vivian shaw

Militarizing Nostalgia: “Allies” in Libya, Media, and Memory

Does neoliberal media miss the good ol’ days of military yore? In following the coverage of the U.S.-led military intervention in Libya, I’ve been struck by a widespread revival of Allies as a term describing Western coordination. With 2/3rds of the Big Three (plus France) involved, the term not only applies a geographic specificity, but quite importantly, loads a historical symbolism onto the invasion. Allies linguistically resurrects the geopolitical binary of World War II, a political theorizing of space that, through its memorialization, continues to bifurcate the globe into moral halves—the good, free West securing its defense against the bad, encroaching despotism of Axis power.

If we recognize neoliberal media as a constellation of political soft power, specifically promoting Western political and economic projects, there’s utility in this reference. (Check out the media’s own linguistic “alliance”: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, BBC, and Bloomberg.) The media’s allusion to World War II as an ethical typology sorting nations into good and bad has operated throughout the many wars of my generation. Now Muammar Gaddafi elicits comparisons to Hitler, but previously, Saddam Hussein wore that honor and Kim Jong Il does too, on occasion. The same vocabulary constructs the Axis of Evil and, more broadly, understandings of the role of militarization in “enforcing” human rights. Whereas Axis language might be applicable for any regime deserving our horror, Allies suggests a stable location within Western righteousness (of course, with the Cold War utterly abjecting Russia from that picture). For while those mysterious enemies might creep quietly across “dark continents,” We can always know, and claim who We are.

Nostalgia does not simply remember the past, it memorializes what we conceive to have lost. Arguably, the West’s crisis of legitimacy is the project attended through the media’s current preference for Allied language. World War II has been core to the ideological rooting of American Exceptionalism—a moral supremacy that now peels at its veneer, particularly worn during the Bush Years. Perhaps Allies is a desperate move, designed for stirring a citizenry that—across its political spectrum—is fatigued by the seeming endlessness of our military involvements in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Even in this stage, public favor for our intervention into Libya is noticeably low in the U.S. and the U.K. Worse than duration is an unsparing cynicism, a sense of betrayal among soldiers and voters who quite realize their sacrifices (and those of occupied communities) pay forward the securities of a global elite, and not their own.

But as a colleague of mine recently pointed out, nostalgia is deceptive: glorifying a history as it never was. The topic emerged out of a discussion about Mad Men. Readers of Racialicious will be familiar with the argument—that the show’s guise of critiquing 1960s advertising culture through exposition entirely belies its neoliberal celebration of all privileges “lost” through the decades—patriarchy, unregulated desires, and a near-totality of whiteness. It may seem like scripted television and war have very little to do with one another, but Mad Men offers clues about how war traumas could possibly memorialize as worthy of remembrance and re-living. Nostalgia is dispensed through aesthetics, and in the case of Mad Men, beauty—those gorgeous actors and their tailored clothes, the glossiness of the film—offers its most beguiling scent. Further, in memorializing the pleasures of hetereosexual, white men, Mad Men fetishes its erasure of marginalized narratives. Implicitly, those untold stories of black and brown protagonists, feminists, queer love, appear nowhere (or seldom) in the Mad Men logic not simply because they are “minority experiences,” but as a result of their un-sexiness, their inability to seduce a market of viewers who are foremost invested in white, American beauty.

We can bridge this understanding of how culture and politics often marry at the site of aesthetic production to our analysis of Libya. To what extent does World War II nostalgia—distributed in texts with a range including Hemingway, Saving Private Ryan, and video game Call of Duty—premise itself on beauty? The beauty of honor, bravery, bellicose morality. If blood-for-oil offends us as an ugly perversion of our democracy’s ethical might, we might consider that war is never divested of economic interest, nor that the organizing motivations of war are ever democratic. Not simply now, but in the obscured war rooms of the mid-twentieth century, too.

Language, in the case of Libya and other wars, is not itself the engine of militaristic nostalgia: it is the arrow pointing us toward what we already remember. In other words, if we are indeed curious about the media’s ability to power softly in times of war, we must examine the cultural production of war and American exceptionalism as a memoir project. Here is our new moral imperative: to dig out and name those structures and interests invested in the cosmetics of war—so righteous, so just, so worthy of sacrifice.