December 6 , 2007: This is my chapter in the upcoming book - Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy
THE WRETCHED OF NEW CAPRICA
“The Cylon Occupation Authority continues to assert complete control over the city and we remain at their mercy. Our insurgency has been striking back against the Cylons whenever and wherever possible. Although these attacks sometimes seem like futile gestures, I believe they are critical to morale, to maintaining some measure of hope.”
Former President Laura Roslin, New Caprica Diary
“Violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence. Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Hooded occupation police, wearing body armor and night vision goggles, kick down a door. A baby screams as his mother is cuffed and dragged off in the middle of the night. A prisoner, one eye gouged out, crouches in the dank corner of a dirty cell. In a dilapidated outpost, a young man straps on a vest full of explosives. He waits nervously at the graduation for new police forces. When an occupation official draws close, he presses the detonator on his chest. The explosion rips apart the ceremony and destroys the occupying force’s sense of confidence and security. These aren't scenes from news coverage of Iraq; they're images from the third season of Battlestar Galactica, the most politically relevant and disturbing show on television.
In its first two seasons, Battlestar Galactica vividly depicted the post-9/11 clash of civilizations. The robotic Cylons, religious fanatics who justify mass murder as a means of carrying out God’s will in the face of human corruption, implied a fierce parallel with radical Islam’s global jihad. Humanoid Cylon sleeper agents struck from within human society - one detonated himself in a failed suicide attack, another almost assassinated Admiral Adama. As survivors of a genocidal attack, the humans on Battlestar Galactica suggested a tough, heroic America courageously defending itself despite shaky leadership. President Laura Roslin - though more than a stand-in for George Bush - was an unprepared chief executive (forty-third in the line of succession, get it?) who turned to Holy Scriptures as a guide in a time of war. At one point, she said, “The interesting thing about being president is you don’t have to explain yourself to anybody,” a paraphrase of a Bush quote.
We as audience sided with humanity as a metaphor for America, though the moral issues occasionally became queasily ambiguous. When they discovered a Cylon terrorism suspect, human interrogators viciously tortured her. With this disturbing similarity to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of Guantanamo prison, Battlestar Galactica suggested the thin membrane between humanity and brutality as well as the dubious legitimacy of civil liberty crackdowns in Patriot Act America. The show persisted in raising tough questions about the preservation of American values in the face of rampaging paranoia about internal subversion. Nevertheless, Battlestar Galactica clearly portrayed the Cylons as evil, unsympathetic, maniacal machines in their obsessive desire to destroy humanity, while the humans - though afflicted with a dark streak of vengeance and racism - were righteously sympathetic as they fought only to defend themselves.
Then at the end of Season Two, Battlestar Galactica made a startling, mind-boggling shift - morphing the hated Cylons into American Occupiers and the beloved Humans into Terrorists. Through a 10-part series of Webisodes and the beginning of Season Three, the show’s geopolitical focus shifted from terror alert America to war-torn Iraq and, in the process, went where no other work of fictional pop culture dared. It provided a devastating, incisive, and subversive critique of the American occupation of Iraq. It did so by dramatizing an unprovoked invasion, portraying the damaging effect on those occupied, sympathizing with a morally ambiguous but legitimate insurgency, and aligning itself with the violent radical philosophy of black French revolutionary Frantz Fanon.
Battlestar Iraqtica
The ragtag remnants of humanity make their home on a dusty, desolate planet they call New Caprica. A year later, the defenseless, impoverished humans are invaded by the technologically superior Cylons, a race of zealot cyborgs. Instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons colonize the planet and impose their way of life. While evoking Nazi occupation of France and French occupation of Algeria, Battlestar Galactica most closely resembles the American occupation of Iraq.
The Cylons seek to save the perverse, primitive humans by bringing them the word of God and converting them to Cylon ideology - by military force. As in Iraq, a dominant power wants to shepherd a much weaker one, but the help turns oppressive as the barbed wire is unrolled, the blast walls are built, and the jails are filled. Prisoners are moved about wearing Abu Ghraib-like hoods over their heads. The Cylon leaders - like Bush and Company - think of themselves as benevolent while ordering the imprisonment, torture, and execution of those that don’t cooperate with the colonizing agenda. If innocent civilians get massacred or maimed in the religious crusade, that’s regrettable but necessary collateral damage.
In an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion, the Cylon Occupational Authority (which mimics the American Coalition Provisional Authority that first ruled Iraq) installs an (elected) president Gaius Baltar as puppet leader - a feckless, figurehead surrounded by sycophants and ideologues. Like Iraq’s American-backed leaders, President Baltar has no street credibility and, according to Laura Roslin, functions “in name only.” The Cylon occupiers take over Baltar’s palatial spaceship Colonial One, turning it into their base of operations and a visible symbol of the occupation - a version of Baghdad’s Green Zone. The humans, like many Iraqis, are predictably not enthused about the forcible seizure of their homeland by self-appointed rulers. They immediately launch an insurgency, using stolen weapons, improvised explosive devices, and suicide bombers. The occupiers prefer not to be brutal, but they won't accept the failure of a glorious mission sanctioned by God.
One Cylon leader Brother Cavil - disgusted with his colleagues' fears about a human resistance - shouts, "How did you think the humans would greet us? With—oh, never mind,” echoing Dick Cheney’s infamous remark “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.” American recruitment of Iraqi police is paralleled by Cylon recruitment of indigenous human security forces. Their brutal raids on unsuspecting human civilians are recorded with the night-vision green familiar to any news viewer. Even the background music is faux Arab.
Obviously, Battlestar Galactica simplifies the situation in Iraq. Unlike the American invasion, Cylon motivation doesn’t involve fabricated links to a terrorist network, exaggerated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, the seizure of an important energy resource, or the deposition and killing of a brutal dictator. The human insurgency doesn’t expand into a civil war between religious rivals or conflict with even more extreme terrorists. These simplifications are not only necessary given the already-established nature of Battlestar Galactica’s fictional world, but also serve to clarify important aspects of the conflict - the brutal, racist nature of occupation, its inevitable provocation of an indigenous revolt, and the ensuing spiral of violence that devours combatants and civilians alike. The powerful implications of Battlestar Galactica’s critique - as seen through the prism of Frantz Fanon’s political philosophy - helps us understand some of the devastating moral, social, and historical consequences of America’s invasion of Iraq.
The Bible of Decolonization
At the level of human rights, foreign occupation is violence personified, systematic enslavement, and fascism with a smiling face, according to philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Described by The New York Review of Books in 1966 as the “Black Rosseau,” Fanon stridently urged violent revolution as a necessary and justified response to colonization. His most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, helped inspire the decolonization strategy of guerrilla warfare that was successful in Algeria’s fight for independence - methods also employed by Castro and Guevara in Cuba, the NLF in Viet Nam, the Palestinians, the IRA, South African militants, and now insurgents in Iraq.
Attacked by some as a glorifier of violence and by others as a utopian, Fanon projected a future vision of a new African unity, arising from the ashes of collective revolutionary violence, has not been borne out by events. But this doesn’t invalidate his analysis of colonization and decolonialization. Fanon, the political sociologist, understood the difficulty of creating the society that Fanon, the political philosopher, said ought be the ideal. Wretched of the Earth achieves significance as an essay on the nature and morality of foreign occupation and violent liberation - from the perspective of the colonized victim turned revolutionary. Courageously, Battlestar Galactica dramatizes Fanon’s ideas, applying his analysis to the Iraq occupation and insurgency.
The Spiral of Violence
The rationale for colonization of New Caprica is provided by Brother Cavil, architect of the occupation - the Cylon Donald Rumsfield, “We’re saving them from damnation by bringing the love of god to these poor benighted people.” Overtly racist, the Cylons believe that humanity is corrupt, evil and consumed with hatred. “Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context,” said Fanon, “It becomes clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to.”The colonial state’s narcissistic and vainglorious proclamations of progressive principles, according to Fanon, reduce the indigenous population to that of a child who must be protected from itself, “from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune.” Fanon challenged the claim that colonial invasion was an evangelizing mission; rather, it’s the first step in the occupying power’s spiral of brutality.
Colonial rule is preceded, inaugurated and maintained by the use of physical force. “The official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier,” said Fanon. “The government’s agent speaks the language of pure violence.” The Cylons impose their paternalism with guns, bombs, and prison. While President Baltar spinelessly surrendered to the Cylons, his own vice-president - who refused to cooperate - was jailed. “Hundreds of us have been rounded up, held in detention, questioned, tortured,” writes Laura Roslin. “Others have simply vanished.” With no system for redressing grievances against the occupiers, the wretched of New Caprica survive fearfully at the mercy of military power.
Along with overt physical violence, Fanonemphasized the psychological violence that destroys the souls of the occupied - the literal colonization of their minds. The occupying power wants to create alienated individuals who embrace their new rulers’ propaganda and reject their own values. Imprisoned in an apartment jail, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is psychologically manipulated by Cylon Leoben. He wants to force her to love him for the purpose of copulation and reproduction, a kind of biological imperialism. Though she violently resists, her mind has been infected. After liberation, she says to her husband, “I’m in a different place. I got out of the cell and it’s like someone painted the world in different colors. I look at you and I want to tear your eyes out. I want to hurt someone.”
The Cylons also employ psychological violence to recruit human police whose dirty job involves the repression of its own race. Dramatizing another aspect of Fanon’s philosophy of colonization, the Cylons’ creation of a proxy police force masks their horrific acts with a human face while producing a native elite, alienated from their own people. “It’s hard to think of anything more despicable than humans doing the dirty work of the Cylons,” notes Roslin. “They were led to believe they were taking the civilian security out of the hands of the Cylons, but the human police force have become extensions of the Cylon’s corporeal authority.”
Sleazy cyborg Aaron Doral, whose blandness belies his sadism, persuades weak-minded Jammer that the Cylons regret their recent slaughter of innocent women and children. Doral brainwashes Jammer into believing the utopian propaganda of Cylons and humans working side-by-side, growing flowers and fruits rather than killing each other. Doral offers Jammer the “opportunity” to prevent further bloodshed by informing the authorities of insurgent plans that might endanger innocent lives. Though Jammer initially balks at betraying the human resistance, he later joins the secret New Caprica Police, carries out raids, and calls the Cylons “sir.” A stranger in his own homeland, he enforces the Cylon occupation and helps bring about the bloodshed he wants to avoid.
Stop the Machines, Win Freedom
Resistance to the Cylon occupation begins even before their invasion. Under the policies of President Baltar, New Caprica suffers from shortages of food, clothing, medical supplies, and building materials. Living in tents, they endure Katrina-like conditions without the flood. Many blame Baltar’s lack of leadership and incompetency for the economic and social disaster. A Gallup poll would show abysmal, Bush-like approval ratings. Baltar couldn’t care less. Living in luxury and permanently wearing a bathrobe like a futuristic Hugh Hefner, Baltar spends his time cavorting with bimbos and consuming drugs. Furious with him, Union president Galen Tyrol and his pregnant wife Cally lead a revolt. As Fanon notes, social injustice motivates radical political action to change the situation.
In a passionate speech that inspires a general strike and links Battlestar Galactica to Fanon, Marxism, and 1960s New Left radicalism, Tyrol proclaims:
“There comes a time when you realize that the engine you’ve built - with your blood and your sweat and your tears - is being used for something so foul and so perverted that it makes you sick in your heart and it’s then that you know you have to throw your body on the gears and on the levers and on the machine itself and make it stop and show the people who run it, the people who control it, that unless we’re free that machine will be prevented from working at all.”
These words, that can be taken literally or figuratively, derive directly from a 1964 speech given by charismatic New Left student leader Mario Savio to a mass demonstration at the height of Berkeley Free Speech Movement. 1960s student activism got initial impetus from this campus revolt and inspiration from Frantz Fanon. Tyrol’s speech simultaneously evokes Karl Marx’s notion of workers seizing the means of production from capitalist overseers and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s criticism of technology’s repressive effect on the human condition. Once Cylon colonization begins, Tyrol’s union leadership provides him with the experience to motivate and organize the human resistance while the union represents politically conscious nationalist elements.
The speech plays a crucial role in Battlestar Galactica’s justification for the insurgency in that it makes freedom the central objective of the humans’ struggle against the machines. The fight for collective and individual liberation becomes the defining rationale - the end that justifies any means. For an oppressed, colonized people, true liberation - according to Fanon - legitimized and required violent action. The occupier will never confer freedom on the occupied - it must be taken back by force.
Holy Violence
In response to organized resistance, the Cylon machines amplify their repression - they institute a curfew, imprison violators, and shoot humans on the spot, if weapons are found in their tents. The insurgents move their meager arsenal into the Temple, a sacred place that confers sacramental value on guns and bullets. While several worshippers pray, the Cylons - who view the humans as “infidels” - announce a search. When people panic and run, they are slaughtered by Cylon Centurions.
Despite its horror, the massacre invigorates the human rebellion, igniting political action. Siding with the insurgency, a thousand people angrily protest outside Colonial One and hundreds of fighters commit to the resistance. To the insurgency, the loss of human life was worth the propaganda victory. “Never dreamed we’d get this lucky,” states rebel leader Saul Tigh coldly. When Jammer protests this tough attitude, Tigh upbraids him: “Instead of bawling like a little girl, you should focus on getting some payback . . . blood for blood. We’re at war.” Tigh expresses the rage and vengeance that occupation violence engenders as well as the tension that, Fanon noted, necessarily erupts within the ranks of the colonized.
When the insurgents decide to hide explosives near a hospital, Jammer criticizes their lack of concern for the patients’ safety. This reflects natural human empathy. But, from Fanon’s revolutionary viewpoint, it reveals Jammer’s domestication and indoctrination by the enemy. The aspiration to do the right thing - collectively fight the colonizer - can be undermined by individual fragility, personal animosities, or traditional morality. After leaving the meeting, Jammer rats out the resistance.
Tigh is captured, interrogated, beaten, and tortured. The Cylons poke out one of his eyes. As he languishes in the barren cell, his spirits are lifted when the insurgents push their violent resistance to a new level. Tyrol and Sam Anders explode an improvised explosive device and cheer wildly when it kills several Cylons; this embodies Fanon’s vision of violence as a liberating force that creates optimism, hope and self-confidence. As he says, “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.”
Fanon preached a new kind of moral obligation for an occupied people. He invested violence with positive, formative, even religious features. The armed struggle mobilizes people into a single direction from which there is no turning back. It introduces the notion of “common cause, national destiny, and collective history into every consciousness . . . mortar kneaded with blood and rage.” Fanon went on to say, “This violent praxis is totalizing since each individual represents a violent link in the almighty body of violence rearing up. All of this is reminiscent of a religious brotherhood, a church, a mystical doctrine.”
Terrified Made Terrifying
With Tigh eyeless and out of prison, the insurgents plot their next move. The Cylon escalation of violence, including torture and mass executions, feeds the insurgency. As the United States discovered in Iraq, the torturing of suspects and the killing of civilians provoke anger against the occupiers and increase sympathy for the insurgents. Violence begets violence: this is the mad psychology of occupation, according to Fanon. The human resistance must ramp up their tactics. “In order for the insurgency to have a more meaningful impact,” Roslin writes, “We must strike a high profile target.” A suicide bomber will kill the despicable collaborator Gaius Baltar along with other Cylon brass at the upcoming New Caprica Police Graduation.
The morality of this new strategy sparks intense debate. Anders complains that going after Baltar will inevitably harm humans - members of the police force. “So what?” says Tigh. “Send them a message: you work with the Cylons, you’re a target. There’s no boundaries for the Cylons, then there’s no boundaries for us.” For Tigh, insurgent actions can’t be restricted by moral limits when the enemy recognizes none. Tyrol argues that it’s wrong to send a human to kill himself. But Tigh disagrees. For him, the end justifies the means: “It’s our best chance to take out Gaius Baltar.” Morally wrong actions are justified to achieve morally right outcomes.
Philosophical controversy about whether the end ever justifies the means starts as far back as Plato’s Republic. Even Christian missionary St. Paul, the Apostle, argued that immoral behavior was acceptable as long as it spread Christianity - though he didn’t address suicide bombing specifically. Fanon held that freedom is the highest good: it’s what makes us human. Therefore, he encouraged violence as a means to a desirable end when it is “socially organized and ideologically directed” to achieve the liberation of the colonized. At the same time, Fanon condemned the violence inflicted by the colonizer on the colonized - such violence destroys their humanity, turning them into subhumans - animals or slaves. For Fanon, violence in the service of repression was the greatest evil, violence in the service of liberation the greatest good. “Killing is a necessity,” agreed philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre bluntly, “Eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.”
In despair after the slaying of his wife in the Temple massacre, another insurgent Duck volunteers for the suicide mission. The occupiers have taken everything, so he has nothing to lose. Like the majority of actual suicide terrorists, Duck is motivated by his social and family network rather than ideology. He wants to avenge Nora’s murder. His friends will profit from his action, not him. Despite Baltar’s absence from the graduation ceremony, Duck fulfills his mission. “I’ll see you soon, Nora,” he says, pressing the trigger that blasts a shockwave through the colonizers.
The Violent Mirror
Angry and frustrated by the horrific suicide bombing, Brother Cavil argues the colonizer’s version of the end-justifies-the-means: “If we’re bringing the word of god then it follows that we should employ any means necessary to do so. Fear is a key article of faith, so maybe it’s time to instill a little fear into the people’s hearts and minds.” Once again, Battlestar Galactica associates the Cylon colonizers with American colonizers by twisting a key phrase from the Vietnam War - winning hearts and minds.
Cavil wants to publicly execute leaders and random groups alike until the insurgency stops or the human population is reduced to a “manageable size.” Cylon Sharon Valerii protests that this is butchery. But she’s over-ruled and a major surge is ordered. “Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence,” said Fanon. “Far from breaking the momentum, repression intensifies the progress made by the national consciousness.”
Once the colonized have chosen counter-violence, further attacks by occupation soldiers automatically call forth reprisals by the nationalist forces. Obviously, the outcome is profoundly unequal in horror and scope - the colonizers’ possess much greater destructive capability. Since innocent people are inevitably intimidated, hurt, or killed, the occupier’s military become terrorists. Therefore, the technologically weaker force adopts terror tactics of its own. The oppressors’ increased violence is reflected back on itself.
“Desperate people use desperate measures,” says Laura Roslin in response to surrender-monkey Baltar who urges her to condemn the suicide bombing. He says, “Using men and women as human bombs is contrary to everything we believe in . . . these tactics cannot be legitimized in any shape or form.” But Roslin asserts that these attacks successfully strike fear into the hearts of the occupiers. She agrees with Fanon who said that social injustice drives men to desperate ends and to the conviction that only path to justice and freedom is through physical violence. Without directly defending suicide bombing, she accuses Baltar of permitting the torture of Col. Tigh and others. Baltar echoes George Bush (“This country doesn’t torture”), with similar disingenuousness, when he responds, “Nobody has been tortured.”
Though she strongly supports the insurgency, Roslin later criticizes Tigh for encouraging suicide bombing. He refuses to alter that strategy. Tigh tells her to “take your moralizing and your high-minded principles and stick them someplace safe until you’re off this rock . . . I’ve got a war to fight.” Tigh’s uncompromising attitude paraphrases Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical response to liberals who wouldn’t support violent Algerian anti-colonialists. “They don’t care a shit for its support; it can shove it up its ass for what it’s worth.” For Sartre and Fanon, colonial aggression legitimizes any method of decolonization. In a time of helplessness, murderous rampage becomes the expression of humanity.
The Wretched Liberated
Moralizing thoughts reflected passiveness, according to Fanon. They undermined the insurgency. If a strategy moved the people closer to liberation, then it was justified. “For the colonized, to be a moralist quite simply means silencing the arrogance of the colonist,” said Fanon, “breaking his spiral of violence, in a word ejecting him outright from the picture. The colonist must be determined to take the place of the colonizer.” This required “the collapse of an entire moral and material universe.”
In Battlestar Galactica, Tigh represents this point of view. Tyrol and Anders tell him that the Cylons will shut down the marketplace to cut the food supply. Tigh regrets this, not for its nutritional impact, but rather because he planned to bomb it. Tyrol is aghast that Tigh would attack a place full of innocent human civilians. He says, “We need to figure out whose side we’re on.” Tigh makes a cryptic reply, “We’re on the side of the demons. We’re evil men in the garden of paradise. Sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go.”
Anticolonial violence, according to Fanon, was sometimes experienced as a psychic and affective curse rather than as a political cause. Victims of oppression must remember that they can be arrested, beaten and starved with impunity. “Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless,” said Fanon, “Because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.”The colonized must overthrow the colonizer to regain their humanity, even if it meant temporarily sacrificing moral values.
The Cylon colonial world is beginning to crack. Another suicide attack critically wounds twenty-four Cylons. The insurgency sabotages a substation, leaving most of the city without power. The Cylons must increase control or lose control. At gunpoint, they force Baltar to sign an executive order to execute hundreds of detainees. When Baltar’s Cylon lover Six protests, Doral shoots her in the head. In dismay, Cylon D’Anna exclaims, “Consensus used to be so easy, now look what they’ve done to us.” This reminds us of how the American consensus for war has dissolved into accusations, acrimony and divisiveness.
The Cylons debate whether they should destroy the troublesome human colony with a nuclear weapon. They don’t realize that, like the U.S., they lost when they invaded. The insurgents have solidified their hold on the public imagination. The Resistance will sow as much chaos and confusion as possible as part of a daring rescue plan with Admiral Adama and Galactica. At the sound of the first explosions, the Cylon leaders rush to the windows of Colonial One and look out on a city that is bursting into flame. Under extreme duress, Baltar tells the Cylons the truth that they were too secure in their smug superiority, too comfortable in their predictions of easy success to even consider the possibility of defeat. This suggests part of the reason for the American fiasco in Iraq - blind arrogance.
As Tyrol, Cally and their baby escape, Cylon D’Anna recognizes that they’ve not only failed to domesticate the humans on New Caprica, they’ve created a new generation of Cylon-haters. The humans will raise their children with stories of the Cylon killers who committed genocide against humanity and that their children will repeat the story to their children, inculcating a dream of vengeance so that one day they will go out and hunt Cylons. Occupation undermines counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism; it reproduces the horror that it seeks to eradicate. Before the invasion, Iraq was free of terrorism. Now, Iraq has become a breeding ground for a new generation of smarter, more experienced terrorists.
New Humans
Before departing New Caprica, Tigh poisons his wife for betraying the insurgency. This initiates a new phase in the human revolution that continues when the surviving humans return to Galactica. “National unity begins with the settling of old scores and the elimination once and for all of any resentment,” said Fanon. “Those indigenous elements who have dishonored the country by their complicity with the enemy are included in the cleansing process.”
In the episode “Collaborators,” several former insurgents organize the “Circle,” a secret, extra-legal tribunal to play judge, jury and executioner for “crimes against humanity.” They convict Jammer of treason for his membership in the Cylon-controlled police force. Though his guilt seems clear, their methods feel harsh. As he pleads for mercy, they ruthlessly execute him, ejecting him out of ship’s airlock into space. The atmosphere of revenge grows stifling when the tribunal urges the conviction and killing of Baltar’s assistant Gaeta without specific evidence. Though Gaeta is saved at the last moment when they realize he was a secret ally of the insurgency, the Circle has crossed the line separating justice from vengeance, becoming little more than thugs out to settle personal scores. Anders quits the group. “I want to stop killing people,” he says.
Taking both a moral and political stance, Fanon believed that the period of payback retaliation must end quickly to restore national unity. “One does not sustain a war, one does not endure massive repression in order for hatred or racism to triumph,” he said. “Racism, hatred, resentment, and ‘the legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture liberation . . . leaders will come to realize that hatred is not an agenda.” Fanon regarded decolonization as something more than the overthrow of an oppressive regime. Violent revolution inspired a spiritual rebirth and the emergence of a new social and political consciousness, an essential step in the process of fundamental social change. “Decolonization is truly the creation of new men,” he said. This new humanity defined a “new history of man” that derived from the violent methods of the liberation struggle.
Agreeing with Fanon, “new thinking” is required for the humans of Battlestar Galactica in order to shape their future. In her presidential acceptance speech, Laura Roslin proclaims a “new beginning.” Rather than investigating and prosecuting acts of collaboration with the enemy, she issues a general pardon for every human being in the fleet. “We all feel the need for justice, and we all feel the need for vengeance,” she says. “And telling the difference between the two can be difficult at times. We are all victims of the Cylons. But I truly believe that this is the only way for us to move forward in strength in a spirit of healing and reconciliation.”
Yet it’s questionable whether this new spirit means much. Palpable animosity still exists between those who fought the occupation on New Caprica and those that stayed aboard the ships, though certainly that tension is held in check. While the hated Gaius Baltar is not pardoned, he does receive a fair trial and gets acquitted. It seems that a new consciousness, a spirit of compromise, should also extend to their Cylon enemies. However, in the episode “Measure of Salvation,” Roslin gets handed an opportunity to exterminate the Cylons. Despite Adama’s concern that “we will lose a piece of our of our souls” and a Cylon plea for a “new beginning,” Roslin - the voice of reconciliation - orders a biological attack that will likely result in Cylon extinction. Though the genocidal plan gets averted by accidental circumstances, it’s clear that the “new humanity” is a lot like the old.
As in Battlestar Galactica, Fanon’s utopian dream of a new humanity, arising from the ashes of occupation and the collective violence of liberation, did not happen in Algeria and Africa. Philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed with Fanon that collective violence, like suicide squads and revolutionary brotherhoods, engendered close political kinships; but she disagreed that these would lead to an enlightened, unified nation state. “No human relationship is more transitory than this kind of brotherhood that can be actualized only under conditions of immediate danger to life and limb,” she wrote. “The hope . . . that a new community and a ‘new man’ will arise out of collective violence is an illusion.”
The Future
The Iraq occupation - its history and possible future - is clarified by Battlestar Galactica’s critical alignment with Fanon’s philosophy. Foreign occupation is shown to be racist, paternalistic, dehumanizing and violent. Resistance to the repression of freedom is so important that a core group cannot accept defeat. As Starbuck says when the Cylon troops first march down the streets of New Caprica, “We’ll do what we always do, fight them until we can’t.” The superior technological force of the colonizer leads technologically weak indigenous forces to apply guerrilla or terrorist tactics because playing the game of “civilized” warfare would get them slaughtered. And so they fight on using the only tactics available to them.
The hit-and-run guerrilla strategy provokes the occupier into using its overwhelming force so that the life of the population cannot continue normally. Using home invasion, detention, torture and the killing of civilians, an occupier - like the Cylons or the Americans - swats flies with grenades, encouraging the ambivalent population to choose sides. Once the insurgency’s recruitment pipeline gets established, the only exclusively military solution available to the occupier is genocide, or some form of ethnic cleansing. An occupying power unwilling to go that far must accept the fact that a military victory cannot be obtained. The insurgency bleeds the occupiers who want to rule the region at a finite cost. If the insurgents cannot be crushed within the cost limitations of the occupier, then eventually the occupier will want to stop the bleeding, give the rebels want they want, and leave. The insurgents win by not losing. This is the story of the Cylons in New Caprica. This is also the story of the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Iraq.
As for the tactic of suicide bombing, the human insurgents of Battlestar Galactica employ it in response to foreign occupation. This dramatizes what research shows - “Suicide terrorist attacks are, almost always, part of an organized campaign to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from territory the terrorists consider its homeland.” More than two-thirds of the world’s suicide terrorists come from Sunni Muslim countries where the United States has stationed tens of thousands of troops. Iran, for example, has never produced a suicide terrorist. Prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never produced a suicide terrorist. Since then, Iraqi suicide bombing has escalated rapidly. In fact, “Iraq has superseded all the other suicide-bomb campaigns in modern history combined,” says Mohammed Hafez, author of “Suicide Bombers in Iraq.” While one stated objective of the Iraq War was to stop Muslim terror attacks, the sustained presence of heavy American combat forces, in Muslim countries, increases the odds of terrorism. The attempt to transform Muslim society by Americans and human society by Cylons - through military force - has worsened the situation.
Battlestar Galactica raises the question of whether the insurgency, in New Caprica and Iraq, is legitimate. Despite its moral ambiguities, the answer is a qualified yes. A violent insurgency is necessary to resist the foreign occupier. “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking,’ said Fanon. “It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” Aligned with Fanon’s philosophy, Battlestar Galactica establishes freedom as the greatest good, the highest value, and rationalizes the insurgent violence as being beyond morality. Further, the Occupation episodes - and the show’s entire history - are designed to encourage us to root for the success of the human resistance in its fight for liberation, including its most brutal tactics - suicide bombers who take special aim at the colonizers and the treasonous human police force. This makes the show astonishing and subversive. Unlike any other fiction or documentary, Battlestar Galactica persuades us to understand and even sympathize with the viewpoint of the occupied and the insurgents - our real-world enemies. As Jean-Paul Sartre says of Wretched of the Earth, “Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling.”
September 16, 2007: GENERAL BETRAY-US & BUSH LIE ABOUT IRAQ SUCCESS
This is what the Bush administration sees as success in Iraq: almost 1 million dead Iraqis; almost 3,000 dead Americans; 2.6 million have left Iraq; 50,000 per month leave their homes; U.S. has spent more than $500 billion in Iraq and currently spending $300 million per month. For this there is a corrupt, non-working central government that operates in name only - a puppet regime propped up with U.S. military power.
In fact, the “government” is unmotivated to do anything, since Bush keeps giving them more time and even now holds out the promise of an unending American occupation. They use us, they enrich themselves on our money, but they don’t secure or supply services to their people.
Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support. The sectarian-dominated, Janus-faced “police force” and “army” is trusted by no one, including their American “allies” who have trained and armed them.
The vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side. The most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live imprisoned in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.
As soldiers in the field say, “Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.”
We are now arming Sunni militias who promise to fight Al Qaeda, but who also hate the American occupation and the Iraqi puppet government. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence.
In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence.
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to force our withdrawal.
May 28, 2007: FACE-SAVING IN IRAQ: FAILURE AS VICTORY
Bush knows that the so-called surge is not working because it could never work. An attempt to stamp a momentary positive face on a 4-year catastrophe, the surge has led to increased American casualties and the spread of violence throughout Iraq. April was the worst month of the year for the American military and May looks to be worse. The United States is being held hostage by a propped-up regime that drags its feet and prepares for a relaxing two-month vacation while American and Iraqis continue to be blown up. Bush is permitting America to be held hostage to Iraq’s civil war.
Bush and the Republicans believe they can save face by painting Democrats as the party of surrender. They continue to repeat the same absurd bullshit over and over: We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here, but the terrorists are in Iraq because we invaded Iraq. Even if we killed every terrorist in Iraq, terrorists that want to kill us would exist in other places, such as Afghanistan. McCain, Romney and Bush argue that we must support our troops by continuing the war - more Americans must die to support the troops that have already died. Therefore we can never stop fighting the Iraq war.
But we will stop. Bush knows we have lost the war. The Republicans and their media lapdogs are madly searching for a face-saving public relations strategy to paint their failure as victory.
January 27, 2007 - Politics - AMERCIAN ELECTIVE DICTATORSHIP - YEAR ONE
The American people are against Bush’s expansion of the Iraq War. The Democratic party is against it. The Iraq Study group opposed it. The Iraqi people are against it. But George Bush is determined to expand the war and now threatens war with Iran. While his 30% approval rating now approaches that of Richard Nixon’s 27% just before he resigned, he defiantly ignores everyone. Can a single man force a nation to fight a war it does not want to fight, expand a war it does not want to expand - possibly to other countries? If he can, is that nation any longer a democracy in any meaningful sense?
I don’t think so. Democracy does not exist with the Bush administration in power. We have an elective dictatorship. Bush has become a 21st century Napoleon, trampling on whole peoples, mouthing the slogans of liberty and popular sovereignty while crushing and looting (the oil) of those he "liberated." How can democratic rule be restored without Bush’s resignation or impeachment? It can’t.
What annoys me is that some people - the mainstream media, for example - talk about the troop “surge” as if it makes sense to ask whether it can “work,” They further imply that somehow if the surge “works,” Bush will somehow be redeemed. The problem with American policy was never that it chose this or that bad strategy in Iraq but that it invaded Iraq at all. Once that was done, all strategies were bad, condemning the United States to blindly stumble from error to error. Everything the U.S. did was wrong: doing more of the fighting, doing less; attacking Shiites, attacking Sunnis; helping Shiites, helping Sunnis; disbanding the Baath Party, inviting back the Baathists. The final irony, the U.S. is sending soldiers to die in Iraq in support of a Shiite government friendly to Iran and Hezbollah. We are arming a Shiite majority to ethnically cleanse the Sunnis. Now, four years into the game, American policy has gone from mistaken to unintelligible - its actions not so much misguided as irrelevant to the ghastly conflict now under way.
The very implausibility of the “surge” as a solution forces us to ask now what will happen when it fails to produce the “victory” that will justify the sacrifice of our people and our money. An unwanted war, the threat of a wider war means a constitutional crisis just like the one that occurred during the Nixon presidency. We have a war launched on the basis of deceptions, again the duel between popular opinion and executive power, again executive secrecy, again the contempt for law, again the smearing of policitical opponents as abettors of the enemy, again wiretapping, again defiance of Congress, again the imperial pretensions. Congress must remove Bush the Dictator whose policies are destroying America.
December 31, 2006 - Politics - TROOP SURGE: DEATH WARRANT FOR AMERICAN TROOPS AND A SLAP IN THE FACE TO VOTERS.
The media promulgates the assumption that, despite all advise and opinion to the contrary, Bush will escalate the war and this might “succeed.” As has been the case throughout, the media misrepresents the extent of the disaster in Iraq, preferring to promote fatal illusions about a viable central government and fantasies of the US being able to shape a new model army of Iraqis that support an illusory government. What will the courageous Democrats do in the face of an escalation? Salute the Commander in Chief as he irrationally persists in believing that military power can “win” the war and support his delusion that a fictional entity called the Iraqi Army, at the disposition of an imaginary power called the Iraqi government, can be welded into an entirely fantastical nonsectarian force by (as yet unavailable and putatively suicidal) US military trainers.
Suicidal? A poll cited by the Iraq Study Group found that 61 percent of Iraqis believe that it is appropriate where possible to attack the US occupying troops. A US trainer, embedded in an Iraqi unit composed of people who believe it’s their patriotic duty to kill Americans, will be little more than a target.
The media and the government cannot accept the reality that America has lost the war. The vast majority of Iraqis want the US out. After Saddam’s pathetic hanging on YouTube by masked executioners looking like nothing so much as the terrorists, the mainstream media showed happy Iraqis celebrating in Sadr City failing to point out that they hate Bush as much as Saddam. Militarily the US has been defeated. An escalation now will increase violence and impede movement toward a political solution.
BEST ALBUMS - 2006
Supernature, Goldfrapp - St. Elsewhere, Gnarls Barkley - Return to Cookie Mountain, TV on the Radio Broken Boy Soldier, Raconteurs - The Warning, Hot Chip - Passover, Black Angels - Gang of Losers, The Dears - Pieces of People We Love, The Rapture - Zeno Beach, Radio Birdman - The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance - Bring Me the Workhorse, My Brightest Diamond
BEST MOVIES - 2006
Strangers With Candy - V for Vendetta - Little Miss Sunshine - The Departed - Babel - Children of Men - Pan’s Labyrinth
BEST BOOKS - 2006
Technophobia by Dan Dinello - I Like You by Amy Sedaris - State of Denial by Bob Woodward - Fiasco by R. Thomas Ricks -
December 6, 2006 - Politics - IRAQ STUDY REPORT FAILS THE COUNTRY
Composed of conservative establishment types, the Iraq Study Group provides a devastating description of Bush's horrible failures in Iraq, but it does not provide a realistic way out and does not explain how it happened. Rather than setting a timetable for total withdrawal and creating a plan to save the Iraqi people who supportted this insane fiasco, it proposes the withdrawal of American combat forces, an increase in advisors/trainers embedded with Iraqi forces and political negotiations with Iran, Syria and insurgent leaders whoever they are. It proposes that within one year Iraqi forces will somehow be able to do what 180,000 American troops could not do. What happens to the defense-less American advisors who would be dependent on incompetent Iraqi forces? What happens to the Americans when Iraqi forces turn on them? Who will be the last American to die for a failed policy? More training will not solve the problem. Bush and now the Iraq Study Group is in a state of denial. What will the Syrians and Iranians do to help the situation, what do we have to offer them? The truth: America has lost the war militarily and politically. Bush and Cheney need to pull all the troops out and resign immediately!
December 3, 2006 - Politics - IRAQ'S BLOOD ON BUSH'S HANDS
Iraq’s horrible civil war was unleashed by the U.S. invasion. The blood is on President Bush’s hands. As he desperately scrambles to find a face-saving exit, let’s not forget that Bush went to war under false pretenses, permitted the situation to spiral into chaos and lied about the war’s cost, length and difficulty. Three years after the invasion, Iraq’s schools and hospitals struggle, electrical service falters, oil revenues stagnate, and civil war rages. Yet, some American officials, who supported the invasion, now join the chorus of Iraqi-bashing as a way to avoid placing the blame where it belongs - on Bush and themselves. The invaders did not understand Iraq’s culture and ignored its history while killing, torturing and humiliating its people. We must hold Bush to account for the greatest foreignpolicy disaster in our nation’s history - a bloody catastrophe that will undermine our position in the world for generations to come. For the good of the country, Bush and Cheney should resign immediately.
November 17, 2006 - Politics: BUSH SAYS WE DIDN'T STAY THE COURSE IN VIETNAM
We had 600,000 troops in Vietnam at its height, we were there for 15 years and we lost over 50,000 people. We lost the war because we supported to phony government that didn't have the support of its people and didn't have the will to defend itself - just like Iraq. We lost the war because we persisted in fighting a guerilla war by murderous bombing, napalm inceration and killing civilians. We created and fueled the insurgency just as in Iraq.
November 9, 2006 - Politics: BUSH TRASHED FROM COAST TO COAST; RUMSFIELD DUMPED
This is the beginning of the end of our national nightmare - Rumsfield gone, Bush and Cheney rendered impotent. Demoncracy worked great this week creating instant change. While getting rid of Rumsfield doesn't represent a policy shift in Iraq, it makes a shift possible. The problem remains how to stop Bush from doing more damage to Iraq. America has lost the war. It's time to leave. Nevertheless, there will be months and years of elaborating a phony plan that tries to save face. Meanwhile the killing will continue. America will eventually leave and what will happen will happen. The plan will only delay the inevitable. The situation cannot be controlled. America must immediately withdraw from Iraq.
October 5, 2006 - Politics: BUSH - WORST PRESIDENT EVER
See the Rolling Stone story: The Worst President in History
Books: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of the Truth From 9/11 to Katrina by Frank Rich; State of Denial by Bob Woodward; Fiasco by Thomas Ricks
See Juan Cole's Informed Comment
September 5, 2006 - Politics: Bush Speech a Real Shocker: Terrorists Don't Like Us
The ultimate master of the obvious, President Bush made another stop on his Fear Mongering Campaign and delivered another empty-headed speech in which he passionately tried to convince us of something that we already know - Islamic terrorists don't like us and want to spread Islam. Like Rumsfield, he got both the Nazi and Communist comparison: "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Hitler and Lenin before them!" So, then why are we fighting in Iraq? Why have we allowed Pakistan to give Bin Laden a safe haven?
The administration's pathetically desperate attempts to fight off public anger with the war by trying to scare us have become "Un-American." Through the illogic of Orwellian Newspeak, Bush and Rumsfield suggest that people who criticize the War in Iraq are like Nazi appeasers: "Terrorists are as bad as Hitler; some of the people we are fighting in Iraq are terrorists; therefore, people who oppose the War in Iraq are as bad as Nazi appeasers." The Bush and Rumsfield strategy is to frighten us into silence so that they can "stay the course." But this approach actually fuels Islamic militancy. Americans finally recognize that the War in Iraq is a distraction from combating terrorism. In fact, we have now created a Shiite government in Iraq that hates Israel and is sympathetic to Iran. The attempt to violently impose American values on the Mideast makes Islamic militancy stronger.
Some other obvious things that Bush did not say: 1. The invasion of Iraq was built on lies. 2. Bush's decision to go to war was one of most colossal and costly misjudgments of any President in American history. 3. Currently, Baghdad and much of Iraq is out of control, the government is a sham, corruption is exploding and the civil war is spreading. 3. America can do little to stop this, yet its attempts continue to hemorrhage public funds and bleed the lives of our sons and daughters.
August 20, 2006 - Politics: "I hate this war," said Neil Young on the Stephen Colbert show August 18. Like many of use, he's so frustrated by the Bush administration's blind persistant that he's reduced to pure exclamation! 66% of the American people want a change, yet Bush continues to 'stay the course' in the 'central battle of the war on terror.' But everyone knows now that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with terror - there was no terror in Iraq until we got there and provided targets. We also know that the radical Islamic Bin Laden and the secular Hussein hated each other. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice and Powell mis-led the world about weapons of mass destruction, the cost of the war, the Iraqi/Al-Qaida connection and outcome of democracy. Everyone needs to look at "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About an Iraq," a 2004 documentary with clips of all the lies spouted by the Bush people. It's breath-taking in its horror.
So far, demoncracy has led to Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah legitamized in Lebanon. In the Irony of Ironies, Al-Qaida is organizing itself into a political party so that they too can be elected in Iraq. In the 3 years that the U.S. has been in Iraq, the July was arguably the worst. Everything is going bad. Last month was the most lethal for civilians, 3, 438 of whom were killed. Iraq sufferred the equivalent of three Sept. 11 attacks in in the last three months. Chaos ensues. We don't even know who is killing who and why. We don't understand what we have provoked. Sectarian violence, insurgent violence, terrorist violence - it's completely confusing. Bush talks about winning - what does this even mean? We've become irrelevant in Iraq except as terrorist-magnets. Even minimal troop withdrawals have been cancelled and soldier returning home have been immediately returned to Iraq. "The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures . . . and has more public support . . . than at any previous time," says a senior Pentagon official.
America failed in Iraq. This failure was predictable. Nothing has gone as the Bush promised. These men lived through Vietnam but learned nothing. Bush must have been too busy drinking, snorting, cheering and pulling frat-boy pranks to have noticed that a homegrown, nationalisitc insurgency can defeat America's technological empire. Some people refuse to be bludgeoned into accepting American dominance.
August 15, 2006 - Politics: The recent terrorist arrests have given the Bush crowd an opportunity to once again divide the country and enflame fear to exploit for political purposes. Vice President Cheny warned that Ned Lamont's victory over Lieberman would embolden "al-Qaida types." Lieberman went further charging that Lamont's call for changing course in Iraq will "strengthen" the "same people who wanted to blow up these planes." This 1984-style far right wing administration will call anyone that disagrees with their corrupt policies a terrrorist - sympathersizer. Republicans - faced with the horrible debacle in Iraq, the catastrophe of incompetence after Katrina, the failed economic policies, the obscene deficits, the below-poverty minimum wage - have decided to run by accusing their opponents of being in league with terrorists. If anyone has weakened America after Sept. 11, it is this sickening administration. Will America be fooled again? Will the democrats, roll over? Stay tuned.
August 9, 2006 - Politics: So wonderful to see whiny, Bush-hugging, Iraq-War loving Joe Lieberman defeated by anti-war billionaire Ned Lamont. Hopefully, he will run as an independent and split the right-wing vote in November. Hopefully, this will be a harbinger for all pro-war candidates running in November.
August 6, 2006 - Politics: Some 100,000 Shites/Sadrists rallied, in Baghdad on Friday, against Israel's war on Lebanon, support of Hizbullah. They burned American and Israeli flags. The estimate of 100,000 comes from the LA Times. The US military attempted to play down the numbers, but I don't trust them on something like this, which has ideological implications. This is yet more evidence of the failure of Bush's Iraq policy which was supposed to bring about a pro-American government but which has instead brought about a pro-Iranian, anti-American and anti-Israeli government. Secretary of State Robo-Rice, on Meet the Press, uttered inane platitudes about how this anti-American, anti-Israeli demonstration was a wonderful example of freedom of speech and thus it confirmed the success of American policy in Iraq. How much longer will these Bush-people get away with their constant lying about the horrible situation that they've created in Iraq? The only reason that I want to see the weak-willed Democrats take over Congress is my hope that they will conduct hearings into Bush's failed, incompetent and murderous policies and finally hold accountable the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield-Rice gang of idiots.
Books: The Revelation by Bentley Little (horror); The Black Angel by John Connolly (thriller); No Place to Hide by Robert O'Harrow, Jr. (the latest in surveillance technology); Macho Sluts by Pat Califia (erotic fiction); The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (fiction); Can't Find My Way Home - America in the Great Stoned Age 1945-2000) by Martin Torgoff (American drug culture);
Music: Wet Dream's Cousin - A Continuous Mix of the Best from Paisley Park by Mass Transit and Spinello; 70s Funk Classics Volume I and II mixed by Spinello; Tired of Hanging Around by the Zutons; Elan Vital by Pretty Girls Make Graves; Decemberunderground by AFI; Beams by the Presets; We Are the Pipettes; The Eraser by Thom Yorke; Citrus by Asobi Seksu; Passover by Black Angels; The Warning by Hot Chip; Silent Shout by The Knife; St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley; Fear is On Our Side by I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
Movies: Other than Strangers With Candy, I've been bored.