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It could be that the leaflets had other positive impacts. I once interviewed the top British forger of the war, and he said that the leaflets ‘did nothing to the enemy, but they were popular among the “adolescents” working for me. They did not demoralise the enemy, but they were excellent for the morale of the British agents who handled and distributed them.’ The two images that signify and drive Baudrillard’s investigation in War Porn are images of 9/11 and the images of prison abuse in Iraq. The two, while different, are in fact flip sides of the very same coin: the event of 9/11 is juxtaposed to a non-event of prisoner’s abuse in the prison of Abu Ghraib. While at first they appear as two responses to the abuse from one yet differently manifested source of power such an observation would come rather short. What is at stake in these images is a duality of one power – the power of the US – to provoke a response as well as to generate and mould that particular response. If the first scene looked at the simulative power of the two images and drew out how what they embody impacts war and law, this section looks at the simulative/productive power of the two images – the excess of production and the desire to see. In 2004, the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard published an essay called "War Porn" in which he focused on how the explicit images of the war in Iraq borrowed from the aesthetics and production values of modern pornography. Since then, the term "war porn" has been used widely to describe the huge amounts of garish video material and photographs that emanate from wars fought in the digital age. If child wellbeing was a national priority, we would act on eSafety’s plan to trial ways to protect young kids from online porn,” National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said in September. We’re the most bad-ass private army in the world. We’re hiring in all regions of Russia,” a woman’s voice can be heard saying. “Don’t j--k off, go to work for PMC Wagner.”
Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape. In 1942, Germany dominated most of Europe. Greater Germany had been enlarged at the expense of its neighbors. They were there, and, like soldiers of every army of every period of history, as soon as they got comfortable they started scouting around for women. And, as always in times of military occupation, there were women to be found. The Great War centenary should indeed have been a festival of lessons. Historians have had a field day arguing over its enduring puzzle – not its conduct or its outcome, but its cause. I have come close to changing my mind with each book I have read, veering from Chris Clark’s cobweb of treaties and tripwires to the majority view that firmly blames the Kaiser and Germany. But I have read precious few lessons. Dr Andreja Zevnik is lecturer in international politics at The University of Manchester; she is working on psychoanalytic and aesthetic politics, political violence and critical legal studies. She’s a convener of Poststructural and Critical Thought Cluster (Political Horizons) at Manchester. Her book (with Samo Tomsic) entitled Jacques Lacan: between politics and psychoanalysis is forthcoming with Routledge in 2015. The absence of difference or of that, which contests dominant narratives (or has a capacity to do so) is what is at stake in today’s production of politics, so Baudrillard argues (1995: 82 – 84). In the above quote Baudrillard speaks of a particular response to the virtuality of violence, in particular he speaks of the violence of consensus, which evacuates difference and thus disarms politics. This is not a novel way of looking at the political, Ernesto Laclau (1985) and Chantal Mouffe (1985, 2013), for example, see antagonism or agonistic politics as a driving force of political change. In sameness, such, it seems is Baudrillard’s position, politics becomes impossible. The First Gulf War was a warning against the disappearing difference masquerading under a label of global consensus, and thus also a warning against politics which used its strengths to eradicate anything that could contest the emerging ‘democratic consensus’ of ‘the West’. (Baudrillard 1995) The 1990ies were in terms of global and international politics known as the years of post-ideology, liberal democracy, multiculturalism, growing globalisation and interconnectedness which, when its goals were to be achieved, was to considerably reduce the chance of war or a violence conflict. While in 1991 the call to preserve the difference was still more of a call than a warning, by 2004, as the writing of War Porn suggests, politics focused on the eradication of difference became a reality.
Young human beings, especially young males, are apt to give considerable attention to sex. In areas of military operations, they are removed from the stimuli of secondary sex references, which are (in America) an accepted part of everyone’s daily life: bathing beauty photos, magazine covers, semi-nudes in advertising, etc. Our enemies tried to use the resulting pin-up craze for propaganda purposes, hoping that a vain arousal of oestrum would diminish morale. The sexual abuse that did occur was part of the Nazis’ drive to humiliate Jews, but there was no systematic approach to this,” he says. This paper looked at one particular text of Baudrillard – War Porn – and aimed to in turn discuss aspects of war simulation as depicted in the two images, the image of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and 9/11. Instead of looking at the content of these images the paper aimed to tease out the underlying ideologies and logics driving war simulations: those that in the first instance make such images possible (law and war), but also those that the two images reproduce (desire and perversion). Thus scene one looked at the simulative power of war and law in the context of the war on terror and laws concerning the detention at Guantanamo Bay, whereas scene two focused on the intriguing relationship between desire, perversion and image. In doing so the paper aimed to show how the two images have a capacity to reveal the simulative power of the war on terror. War Porn shows that any power – when it no longer knows what to do with itself – turns on the side of the pornographic and the obscene. When power is no longer accountable, when it sees itself as serving its own purpose, at that moment a strategy of overpowering, defeating, subjugating the enemy is no longer enough, the enemy has to be humiliated, exposed and symbolically exterminated. Or as Baudrillard (2005a: 209) put it by drawing upon Elias Canetti: “the goal [of such] war is to abolish the enemy, extinguish the light of his sky”. Pornography of war: violence for the sake of violence, virtuality for the sake of seduction. The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. "On the night of 24 February," General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, "a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them." The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army officers settled in with German "occupation wives". The Soviet authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it was time to return to the Motherland.
In December, four Republican congressmen wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking his Justice Department to do just that by prioritizing obscenity prosecutions. Let me be absolutely clear – online pornography is not equivalent to a ‘top-shelf’ magazine,” Dame de Souza said. Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort: "Frau ist Frau." Research has linked the regular consumption of violent pornography with increases acts of real-life violence. Picture: GettyThe Conspiracy of Art’, in: The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005c): 25 – 29. Later in the interview, McInnes asked West how, as a hypothetical president of the US, he would respond to someone asking him what he’s “going to do about these Jews”. The rapper reportedly answered: “Jews should work for Christians. I’ll hire a Jewish person in a second if I knew they weren’t a spy and I could look through their phone and follow through their house and have a camera all in their living room.” Some observers claim that taking " trophy photos" of your enemy in an armed conflict contravenes the Geneva Convention. (Warning: graphic imagery) Jason Leopold, ‘James Mitchell: “I’m just a guy who got asked to do something for his country”, The Guardian April 18 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/18/james-mitchell-cia-torture-interview; accessed: April 20 2014. The Charter of the United Nations (1945). Available on: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pdf; accessed: April 20 2014.
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