackers would actually pilot commercial airliners, like Kamikaze missiles, in
coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC), the Pentagon, and (a near miss
on) the Whitehouse. Every other hijacking, passengers were just held for ransom then
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released, and planes were just used for escape, not as missiles. This was a new McWar,
different than Kosovo or Gulf.
What is postmodern about McWar, is that it incorporates more cybertech, with “virtual
battlefields” updated by “infra-red satellites” and "smarter" military uniforms with “headmount display screens,” cyborg soldiers with Star Trek-style “flip phones,” and this is, in
part, directed by “Artificial Intelligence” assisted by absentee generals holding remote
controls, capable of changing deployment of troops on “digital theatre” screens with the
touch of a button or the swoosh of a joystick, like playing some Nintendo video version
of the movie, War Games. It’s also good for training soldiers and generals in cyber
warfare.
"We can re-create what went on in Operation Desert Storm," [Brigadier
Gen. Stephen Seay, of the Simulation Training and Instrumentation
Command in Orlando] said, adding that other "classic war scenarios" can
be incorporated into a library of different types of video games that would
be available to soldiers wherever they might be stationed. Noting that
some video games were modified and movie releases were delayed after
the Sept. 11 attacks because their content had such striking parallels to the
day's tragedy, Seay said, "That's the kind of realism we're trying for."
(Bracketed additions mine).12
Both sides wage McWar as spectacle on a three-front: war on terror, control of the
spectators at home, fighting abroad in the theatres of operation, and taking care of
business. The al-Qaida financial network is being mapped and rooted out. President Bush
has asked Americans to start shopping; Mayor Juliani wants New Yorkers to attend plays
and show their support for Broadway. In the wake of Sept. 11, five Broadway shows are
closed, and another ("By Jeeves”) won't open.13 Those closed included "The Rocky
Horror Show," "A Thousand Clowns," "Stones in His Pockets," "If You Ever Leave Me,
I'm Going With You" and "Blast!"
The theatrics of cyberwar has commonalities and differences with modern warfare and
with modern theatre. Generals Macarthur and Patton loved to perform on the battle stage,
managing each pose, costuming themselves for photo opportunities. President Bush has
his speechwriters and dialog coaches that make him less the bureaucratic leader and more
like Churchill and FDR in his grit and determination as a post-11 leader. Situation
defines leadership. The situation says President Bush is to finally overcome the ‘Vietnam
syndrome,’ the pathology of a nation that believes it lost the war due to tragic character
flaws, notably a weakness of will. By December, his speeches indicate this has been
achieved.
McWar reterritorializes popular culture. In the shock of post-11, videogame publishers
and movie studios suspended or modified existing and upcoming product offerings to
remove New York skyline scenes or situations of war and terror that might offend
consumers. Since September 11th, pop culture has been purging itself of anything
insensitive or that might hurt consumers, in acts of retrofitting and revisionist self-
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censorship. Cyberwar is technocratic commerce, and media spectacles mean ratings for
entertainment corporations.
For example, Geek.com lists the video games affected by post-11:14
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Microsoft is changing Flight Simulator 2002 to take the WTC out of NYC's
skyline (and so players can't fly planes into the buildings).
Digital Leisure is suspending release of its Crime Patrol game, originally
scheduled for November 16, 2001 was rescheduled to 2003.
Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge will be delayed two weeks because the
cover showed one of the World Trade Center towers on fire.
Activision's Spider-Man 2--Enter: Electro is now delayed because some of the
gameplay takes place on a skyscraper in NYC that looks like a WTC tower.
Ubi Soft "indefinitely postpone[d]" its Tom Clancy's Rogue Spear: Black Thorn
game while parts that involve fighting terrorists are modified.
Arush Entertainment was working on a new Duke Nukem game, but pulled
promos from its website and will now "reevaluate" the game's viability because
some scenes take place in New York.
TV productions had to be edited or delayed:

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A scene in which Chandler makes a joke about going through airport security was
cut from the "Friends" Oct. 11 episode.
In the premier episode of "The Ellen Show" a character's line about a collapsing
building was deleted.
The events of Sept. 11 delayed the start of the new television season by a week.
"24," a Fox TV show, cut a scene showing an airplane exploding in flames.
Hollywood changed the release date for over 45 films until the consumer mood of post11 could be gauged:15
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Sony Pictures' "Spiderman" advertising campaign went back to the drawing
board. The trailer featured Spiderman building a web between the twin towers of
the World Trade Center to catch bad guys. In the poster, the twin towers were
reflected in Spiderman's shades.
In September, Columbia Pictures postponed the production of "Tick Tock," a
Jennifer Lopez film about terrorist bombs in Los Angeles shopping malls.
MGM stopped plans to film "Nose Bleed," a Jackie Chan movie about a window
washer who discovers a terrorist plot to blow up the World Trade Center.
"As soon as [the attacks] happened," Arnold Schwarzenegger told Jay Leno about
a violent film [Warner’s Collateral Damage] that had been in the works, "the first
thing I did was I went to the phone and I called Warner Brothers."16
Disney's “Big Trouble” with Tim Allen was pulled since it had a suitcase bomb as
a plot element.17
MGM’s $120 million production of John Woo’s Windtalkers was delayed.
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DreamWorks' new take on H.G. Wells' “The Time Machine” with Guy Pearce.
Seems safe enough, but the ending has chunks of an exploded moon falling on
New York.
Miramax's $90-million production of Martin Scorsese's Civil War-era drama
“Gangs of New York,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis, was
delayed since it involves sequences showing the deadly draft riots of 1862.
Other areas of pop culture were also self-censoring: 18
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Hip-hop group the Coup scrambled to change their album artwork, a
representation of the World Trade Center exploding.
DC Comics has "indefinitely postponed publication of one violent comic and
rewritten forthcoming stories to eliminate references to terrorism."
Diesel had renamed its striped denim line from "Scars and Stripes" to "Stars and
Stripes."
War is now megaspectacle theatre, where heroes win over villains. Postmodern theatrics
of war is more about the, corporeal, the entire social body turns into theatre. And this
extends to popular culture, to self-monitoring for appropriate viewing content, purging
that which might offend audiences. It is the corporeal theatre of war that is materially
affected by interactive spectacle theatrics, less real, and yet with interactive spectacle,
you can experience it over and over, until it is more real than real, until you are more
traumatized than eyewitnesses.
McWar is a corporeal theatre, more real than real. It is also self-organizing theatre, order
arising from theatre, and perpetuating more theatre, able to colonize, appropriate, and
reterritorialize anything it touches, until the entire social and global body is subsumed
into total McWar. The entire social body becomes a global postmodern theatre where
McWar is staged, and affects the materiality and mentality of everything. On local stages,
in community blood drives, flag-flying automobiles, there is no escape from McWar.
McWar, be it global or local (diffuse or concentrated) is postmodern theatre that
disciplines the social body and from which there is no escape. Theatre when fused with
war, leaves the theatre building, and is played out in the local and global social body.
Scholars of theatre will note that Driver’s (1980: 361) review of Artaud’s theatre
anticipates the corporeal systemic theme I am defining as McWar:
Now, the theatre is a body. The theatre arises from itself and goes toward
itself and has no essential relation to anything that is not part of its own
self-generation and self-realization. The theatre is the body in its ultimate
function and is the ultimate spiritual state.
McWar of Jihad and McWorld - In this McWar, the ultimate spiritual state (and plot) is
the Crusade versus Jihad, McWorld versus tribalism, Christian fundamentalism versus
Islamic fundamentalism. Barber’s (1995) book, Jihad versus McWorld, Jihad is partly a
metaphor for “anti-Western antiuniversalist struggle” (1985: 207) and McWorld in its
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most negative form “is a kind of animal greed—one that is achieved by an aggressive and
irresistible energy” and “Jihad in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal
fear propelled by anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relived by self-sacrificing
zealotry—an escape out of history” (1985: 215). “Jihad versus McWorld” is Barber says,
is “much more than a metaphor for tribalism or a worried antimodernism” (1985: 204207). He concludes that neither Jihad nor McWorld spectacle portends a democratic
future for the social body, “Jihad in fact has little more use for citizens than does
McWorld” (Barber, 1995: 224). Barber (1985: 224) sees Jihad versus McWorld as
dialectic, but not one whose synthesis is democratic. The democratic choices in McWorld
are decisions about commodities, what model of automobile to drive, which brand of
sneakers to wear, and which channel to watch. They are not choices about the democratic
sovereignty of the citizenry; consumer choice does not equal empowered democratic
choice about this new Cold and Hot War. Jihad (tribalist culture) is not better; it uses
concentrated spectacle to promote charismatic rule and feudalism, not democratic
deliberation.
Rather than descend into dualisms, into one extreme versus another promoting more or
less democracy, let us step behind the spectacle stage, and see the middle, the corridor
running in between McWorld and Jihad. The Taliban may aspire reinvoke and protect
13th Century culture with concentrated spectacles of terror, but it also very much
participates in the diffuse spectacle of McWorld. Alternatively, McWorld in its diffuse
spectacle colonizes tribalism, appropriating it into McWorld, but McWorld is also quite
tribalist. Jihad is not separate from McWorld, and vice versa.
The McWorld, of transnational corporations and global consumers, is able through
telecommunication and virtual technologies to transcend national and tribal boundaries
(and sovereignty), to enact commerce anywhere in the biosphere, by any means that are
profitable. It is also able to invoke tribes defined by fashion. There are aspects of
tribalism in America, and aspects of McWorld in the Taliban. Tribalism in the
postmodern world is much different than what is tribalism in the Taliban world.
American tribalism comes from philosophical, emotional, or lifestyle identity-choices,
rather than blood or birthright connections. Patriotic flag waving and calls for ‘God to
Bless America’ (contemporary attempts at tribalist behaviors/rituals/expressions) as well
as the tribalism of ethnicity and race are evident everywhere, from the White House to
the streets of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Postmodern marketing feeds tribalism defined by
fast-paced, high tech and designer lifestyles of spectacle consumption. Tribes in high
schools and colleges, and in the workplace are identified by fashion logos.
Terrorist networks are able to transcend national boarders, to diffuse spectacles of terror
across the global village. And that is the uniqueness of post-11, compared to previous
McWars. We can say McWorld is terrorism without country. What country do we
complain to about a terrorist network that is trans national and even trans tribal? OBL is
not a citizen of Afghanistan he is from Saudi Arabia.
While McWorld enacts WTO, GATT, WB, IMF, NATO, and G-8 to create a superinstitution to govern global capitalism and pursue global terrorism, “the appeal to
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traditional [super] international institutions is an appeal on behalf of the weak to the
goodwill of the powerless” [bracketed addition, mine]. The McWorld of transnational
corporations fit Thomas Jefferson’s warnings about the consequences merchants that
have no country (Barber, 1985: 231). They will rule the world. Who do we complain to
about the appropriation of peasant lands by transnational corporations, the genocide of
natives, predatory practices, the sweatshop plantations of the fashion, computer and all
other industries? Corporations have email and mail addresses, where PR staff will
respond to our complaints (but not likely change). An appeal to government is of no
value. Governments no longer control transnational corporate rule (Korten, 1995).
This is why people against global corporate rule or against global terrorism (or both) are
feeling a sense of alienation and disempowerment (McWorld is not responsive to
citizens), and have therefore taken protest to the streets and to cyberspace (see section on
Carnival below). McWorld and Jihad are both the problem, neither is a solution (Barber,
1985: 267). Protest and resist both. It is one way to move beyond dualities if Jihad versus
McWorld. There is no separation. Islamic tribes and nations do not prevent satellite
programs being beamed to those who can afford hi-tech things. If Taliban is a loss of
freedom under charismatic leadership, so too have U.S. citizens been forfeiting social
liberties and freedoms.
Having explored the theatrics of capitalism in post-11, we turn now to pre-11, to make
the point that while the play has changed, the characters, plot, and spectacle remain much
the same. Post-11 is a sequel to pre-11.
The pre-11 Event - Fundamentalism and nationalism are on the rise in America. There
were on the rise, in pre-11. America had commercial and military interests, and both
supported and pursued OBL and the Taliban in pre-11. Pre-11, there were attacks on
Americana symbols by OBL.
The attack of September 11th was a sequel to McWar spectacles, part of the learning
curve of how to inflict terror and spread panic. This was a carefully scripted theatre, by
all accounts, meant to destroy three primary symbols of American life, the World Trade
Center (WTC) representing global capitalism, the Pentagon denoting military power, and
the (abort attempt on the) White House standing for democratic government.
This spectacular theatrical McWar strategy was also, by most accounts (even by
admission of Osama bin Laden), a part of a grander plot, a planned theatrical
performance meant to bait the United States into attacking any one of several Arab
nations, thus setting off a Jihad world war with all of Islam. By December, this plot
seems to have fizzled. Osama bin Laden (hereafter, OBL) in a recent video clip released
by the Pentagon, claims he planned the September 11th attacks: 19
OBL: (...Inaudible...) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the
enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We
calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I
was the most optimistic of them all. (...Inaudible...) due to my experience in
Page 14
this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt
the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit
and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.
Shaykh: Allah be praised.
OBL: We were at (...inaudible...) when the event took place. We had notification
since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day. We
had finished our work that day and had the radio on. It was 5:30 p.m. our
time. I was sitting with Dr. Ahmad Abu-al-((Khair)). Immediately, we heard
the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We turned the radio
station to the news from Washington. The news continued and no mention
of the attack until the end. At the end of the newscast, they reported that a
plane just hit the World Trade Center.
Shaykh: Allah be praised.
OBL: After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World
Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it.
Shaykh: I listened to the news and I was sitting. We didn’t...we were not thinking
about anything, and all of a sudden, Allah willing, we were talking about
how come we didn’t have anything, and all of a sudden the news came and
everyone was overjoyed and everyone until the next day, in the morning,
was talking about what was happening and we stayed until four o’clock,
listening to the news every time a little bit different, everyone was very
joyous and saying “Allah is great,” “Allah is great,” “We are thankful to
Allah,” “Praise Allah.” And I was happy for the happiness of my brothers.
That day the congratulations were coming on the phone non-stop. The
mother was receiving phone calls continuously. Thank Allah. Allah is great,
praise be to Allah. (Quoting the verse from the Quran)
There are two manifestations of pre-11 spectacle.
First, the pre-11 spectacle aims to purify and purge the social body of any global
capitalist and Americana elements.
Second, as already stated, every Friday night in sports stadiums in Afghanistan (warpermitting), Taliban conducts a spectacle of torture and execution that aims to purify and
purge the social body of any anti-feudalist and anti-Taliban elements.
Having explored the pre-11 spectacle and commerce of the Taliban, we can look now to
the pre-11 spectacle of the West.
Oil and War – As I mentioned in Act 1, before my Dad died, he said, “David, I want you
to study the relationship between the President and oil.” Postmodern war (like all war) is
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driven by the logic of the commerce, not just national security. My Dad had worked for
ATT on the early warning defense stations in northern Alaska. He was in love with the
wilderness, and hated the thought of pipelines cutting it up. My dad (who worked around
oil pipelines) and others say “President Bush's "crusade" against the Taliban of
Afghanistan has more to do with the ongoing pre-9-11 control of the immense oil and gas
resources of the Caspian Basin than it does with "rooting out terrorism."20
There was a profitable commerce to McWar; and in pre 9-11 the threat and reality of
terrorism did disrupt oil capitalism. Here, we examine the possible and alleged links
between pre-11 and post-11.
The War on Terror is alleged to be a pretty darn good excuse to continue to arrest control
of an estimated $5 trillion of oil and gas resources from the Caspian Basin. Unocal has
pipeline projects in Afghanistan (the Turkmen Dauletabad gas fields and the 1,030-mile
oil pipeline called the Central Asian Oil Pipeline Project). Certainly oil is not the total
explanation for pre or post 11. There is however a definite parallel if post-11 to the Gulf
War, to senior Bush's Desert Storm campaign in 1991 that secured access to the huge
Rumaila oil field of southern Iraq.
The Internet is replete with sites claiming a conspiracy linking the post-11 to the pre-11
corporate attempt to get an Afghanistan pipeline to the Caspian Oil and Gas reserves. The
allegation is the current US government focus on Afghanistan is more than the search for
bin Laden or the destruction of the terror network; it is also about oil security and oil
profits. In 1970 the U.S. used 16m barrels each day; today it uses 22m. 20 billion barrels
of oil reserves have been found in Kazakhstan, which with a pipeline could be the behind
the scenes, backstage reason for intensifying the war. Below is a summary of some
typical posts of the pre-11 connection to post 11 McWar:
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Oil War II, the Sequel: The Empire Strikes Back in the Caspian" is the Indypress
headline. The Unocal-led [Afghanistan pipeline] initiative foundered in 1998,
after the US cruise missile retaliation against bin Laden's Afghan camps for the
bombings of its African embassies. Brown University's William O. Beeman wrote
in 1998 that ... " From the US standpoint, the only way to deny Iran everything is
for the anti-Iranian Taliban to win in Afghanistan and to agree to the pipeline
through their territory. The Pakistanis, who would also benefit from this
arrangement, are willing to defy the Iranians for a share of the pot." … at the
same time, Unocal came under fire from international women's organizations for
its courting of the Taliban, despite their notorious repression of women's rights.21
The US government Energy Information fact sheet on Afghanistan dated
December 2000 says that, “Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint
stems from its geographic position as a potential transit route for oil and natural
gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.22
One version is one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorized by the
most powerful nation on earth, not just to capture OBL, but to get control over the
oil and gas reserves and the Caspian Oil Sweepstakes.23
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The impact of American oil interests and the Bush-Cheney energy stance on U.S.Afghanistan politics has been apparent to observers for years. Has this influenced
American actions in response to the events of 9-11?
The September 11th atrocities sparked a coalition - a "crusade" said George Bush
- for freedom and justice. But take a closer look. There's an important subtext to
the struggle over Afghanistan. The oil industry wants its pipeline.24
The importance of an Afghanistan route for Caspian oil - Congressional testimony
of Unocal VP John Maresca (see Congressional record 2-12-98).25
o “The 1,040-mile-long oil pipeline would begin near the town of
Chardzhou, in northern Turkmenistan, and extend southeasterly through
Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the
Pakistan coast on the Arabian Sea.”
In sum, in 1996, Unocal, allegedly with US government approval, offered the Taliban a
generous cut of oil and gas profits, if a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from
Soviet central Asia could be built through Afghanistan. The hidden agenda of pre-11 is to
make Afghanistan an American oil and gas colony; or alternatively for the Taliban to
strike a better oil deal.
Theatre is a body that is sensitive to the cruelties of Sept. 11 yet, able to enact cruelty,
while sustaining the moral justification of justice and security. “The body, which suffers
cruelty, also inflicts cruelty, since its nature is to be both passive and active” (Driver,
1980: 365).
War and commerce interpenetrate the middle of the McWorld/Jihad duality. Commerce
of war is more than just oil. October 24th, the House passed the "Economic Security and
Recovery Act," to pump $100 billion into the economy. Representatives assert that the
tragic events of 11 and post-11 require $1.4 billion to IBM, $1.0 billion to Ford Motors,
$832 million to General Motors, $572 million to Chevron Texaco, $371 million to United
Airlines, $254 million to Enron, and $241 million for Phillips Petroleum.26 How can we
unite with a government that gave out $15 billion in aid to airlines that had refused to
give severance pay to laid-off workers?
Theatrical control of spectators reinforces the spectators’ internalized social and
psychological conditioning, and the acceptance of corporate conquest. People are drawn
to violent conflicts (the essence of drama) that allow their accumulated frustrations to be
expressed in socially condoned gatherings of pride, hate, and fear.27 Participating in
public spectacles allows vicarious experience of the fight against a common enemy by
the state and various heroic capitalist and military agents.
Finally, theatres of capitalism create artificial needs for an accumulation of spectacles,
properly commodified, to satisfy. Post-11 has had international and domestic resistance
since war was declared.
PART II: Carnival
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If the first purpose of spectacle is commerce, the secondary purpose of spectacle is to coopt any truly radical popular and theatrical movement of resistance, especially any rival
carnivalesque theatres of protest to transnational capitalism or McWar. My focus here is
what Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva would call carnivalesque, the use of theatre to
parody and resist spectacles of global corporate hegemony and McWar by mixing
outrageous satire, popular music, models, and critical pedagogy to problematize McWar
as reinvented ideologies of colonization and global racism in the 21st century.
The street theatre of the WTO protest, the sit-ins in university administration offices, and
boycotts of Footlocker, NikeTown, Gap, Wal-Mart, and Disney merchandise stores are
examples of carnivalesque resistance to the spectacle of postindustrial capitalism and its
marriage to the spectacle of postmodern consumerism. Claiming voicelessness, citizens
reinvent forms of carnivalesque resistance, for street theatre to e-carnival of
Electrohippies to regain voice. Carnival is also a theatrics of rant and madness seeking to
repair felt separation and alienation. It is a call for release from corporate power, a cry of
distress and repression mixed with laughter and humorous exhibition meant to jolt state
and corporate power into awareness of the psychic cage of work and consumptive life,
and now McWar.
In pre-modern carnival theatrics (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1981a), the most respected nobles and
clergy were vilified, degraded, and ridiculed through vulgar, farce, buffoonery and
grotesquerie. In the Feast of Fools, the medieval underclass mocked and degraded the
official life of nobles and clergy. In carnival, social class and gender distinctions were
suspended. Young men dress up as girls, young girls as boys. People wore grotesque
masks and costumes with huge bellies, bosoms, and buttocks. The theatrics included
farcical imitations of childbirth and copulation. Parodies of the rituals of the official
culture of Church and Crown were common.
"Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and
everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While
carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is
subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom" (Bakhtin,
1981a: 7)
Carnival manifests its theatrics all around us, as authority figures and norms of behavior
guiding our socialization become questioned and their rigid structure turns problematic
(Mueller, 2000). Carnival of the Middle Ages calls to mind images of outrageous
mocking medieval buffoonery, the parody of religion and crown, as well as naked
bottoms and breasts, masks and costumes, and Dionysian sweet chaos. And it is now on
the streets everywhere; every meeting of corporate power with the state is met by
carnival, and rebroadcast as entertainment.
I view carnival as the resistance sideshow, the mirror-stage to Debord’s (1967) Society of
the Spectacle. Spectacle was once a way for State and Church power to keep the masses
under control. Public hangings and torture in the city square were widely attended
events, in which the accused could redeem himself in the eyes of God, if the executioner
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failed in his task. Foucault’s (1977) illustrates this point in his opening scenes of
Discipline and Punish, depicting Damien’s torture in gory detail, the chopping off of his
hands and limbs after the drawing and quartering did not demonstrate executioner talents,
or Kingly providence. As this spectacle got out of control, the executioner had to use
extra knife cuts, and the message became more an indictment of the crown’s lack of
power and an expression of Damien’s probable innocence.
IN these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of
the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which rules were
inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes
(Foucault, 1979: 61).
Foucault argues that the body-torture spectacle, to avoid carnival, ceased to be public
exhibition, and went in doors where modernity could give it proper bureaucratic control.
I argue, here, that spectacle and carnival has resurfaced with new technologies, to control
it as public consumption, in the face of new forms of carnivalesque challenge and
resistance.
Contemporary carnival is more controlled, a safer theatre than ones in the Middle Ages.
Carnivalesque has four themes: the tumultuous crowd, the world turned upside-down, the
comic mask and the grotesque body. Contemporary carnival is a polyphonic (many
voiced) expression by those without power, sometimes sanctioned by those in power as a
way to blow off steam.
Bakhtin (1981a) saw in carnivalesque theatrics the peasants’ ridicule of officialdom,
inversion of hierarchy, violations of decorum and proportion, celebration of bodily
excess, including mutilation. I see a resurgence of carnival (not the circus-type), but the
theatrics used to protest globalization. As Kristeva (1980: 45-6) puts it, the author is
"(author + spectator)" and very much a part of the carnival scene, part of acts of
production, distribution, and consumption.
Just as in the days of the Vietnam war protests, most of the students and faculty are not
protesting. I hypothesize that carnival (in the way it is defined by Bakhtin) will always be
marginal in its own way; it is reactionary. And in some sense it is a protest that is
carefully managed by State and Corporate interests. Kristeva (1980: 46) notes "the scene
of the carnival introduces the split speech act: the actor and the crowd are each in turn
simultaneously subject and addressee of discourse." In short, carnival is very much a
strategic response to current feelings of alienation in McWar. There is also a negotiation
with power over the terms of engagement between spectacle and carnival, as they comanage the stage and drama.
This includes the when and where of protest, and what acts will get one arrested, and how
one can be released. This was apparent in the way that demonstrators at WTO and since,
negotiate with police agreeing, for example, to be more peacefully arrested if police use
less violent means of crowd control. Special areas are set aside for protest, and activists
attend training camps to learn how to act in civilly disobedient manner, while police and
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military go to their own camps to learn how to intimidate while inflict pain, but not
bodily harm.
In the erosion of the nation state as a global character, the corporate state has emerged as
a new star of the global McTheatre, but one who is being vilified by activists in offBroadway (Saner, 1999) carnivalesque productions that rebelliously reinterpret the
experience of consumers putting on garments in acts scripted to raise consciousness of
the bloody consequences of McWar.
McWar spectacle is increasingly a corporately orchestrated performance, a display
intended to persuade the masses of spectators (from a distance) that global corporations
participate in moral causes, and therefore merit public trust. The spectacle sells the
spectators on the emancipatory power of commerce: commerce and trade will bring
modern Enlightenment through materialism and free market capitalism to Afghanistan.
Spectacle politicians and generals would also rather not upset the public with the reality
of what waging war means. They fear Yate’s prophecy that anarchy will be loosed upon
the world, which they resist with the theatre of carnival.28
Carnival has been the sideshow to meetings of World Trade Organization, IMF, World
Bank, and G-8. The hand of commerce is being asked to be not only more visible, but to
open the closed door meetings to democratic participation by stakeholders who did not
get invited to decide global trade policy. It is no accident that the anti-globalism
movement is redefining its performance as anti-war. Carnival now enacts an anticapitalist and anti-war theatre with heretical unfaithful (some say unpatriotic) drama.
Many of the actors are the same.
The postmodern peace movement is more diffuse, with less establishment celebrities, and
a myriad of social movements networking on the local stage, and organizing resistance to
more concentrated nation and corporate spectacles. The peace movement is intimately
linked with the environmental movement, feminist movement, ethnic minority
movements, and the stirrings by the aged, poor, and unemployed who are the most direct
victims of the "defense" budget and the vast reductions in expenditures for social budgets
(Bookchin, 1983).
Carnival is also quick to portray the collateral damage of the War on Terror wrought by
cluster bombs.
Why are cluster bombs being used? Cluster bombs are not a surgical air strike; they are
weapons of mass destruction. Cluster bombs are used to cover a broad area rather than a
single specific target. CBU-89 Gators, for example, are 1,000-pound cluster bombs
dropped by B-52 and B-1 bombers. Cluster bombs were used extensively in the 78-day
bombardment of Yugoslavia two years ago. Each bluster bomb unleashes 147 to 700
bomblets, each firing a plasma-jet able to penetrate armor but having a secondary antipersonnel effect with over 2,000 sharpened pieces cutting into the bomb casing.
According to the UN, 30,000 unexploded bomblets remained in Kosovo after the conflict
ended. 60 percent of the 531 cluster bombs dropped by the RAF during the conflict in
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Kosovo missed their intended target (5% and 12% of the bomblets fail to Explode,
according to UN estimates).29
The Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Landmine Action have
called for a ban on cluster bombs. The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which
has given heavy backing to attempts to clear mines and other weapons from conflict
zones, has also urged the US and British governments to stop using cluster bombs in their
campaign in Afghanistan.
The bomblets that fail to explode lay on the ground serving as anti-person landmines.
Pilger (2001) calls the War on Terror a fraud, since it is not the capture of bin Laden or
stopping the Taliban that is the primary objective in the use of cluster bombs.30 “The
‘war on terrorism’ is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that
lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.” Unlike the CNN interactive spectacle
of the collapsing tower, we are not seeing the on the ground blood and guts consequences
of the cluster bombs in coverage on the War on Terror.
This is a theatre that reenacts people being decapitated, arms, legs, hands and feet being
severed from their bodies — as anyone alive in the immediate vicinity is shredded into a
bloody mess.31 Below is a summary of the Sept. 22nd protests:32
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Landmine Action is distributing 35,000 postcards featuring pictures of Britishmade cluster bombs, which it hopes will be sent on to politicians in a bid to stop
their use.33 A tragic irony is that cluster bombs and food packages are both
yellow. The Gulf War spectacle included cameras mounted on warplanes to show
how smart bombs hit their targets with pinpoint accuracy. This cloaks the
bombing in a sense of sanitized and digitized unreality. The video-game images
have appeared again during the Afghanistan campaign. The aim of this carnival of
resistance is to show the bloody terror and gruesome slaughter of both military
and civilian people, with cluster bombing.
11,000 people from trade unions and mainstream non-governmental groups
braved pouring rain to stage a peaceful, carnival-style rally and took a similar tack
at the outset in Liege on Saturday… anti-capitalists, students, communists,
environmentalists and anarchist flag-wavers, has been shunned by the trade
unions and NGOs that marched on Friday
September 22nd, about 1,000 protesters marched through the Belgian city of
Liege, protesting the war, at the EU meetings (dubbed d14), with banners reading
"Make Love, Not War"
In London (Sept 22), many of the 3,000 protesters wore black and carried pieces
of paper reading: ''Stand shoulder to shoulder for peace and justice. No more
violence.''
In Japan (Sept. 22), 100 people representing 33 civic groups marched through the
city of Kyodo, yelling, ''The U.S. should stop retaliatory war.''
In Germany (Sept. 22), Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets of
Berlin and other German cities on Saturday shouting "No Third World War" and
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urging the United States not to answer attacks on its cities with more violence,
with banners reading "Enough deaths" and "No retaliation,"
And here in New Mexico,

Shock waves from the nation's war on terrorism spilled onto city streets as clashes
erupted between about 350 anti-war protesters, bystanders and passing motorists
on Central Avenue near the University of New Mexico (Anti-war rally turns
rowdy; four arrested By Andy Lenderman, September 22, 2001).
By the end of September, about 4,000 marched in the UK, protesting British involvement
in the international War on Terror; alleging is was a mass slaughter of innocent
civilians.34 The majority of marchers, including two topless women, were in a
carnivalesque mood, following drummers and chanting: "They want to drop the bomb,
we want to drop the debt." They carried signs saying for example, WTO really means the
World Terrorist Organization.”
October 27th was a day of arches, rallies and teach-ins to stop the war and end racism in
about 37 states and eight countries.
December 13th to 15th in Brussels 5,000 people are demonstrating and raving in the
street, in a carnival atmosphere with techno sound-systems and samba-drumming bands.
Local people are showing support by coming out of their windows and cheering the
crowd. 35 The carnival of resistance and protests are for democracy and freedom and
against capitalism and the war in Afghanistan.
Cyber McWar and Carnival – Spectacle and carnival have taken their battle for public
allegiance to the web. The Internet is altering the landscape of political discourse,
advocacy, and resistance. Carnival, like spectacle, can also be concentrated or diffuse. In
the past highly centralized and concentrated national protest actions have been staged in
cities like Washington D.C., New York, Sydney, Pairs, Genoa, and elsewhere. This
makes for splendid theatre that can be digitized and distributed across the Internet. As in
spectacle, carnival theatrics elicits visceral responses from spectators. A wellorchestrated carnival such as Rio, or the protest against WTO in 1999, takes a year or
more of planning and organizing.
For the past decade, the number of web visitors to corporate and government sties
competes with visitors to human, ecological, animal, and civil rights sites. The Internet
problematizes idea of international borders and corporate and state control of speech in
cyberspace. Traditionally, most radical computer use has been restricted to sending email
and posting items to lists and webs. Recently, however, more radical web discourse
tactics have escalated into trespass, disruption, and blockade of corporate web site. There
is a raging cyber war of non-violent opposition, fought daily in Internet territory as
indigenous, labor, anti-sweatshop, non-genetic food, animal rights activists, and other
critics of free trade and the WTO are turning to more direct forms of action, then posting
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a item to a list serve or speaking out on a web page; Tactics of street campaigning and
carnival are being imitated in cyberspace.
Corporations are protecting their spectacle knowledge machine by hiring computer
wizards to defend their web sites from attack, contracting public relations firms to design
counter-information campaigns, and more consultants to produce scientific reports that
testify a corporation’s products are safe, produced by “free” labor, and benefit consumers
as well as environment. The big producers in the athletic and campus apparel industry,
for example have web sites touting its labor and environmental practices; the biotech
industry has one legitimating its practices with science reports
(http://www.whybiotech.com). Spectacle actors, including IMF, WTO, and WB officials
and corporations are claiming a turnaround in the economies of once-struggling Asian
nations. The spectacle of late modern capitalism is socially reengineering of web into
sites that can console and persuade consumers and investors. New forms of cyberactivism are a natural reaction to mass media spectacle and the restriction to street
protest, as corporate interests present celebrate global progress. Sorting through the junk
science and disinformation put out by multinational corporations such as Monsanto
claiming its products will reduce world hunger, or countless Greenwash ads claiming
corporations are eco sustainable – is a difficult, but researchable task.
At the 1999 WTO's Seattle Conference, the Electrohippies organized their first major
virtual action - a 'virtual sit-in' at the WTO conference and corporate servers. A
traditional sit-in is where people place themselves in front of some sort of entry way, or
inside a building, and remain there as a form of peaceful protest. Virtual sit-ins find ways
to occupy places in cyberspace, such as public information system web sites. Bot (digital
robot programs), for example, can automatically reload a target’s web page every few
seconds or send large image files to take up occupancy in the server’s band width spaces,
preventing other data from moving in or out of the site, disrupting other traffic or
accumulating capacity demands until the server crashes.
Hacktivism combines hacking and activism, by targeting corporate, WTO, WB, IMF, and
other sites for disruption (web sit-ins, virtual blockades, redirects, and automated e-mail
bombs), but the intent is not to do serious damage person or property (Denning, 1999).
Hacktivism is non-violent, electronic civil disobedience that allows virtual sit-ins on a
mass, global level (Kaplan, 1998). Cyber-terrorism, on the other hand, acts
anonymously to attempt property and human destruction.
Cyber Jihad versus McWorld is now a virtual war between hackers who are taking sides.
U.S. officials are not only mobilizing to freeze the financial assets of OBL, they may
resort to cyber methods, such as hacking, to cut off the money supply. Fairfax, Va.-based
iDefense, which monitors cyberattacks. There is an active cyber war on terrorism, and a
counter-cyber e-Jihad war on McWorld.
The Gforce Pakistan in Kashmir hacks on behalf of bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda, while
German YIHAT hacks on behalf of the War on Terror.36 The in October, Gforce
attacked a server of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, leaving
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messages, like "You call it terrorism? We call it Jihad." They also gave an ultimatum
that the following demands must be met or they would attack US and British military
websties:
i. The departure of US troops from SaudiArabia
ii. An end to the bombing campaign in Afghanistan
iii. Evidence linking Osama Bin Laden to the attacks in the US.
They then hacked three military sites associated with the US Defence Test and
Evaluation Professional Institute.
On the other side is YIHAT, Young Intelligent Hackers Against Terror, who cyber
counterattack the Gforce. For example, in September YIHAT hacked into Al Shamal
Islamic Bank in Sudan to get data on OBL and al-Qaeda accounts.
The FBI warned in mid-October that political events were increasingly leading to cyber
protests. This is not new. The Electronic Disturbance Theatre initiated its first act of
Electronic Civil Disobedience in April 1998 to stop the War in Mexico, in support of the
Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico (See http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html for
details). The U.K. group, “Electrohippies” enrolled 452,000 web users to bombard the
WTO’s web site during their virtual sit-in. There is a current Electrohippies online protest
against the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Quebec and a Zapatista Tribal
Port Scan demonstration tool by Electronic Disturbance Theatre distributed at their web
site (Electrohippies, 2001).
This is e-carnival, a cyber form of McWar, paralleling war on the ground. It is a mix of
parody, mimicking street theatre, a digitizing theatrical resistance on one side against the
other. These e-carnival groups develop the Internet as a viable means for public dissent,
disobedience, and protest — mirroring traditional means of political and social
expression. The point is that like spectacle, carnival has taken on a postmodern face. The
third element of the trilogy is festival.
PART III: Festival
Festival was wiped away for a time in post-11, but had to return, lest we all lose our
sanity and joy. Festival is very important right now, because if people just watch the
spectacle of the collapsing towers, over and over, and see the speeches and flag waving
of people preparing for all out war, then the stress is unbearable. Children it is said need
to see more on TV than just buildings re-exploding and collapsing, as if every building in
every city was doing the same, day after day. Such is the infection and addiction of
spectacle in the social body, that parental viewing labels are needed; where too much
cyber spectacle is addictive, and debilitating. Ironically cyber festive activity is seen as a
partial remedy to spectacle addiction. A little Barney and Nickelodeon, is a festive
respite, a safe and fun, time and place, in a world, otherwise, gone mad for spectacle
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reenactment. Sometime you have to turn off the TV and Radio and unplug from the
Matrix (the Internet), and head to a museum (see a Van Gogh or Renoir painting), or take
a walk. But, that would negate the postmodern metamorphosis of traditional face-to-face
festival into cyber-digitized interaction.
Festival differs from carnival, by not being about resistance to spectacles of power.
Carnival and spectacle, a rally or a march can take on a festive, a more Dionysus
atmosphere. I see potential for what Victor Turner (1967; 1982) said was carnival, but I
see as festival, a more Dionysian play or folkloric rites of passage (Boje, 2000a,b; Boje &
Rosile, 2000; Boje, 2001d, f, g, h; Rosile, Best & Boje, 2001).
Festival shares with carnival a focus on absurdity, fantasy, and ribaldry. But, as with
spectacle, festival can turn into carnival when it becomes resistance. Carnival can become
festive when it ceases to be resistance. Festival, like carnival, can be appropriated as an
enticement, an opening act for the spectacle. Festival and carnival are, for example,
appropriated in spectacle to attract the tourist, but much of the "sweet chaos" is designed
out of the theatre. The critical difference between festival and carnival is in the use of
resistance, not in what label is used. Festival becomes carnival when there is resistance
and parody of corporate, religious, military or state power. Spectacle differs from
carnival and festival, by scripting and controlling the magnitude of the performance.
Carnival and festival are not without rules. This occurs more in the pre-festival and precarnival time and spaces. Here, quite complicated rules, regulations and traditions come
into play (Turner, 1987: 81) In fact, they become so structured, and you would not
believe that any spontaneity would be possible. Bureaucratically hierarchical, Samba
Schools in Rio are for Victor Turner a direct response to modernity (1983: 82). The
carnival time, after all that organizing, is a way to subvert the regime of modernity, a way
to keep traditions and life-values out of the capitalist systemic of efficiency and
control. Festival is rarely a free good. But what is the festival of post-11? Is it any
different from festive moments in any other war?
We relish festive moments in times of war. Soldiers who get welcome-home hugs from
sons, daughters, wives, and friends; the dancing in the street at the victorious end of a
war. As in other wars, Hollywood personalities got involved. The first festive
performance (September 22) was America: A Tribute to Heroes. Compared to other
wars, this Hollywood tribute was quite elaborate and massive in its networking. The
effort took 38,000 backstage volunteers to network 35 separate broadcast and cable
stations in a simultaneous stage, with no ad breaks, and reaching 89 million spectators in
210 countries.37 On stage, it featured the likes of Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Stevie
Wonder, Billy Joel, Sting, and Jack Nicholson appealing for donations. Brad Pitt, Meg
Ryan, Will Smith, Robert de Niro and Al Pacino made celebrity appearances. Pledges
were taken over the phone in the studio by stars including Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz
and Sylvester Stallone.
Yet, this was more than a festive respite, a time to enjoy music, and get a way from the
spectacle. No, this festival was interlaced with stories of innocent people killed and
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heroic acts by fire and police meant to arouse our pity and monetary support. This was a
pedagogical moment of theatre. There was some resistance to ethnic profiling.
Muhammad Ali appealed to people not to target all Muslims in the wake of the attacks.
But, mainly this was a flag-waving festive event. Clint Eastwood growled out the final
speech.38 "The terrorists who wanted 300 million victims," he said, "are going to get 300
million heroes, 300 million Americans with broken hearts but unbreakable hopes for our
country and our future."
This is still capitalism, “A CD of music from the America: Tribute to Heroes night is now
expected to be released featuring performances such as Bruce Springsteen's My City in
Ruins, Neil Young's rendition of Imagine and Wyclef Jean's version of Bob Marley's
Redemption Song.” Yet, there is great charity in the event: Actress Julia Roberts donated
$2 million and actor Jim Carrey $1 million. Corporate donations included Microsoft
pledge of $10m, media company Vivendi $5m and United Parcel Service $4m.
Other festivals followed Tribute to Heroes. "United We Stand, What More Can I Give"
show at RFK, Paul McCartney's "Concert for New York City" was "hyped and fat with
corporate underwriting."39 Doubt and criticism of the war and its telethons has become
unpatriotic; the logic of mainstream pop culture is any disloyalty begets social
disintegration, united we stand.
Afghanistan has its festivals. There are precious personal festive moments in war-torn
Afghanistan. A festive celebration of a soldier’s return from Afghanistan. December 16
and 17th is the end of the festival of Ramadan (Eid al-Fitr); Ramadan the Muslim
religion's month-long fast. It is typically celebrated with feasts, food, new clothes and
family activities. Children usually receive gifts or money called "Eidi".
How has cyberspace affected festive tradition? Cyber festival redefines traditional
festival: audience, community, theme, expectations, and image. Can we festive digitize
jugglers and clowns or find community in cyberspace? We cannot taste a festive meal in
cyberspace. The new technologies are visual and auditory; some games do vibrate. We
can mask and costume our self in a festive digitized character, pretend to be old or young,
male or female, conservative or liberal.
Cyber festivals take place in all corners of the globe and in virtually every culture. There
are cyber film festivals, digital storytelling festivals, digital poetry festivals, and many
more. Cyber festivals gather people in hyperspace virtual communities, in chat rooms,
list serves, streamed video archives, 3-D cyber art festivals, etc. The Internet makes it
possible for fans, promoters, artists, disc jockeys, record companies and journalists to
meet on-line. Fistive.com advertises itself as an online gathering place of the worldwide
festival community. There is a festival search engine, you can upload festive photos,
share your festive experiences, nominate festive events as features, and join online festive
communities. There are interactive maps to find festivals and information on every
country in the world
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The marketplace was once a tangible place. Now it is a cyber mall or cyber auction, a
place for virtual buyers and sellers to meet in digitized space.
What is a cyber festival? A festival incorporating exhibitions and performances by artists
who use computer technology and digital media. The festive gathering takes place over
the internet, with a focus on interactive displays. Pre-festive work includes lots of
programming and networking.
Cyber festival grows in spectators their more digital mind. SIMS allow us to plan
organize, manage, and control imaginary communities, or futuristic cities or even entire
galaxies.
During ancient war, the combat would cease so combatants could take a festive meal or
engage in seasonal or religious ritual. Ramadan and is the most festive Muslim
holiday of the year. Fighting the war during the festival of Ramadan had been
controversial, the iftar meal, attended by families and friends where cooks go out of their
way to show off specialties was not an option. Terror attacks clouded U.S. Halloween
festivities. Fear of Anthrax pranks put a damper on the usual festive cheer.
When is war festive? Parades are festive. As are F-14 Tomcat fighter jets that fily
overhead in formation, as the audience erupts in cheers. Dropping Tomahawk cruise
missiles, 500-pound gravity bombs and guiding computer-guided bombs at targets in
Afghanistan does not sound festive. Yet the military has had important victories. The
Navy, for example, will celebrate the performance of its USS Enterprise carrier and sister
ships Carl Vinson and Kitty Hawk in 21st century combat. They dramatically made the
Navy’s case that the Navy is a centerpiece in US military power.
Conclusions
I favor non-violent forms of conflict resolution, not war of any kind. We have explored
the ways in which spectacle, carnival and festival interact and how each has taken on a
postmodern poetics in pre and post-11. Carnival is an anti-spectacle theatre, and festival a
way to take a break from spectacle and carnival. Yet, each can transform to the other in
an instant.
We turn now to Enron, where the megaspectacle turns to scandal and ruin. But, as
always the concentrated, diffuse, and integrated spectacles return once the spectators lose
interest.
Event with capital “E” refers to system of theatrics, which redistributes events with a small “e.” This
convention of reference follows Deleuze (1990) but extends it to the area of Theatres of Capitalism.
2
As a Nam vet, I agree with Best and Kellner (2001), Vietnam was not a postmodern war. The Vietnam
War did become both street theatres of protest, as well as an infection of statecraft. It was also a media
spectacle, and like the post-11, it did pit a superior high-tech army against a smaller, less affluent nation. In
the Vietnam War, we watched the media spectacle, held few parades for veterans, and many did protest
against the Vietnam War; some contested propaganda on the street and ridiculed the domino effect.
However, it is not the media spectacle or the carnival of resistance alone, which makes this war
postmodern. Medieval and modern wars have always included spectacular theatre to control the social
1
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body. What makes this war postmodern, is the new technologies, the digital interactive theatrics of this
war, its high-tech reliance upon biotechnology (biowarfare of Anthrax), the virtual virus attacks and
counter-attacks upon computer systems, and the remote control cyborg and bot warriors acting in a digital
theatre.
3
Marines on line 1996, accessed December 16, 2001
http://www.usmc.mil/marines.nsf/e7398bff9f70330b852562c9005ea98b/a3bc8baca8e76c8b852562f900737
f06?OpenDocument; Also see Marine Corps web site at http://www.mcu.usmc.mil/mcwar/
4
Castonguay, Jim (1997). The Gulf War TV Super Bowl Bad Subjects, Issue # 35, November 1997.
Accessed December 15, 2001 http://eserver.org/bs/35/castonguay.html
5
Castonguay, ibid.
6
CBS Web site on BioTerror is at
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/mass_destruction/biochemical/framesource.html
7
CBS Web Anthrax interactive site is at
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/mass_destruction/anthrax/home.html
8
See November 10, 2001 Time.com web site.
9
See December 17, 2001 CNN.com http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/interactives.html
10
Pilger, John (2001). Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror. October 29, 2001 in the Mirror/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1029-02.htm
11
People’ Tribune – on line edition November, 2001
http://www.lrna.org/league/PT/PT.2001.11/PT.2001.11.7.html
12
Brandon, Karen (2001). Army enlists Hollywood in anti-terror war. Chicago Tribune on line, October 15.
Accessed December 17, 2001 http://chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0110150224oct15.story
13
Hinckley, David (2001) Broadway revival: Signs of bouncing back. .New York Daily News 09/27/01
Accessed December 17, 2001 http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/fyi.pat,fyi/3acd0214.926,.html
14
Geek.com accessed December 17, 2001
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2001sep/gam20010919007929.htm
15
PBS Newsletter on line accessed December 17, 2001 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/julydec01/culture.html
16
Colin, Chris (2001). Terror Cleansing. Salon Magazine on line, Oct. 19. Accessed December 17, 2001
http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/19/sensitivity/print.html
17
Daily Breeze movie section on line dated December 17 th and accessed December 17, 2001
http://www.dailybreeze.com/content/rav/nm26673.html
18
Colin, Chris (2001). Terror Cleansing. Salon Magazine on line, Oct. 19. Accessed December 17, 2001
http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/19/sensitivity/print.html
19
Transcript of Osama Bin Laden video, discussing the Sept. 11 attacks with friends, as supplied by the
Pentagon. Transcript and annotations independently prepared by George Michael, translator, Diplomatic
Language Services; and Dr. Kassem M. Wahba, Arabic language program coordinator, School of
Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/672063.asp?0cb=-71924124
20
See Christopher Bollyn (2001). War is Profitable. American Free Press web site, accessed December 16,
2001
http://www.americanfreepress.net/10_01_01/War_on_Terror_Profitable/war_on_terror_profitable.html
21
Oil War II, the Sequel: The Empire Strikes Back in the Caspian, Indymedia on line, Oct. 6 th, accessed
December 17, 2001 http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=70755&group=webcast
22
Oil and the War on Afghanistan web site lists links on the topic http://www.globaldialog.org/mvd/mvl.cgi?NextName=wWTC.OIL.html
23
Pilger, John (2001). Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror. October 29, 2001 in the Mirror/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1029-02.htm ; for Oil Sweepstakes see
http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/3.21/971015-oil.html
24
American Free Press on line, October 1st, 2001
http://www.americanfreepress.net/10_01_01/War_on_Terror_Profitable/war_on_terror_profitable.html
25
Testimony By John J. Maresca Vice President, International Relations, UNOCAL Corporation To House
Committee On International Relations, Submmittee On Asia And The Pacific February 12, 1998
Washington, D.C. See http://www.sumeria.net/politics/maresca.html or
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa48119.000/hfa48119_0.HTM
Page 28
26
Grytting, Wayne (2001). American Newspeak Advanced Flag Waving.. The Ethical Spectacle,
December 2001. Page accessed December 15, 2001 http://www.spectacle.org/1201/newspk.html
27
For a good review of the Spectacle nature of the gulf War, see “The War and the Spectacle” (no author)
Bureau of Public Secrets (April 3, 1991). Accessed December 15, 2001
http://www.slip.net/~knabb/PS/gulfwar.htm
28
From The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
29
Taylor, Richard-Norton (2001) The guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,568278,00.html
30
Pilger, John (October 29, 2001) Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror. Mirror/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1029-02.htm
31
Paraphrasing from Free speech web site on use of cluster bombs in post-11
http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/ClusterBombs.html
32
Web list of protests http://www.peacenowar.net/Sep%2022%2001--World.htm
33
Charity calls for cluster bomb ban BBC News, 5 November, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1638000/1638612.stm
34
BBC Sept. 30, Peace protest targets Labour conference.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/uk_politics/2001/conferences_2001/labour/newsid_1571000/157
1806.stm
35
Indymedia web http://uk.indymedia.org/December 12, 2001
36
Andersonk, Kevin (2001). Hacktivists take sides in war. 23 October, 2001. BBC News.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1614000/1614927.stm
37
BBC coverage of Telethon for Heroes, 25 September, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/tv_and_radio/newsid_1562000/1562007.stm
38
Chris Stark (2001) The greatest TV benefit ever. Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2001/09/21/telethon/?x
39
Plotell, Tina (2001) http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/archives/indc/rockstar/2001/rock1026.html
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