#war making

In the darkness of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

“The most troubling thing about tonight's missile strike on Syria is that it comes primarily as an intervention not in a Syrian armed conflict, but in the American war of public perception. It wasn't until the public was disgusted by the random outbreak of a single chemical weapons attack, repeated over and over as a depraved meme, that the Trump administration rightly understood that this was the moment to act. Scenes of mass suffering in Syria are reproduced all the time, but they rarely enter public consciousness. When they do, they matter. As Jean Baudrillard says, "only the medium can make the event."

Media drives warmaking, warmaking drives media. Paul Virilio told us a long time ago that media representation and war are deliberately and intimately connected. Today this connection is revealed in an instant, an instant that for most of us remains a hashtag, an algorithmic surplus that makes us aware, while in Syria, under at least 60 missiles, the instant is a crater of fire and blood.