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In Hijacking History, Liane Tanguay unravels the ideology behind an American enterprise unprecedented in scope, ambition, and brazen claim to global supremacy: the War on Terror. She argues that the fears, anxieties, and even the hopes encoded in American popular culture account for the public's passive acceptance of the Bush administration's wars overseas and violation of many of the rights, privileges, and freedoms they claimed to defend.
Liane Tanguay has taken the time to answer some questions about her book and the War on Terror.
Hijacking History is an
interdisciplinary look at the War on Terror through the lens of cultural and
media studies. What inspired you to write this book?
I flew to Manchester from Toronto to begin
my postgraduate studies on September 13, 2001 – my flight was either the first
or second out of the country after all planes were grounded on the morning of
the 11th. I was starting an M.A. in English and had some vaguely
formulated plans to study contemporary literature in the context of electronic
media, but like many of my peers and mentors I was increasingly concerned with
the events that were unfolding in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. I was
fortunate enough to meet the right people and be in the right environment to bring
these concerns to bear on my studies. What started as a Master’s dissertation
on CNN in the first year following 9/11 became a doctoral thesis on the broader
cultural contexts of American foreign policy under Bush. Global events aren’t
constrained by academic timelines, so in 2006 when the extent of the failure in
Iraq became abundantly clear and as opposition grew more vocal and substantial
even in America, it seemed to me I had to pursue my line of inquiry beyond the
parameters of the thesis (completed early that year) and into the present. The
result was this book, which, though it still (by necessity) draws a line at the
end of the Bush presidency, was able to capture much more of the dissent and
its cultural mechanisms than the thesis had been able to do.
You
argue that the American cultural mainstream was seduced into allowing a rising
American death toll and dissolution of core American values as a result of the
War on Terror. What would you say were the main driving forces behind this
seduction? Who were the key players involved?
It’s tempting to just blame “the media”,
but we have to view the media in conjunction with the specific historical
circumstances in which these events unfolded. By historical I mean social and
economic, more specifically the present stage of capitalism – what some have
called “late” capitalism, rather optimistically I fear, and others call
“global” capitalism, or “finance” capitalism, or “post-industrialism,” etc.,
all referring to the stage of capitalism that corresponds to what in cultural
terms is known as postmodernism. Add to this the accelerating and intensifying
effects of our communications technologies, which collapse our decision-making
and temporal horizons into an immediate and endless sort of present at the same
time as they create a global marketplace that transcends spatial limitations
and international borders. The commercial and the cultural are increasingly
integrated in this transnational hyperspace in ways that are most immediately
obvious to privileged Western societies, to be sure, and that have also already
been the subject of endless analysis and debate over the past several decades.
I describe this era and its corresponding “structure of feeling” in some detail
in the book and would find it hard to summarize that discussion here. But the
particular resonance the media have – and I focus mainly on the “mainstream”
media, not the independent media that we usually find online and that tend to
present the alternative viewpoints –
results from the extent to which they are interpenetrated with the range of our
lived experience as subjects of a post-industrial/globalized/late capitalist
world. The messages they convey must take root in what we know and live in
order to be as persuasive and compelling and consumable as they are. It helps
when “history” as we understand it would seem to bear out in concrete,
narrative terms – to validate – our intuitions about the world and our place in
it, intuitions that arise from these same “structures of feeling.” The book
argues that even though media have long served the interests of the ruling
class, often in times of war and always with exceptions, the end of the Cold
War marked the perfect convergence of historical, technological, ideological,
and cultural developments; and that 9/11 was not the historical rupture it was
seen to be but in fact fit seamlessly into what had preceded it and what was to
follow.
I see more “forces” than “players” at work,
though players – like the more prominent members of the Bush entourage, Rove,
Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. – certainly have a guiding hand in it. Unfathomably
powerful interests have been served by this war; conspiracy theorists are not
always that far off the mark. But these players wouldn’t get very far in terms
of popular support without the necessary conditions being in place – and these
are the conditions I describe in my book. Another of those conditions,
unfortunately for them, was that America appeared to be winning the war, and by
the time of the 2008 election this was patently not the case. By then, of
course, the damage had been done, and the profits reaped.
What
is the current status of the War on Terror today? How have shifting values in
the media changed public perception?
There is a bit of a chicken/egg relationship
between public perception and values in the media. The media do shape public
perception, but they are not monolithic, nor are they the only shaping factor.
Since the media are producers of commodities, they have to “sell” their
products to viewers and therefore must appeal in some way to changing
perceptions. It certainly became more obvious towards the end of the Bush
presidency that the war in Iraq was not working out, was costing too much and
was taking too many American lives. Even those media outlets that had made the
most vocal case for war in the first place could not deny that the war was not
having its desired effects. This effective defeat, among other egregious
failures of the Bush era, paved the way for Obama’s victory on a platform of “hope”
and “change.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the media embraced different
values – Fox remains after all Fox – but MSNBC only really gained in popularity
towards the end of the Bush years when it began to define itself along
distinctly progressive lines. By 2010 the former “website with a cable channel”
was outranking CNN in prime time viewership, and it is catching up to Fox in
key demographics.
Obama does not use the phrase “War on
Terror,” and he has distanced himself from the Bush-style “shock and awe”
campaigns that led to the crises in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are still
troops in Afghanistan and the US has built an embassy the size of Vatican City
in Baghdad, but we don’t hear of it very often. We generally have to go online
and look for that information. The “War on Terror” has given way to “overseas
contingency operations,” which is another way of saying targeted assassinations
and smaller-scale missions about which the less is known, from the
administration’s perspective, the better – because in international legal terms
they aren’t really on any more solid ground than Bush was when he led the
charge to invade Iraq. Instead of a front-and-centre, spectacular global
venture we now have a low-profile, targeted strategy that depends on secrecy
and concealment. It took several years for the Obama administration to even
admit to the use of drones in targeted killings, let alone to the extent of
their use, which is actually fairly well documented, if you know where to look.
But drones don’t have the human interest
factor of invasion/occupation narratives, or of piloted airstrikes. There is no
“victory narrative” to frame the use of UAVs because the pilot is seated safely
at a computer terminal thousands of kilometres away. It is also difficult to
narrativize in that it defies the older logic of war between nation-states –
the war itself is undeclared.
Another factor is simply that attention has
shifted to matters closer to home, to the economic crisis and recession.
Obama’s “overseas contingency operations” are simply not spectacular enough to
distract from what is happening at home, nor – unlike the spectacles of
Afghanistan or the “shock and awe” in Iraq, are they supposed to.
Are
there important aspects of the War on Terror that you think the public is
generally unaware of? What messages do you hope Hijacking History will bring to readers?
There is nothing in Hijacking History about
the historical facts of the war itself that isn’t already known and public,
even if it’s not mainstream knowledge; but the purpose of the book was more to
bring to awareness the ways in which we are conditioned to interpret and accept
events like 9/11 and the ensuing wars in culturally specific ways, which in
itself is nothing new but which I have explored in relation to a very specific
set of circumstances. Hijacking History
is meant as a contribution to the literature that explores our lived
environment, the aspects of experience we take for granted or simply don’t
notice, and the ways in which we uncritically lend support to this or that
agenda without ever questioning or even being aware of the cultural assumptions
behind it.
I believe that many people, even people who
acknowledge that the media are manipulative and biased and dysfunctional as a
nervous system for our present democracy, do not recognize how truly pernicious
their effects are – as if just by ignoring them, or by researching alternative
sources online, we can somehow access the “truth” of a matter and be free from
ideological manipulation by the corporate news networks. I think this comes
partly from our continuing tendency to compartmentalize, as if we can study
“the media” as an object distinct from other cultural objects. The media are
not simply a mouthpiece for this or that dominant view. They are structurally,
cognitively and perceptually all-encompassing so that our deepest cultural
biases and assumptions, those of which we are most blissfully unaware,
constantly feed into and are fed by them. Moreover their products are
commodities through and through, so that regardless of their specific content
or overt political bias they are nonetheless designed as means for their own
consumption. Even dissent needs a market – it needs to be commercially viable.
The profit imperative inevitably circumscribes the debate and limits what can
be thought and said about the issues and decisions that ultimately affect us
all.
How
has the portrayal of warfare in film and/or television changed over the course
of the past decade?
We still have blockbusters that glorify war
and vilify or criminalize “others” – often still Muslims, as has been the case
since the end of the Cold War and even before. But in the latter half of the
past decade we saw more films that refused to take part in this glorification –
and some that opposed it outright (Redacted
comes to mind as a particularly wrenching critique of both the war and the
media). Of course there were films that were critical of the war in Vietnam as
well, even if Rambo hit the scene shortly after to reassert a particularly
masculine, individualist and militarist ideal. Neither pro-war nor anti-war
films are really anything new since film began, but the films and television
series that began emerging towards the end of Bush’s second term were decidedly
more ambiguous if not plainly critical of American militarism. One thing that
tends to happen is that the “victory narrative” typical of pro-war visual
entertainment since the days of the newsreels is subverted by a self-awareness
that exposes the artificiality of all narratives (Redacted, for instance) or undone by a story that refuses us the
usual narrative satisfactions. The Hurt
Locker certainly reaped a lot of criticism for being ostensibly pro-war,
but critics seemed to ignore the lack of narrative closure, of any clear moral
victory, of any hero (in the sense of either a competent leader or even an
individual in control of his own destiny). I too have some problems with the
film, and I don’t pretend to know what Bigelow had in mind (I never take a
director’s claim to present a situation “as it is” at face value, for obvious
reasons). But I don’t think the film would have won an Oscar had it come out in
2003.
While
your book focuses mostly on American culture, what can be said of public
opinion in Canada? Were Canadians subject to the same media-driven shaping of
political ideologies and values?
In some ways Canada is very close
ideologically to America. But what Canada lacks (for the better, I’m sure) is
America’s exceptionalism, in more than one sense of the word: not only the
sense of chosenness but the sense of being above the law, of having recourse to
truly exceptional measures. This particular understanding of one’s nation as
supremely destined to global leadership, as destined through sacrifice to save
the world from its darker elements, is largely foreign to Canada. Though we
probably reacted in similar ways on 9/11, and we went into Afghanistan
willingly and with the blessing of (much of) the international community, we
were prudent enough to decline to accompany our neighbours into Iraq. Now,
Canada may certainly position itself differently in the international community
under a Harper government, one that has adopted a more aggressive stance, that
emphasizes at home the country’s military history and tries to create in the
national consciousness an American-style revolutionary origin where in fact
there never was one; but in general this hasn’t sat well with Canadians, whose
national identity – I use that term loosely – is not married to any notions of
manifest destiny or a revolutionary break from the old world. Far more has been
said about the cultural and ideological differences between Canadians and
Americans than I could possibly account for here, but certainly it is safe to
say that apart from registering shock at the attacks we did not respond from
the same cultural place.
In terms of the media I noticed early on
that Canadian (and foreign) media were covering aspects of the crisis that the
American media left untouched – aspects as basic as the CIA’s longstanding
involvement in Afghanistan, the “backstory” that would have provided some
context to the 9/11 attacks. I am not an expert on the differences between
American and Canadian media, though I would point out that our public
broadcaster is our principal broadcaster and doesn’t answer to the same
ownership structures as the main networks south of the border; it tends not to
stray too far from the centre, trying, as befits a public broadcaster, to be
most things to most people. Our corporate networks may lean a bit more towards
this or that end of the spectrum but nonetheless stay fairly close to the
centre as well (with SunTV a recent, and not particularly successful,
exception; there is definitely a book to be written on the “Fox of the North”
and why American-style conservatism tends not to thrive on this side of the
border).
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