Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization

The return of what was once termed gunboat diplomacy in the first decade of the twenty-first century as part of the "new global order" endorsed repeatedly and abstractly by George H. W. and now George W. Bush's regimes could not have occurred without the prior work of culture. In what follows, I make a simple, important point: US cultural production, the work of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno termed "the culture industry," conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised militarism and jingoistic nationalism now driving US foreign policy (Horkheimer and Adorno 122). In its inevitably globalized forms, the US culture industry continues to produce the deep divisions between local resistance and subaltern imitation so characteristic of colonial conflicts from the age of traditional imperialism to the neo-imperialisms of our postindustrial era. And the culture industry today does its work in ways that encompass a wide range of nominally different political positions, so that in many respects Left, liberal, and conservative cultural works often achieve complementary, rather than contested, ends. In this respect, little has changed since Horkheimer and Adorno argued in 1944, "Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system" (Horkheimer and Adorno 120).

As the US military raced toward Baghdad, there was considerable criticism of the "embedded reporters" allowed to report the war under the special conditions imposed by the Pentagon and Department of Defense. Most of the criticism assumed that such reporting was biased or censored. When a Newsweek photographer was caught doctoring on his laptop a photograph of an encounter between Iraqi civilians and US military personnel, his firing seemed to vindicate the news magazine of prejudice. Antiwar activists circulated two photographs of Iraqi demonstrators tearing down a monumental statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad: The first was a familiar photograph in the news of demonstrators beating on the sculpture's foundation and then, with the help of an Abrams tank, toppling the hieratic image of the defeated dictator. In the second photograph, not displayed in the popular press or evening news, the camera provides a wide-angle view of the scene at the square, where access roads have been blocked by the US military and the "populist" demolition of the statue has been theatrically staged by US forces. In a third photograph circulated on the Internet, the same Iraqis actively involved in attacking the Baghdad statue are shown "one day earlier" in Basra, where they are preparing to board US military aircraft for transport to Baghdad—identified in this photograph as members of the "Iraqi Free Forces."¹

Such exposures of US military propaganda during the war have continued in news coverage of the putative "rebuilding" of the political and economic infrastructure in Iraq. The current debate regarding who was actually responsible for the disinformation regarding "weapons of mass destruction" used as the principal justification for the invasion of Iraq is the most obvious example of public concern regarding the federal government's veracity. For such propaganda to be successful, there must be a willing audience, already prepared for certain cultural semantics adaptable to new political circumstances and yet with sufficient "regional" relevance as to make possible the very widespread confusion between Hussein and Osama bin Laden, between a secular Iraqi state tyranny and an Islamic fundamentalist guerilla organization. How was it possible that such a preposterous war could be permitted by Congress and by the US population? The answer is not simply that the Bush administration ignored the numerous international protests of the preparations for war and its eventual conduct. Nor is the answer simply that when the war began, the Bush administration controlled the news and staged symbolic events to fool the public, although there is plenty of evidence to support these claims. The cultural preparations for a "just war" and for the US as global "policeman" did not occur overnight; they are our cultural legacy from the Vietnam War...