Righteous Indignation: intro
A whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture
“If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits.” — Michael Moorcock, Epic Pooh
You are invited to pick through the vestiges of a ruin. I hope you will find it intriguing.
What’s this?
In 2016-ish I started to keep a rough set of notes, largely to help my own thought processes, with respect to the politics of conflict. I intermittently attempted to turn it into essays, and in early 2020 I turned those false starts into the first draft of abook.
I shopped it around a bit for feedback or interest, and found that publishers had little of the latter. I think my sister hit on the reason why when she told me that what I had read more like a lecture series than a book.
In 2021 I failed to do anything with the draft, but now it is 2022 I am determined to do something with it. Two things in fact.
First and foremost is a lecture series, to be released in the form of a podcast, on the politics of conflict, and my own take which is that rather than considering violence as good or bad in and of itself we need to consider who is using the violence against whom, and to what ends. It’s an argument for the possibility of violence as a tool of liberation, heavily caveated by the probability that that is not how it will be used.
That argument might not be particularly original (it’s an only slightly syncretic mix of Fanon, Butler and Crenshaw) and might not be that sophisticated (punching down is bad, punching up is good) but it’s a point that feels important to make: avoiding both the “anti-imperialism of idiots” and the fetishization of sovereignty that is often its antithesis by keeping a rigid focus on power and whether the user of violence is more or less powerful than those they are using it against.
Anyway this isn’t that, this is the other bit.
My book draft started out with a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. This worked to introduce some of the key concepts and themes that I then went on to discuss, and to explain why our political classes have such a basic and messed up approach to them.
Those bits are neither necessary for, nor really work in, the lecture series. So I’m sticking them up here. They’re primarily amusing offcuts that you might find interesting, but they also add up to something like a course in some of the primary dynamics of the politics of modern conflict explained through the medium of popular culture.
It wasn’t just for amusement. This was my thesis: that popular culture and much of the debate that occurs around the politics of conflict share the following unfortunate characteristics:
- They are overly simplistic, both in their analysis and even more importantly in their approach to solutions
- They are openly disdainful of nuance and those presenting nuanced approaches; the act of doing so is itself seen as suspect
- They are Manichean in their conception of good and evil. This is coupled with a dehumanisation of adversaries who are seen as little more than cartoon characters
- They have a very protagonist-centric attitude to agency, in which all external actors, affected populations, stakeholders, allies, potential adversaries and likely victims are presented as little more than props in our all-powerful hero’s moral dilemma
- While we frequently see exceptional and lethal violence resulting from our protagonist’s actions this violence is presented in a highly sanitary and aesthetic manner, with no focus on grief, pain, wounds or unpleasant aftermaths
- They understand problems as discrete and episodic events: fully and completely resolved in a short period of time, unconnected to any other issues and themes, and with no lasting consequences after the end credits roll
I am making no claim as to the effect popular culture has had on our politics or of our politics on popular culture — many far cleverer people have written at length about which way causality might be going. I’m simply suggesting that the two things hold mirrors up to each other.
The chapters are as follows (not all of them are live yet, I’ll post them as I edit them):
- Croaking Toads: why we should look at conflict in popular culture
- Crazy Ivan: general and cold war depictions of conflict
- Going where no ordinary rabbit would dare: conflict in the popular culture of the long ‘90s
- Themyscira: humanitarian intervention in popular culture
- On Her Majesty’s Service: the international role of the UK in popular culture
- Liberalism with a grenade launcher: liberal interventionism in popular culture
- George Clooney is not a political theorist: “sophisticated” foreign policy films
- Special Circumstances: popular culture on the left
- The 18th Brumaire of Johnny Rico: conflict in Sci Fi
- Reading list
A couple of things to note. In terms of generalisability, I’m working outwards from myself and it is for others to say how far these reflections hold true more widely.
Time wise: although we go from the 19th century until 2020 there’s a particular focus on the 1990s, both because they were formative for me and because they were formative for the foreign policy attitudes we still seem to be stuck with. I don’t think that’s entirely coincidence: I think they were formative for many people in the generation coming into the political ascendency.
Place wise: there’s definitely a focus on the UK and more broadly on western media, and the attitude within popular culture I critique is definitely that of a former imperial power in the global north. But given the hegemonic reach of western media some of this stuff will no doubt feel familiar to many people worldwide.
Content wise: it’s beyond both the scope of this exercise and my own attention span to survey popular culture in anything approaching a systemic or comprehensive way, so instead I will be selecting works fairly arbitrarily for their illustrative value. It’s also worth noting that it’s not a very diverse list: I talk a lot about men and a lot about white people. But that’s sort of my point, or one of them[1].
Finally, just to say I can’t take all the credit for this idea. A colleague had the idea of writing something about R2P and Wonder Woman at the same time that I was thinking about writing something about R2P and Bucky O’Hare, and it was in the synthesis of those two ideas that the concept for my draft was born. So they deserve at least some of the credit or blame, but for their sake I’ll hold off on naming them until we know which of those two things is more abundant!
Anyway, that is what this is, I hope you enjoy it!
Notes
[1] This is sadly not a matter on which I have sufficient expertise, but I do somewhat suspect that media created for non-white audiences has a more nuanced approach to violence than media created for a white audience, a consequence perhaps of those communities’ greater familiarity with it. Take, for example, a fairly mainstream romance created primarily by and for the African American community: Queen & Slim (2019) and you will find it has a lot to say about violence and power (as well as a cameo from Flea — truly the mark of a quality film)
