Prominently featured in the Review section of today’s New
York Times (though pretty much buried on the Website), is a contribution wittily titled “The Fog Machine of War”
(a deft pun on the self-exculpatory standard excuse, “The Fog of War”), by one
“Chelsea Manning”, identified only as “A former United States Army intelligence
analyst” -- witty again, in its winking minimalism. No current institutional affiliation is listed,
although the reader might glean it from the unusual “reporting-from” location: Fort Leavensworth, Kansas (not normally
among the sources for Sunday Supplement deepthink pieces out of Cambridge, MA,
or Princeton). Not
recognizing the name, I was about to flip the page; when suddenly a tiny light-bulb went on, in a sleepy brain
still absorbing its morning French-roast refreshment: That’s Bradley Manning, the former … Well, you
know. Here it is:
The piece is well-written, and even contains some observant
skewering of the sort of psychopolitical media puffery which we often chronicle
under the Label “The Society of
the Spectacle” (click here for the roster):
If you were following the news
during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American
press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained
fingers. The subtext was that
the United States military operations
had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.
Such images (we might call them “Purple-Finger Porn”) have
become a meme, and a staple of the media fog machine.
Manning’s article is accompanied by a memorable
counter-image to such things:
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