Virtuous War
Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network
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- $72.99
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- $72.99
Publisher Description
Virtuous War is the first book to map the emergence and judge the consequences of a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. James Der Derian takes the reader from a family history of war and genocide to new virtual battlespaces in the Mojave Desert, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and American universities. He tracks the convergence of cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, war movies, and do-good ideologies that produced a chimera of high-tech, low-risk ‘virtuous wars’.
In this newly updated edition, he reveals how a misguided faith in virtuous war to right the wrongs of the world instead paved the way for a flawed response to 9/11 and a disastrous war in Iraq. Blinded by virtue, emboldened by technological superiority, seized by a mimetic terror, the US blundered from one foreign fiasco to the next.
Taking the long view as well as getting up close to the war machine, Virtuous War provides a compelling alternative to the partisan politics, instant analysis and technical fixes that currently bedevil US national security policy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Just months after David Mamet's film Wag the Dog represented spin doctors manufacturing a virtual war to distract Americans from a potential presidential sex scandal, former President Clinton's foreign policy came to be viewed through that lens. This eye-opening, entertaining and sobering study of the increasing "virtualization" of American politics and of war in particular via media manipulation makes an important contribution to political, media and social studies. Picking up cultural theorist Walter Benjamin's 1939 concern about the social impact of a "new and incestuous relationship between mass politics and the mass means of reproduction," Derian explores a wide range of theories and their applications. Dashing from French postmodern theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, FelixGuattari, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault and film theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer to such mainstream movies as Diehard, Red Dawn and Full Metal Jacket, Derian offers a sustained, complex investigation of how the "virtual" elements of our culture are quickly having an impact on our actual national policy and imagination. After discussing how famed "mud soldier" General Schwarzkopf was the first "cyberpunk general," using computer war games to plan U.S. troop motions (and how Iran's invasion of Kuwait had already been mapped out on a computer simulation purchased from a Washington, D.C., firm), he moves on to how the 1987 Wall Street crash was a result of "program trading," in which buying and selling was triggered automatically by software programs. No Luddite or isolationist, Derian simply encourages public awareness of how our perceptions of the world can be manipulated and altered, and of how such manipulation smoothes the way for catastrophes like Hiroshima and the Holocaust.
