Under orders from Octavian, the hardened captains – Pansa, Carfulenus – patrolled the narrow pass they had determined to defend, with the Martian legion and half a dozen cohorts in their train.
Surrounded all about by mulling marshland, heavy bogs, eight miles south-east of Mutina, their suspicions as they carried on were roused on either side
by movement from the rushes; softly here and there a shield or helmet seemed to glint, a fog of shining apparitions. Suddenly the Antonian praetorians appeared, in grim array.
Having nothing in the way of tactical advantages or spaces to maneuver, the men instructed new recruits to linger at the rear, lest they lose or hamper the attack.
Then spreading through the swamp, the veterans unsheathed their blades and readied for the fray. The massacre was brutal – for these were brotherly
antagonists, Roman known to Roman, lethally opposed. Worse by far than war itself, a savagery incarnate, is the rending of a nation from within, neighbour
killing neighbour – the enmity unending. On this occasion, the Antonians resolved on rooting out the ones they called defectors, in the name of the republic;
the Octavians believed themselves entitled to revenge for the calamities inflicted at Brundisium. Thus the armies clashed ferociously, in silence: because
of their experience, the soldiers never raised a cry, knowing their assailants to be seasoned, unafraid. No sound was heard but metal in the mist, the guttural
alacrities of flesh. Since the sodden ditches offered little hope of charging or retreat, the soldiery were locked as in a pit together, limb to limb, dealing death between them.
When one fell downwards, blacking out, another instantly stepped up into the gap. None had any need of bidding or encouragement, for all became their own commanding
officers in battle. They fought with the intensity and muscled grace of dancers, in a muggy April sun that never broke. The novices, obeying their instructions
from the start, watched in wonder as the butchery continued, with everywhere an eerie quiet hovering, a shroud. Having gained the upper hand at last, the Antonians caroused
along the avenue, relieved. But history is fickle as a breeze. When Hirtius had word of the catastrophe, from Mutina he led a squad of legionnaires in haste, and tracked
the weary victors down the road. He killed them all, methodically reversing the result. Octavian was cheered by the intelligence. He slept, that night, as gently as a babe.
The bomb might be dropped any time soon now, apparently.
The end of all ends, a nuclear war, looms among the narratives of where Ukraine and Russia’s war might end. Timothy Snyder warns in this regard that a nuclear bomb ‘would make no decisive military difference’; adding that looking at ‘the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking. Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.’
As much as we can agree with this statement, and as much as it is nothing but a prediction for one of the possible futures, other geopolitical analysts such as the Italian Lucio Caracciolo warn of the ease with which the nuclear option has entered public discourse, the talk shows and political debate.
What now seems evident after Ukraine’s successful counter offensive in the north, and the ongoing systematic bombardments on its energy infrastructure, is that hostilities are continously escalating and we should prepare for a new phase in this war. If the unspeakable does happen, it will coincide with a new era of warfare. Maybe the last.
How we develop historical awareness, and a particular narrative, depends more and more on which side of the Iron Curtain 2.0 we fall. For all our apparent enlightenment, time and again, we show ourselves incapable of building diplomatic bridges without brandishing the Sword of Damocles.
The Bomb might be dropped anytime now. But a cultural bomb, thenormalization of the possibility of nuclear war, has already dropped from the virtual skies that we carry in our pockets; conveying an endless stream of images, produced by and for everyone, but curated and filtered by a few.
No one can say when it started dropping. Maybe with the invasion of February 24, or maybe 2014. Some say even 2001. Regardless of the date, we join other generations of humans that must now worry about the existence of nuclear weapons; of the apocalypse.
The first shockwave comes in the form of war’s inevitability as soon as Russia’s tanks began rolling down towards Kiev; until the last moment many, including me, were unconvinced the troops amassed at the border would ever march. The taboo of a land war directly involving nuclear superpowers was still intact.
We are generally shielded, or not even exposed, to pictures revealing the true horror of warfare. For the most part, what is put in front of us depends on the political agenda of warring superpowers or various forms of commodification of suffering. One wonders whether we are now even capable of autonomously creating our own memories; or freely perceiving the present and past, never mind the future under such conditions of conditioning.
The effect of an endless flow of images, tailored and auto-curated to arouse emotions – residing alongside our most intimate obsessions – requires acknowledgement. Their capacity to induce fear and trigger desire are the preferred tools of contemporary propaganda and such tools are used by both side of the Iron Curtain 2.0.
Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race."https://t.co/gtJMu7XUA3
The political consequences of a lack of cognitive freedom in response to weaponized imagery and information are not new in history but, as with every historical constant, is a question that ought to be explored.
The times we live through are what the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi calls the Global Civil War, where:
‘[…] relations among individuals are wired and subjected to automatic connections: political power, therefore, is replaced by a system of techno-linguistic automatisms inclined towards the automation of every space of life, cognition and production.’
For example, how we react to the pictures of Nord Stream II’s bubbles or the Crimea Bridge strike, depend mostly on which conveyer belt of opinions and positions (“the techno-linguistic automatisms”) we find ourselves exposed to.
The same goes for how we perceive the veracity of the images of the massacre of Bucha, as well as Russia’s depiction of neo-Nazism in the Ukrainian armed forces, which was previously extensively covered in our media as well.
Voraciously consuming images of war – of a particular war – I often consider the extent to which images are being used to perpetuate suffering rather than end it.
Just like in the times of COVID-19 – if your memory stretches back that far – it now takes a great deal of discipline to regulate the right dose of news consumption, as the induced anxiety can be overwhelming. Never mind the moderation necessary to digest and discuss it; or put ourselves in another’s shoes.
With a diabolical enemy in our sights, such as our culture demands, as well as a defined timeline of events, wherein we struggle to look past February 24, 2022, we weary of discussing strategic failures – reckless dependence on Russian gas – and broken promises – NATO’s expansion eastwards despite undertakings – over the last two decades by Western governments.
Are we capable of comprehending and reconciling Russia’s (not just Putin’s) very real phobia around encirclement – something that history teaches us is hundreds of years in the making – alongside Ukraine’s legitimate path to independence, which also goes back centuries? Is there now scope for rational dialogue?
Recently, one of Italy’s most prominent newspaper, Il Corriere Della Sera, published the names and pictures of ‘influencers’ who, allegedly, the Kremlin benefit from. Labelled ‘filo-Putinisti’, among these are independent journalists, academics and politicians, treated as ‘enemies of the people’.
It is not very different to how Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have been treated by the Irish Times.
To call for a strategy that would include negotiation with Putin’s regime would be to go against what Italian journalist Nico Piro calls the ‘Pensiero Unico Bellicista’ (Unique Bellicose thought current). Unequivocaly taking NATO’s side is what counts. Whoever doubts the legitimacy or even the sanity of ‘interventionism’, even in the closet, is accused of aiding and abetting the enemy.
How is it that we have been shielded from what has been happening in the Donbass since 2014?Fourteen thousand died in brutal trench war raging at the edge of Europe. Now, suddenly, we feel the heat of the battle across Europe, and simultaneously wonder whether we will have sufficient energy to heat our homes.
Let’s keep pretending Putin’s invasion came as a surprise. Countries don’t invade each other anymore. Nuclear superpowers don’t engage in land wars anymore. Right?
The mnemonic silence over the war in Donbass, has morphed into a cacophony of coverage in the wake of a fully fledge invasion, filling, for months, the void left behind by the receding pandemic, as ominously Europe faithfully follows the dictates of a declining US Empire.
Actually, it seems that as much as rest of the world is preoccupied and even annoyed with Putin’s invasion, it is now giving the finger to the West, after centuries of exploitation.
It seems incredible how the US, apparently so tired of being an Empire, and on the retreat elsewhere, is still willing to unleash the most pervasive and subtle of propaganda campaigns, suppressing dissenting opinions in countries it sees as vassals, perhaps in order to preserve itself, or what is left of its power.
This is no time for negotiation is the message, or better still, there was never time for any. Negotiation cannot occur with a genocidal dictator, or can they?
The propaganda operates not just to change the narrative of the past; it makes one forget that there was a past; or that the past is always brought to us through competing narratives on the battlefield of time and discourse.
Now, with our sense of time destroyed, and with that an opportunity to discuss, and possibly negotiate, we become more and more ready, and even eager, to kill one other. This is the paradox of a time we had dared to call the “End of History”.
The Dust
To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. Susand Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
As Susan Sontag remind us, representations of war and suffering have a long history and contain codes of production and consumption: From Goya’s print series The Disasters of War; to Fenton’s Crimean war pictures; Picasso’s Guernica; and pictures of the 9/11 terrorist attack exhibited in the exhibition ‘Here is New York’.
Francisco Goya Disasters of War – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Nonetheless, exposure, or really, the immersion in the infosphere, where the weaponization of images and messages is unprecedented, cannot be compared to any of the previous decades of warfare.
There is now an overwhelming revival of violence in this all-pervasive info-sphere. The message of its inevitability seems a deliberate imposition to distract us from those past and present voices with a lot more to say than a fleeting frame destined to be rapidly replaced in our compulsive doom-scrolling.
At the same time, it devalues those frames, often taken by the rare photojournalists who are able to go where it really matters – at great risk to their lives – and actually convey what their subjects are unable to. Often because they are dead.
The curated, over-mediatic exposure of one tragedy instead of another is not really a novelty in the way we use and experience imagery of a current context of interest, but, as well explored in a recent podcast by the Economist, we live in a radically more transparent battlefield.
The abundance of what is called Open Source Intelligence data, of which photography is a key component – its democratization as with the latest Iranian protests – is to be welcomed, even if it is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, we can say that we have never had as many tools available to us in the search for truth. On the other, the concept of truth, or what is truthful, has never eluded us to such an extent as in recent times.
In an attempt to clear the view amidst the Fog of War, we create individual, atomized fog, which follows us wherever we go.
Little wonder that in our so-called liberal-democratic hemisphere we have no idea how to bring democratic oversight to social media platforms; even leading some of us to cheer on the idea of Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, taking control of such a decisive device for dialogue and confrontation as Twitter.
No amount of moderation, fact-checking, algorithm-driven-filtering or surveillance, can keep pace with the endemic disinformation present in our feeds; as much as no amount of critical thinking, rational argumentation and corroboration can prevail over a propaganda machine built right inside our minds.
“We have no doubt we will prevail.” As the war in Ukraine enters a critical new phase, the country’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska, has become a key player—a frontline diplomat and the face of her nation’s emotional toll. https://t.co/DCXWYnzAsKpic.twitter.com/wcaY5IFGHf
There’s little doubt that photography carries the popular connotation of bearing truths: ‘the image doesn’t lie.’ But we don’t need not look too hard to work out how easy it is it for a photograph, and its caption, if not to lie, to deceive. If not to manipulate, then to be as alluring as a Vogue feature can be.
Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska before a grounded Antonov plane and surrounded by fierce special forces is, in my modest opinion, a photographic masterpiece.
Having said that, going through Rachel Donadio’s piece, and Leibovitz other pictures I recognise how instrumental this is to the current war struggles. Via the gloss of what many desire – to be a celebrity or to become a hero – the image of a presidential couple of a devasted country becomes something we aspire to.
With each blast we feel more and more impotent at creating the conditions for dialogue to occur. Is it possible that neither Putin’s Russia and his allies, nor the West, composed of thirty NATO members supporting Ukraine is willing to take a step back from the brink?
How are we to create the conditions, if the dominant message is one founded on our utter impotence, because it’s always the other sides fault?
It is often been said that impotence breeds violence, and psychologically this is quite true, at least of persons possessing natural strength, moral or physical. Politically speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power […] and that violence itself results in impotence.
If we are actually talking about the possible, and rational, use of the most powerful weapon available it is exactly because power is slipping away from the Western alliance, as much as from Putin’s regime.
Nothing new in that as the re-allocation of power is one of the preoccupations of history itself, seldom unaccompanied by violence. But what does it mean when the existence of nuclear arsenals capable of causing our premature extinction are carelessly normalized as facts of life? Like any other storm. Like any other crisis. Like something we’ll remember. You see the path? And where it leads?
In 1955, Bertolt Brecht published a book called Kriegsfibel or War Primer. It was a collection of photographs, cut out of newspaper and magazines, which he re-captioned with his own verses.
Such a document now exists not only thanks to Brecht’s artistic sensibility, but also because new generations survived to look at it again.
“What are you doing, brothers?”-“An iron tank”. “And with these slabs here?”-“Bullets that will pierce those Iron armors”. “And why all this brother?”-“To live, nothing else”. From Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel
As events in Ukraine demonstrate, ineluctably, war diminishes our humanity, possessing men – and mostly men – of a callous disregard for life, and a capacity for often inexplicable cruelty.
As such, the invasion of one state by another without a casus belli – as we have witnessed in Russia’s essentially unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and also with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and other incursions since – has long been considered an injustice: any aggressor thus bears a level of responsibility for what follows.
This does not, however, absolve an injured party from guilt for mistreatment, or worse, of prisoners of war, or other breaches of the Geneva Convention; notoriously described as ‘quaint’ by George W. Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with apparently horrifying consequences.
Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.
A Single Murder
In peacetime the violent ending of a single life is newsworthy, but during a military conflict the deaths of thousands are often defined as mere casualties, calculated to diminish one side or another’s capacity to wage war. A cold-blooded logic often underpins such strategic analysis.
‘What was a single murder’ Stefan Zweig asked of World War I, ‘within the cosmic, thousand-fold guilt, the most terrible mass destructive and mass annihilation known in history?’
Beyond the mindless trench warfare of World War I, the twentieth century also produced the exquisite evils of World War II, when the carnage reached the civilian sphere as never before; the leading industrial nations harnessing advanced technologies to produce Concentration Camps, Gulags, carpet bombing, and of course – supposedly bringing wars between Great Powers to an end – the atomic bomb.
In that war’s wake there emerged a new understanding of international law, previously dominated by an insistence that this should only apply between states, as opposed to allowing individual rights to be enforced against officials of an offending state in a foreign jurisdiction.
This traditional understanding was emphasised by a British official during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I: ‘The new League of Nations must not protect minorities in all countries,’ he complained, or it would have ‘the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from the more serious problems such as the Irish.’
According to Phillipe Sands: ‘Britain objected to any depletion of sovereignty – the right to treat others as it wished – or international oversight. It took the position even if the price was more injustice and oppression.’ [i]
But the depravities of World War II changed the global mood, even if Hermann Goering could persuasively assert that ‘the victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’ Indeed, there is a reasonable argument that Russian, American and British officials should also have been in the dock to account for what occurred in Katyn, Hiroshima, Bengal and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, the universal ambit of human rights was one of the great advances of the post-Second World War period, culminating in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In theory at least, it was no longer permissible for states to act with impunity even within their borders, as the Rule of Law gained universal jurisdiction, at least where atrocities were concerned.
Looting of an Armenian village by the Kurds, 1898 or 1899.
Genocide v. Crimes Against Humanity
Thus, charges of Crimes Against Humanity and, arguably more problematically, Genocide, were laid against leading Nazi at the Nuremberg trials.
Coincidentally, the two Polish-Jewish jurists Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht responsible for developing these novel concepts both studied in the University of Lwów, a Polish city between the Wars, before being annexed by the USSR at the end of World War II. Today Lviv, as it is now called, is the main city of Western Ukraine.
Amidst accusations of war crimes, including that of Genocide, being levelled against Russia, it is worth considering important distinctions between Crimes against Humanity and Genocide.
The author of the former concept, Hersch Lauterpacht argued that ‘The well-being of an individual is the ultimate object of international law.’ In contrast, in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Rafael Raphael Lemkin adopted an approach which aimed to protect groups, for which he invented the new crime of ‘Genocide.’
In response, Lauterpacht worried that the protection of groups would undermine the protection of individuals. He challenged the ‘omnipotence of the state,’ suggesting atrocities against individuals should be referred to as Crimes Against Humanity, whereby no longer would officials from any state be free to treat their people with impunity.
Lemkin also wrote of the misdemeanours of the ‘Germans’ rather than the Nazis, arguing that the ‘German people’ had ‘accepted freely’ what was planned, participating voluntarily, and profited from their implementation. This was similar to the War Guilt Clause contained in the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which was deeply resented by Germans.
Genocide concerned acts ‘directed against individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups.’ For Lemkin Germany’s terrible acts reflected a militarism born of the innate viciousness of the German racial character. He selectively included a quotation from Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt who noted that one of Germany’s mistakes in 1918 was to ‘spare the civil life of the enemy countries’[ii] and that one third of the population should have been killed by organised under-feeding, but not all Germans shared this mentality.
Collective Guilt
The difficulty, therefore, with the crime of Genocide is that in purporting to protect one national, ethnic or religious group it often implicates another via its ruling authority; this may perpetuate racial stereotypes, such as innate viciousness, and contains a potential for indiscriminate reprisals, or even further wars.
Under the original conception of the crime of Genocide, any Russian, even an expatriate opposed to Putin, might be held responsible for the conduct of the Russian army in Ukraine. This idea of collective guilt – a species of Original Sin attached to a national or racial group – generally based on supposedly timeless national characteristics, could also permit crippling sanctions and even bombing campaigns impacting on civilian life.
Punishing an entire nation for the conduct of its government – even if that government is democratically elected – is therefore unjust, not least as it tends to bolster the authority of belligerent elements within a state – who may point to the aggressor posture of the opponent – diminishing the likelihood of lasting peace.
Far less problematic is the idea of Crimes Against Humanity, which simply asserts a universal jurisdiction for atrocities committed by the officials of any state, including ‘legally’ against their own people.
But charging Russian officials with Crimes Against Humanity might lead us to consider whether the leaders of other nations, including the US – which along with Russia (and Ukraine) is not a party to the International Criminal Court – should be similarly indicted.
Drone Strikes
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the US has been waging warfare through extra-judicial assassination operations: drone strikes, aimed at suspected ‘terrorists’ living in some of the world’s most deprived and defenceless countries. As of 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that there have been at least 13,072 confirmed drone strikes on Afghanistan alone since 2015.
These remote attacks represent a new phase in the cruelty of warfare, as the leading Superpower maintains a social distance from each hit. The consequences, or ‘collateral damage’ is rarely investigated by a mainstream media that now howls in anger at Russia’s excesses.
As LSE’s Maarya Raabani puts it: ‘Buoyed by mainstream media, an alarming preponderance of metaphors and passive-voice reporting have denied any chance to hold drone atrocity perpetrators to account.’
Moreover, ‘Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,’ said Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. ‘These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the U.S. government that owes the public an accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.’
In July 2021, U.S. President Biden announced the adoption of an ‘over the horizon’ counterterrorism strategy. According to the Brookings Institution:
The new plan would rely on armed unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones — to respond to terrorism threats around the globe without deploying American boots on the ground. But although the strategy was designed to overhaul policies that had kept the United States embroiled in conflict for 20 years, it failed to address the unintended consequences of counterterrorism strikes, namely civilian casualties. On August 29, 2021, with most U.S. soldiers withdrawn from Afghanistan and regional bases shuttered, this challenge became clear. The U.S. military conducted a strike that killed 10 civilians, including women and children, rather than the intended target.
TAS13: GENOA, JULY 22. Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and US President George Bus.
In striking unison, mainstream media in the West has reacted to the invasion of Ukraine with outrage, and conveyed statements of the President of Ukraine with uncritical approval. Russia certainly deserves opprobrium for his war of aggression against Ukraine – and its officials may be responsible for war crimes – but the failure to interrogate the actions of the US and its allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia over many years makes the self-righteousness ring hollow.
Russia is operating in a context established by the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that destabilised the Middle East causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Putin exploited the anarchy in the international system with his invasion of Georgia in 2008, having divined that the rules of the game had changed. There is a continuum between Russia’s attacks against Georgia, the Donbass and Crimea campaign in 2014, and this latest invasion of Ukraine.
Once Western leaders and their allies are also held accountable for their actions we may move to an environment where the Rule of Law attains a universal character; then the invasion by one state of another without a legitimate casus belli may become unthinkable.
Unlike during the period of the USSR, Russia exerts little ‘soft’ power. Putin’s propaganda relies on the hypocrisy of the West, especially the US which continues to baulk at becoming a party to the International Criminal Court and allies with rogue actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Confronting Russia should also involve Western governments pursuing morally consistent foreign policies.
[i] Phillipe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, (Knopf, New York, 2016) p.72
