Themyscira [RI4]
Humanitarian intervention in popular culture
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 4 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to Chapter 3 here, or go on to Chapter 5 here)
Humanitarian intervention can be moral and can be immoral, can be helpful can be unhelpful. It depends entirely on circumstances and context, and it is rarely straightforward. Above all it requires a comprehensive, and populace centric, understanding of the problem. Humanitarian intervention is an act of solidarity, but unless it is requested and led by those in whose names one is intervening — unless it has the effect of increasing not reducing local agency — then no matter how well intentioned it becomes an act of imperialism. In order to avoid this pitfall one mustn’t be simplistic, and if one is an outsider one must acknowledge the limitations that places on one’s understanding of a given crisis.
Which brings me to Wonder Woman (2017).
To understand Wonder Woman it helps to know a little about the 1941 comic strip upon which it was based. The character was created by the psychologist Professor William Moulton Marston under his penname Charles Moulton. He was an enthusiastic practitioner of BDSM and polyamory, and lived much of his life in a ménage a trois with his wife, the psychologist and inventor of the polygraph test Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their life partner Olive Byrne, a writer and the niece of the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Once you know this Wonder Woman’s costume and her “lasso of truth” make a lot more sense.
For Marston BDSM and polyamory weren’t just sexual preferences, but vital political and moral positions. Marston believed in a dichotomy. On the one side: masculinity, violence, evil; on the other: femininity, eroticism, love. Therefore free(er) love would make world peace possible by allowing women to entice men to make love not war. BDSM represented a formalisation of this process: turning acts of violence into acts of love, and facilitating the transference of power from male to female forms through “loving submission”. Bondage in particular — the literal use of restraints to equalise or temporarily reverse power dynamics — became a metaphor for his world view, to the extent where Wonder Woman’s cuffs have their own Wikipedia page[1].
There’s a few things here that might stick in the craw of the modern and enlightened reader: the gender essentialism of this position, the instrumentalization of female sexuality, the total absence of the LGBT community from the conversation. But for 1941 it was at least interestingly antipatriarchal. In providing a gendered analysis of conflict at all, and in linking violence and power dynamics, he was well ahead of his time.
From all of this, the makers of the 2017 film borrowed little beyond the fact that Wonder Woman is hot, and wears an outfit that is tastefully kinky.
To be fair, bits of the politics of Wonder Woman are good, bits are bad, and bits are just confused. The good is the way in which Wonder Woman, aided by her inevitable gang of quirky misfits, manifests a genuine and good faith attempt to use their powers to protect the weak from the strong. This is the idea of humanitarian intervention at its most fundamental, and at its most hopeful.
The bit I find particularly bad is the unique importance the story places on preventing the use of chemical weapons in particular. This feels like a very pointed satire of the Syrian “red line” controversy of 2013, particularly as by coincidence the film would premiere just after the 2017 Khan Shaykhun attacks. This is a complex issue which deserves, and will get, a longer discussion on the podcast, but Wonder Woman did not helpfully contribute to the debate. It plays fully into the idea that there exists a hierarchy of atrocities, and that therefore certain fairly arbitrarily selected forms of inflicting untold suffering are fine, while others are so unconscionable that we should inflict suffering ourselves to prevent them from happening. Choking a person to death with noxious fumes is for some reason so qualitatively worse than burning them to death or ripping them apart with shrapnel that we should burn people to death or rip them apart with shrapnel to stop the former happening, but we do not need to worry about stopping the latter. It frames the reason why the bad thing is bad purely in terms of the label we attach to the thing, not in its effects. Indeed, it forgets the victims and potential victims entirely — they perish offscreen.
Where Wonder Woman gets really confused is the bit where she claims to be fighting a war to end war. This is problematic anyway but it makes it an even odder choice to place this film within world war one: a war almost universally held to be completely unnecessary and pointless and entirely devoid of goodies or baddies — merely the industrial slaughter of populations for the sake of an elite power play. It was extraordinary to see Hollywood strain to force even this conflict into their Manichean vision of good and evil (largely by conflating Imperial Germany and the Nazis), and then somehow make the British military top brass into goodies who only wanted peace.
Wonder Woman meanwhile believes war is caused by Ares the god of war[2] and that therefore she must defeat Ares to bring peace.
This idea that you can shoot your way to peace is deeply dangerous[3]. Peacebuilding is the art of taking deescalatory actions to reduce tensions to the point where an accommodation can be found. You cannot escalate your way to a lasting peace — only to further conflict or to victory by conquest (and conquest invariably sets yourself up for further conflict down the line).
That’s not to say that one should never escalate. Sometimes — admittedly not during world war one — war is actually worth fighting and winning on moral grounds. And sometimes escalation is warranted to prevent atrocities. After all, conflict is inevitable but atrocities aren’t — sometimes it might be worth taking a slower path towards peace if it circumvents atrocities along the way.
This, in a nutshell, is a key difference between conflict prevention and atrocity prevention[4]. Conflict prevention is about cooling things down: deescalating tensions and working towards peace. Atrocity prevention can also take this form, after all since conflict is a risk factor for atrocities, reducing conflict usually (not always) makes atrocities less likely. But fundamentally atrocity prevention is about taking actions, even if they are escalatory actions, to prevent specific egregious events from occurring. These events might be unrelated to the resolution of a conflict or there might not even be a conflict. The resolution of conflict can sometimes even make atrocities more likely by removing the contestation of power that holds a potential perpetrator in check.
In such circumstances we are presented with a difficult trade off. Any escalation is going to prolong and exacerbate conflict; it is a pouring of fuel onto fire. The question is: is it worth it? Is the harm prevented proportional to the harm caused? Is a longer but perhaps cleaner conflict which gets worse before it gets better preferable to the likely consequences of inaction — where peace is perhaps closer but tragedies that might have been prevented occur in the meantime? These are genuinely difficult issues with no straightforward answers and many unknown unknowns. In the chapters and podcast that follow we’ll look at some potential approaches but will find no silver bullets.
However, what is deeply dangerous is the idea that Wonder Woman articulates, and many governments appear to believe: that there is no trade off, and that escalating conflict to prevent atrocities also brings peace closer[5], or at very least is without consequences for the pursuit of peace. Nothing could be further from the truth and those who advocate escalation, morally correct as this course of action may sometimes be, have a duty to look the consequences clearly in the eye.
Wonder Woman is of course just one, and one of the better ones, of the absolute slew of superhero films that have come out in the last decade, meaning that there are no longer any other fun blockbusters to watch on planes. This phenomenon was kicked into high gear by the breakout success of Iron Man (2008).
Iron Man was a lot more fun than a lot of the films that followed it because it’s a decent standalone action story as opposed to being merely a piece in an increasingly sprawling and convoluted cinematic universe. But its politics are a frustrating mess. The hero is an arms dealer. The moral consequences of this are talked about a fair deal but not really explored. Likewise the backdrop of the war on terror, and the complicity of the western military industrial complex in the rise of the Taliban is referenced, but no real inference drawn. Tony Stark is a billionaire playboy, and the moral issues regarding both his wealth and his lifestyle are also touched upon, but also not explored further.
This is standard issue intellectual lampshading — the problems were mentioned, actually addressing them is therefore unnecessary. How could a film have a morally dubious message if it includes a scene where a character rhetorically asks if its message might be morally dubious?
But it goes further. Tony Stark launches what is explicitly stated as an illegal, but moral, and incredibly clean and bloodless, act of humanitarian intervention to prevent a genocide that would have otherwise taken place using weapons his company made and sold to the perpetrators. At the end of the film Tony Stark announces that his company will no longer make weapons. Instead it will make … err … weapons in suits, to protect people from weapons. And he’s going to work closely with the Pentagon so you know he’s on the right side.
What are we to make of this playing with the language of both progressive and reactionary politics? The script toys with neoconservatism, humanitarian interventionism, antiimperialism and pacifism but never really picks a side. Is it an attempt to have it all ways at once, so you can sell theatre tickets to people of all political persuasions across the globe?[6] Probably in part.
But beyond that I think what Iron Man is trying to do is to find a way to be comfortable with the uncomfortable parts of the military industrial complex by selling this idea that the situation is complicated and there are many shades of grey, but those shades have been considered by people smarter than you. And so we can trust our heroes and the conscience of the US military — “Rhodey” Rhodes — to be our unfailing[7] moral guide. Forgive the billionaire playboy arms dealers when they sometimes get it wrong, and support their use of high explosives to fix the problems they cause.
The idea that we don’t need to take this on trust because a deeper understanding of these dynamics is in fact possible, but would require you to talk to someone outside of the military industrial complex, is never considered.
This is the paradigm within which humanitarian intervention, in all its forms, is predominantly presented. And therein we find both the reason why many of the specific humanitarian interventions that are proposed are so counterproductive and problematic, and the understandable reasons why many are sceptical of the entire concept, to the point where it sometimes blinds them to the rare occasions where it is the morally righteous choice.
But if the oversanitisation of Wonder Woman and the excuse of complexity of Iron Man pose specific problems to our understanding of humanitarian intervention, a far broader and more general problem are the issues we mentioned in our introduction. It’s the framing of agency. You have the protagonist over here, the bad people doing the bad thing over there, the understanding and analysis (for some reason) coming from here, the intervention needed there. Intervention is a moral choice the protagonist makes, not a reaction to the material conditions of the situation meriting it. It is an action we take, not a response we have.
This is everywhere. From the very explicit (Machine Gun Preacher 2011, My little Pony: the Movie (1986)[8] to the highly inferred (Dances with Wolves 1990), from the unapologetically belligerent (Black Hawk Down 2001) to the apologetically confused (Black Earth Rising 2018). Some of these films are further left, further right, more isolationist, more interventionist, more nuanced, more cartoonish, more in sorrow, more in anger. But all of them do it.
And what they also all do is warn people off analysing the simplicity of this position in any depth by peddling the idea that questioning any of this is namby pamby hippie nonsense which makes you complicit in genocide.
Take this scene where John Rambo, in the unnecessary 2008 reboot of the same name, speaks to an earnest young (also white) missionary. It has everything: the Genocide word, an implicit assumption that an American dropout would know a Burmese river better than any Burmese person, unexamined colonial and in this case proselytising dynamics, and this us and them attitude in spades:
What would it mean if they had brought weapons? Fundamentally, Kony 2012: the laughable viral marketing campaign from Invisible Children which reached new heights of white saviourdom and vacuous awareness raising about a cause few of the participants themselves understood, and is now chiefly remembered for its founder’s very public nervous breakdown. What sometimes gets forgotten is that the express aim of Kony 2012 was to lobby the USA to invade Uganda with the objective of restarting a brutal civil war which had only recently ended — ostensibly for humanitarian ends.
Other media is a little more subtle than Rambo, just as other warmongers are a little more sophisticated than Kony 2012. But few have the sophistication necessary to get us to the point where we can have a meaningful understanding of the morality and complexity of humanitarian intervention.
Game of Thrones (2011) went deeper than most with regards to the politics of intervention.
It touched on some issues. In Daenerys’ attempts to end slavery in Slavers’ Bay we saw the difficulties of occupation in the face of insurgency, even with popular support and even when legitimised in humanitarian terms. In the battles between the pro-slaver Sons of the Harpy and the former slave radical Freedmen, we saw something of the complexity of revolutionary politics. In her transference of the rationale of this crusade to slave-free Westeros we saw the way in which moral causes are frequently insincerely used to justify self-interest. Ditto in the way her desire to “break the wheel” of monarchy transferred into a claim to leadership based on bloodline. In the violence of her liberation we see an, admittedly oversimplified, version of both the probable and unforeseeable consequences of military action even when undertaken for moral purposes. And specifically in her dragon’s sacking of King’s Landing we see the devastating affects of urban areal warfare and the complete incompatibility of these tactics with a protection strategy.[9]
Yet for all Game of Thrones loved to subvert expectations, in one key regard the show behaved exactly as expected. Our remote, elite, protagonists make the decisions. Everything is top down, nothing comes from below. The voiceless remain so, often literally, and our heroes speak on their behalf. Those who are to be liberated say little more than “mother” or else hiss. The slave army of the Unsullied are so notoriously taciturn that when they end up accidentally in charge they immediately summon a council of white aristocrats to tell them what to do. Game of Thrones might provide greater depth than other depictions of humanitarian intervention, but that is not the same thing as providing greater sophistication.
Against all odds one of the few works of mainstream fiction that does offer a different attitude is The Two Towers (2002).
Don’t get me wrong. The Lord of the Rings (1954) is a horrible book politically. It is the sine qua non of the racial politics in fantasy problem[10]. And frankly I’m Team Orc: the hobbits are basically UKIP and the Shire sounds horrible — the fear of the different or the aesthetically imperfect is palpable. As Kirill Eskov’s novel The Last Ringbearer (1999) makes abundantly clear, seen from another perspective the story is one of legitimising the racial superiority of Elves and Men and using actions up to and including genocide to keep the uppity subhumans in their place[11]. Even in Tolkein’s own telling of the story it is very hard to find fault with Saruman’s pitch to the Dunlendings:
“The horsemen took your lands. They drove your people into the hills to scratch the living off rocks. Take back the lands they stole from you”[12].
It is also the most Great Man of all the whiggish fantasy stories: the idea that oppression is not structural but a specific act of certain bad individuals that can be dispelled by a plucky band of nobles with one weird trick. This conception of agency doesn’t just bring with it all the cartoonish problems for foreign policy we have discussed thus far, it’s also kind of dismal. To borrow an argument[13] I think it’s such a shame that high fantasy took Lord of the Rings as its starting point, and not the slightly earlier (1946) much better Gormenghast series. Fantasy could have been so much weirder, so much more interesting, and so much more structural. As it is we just have endless fetch quests for the Chosen One. What a boring, bleak place Middle Earth is if you are not the Ringbearer, Skyrim if you’re not the Dragonborn.[14]
But, for all that, we have to accept that no piece of mainstream art is ever going to have good politics when it comes to liberational violence, not until the ghost of Frantz Fanon starts scripting Marvel movies[15]. And so the best we can hope for from such stories is that they will occasionally have the odd decent scene. And in the Entmoot, the conference the tree-gods hold to decide whether to join the war, we see one of popular culture’s only real depictions of the politics of intervention told from the perspective of a sober weighing up of the consequences of action and inaction in terms of the impact it will have on the planet and the sentient creatures within it. Granted, there’s some hawkish chuntering about how long it takes, more so in the film, but by and large here you have the decision made as it should be — carefully, thoughtfully, and from the perspective of considering the likely effects.
I actually think the film version, while slightly contrived for added drama, is even more progressive. Because the Entmoot decides that we “cannot hold back this storm” and decide not to intervene, despite Merry’s compelling argument that we are all of us “part of this world” and so compelled by our shared sentience to fight to protect each other. The ents understand the limits of their own agency, the fact they are not all powerful. But then, for once, the victims themselves are — if not quite heard from — at least seen in the form of a felled area of formerly sentient treelife:
And it is then that the trees intervene — as an act of bottom up solidarity. The closest a mainstream depiction of intervention has come to having the request to intervene come from those in whose name the intervention is taking place themselves.
Notes
[1] Just one page, not a page each
[2] Politics aside the biggest problem I have with Wonder Woman as a film is that the man who plays both Ares and a good-natured member of the British Military top brass by the name of Sir Patrick Morgan (David Thewlis) is the absolute spitting image of Mark Williams in his persona as Jesse of Jesse’s diets from the Fast Show. Once you have the image of Sir Patrick stumbling out of a shed to declare “this season I’ve mostly been wearing … khaki” in your head it’s quite hard to take anything that follows seriously, particularly his transition into the all-powerful god of war.
[3] Wonder Woman is also fairly confused on the subject. One of the reasons that World War 1 went on for as long as it did was because, while for four years the front was frozen in near stalemate, both sides believed that soon a superweapon — tanks, aircraft, mustard gas — would blow things wide open. So they did not attempt to negotiate peace. On the one level Wonder Woman acknowledges this, the plot is built around the idea that the Germans need to be prevented from developing their new super mustard gas because only then will they accept the armistice. Yet on the other Wonder Woman herself is explicitly acknowledged as being just such a superweapon. And she does blow the front wide open, to great rejoicing, even though her actions would presumably have ended the stalemate and thus prolonged the war.
[4] It’s not the only difference: this is a large sector of research and practice on which many people have written in detail. In my day job I even wrote something about this myself alongside Dr Kate Ferguson who has been making this point consistently for years.
[5] I’m going to sound like a very old man here (specifically I’m going to sound like Tony Soprano saying “whatever happened to Gary Cooper?”) but the thing that upsets me most about modern western storytelling in all its forms, but particularly in superhero films, is that we have conflated heroism and escalation. Why have we not had any heroic deescalators since perhaps Atticus Finch? Why is our hero the person turning the temperature up not the person cooling things? Why is our hero the person who walks into a group and then a fight breaks out? Whatever happened to the hero that walks into a fight and talks everyone down? Why do our heroes insist on doing so much? In common with many people I’m sure, my notions of heroism owe a lot to my father: someone who — when he’s not winding you up — exudes calm in the face of tension and becomes only more calm the more aggressive the situation becomes to the extent that there are fewer fights, and fewer confrontations, because of his interventions — not more. You don’t see heroes like that in popular culture, I think that’s a shame.
[6] There is a common phenomenon whereby art uses real-life political events for colour and to act as reference points for a common cultural language, but strips them entirely of their political meaning so that they can appeal whichever side of any divide the audience might fall on. The most ridiculous and extreme version of it I have seen is the Daniel Bryan kayfabe leading in to Wrestlemania XXX (2014) which attempted to do a depoliticised and thus universally acceptable story based closely upon the actual literal Occupy movement.
[7] Terrence Howard, the actor who plays Rhodey, genuinely believes that 1x1=2 and has published “proofs” of this on his twitter.
[8] The plot of which, to be fair, is largely lifted from CS Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy (1954), My little Pony is about as equine but less orientalist.
[9] I’m giving Benioff and Weiss, Game of Thrones’ showrunners, a lot of credit here, but in truth all they did was pay some attention to recent events in Syria, Libya and the legacy of the Iraq war, and borrow some stuff.
[10] Discussed further in footnote 8 of the previous chapter. Maybe sine qua non is harsh. Maybe Redwall is the sine qua non, but one has lower standards for Redwall.
[11] Eskov actually suggests it’s about class not race: Orcs are industrialists, Elves are aristocratic rural landowners.
[12] This quote is from the film script; the book version is more obscure but has the same basic message:
‘Yet there are many that cry in the Dunland tongue,’ said Gamling. ‘I know that tongue. It is an ancient speech of men, and once was spoken in many western valleys of the Mark. Hark! They hate us, and they are glad; for our doom seems certain to them. ‘The king the king!’ they cry. ‘We will take their king. Death to the Forgoil! Death to the Strawheads! Death to the robbers of the North!’ Such names they have for us. Not in half a thousand years have they forgotten their grievance that the lords of Gondor gave the Mark to Eorl the Young and made alliance with him. That old hatred Saruman has inflamed. They are fierce folk when roused. They will not give way now for dusk or dawn, until Théoden is taken, or they themselves are slain.’
[13] China Miéville tells the International Socialism Journal:
“The nicest thing anyone ever said about Perdido Street Station was that it read like a fantasy book written in an alternate world where the Gormenghast trilogy rather than Lord of the Rings was the most influential work in the genre.”
A friend pointed out what a better world that would be and I’ve basically stolen that argument from him.
That said, I love Miéville but found Perdido Street Station a slog. To adapt something another friend once said Perdido Street Station reads like a fantasy book written by Terry Pratchett in an alternate world where Terry Pratchett wasn’t funny.
[14] There’s another dynamic at play here too, and it definitely contributes to the one I described, which is what Michael Moorcock refers to in his wonderful essay of the same name as “Epic Pooh”: the manner in which Lord of the Rings, and its many literary progeny, takes as its tonal starting point the whimsical sentimentality of Victorian romances like Winnie-the-Pooh and then imbues it with the righteous portentiousness and half buried trauma of winning two world wars to produce incredibly twee and high Tory epic fantasy:
“they don’t ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.”
[15] Yes Kilmonger’s approach in Black Panther (2018) (by orders of magnitude the best Marvel film) is interesting in that it comes close to Fanonian liberational violence, and that his character is made sympathetic through that lens. But it does make him the baddie, and cartoonishly so on occasion. It also has the CIA and Rwanda as the goodies which is questionable at best, as anyone from the DRC would be able to tell you. If you were being charitable you’d suggest that the film is exploring a valid critique of Fanon: that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. But I think the more churlish analysis is likely to be correct: Kilmonger’s affinity for desecration and murder was shoehorned in, despite not remotely fitting in with his character or with Fanonian ideas, because otherwise the film might have been genuinely subversive.
Also seriously, why are we rooting for T’Challa again? Purely because of hereditary privilege? Shuri, Nakia, Kilmonger, W’Kabi, M’Baku and possibly Okoye would all make better rulers than him.
