“Face to Face”

Abstract

the ruthlessness of our attempts be rid of [unconscious impulses] ... might be one reason why illegally occupying armies, who can neither settle nor face their own conscience, become so brutalized--it their own discomfort they are trying erase. --Jacqueline Rose (1) To be in relation with the other face face be unable kill. --Emmanuel Levinas (2) During 1970, hundreds of thousands of United States citizens marched in protest against atrocities committed in Vietnam by U.S. soldiers brutalized by a situation that rendered them victims of their government's projections of fear and terror. In that year, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the shooting of protestors on college campuses by the National Guard were further rungs on the ladder of escalation. An earlier rung had been reached with the publication of horrific photographs of Vietnamese burn victims, including children, caused by the U.S. use of napalm, which provoked new forms of artists' dissent in 1967. Then, in late 1969, color images of the My Lai Massacre reproduced in Life magazine regalvanized artists and intellectuals utilize photographs of atrocities and their perpetrators force members of the government and the military face their own consciences and mobilize support for the anti-war movement. Consider, for example, the face of Lieutenant William Galley, leader of the platoon responsible for the killings at My Lai, reprinted as masks be worn on the back of protestors' heads in 1970 and '71. His eyes' blank circles metaphorically represented him as unable look at, see, be face-to-face with the Other in Vietnam. Judith Butler writes that for Emmanuel Levinas, the face is that vocalization of agony that not yet language or no longer language, the one by which we are wakened the precariousness of the Other's life, the one that rouses at once the temptation murder and the interdiction against it. (3) There a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence. The fear of one's own death could be overcome by obliterating the Other, but this might require a need to keep obliterating, especially if there are four hundred men behind him, and they all have families and friends, if not a nation or two behind them. (4) THE KILL TEAM PHOTOGRAPHS In early 2011, photographs of U.S. atrocities in Afghanistan, leaked by investigative journalists and freedom of information organizations, dominated public debates about the war on terror (5) and the nature of effective dissent. Inevitably, these revelations evoked those during the Vietnam War and raised questions about responses by artists, writers, and intellectuals--then and now. In May 1971, the New York Review of Books published a letter from Robert Lowell, poet and dissenter, after President Nixon had effectively pardoned Calley. The relevance of Lowell's letter for 2011 could be grounds for melancholy: His atrocity cleared by the President, public, polls, rank and file of the right and left. ... Our nation looks up heaven, and puts her armies above the law. No stumbling on the downward plunge from Hiroshima. Retribution someone somewhere else and we are young. In a century perhaps no one will widen an eye at massacre, and only scattered corpses express a last histrionic concern for death. (6) At the end of March 2011, Naomi Wolf considered the recent scandal surrounding atrocity photographs taken in early 2010 by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, which were first published in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel on March 21, 2011. The magazine reported that it had obtained four thousand photographs and videos taken by a self-styled Kill Team, and reproduced three images, digitally blurring the faces of Afghan victims. (7) Between January and May 2010, members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, [2.sup.nd] Infantry Division, conspired target civilians, kill them, and make their deaths appear be those of insurgents. …