War Nerd

Have you ever heard of General Butt Naked of Liberia? It sounds rather like the punchline of a joke, but if so, it's a pretty grim one. Apparently, to quote from Gary Brecher's new book of collected columns from the online journal eXile ("Mankind's Only Alternative"), War Nerd: "at the age of 11 he had a telephone call from the devil who demanded nudity on the battlefield, acts of indecency and regular human sacrifices to ensure his protection."

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. [104]

"We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal," the general summed up, in a recent press conference in front of the world's assembled media.

Is this stuff for real? Apparently it is. A quick Google search reveals a Wikipedia article about one Joshua Blahyi (aka "General Butt Naked"). He's repented now, though, after killing approximately 20,000 people during his rampages.

In June last year God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be, so I stopped and became a preacher.

Well, that is reassuring. A bit like George Bush Jr. giving up being an alcoholic loser and family ne'er-do-well and deciding to enter politics instead.

War Nerd, sent to me from Canada by my friend John Dolan, is full of such fascinating anecdotes from ancient and modern history. Its author makes no secret of the fact that he gets off on the whole subject of war, and considers virtually any form of violent and excessive human behaviour preferable to sitting in rush-hour traffic in downtown Fresno, where he works as a downtrodden data-entry clerk.

His reflections on the details of human conflict over the ages are, admittedly, disreputably fascinating, but I guess what interested me most about the book as a whole was how difficult it was to dispute the basic tenets of this war-ophile.

Earlier this year I had a go at reading Robert Fisk's monumental tome The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It was a library book, unfortunately, which meant that I had to read ever faster and faster, hundreds and hundreds of pages of massacres, betrayals, genocides, bombings, burnings etc. until the whole gallimaufry began to spin around my head. Finally it had to go back, all possibilities of renewal exhausted, with a good 400 or so pages to go.

I still haven't given up on it. Bronwyn's bought me my very own copy now, so I will adventure down that intrepid path again one of these days when I'm feeling mentally strong, but I guess my point is that Fisk's tome would appear to confirm the view that Brecher is the one who's on the straight and narrow - it's the rest of us with our idealistic notions of the universal power of peace and fair play who are out of step.

And I don't mean to imply, either, that Brecher's book is somehow "justified" by this comparison with Fisk's more sober-sided, serious trawl through contemporary events. I guess my problem with Fisk (and John Pilger, and various other noble-minded crusaders for truth and justice) is that their position gets increasingly paradoxical as they go along, and yet they never actually go back to square one and examine their own basic postulates about politics and human nature.

The trouble with reading a book by Pilger or Fisk is that they first describe, in grim detail, a whole series of appalling injustices, and then vaguely imply that it should be somehow "set right." Set right by whom? What is the norm in human affairs: Assyrian Kings decapitating their foes, Aztecs tearing out human hearts, Spanish Conquistadors working their Indian slaves to death - or tea parties in Mayfair and Manhattan?

Personally (of course) I'd rather be at the tea party, but I soon as I start to dig a little (what we old-fashioned humanists used to call "thinking"), the motives of the waiting staff begin to present themselves as emblematic of an essentially exploitative top-heavy rewards system. Who cleans up the tables after the tea is drunk? Who carries off the trash? Where does that trash end up? Who lives next to (or on top of) the rubbish-dump? And so on.

Mind you, I certainly respect Fisk and Pilger's moral indignation, but I'd rather they did a more grass-roots, Thoreau-style analysis of their own being-in-the-world. Who folds their sheets? Pays their expense accounts? Why do their books get published and distributed? Because they have the end result of supporting the status quo by implying that wars and genocides are occasional, aberrant - though still distressingly frequent - exceptions to the normal run of affairs in late Capitalist society, rather than "politics continued by other means" (von Clausewitz)?

Brecher's a kind of a humourist, I suppose. At least he certainly writes amusingly. And yet he dares to ask these difficult questions and follows through on the answers. He admits that he'd love to be a warlord, that he sees nothing "irrational" in low-profile, grass-roots guerilla wars. It's funny, yeah, but it's also food for thought in a way that Messrs Chomsky, Fisk and Pilger aren't. They fall back on invoking old-fashioned codes of decency, when the world they describe clearly no longer has the remotest use for such bourgeois scruples.

I'd prefer to live in their world than Brecher's, but the picture he paints makes disconcertingly better sense. And, you know, his analysis of the likes of General Butt Naked (whom it 's hard to imagine even accommodating in most conceptual universes) rings bitterly, horribly true:

The sad part is, I can imagine my folks going to see the bastard preach and getting all sentimental when he starts talking about how the Devil captured him at age eleven ... General Naked may be preaching the Gospel now, but that's the kind of job-change psychos like him can do without breaking a sweat. and they can go back to the old psycho-killer job just as quick when the time's right. [105]

In a world where you can still meet people who feel indignant at the "persecution" of that poor old man General Pinochet, when he was finally arrested in Spain and asked politely to attend a non-binding tribunal to inquire into certain crimes against humanity which had been alleged against him; where immaculately-suited, well-fed media commentators seem genuinely unable to explain why Robert Mugabe doesn't simply renounce the Presidency of Zimbabwe, crying out: "Lord, I done wrong!" under the withering hail of "international opinion," I think it might finally be time to get just a little real.

I'm appalled by the brutal world that Brecher paints, but I'm increasingly unable to pretend that he's making it up as he goes along. Give him a listen. And after you've stopped laughing at all those witty asides, you might do worse than start to think about what he's actually saying.

Battlestar Galactica = Iraq War

Well, yes, I guess you don't have to be a genius to figure it out. The feature-length miniseries which spawned the remake first screened in 2003, less than two years after a certain sneak attack on the World Trade Centre got the Americans so crazy for vengeance.

It's true that the Cylons pretty much succeeded in wiping out human life on the 12 colonies with their own weapons of mass destruction, but the analogy is not -- as I understand it -- meant to be an exact one: simply a good way of setting up a dramatic situation where one can examine at leisure the psychology of a particularly paranoid and inward-looking society at war.

The "remake" idea is an excellent one when it comes to protective camouflage. What harm could possibly come from revisiting kindly old Lorne Greene as Adama, and those two good old boys Apollo and Starbuck hotdogging around the sky in their Star Wars-knock-off fighters? That version was made back in the late seventies, when Vietnam had sickened the USA on real wars, and escapist fantasy westerns and space operas were the order of the day.

Is mine a reductionist reading? Possibly. I'm a big fan of the new series -- not (even at the time) the old one -- but what struck me about it from the first was the profoundly insightful line it took on military expediency and power-hunger.

It isn't just the black uniforms with silver highlights that make Lee Adama and the others look like a squad of young Fascists. Edward James Olmos's croaky, world-weary Adama is certainly no Hitler, but he might be a Rommel or an Admiral Raeder. Is there anything he and his friends won't do in the interests of survival? Adama's led a military coup against civilian government, ordered the assassination of a superior officer, connived at torture, the black market, the murder of civilians -- the list goes on and on. Some hero.

But it's all okay, because the Cylons are even worse.



Or are they? The biggest revelation of the new-look series is the Cylons themselves. they look human. They look better than human, actually. The women -- Tricia Helfer (above), Grace Park (below) and our own ex-Xena Lucy Lawless -- are all babes and supermodels. The men, on the other hand, tend to take a bit of a back seat when it comes to decision-making.



Gorgeous female robots are no new thing in Sci Fi, of course -- think of Metropolis or (for that matter) Blade Runner or Solaris. The interesting thing about these "skin-jobs" (or "toasters"- or any of the other loving terms applied to them by the freedom-loving colonials) is their obsession with theology.

Yes, you heard me right. The quickest way to spot a Cylon infiltrator is to lure them into a discussion about the existence of God and His/Her intentions for the universe. That's the true genius of this TV series. Who the hell came up with that idea?

The Cylons are strict Monotheists -- they're very impatient with the pagan superstitions of the 12 colonies (the planets were named after thinly-disguised signs of the Zodiac: Tauron for Taurus, Geminon for Gemini etc.). The "gods" whom Starbuck and the others repeatedly invoke are an early version of the twelve Olympians: Zeus, Diana, Apollo, Athena and so on.

Liberal Humanism versus Islam? The Colonials are a pluralist society, very like contemporary America. The Cylons, on the other hand, are made of sterner stuff. Philosophy, for them, is to be taken seriously. The basic issue for them, as Sharon-the-Cylon explains to Adama at one point, is whether humanity deserves to survive. The jury's still out on that one, I'm afraid.

As for Iraq, the evidence is all there if you want to look for it: torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the lynch-mob mentality of the fleet's civilians, the primitive glee that Apollo and the others take in killing (they do have qualms when it comes to destroying their own ships -- but they fade pretty fast when the bullets start flying).

It's not a programme which propounds easy solutions, but there at times when the cowardly, compromised, half-schizophrenic Dr Gaius Baltar looks like the only sane one aboard. At least he enjoys basic human pleasures: booze, sex, cards. He's smart, too, if a little eccentric. Compare him to the drunken buffoon executive officer Colonel Tigh, and it's hard not to see the dichotomy between the red and blue states of the USA condensed into one simple proposition.

Start watching it. I think you'll find it's worth it. Who would have thought the American mainstream media could be so intelligently self-analytical?