War Porn2006

This essay is about the images revealed by CBS in 2004 depicting torture and prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. The Hooded Man being the most famous. Here B begins by comparing this with 9/11, declaring the first a banality, insofar as it represents pornographic staged humilliation, a parody of violence, and the latter a major event that revealed vulnerability in the hitherto invincible hegemon. B says war turns itself into a grotesque (...) reality-show, in a desperate simulacrum of power.

Left without enemies, drunk with power, Miss Columbia has no other option but to humiliate herself. This is very much of actuality at the time of this review, and truly at any other time. Here we have a theory of power that explains the current state of self-destruction that reigns the imperial cores.

B argues that the images themselves are secondary to the spectacle they produce, as they have become as virtual as war itself. This has rendered image to go from representation to pornography that exposes the absolute degradation present in the systems that proclaim themselves a beacon of freedom and democracy and so on. Because this other does not fear death, the objective is for it to be exterminated symbolically. B says the goal of the war is not to kill or to win, but abolish the enemy.

Add 22 years and replace the q in Iraq with an n for Iran. Or switch 9/11 to October 7, and the images to ones of the Gaza Genocide. Current events reproduce this symbolic violence.