Enduring Freedom: War, Corporate Television, and the Delusion of the Delusion

Year 2001, Issue: 14, 35 - 50, 01.10.2001

Gerhard Richter

Abstract

When the policy and propaganda divisions of the current Bush Administration set out to generate a rhetoric that could be mobilized to inaugurate a new “foreign policy” in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, they inadvertently radicalized Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of truth as a “moveable army of metaphors and metonymies” by instrumentalizing this concept to achieve a clearly stated set of interlocking stratagems: to reinterpret the meaning of “terrorism,” to establish precedent for the disregard of international law and the will of the electorate, and to rule the global community by force.[1] In the months leading up to the second Gulf War, elements of this rhetoric were mobilized to justify any number of highly questionable maneuvers, ranging from the attack on Afghanistan to the inhumane treatment of Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, a treatment that was legitimized by the Administration through a particularly narrow and aberrant interpretation of the Geneva Convention, limiting POW status—and, effectively, the human rights of prisoners—to combatants deriving from conventionally recognized nation states.

Keywords

Enduring, Freedom, Corporate Television