On Religion and the Pornography of Imperial Violence

Some excerpts:

Simple utilitarian calculations suggest that the amount of academic attention devoted to a given threat ought reflect its seriousness, based on calculations of the likelihood that threat will be realized and the destruction it can unleash. By these standards, al Qaeda, Hamas, the Aryan Nations, Aum Shinrikyo, the Tamil Tigers, Gush Emunim, and all other non-state groups are relative pikers, whose capacity for violence is dwarfed by that of the larger states, who also use their formidable discursive capacities to normalize their own aggression, while stigmatizing that of all adversaries. State violence is, of course, held in check by numerous factors, including law, tradition, international institutions, political and economic costs, calculations of self-interest, also—not least in importance—considerations of morality and religion. Should any of these militate in other directions, however, the likelihood of violence increases accordingly. Among the most dangerous of situations is that in which an extremely powerful state bent on conquest finds and deploys religious arguments that encourage its aggressive tendencies and imperial ambitions.

Without great difficulty, one can identify a contemporary case of this type, but its very proximity threatens to distort one’s perception.3 Believing that it may be useful to consider data sufficiently removed from the present to afford some critical distance, I have devoted much of my research in recent years to the role played by religion in Achaemenid Persia (550–330 BCE), the largest, wealthiest, most powerful empire of antiquity before the emergence of Rome.4 [ ]

Of infinitely greater importance than adjudicating any of the particulars is to observe what happens when a powerful state develops the capacity to persuade itself, its citizens or subjects, and perhaps also others, that the world is divided between the forces of good and evil; further, that its leaders have been divinely ordained to lead the good in battle. As an occasional fantasy, this is bad enough. As a core belief, sustained in and by a well-wrought body of discourse, broadcast widely through all available media and genres, it becomes infinitely more dangerous. This is so, whether it is done cynically or if the propagators are themselves fervent believers. An important part of this process is the state’s ability (and its proclivity) to stage impressive spectacles that confirm—to its own satisfaction and benefit—its own delusions of grandeur.

Achaemenian religion involved three constructs that I have come to understand as ideally conducive to the aggressive pursuit of imperial ambition. These are: (1) A starkly dualistic ethics, in which the opposition good/evil is aligned with self/other; (2) A royal theology that grounds the ruler’s legitimacy in divine right, charisma, and election; (3) A sense of soteriological mission that recodes aggression as salvation (or liberation) and one’s victims as one’s beneficiaries. Moreover, the Achaemenids were past masters in the art of staging spectacles that reproduced, and seemingly validated these convictions. [ ]

The Persians, of course, were not alone in this enterprise, and successful empires almost inevitably engage in something similar. One might mention any number of recently staged spectacles like the April 9, 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square (a name derived from Persian “paradise,” Figure 1) or President Bush’s “Top Gun” landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln just three weeks later to proclaim that he and the American military had accomplished their divinely ordained mission to liberate Iraq and to bring God’s gift of freedom to that nation’s benighted people (Figures 2 and 3).

Also relevant are the infamous photos taken by members of the 372nd Military Police Company shortly after they assumed control of Tier 1A at the Abu Ghraib prison on October 15, 2003. Over the next month, members of this unit staged and photographed various scenes that construed Iraqi captives as bestial and lowly (Figure 4), dark and demonic (Figure 5), sexually repressed, but secretly lascivious and perverse (Figure 6), filthy (Figure 7), weak and easily scared (Figure 8). In most instances, the Iraqis were naked and cowering; in all, they were—or were made to seem—humiliated, demoralized, craven, and thoroughly dominated by the superior power of America, as represented by its tall, strong, happy soldiers.46 [ ]

Only when Seymour Hersh, our modern Ctesias, secured publication of these photos were the signs of hero and villain inverted, so that a broad audience could read the story as one of moral depravity. While I share that reaction at a visceral level, for analytical purposes I find it important to combine the initial intent of the photos with their subsequent reinscription to make a more complex point, with which I will conclude this essay. What we see here is the way moral depravity and moral confidence (or the simulacrum thereof) are dialectically related: how they produce and reproduce each other through a variety of discourses (spectacular, obscene, aestheticizing, parodic, solemn, carnivalesque, official, improvised, etc.), all of which help relieve the leaders and foot soldiers of empire from those inconvenient reservations and qualms that might otherwise inhibit their effective, relatively guilt-free exercise of the brutish and brutalizing power necessary for the conquest and maintenance of empire.