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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Zona Roja
The Future is War
Friday, 2008-03-28 | Zona Roja
| I've seen the future brother: it is murder. |
In her totally fucking sweet book, The Shock Doctrine expert witness, socialist agitator and punk rocker Naomi Klein characterizes the heavily fortified "Green Zone" in Baghdad as something of a prototype.
In the book, she writes thus of the Green Zone phenomenon:
At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.
Barring her thesis and her rhetoric (both of which have their time and place--and this ain't either) and leaving the explanation of "the disaster capitalism complex" and the politics of inclusion/exclusion (salvation/damnation) in post-disaster reconstruction situations to one side, let's dig into the idea of the Green Zone as a "phenomenon" or, as I'm about to argue, as prototype.
Basically, we're going to stop thinking about the Green Zone and start thinking about a Green Zone.
In a Harper's article from a while back where she riffs on Baghdad's Green Zone, Klein calls Iraq's Green Zone a "city within a city", describes how the American occupation's leadership were billeted there and, crucially, makes mention of its heavy military fortifications--bulwarks against insurgent fighters.
But there's more to those fortifications than simple military expedience.
It's noting that these fortifications are more than just perimeter defenses: they're more than walls designed to help hold a defensive position. The walls of a Green Zone are more like bulwarks than, say, breastworks or ramparts: they are bulwarks in a very literal sense. Just as the bulwarks of a ship keep the water out and the passengers in, the fortifications of a Green Zone keep insiders from being swept out (and lost) and they keep outsiders from making their way in, undermining the Green Zone and overwhelming the insiders.
The implications of the walls of a Green Zone are more than merely military; more importantly than any of that, they're political and social barriers.
So, synthesizing that notion and the excerpt from her (totally sweet) book, we can recognize types of that prototypical Green Zone in Iraq by the following characteristics:
1.) Green Zones emerge from turmoil and upset.
2.) Green Zones are superimposed upon inhabited, urban areas, in spite of the inhabitants of those areas.
3.) Green Zones are where you find the forces of "order". The occupiers hole up in the Green Zone and make policy decisions--decisions about that which is to happen without--from within.
4.) Green Zones are heavily fortified and the fortifications serve as a social and political barrier as much as a military one.
If the analogical imposition of "brain is to body" as "one particular building is to urban center" is an easy fit, then you're dealing with a Green Zone. If you're looking at an urban landscape and a civic body's agency is centralized and isolated in the midst of that civic body, you've got yourself a Green Zone.
And thus we arrive at a point I intend to dwell upon at greater length in the future: Green Zones are the way of the future.
And not just for "disaster" areas and the Third World. It's my sincere hope that Green Zones will start popping up all over the American landscape.
As the federal government grows increasingly toothless in its old age and the Mega Corps continue to lose control over the distribution of "intellectual property", I hope that the Mega Corps will simply elect to cut bait and quit waiting on the federalis to wage their wars on the free and democratic exchange of ideas the way they ought to be waged and to keep their revenue streams from drying up.
In the future--the more-or-less immediate future--I see city states. I see the influence of the Mega Corps radiating out from America's urban centers. I see privately owned and operated organizations calling the shots from within Green Zones that take the shape of skyscrapers. Where there were once divided civic bodies with as many conflicting wills as there were enfranchised individuals, I see single corporate heads that answer to no lesser an authority than ol' Mammon Himself willing vast, docile consumer populations.
And, most importantly, I see an American insurgency ringing those Green Zones in Red.
