The Brooklyn Rail

I wish I could remember when it was that I saw Sun Tzu’s The Art of War available for purchase in every train station and airport bookshop I walked through. It feels like it must have been after September 2001, but it could have been a bit before. The book was not there for political reasons (at least not of the overt, party-politics sort). It was there to tickle the ego of those who fancied themselves future oligarchs, people who would likely never take up arms for any country or cause but who craved the spoils of capitalist victory. And it was always sitting on a shelf next to books about business and management, or tucked between biographies of tycoons. The marketing copy on the back would inevitably make some alliterative conjecture about Sun’s words being useful both in battle and the boardroom, because of course running a business is an act of war.

At some point I remember picking up one edition or another, skimming through it, trying to understand why it was supposed to be so appealing to those in transit.

World of WarCraft, the most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game of all time, launched in 2004. In order to play, a person had to create an avatar—their alternate self for this alternate universe. Creating the avatar involved choosing a faction, then a race (these were many, including such options as orc, troll, human, or elf), and also a class (the selection of classes was limited depending on which race you chose). This particular game-logic seems to have been devised without any irony at all. Importantly, people from differing factions cannot speak to one another—their means of communicating is limited to “emotes”¹ such as “/cackle” or "/bark" or "/grovel," which signify actions more than articulate messages. In other words, given the inability to communicate in a shared language, each faction is left to interpret the others’ actions as they will, to craft a narrative of their own devising.

The word “craft” connotes a kind of highly skilled labor. A person who has honed a craft is a person who has spent significant time and effort to build a skill, developing the muscle memory that allows for what’s often termed a “flow state”—the body and brain being so attuned to a particular task that one no longer needs to command the hand to move the shuttle through the warp of the weaving, but instead an ingrained physical and psychic (il)logic usurps conscious, labored thought; movement and the inarticulate vision dictating that movement align to render a thing in the real world that couldn’t have arrived without all that came before—all the training, practice, development of technique and habit of thought. It’s one of the few areas where North Americans will allow that the mind and body are actually one.

Something must be rendered in physical reality, even if only through the movement of hands over a keyboard and the recording of the data on a hard drive. Actions are taken in order to manifest the desired form, craft is tied to consequence, results that live in the world.

Art and craft are not the same, but they are often related.

How much war would it take to become a craftsperson? How practiced can one be in mass murder?

If streaming services are any indication, US culture is obsessed with “true crime” stories. And yet, virtually none of those television shows, films, or podcasts, revolve around the people who have the chance to practice death at the highest level—soldiers, and more directly, the people who command them. As with so much of our popular political imagination, we prefer the bounded space of personal conflict, of foisting individuals and small groups against one another in ways that almost always manage to sidestep larger social realities. Seemingly contained conflicts, within homes, particular corners of a city, isolated communities, or between neighbors, that intentionally avoid the encroachment of societal limitations, except as a vague context—never, for instance, tying white collar crime and exploitation (so rarely prosecuted or even considered to be criminal activity) to the inevitable consequences of engrained poverty, or elucidating the kind of killing that’s orchestrated by the state and enacted by infantrymen sold an education, a salary, healthcare for life, and even citizenship, all for the low, low price of their lives and well-being. Far more fun to stay with a psychodrama.

From the Lionel Giles translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “All warfare is based on deception.”

As I type these words there six active conflicts underway on Earth in which at least 10,000 people per conflict were killed in 2023: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, Myanmar’s Civil War, the insurgencies in the Maghreb region of Northern Africa (which crosses into seven different countries), internal conflicts within Ethiopia, and the ongoing war in Sudan. There are additional armed conflicts of varying sizes and death rates in places such as Mexico, Colombia, Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Syria, Haiti, and Yemen. And then, of course, there is the violent rule of leaders in countries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Turkey, among others, and the right-wing populist leaders and would-be leaders actively stoking political violence, from right here in the US, to places like Argentina, the Netherlands, and Hungary.

If all war is based on deception, who is being deceived? The most obvious deception is aimed at the enemy—finding an advantage through surprise or subterfuge or an unexpected stronger arm. But the Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine wars offer many lessons about the primary deception: deception of the aggressor’s population and allies. The same has been true in countless wars (if not every war), including the war that followed the events of September 11, 2001—during which the then-leaders of the US famously ginned up lies and bloodlust for places and people who had nothing to do with hijacked planes and fallen buildings. War propaganda is aimed first and foremost at those who must do and pay for the fighting, who must be turned into killers and accessories to death. There must be no questioning of the authorities who command and no pause for the humanity of those being killed. The deception begins most pointedly by defining and then othering the enemy.

Among the darkest and truest books I’ve come across about the potential for evil among humans is Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect. It’s a long and bracing read that takes in genocide, torture, rape as a weapon of war, and the reality that every single one of us is capable of enacting the horrors he describes. Published in 2007, it was Zimbardo’s first time writing for the public about his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.

The Experiment took place in August 1971 on the campus of Stanford University in the Bay Area of northern California, and though it was planned to last two weeks, it devolved into abuse and humiliation by day two and was shut down completely on the sixth day. The structure was relatively straightforward: volunteers (primarily from the local community and some from the university), were randomly assigned roles as either guards or prisoners, and then they were brought into the basement of a campus building that had been roughly staged as a pseudo-prison. The purpose of the experiment was to see how the power of even a fictional prison-lite situation would alter participants’ perspectives and behaviors (whether or not this was a plausible or achievable purpose given Zimbardo’s designs is a matter of debate, but certainly the situation participants found themselves in elicited noteworthy reactions).

What’s fascinating to me about the book, published thirty-six years after the Experiment took place, is that the thing that prompted Zimbardo to write it, to revisit the temporary hell he constructed, was the public release in April 2004 of numerous photographs depicting the torture, abuse, and humiliation of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—prisoners captured and held by the US military. The particular public fascination with these photographs was not just the obvious horror of what those being held in captivity were made to endure, but the fact of the photos themselves, an inordinate number of which depicted US military personnel not only actively engaging in abuses, but smiling into the camera, raising a thumbs up over prone and sometimes dead bodies, not only recording their crimes, but seeming to delight in them.

From Zimbardo: “One thesis of this book is that most of us know ourselves only from our limited experiences in familiar situations that involve rules, laws, policies, and pressures that constrain us. We go to school, to work, on vacation, to parties: we pay the bills and the taxes, day in and year out. But what happens when we are exposed to totally new and unfamiliar settings where our habits don’t suffice? … Throughout our journey I would like you to continually ask the ‘Me also?’ question as we encounter various forms of evil.”

Among other things, our fixation with true crime reveals, to some extent, the ways in which we love to play with questions of good versus bad. True crime narratives almost always involve murder and/or sexual violence or exploitation. It’s a titillating genre, combining elements of soap opera, soft porn, and mystery, ultimately providing the promise of resolution that is similar to the lure of procedural dramas (courtroom, police, or medical shows), where a crisis is introduced, but more importantly, resolved, through prosecution, arrest of the “bad guys,” or life-saving surgery. Our cortisol (stress hormone) levels rise, we wonder and worry how it will all turn out, and then that glorious little dopamine hit comes when it all gets wrapped up, the big bad mess is tidied, and we can go to bed.

Of course, in true crime, the real focus is on the imagined motivations for the crime; the storytellers claim they can inhabit, or at least approximate, the inner world of the person who did the deed. While the “how” is very much a subject of these tales, true crime has a particular fascination with the “why,” it revels in imagining the reasons a person might be driven to such an act. And I make the assumption (which I welcome others to challenge) that at least some small part of the allure of the shows is the conversation viewers have with themselves in which they compare their thoughts and actions with the person being depicted, at least vaguely calling up moments when any of us have entertained violent fantasies, and to ask what is the difference between me and that person. But in many cases, the container holding the story often serves to close the door to our own darkness; it seems to reassure us that we are not the one who commits the crime, that we don’t let ourselves go, that while we may relate in some ways to these people, we are good, they are bad. As Zimbardo puts it: “Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special. These self-serving protective shields allow us to believe that each of us is above average on any test of self-integrity.”

The desire to categorize people as good or bad, or even as controlled and uncontrolled, is tied directly to that exceptionalism we grant ourselves. We generally know that we are fallible, but we still reach toward a good/bad binary rather than swimming in the murkier reality. In truth, there is only gray area. As Maggie Nelson puckishly puts it in her book On Freedom: “Our desire to treat everyone with compassion, kindness, and forgiveness and to throw harmful assholes off a cliff is a big koan.”

Perhaps it’s my queerness, and more particularly my intimate adjacency to trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people who are subject to violent gender expectations, but anytime I encounter righteous rejection that carries a homicidal edge, I operate under the knee-jerk assumption that the person threatening or enacting violence is confronting fears within or about themselves. This isn’t to say they are necessarily queer themselves, but rather that they, like all of us, are living within the confines of systems that are ill-suited to full expressions of humanity in general. We live in a world that is wildly constricted, that other people across every aspect of their humanity, that polices even our fantasies, and living within those systems of constriction has a habit of producing more, not less, violence.

Compliance, or the appearance thereof, is a craft all its own.

In December, the Writers Against the War on Gaza Instagram account posted reflections from Palestinian-American performance artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, including these:

• “Craft is a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures; it is a counterrevolutionary machine.”²
• “If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberators tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.”

In the cycles of endless crisis we experience today, it feels hard to hold onto care about art, about craft, about any of it, when the rush to death feels so intractable, the slaughter so unmitigated, and the adding on of new problems and disasters so relentless. The wars that catch our attention eclipse the wars that were already there, the wars that never stop, the mass extinction that marches on, the yawning chasm of inequity, the… You know the litany, I hardly need to say it. There is no craft in it. It is a blunt instrument, a dirge nobody wants to sing, reminding us of the brute realities we face.

I take Tbakhi to mean by “Craft” the narrative forms, language, and methods of expression that predominate within white, Euro-centric, colonial traditions—the kinds of storytelling that produce the history and narrative that Isreal uses to justify apartheid and the genocide of Palestinians, the Craft that launched the US war with Iraq, Craft as propaganda, Craft as an appeal to power, an appeal to hold power, an appeal to the guilt and fear of others holding power who have themselves committed atrocities. Selective and self-serving, this Craft is a project aimed explicitly at creating narratives that preserve a false hierarchy and illegitimate claim to things that ought to belong to everyone instead of only a select few: land, air, water, sustenance, the right to exist. It creates a coalition of the horrible who call their horrors righteous and in gathering together prop up their exceptional view of the horrors they enact, as if those horrors themselves are acts of kindness, benevolence.

Howard Zinn is a figure I came to know in college, a gangly older white man known for illuminating the sides of history that do not prop up the aggressor. When I learned about him I didn’t know his path into history came through his own actions. The child of Jewish parents who immigrated to the US before the start of World War I, Zinn enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and became a bomber in World War II. His famously strong anti-war sentiments came in large part from his firsthand experience of being an instrument of war, of committing atrocities himself. Reading his 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, particularly the chapter “Violence: The Moral Equation,”³ it is notable how clear he is about the pivotal role of the central deception, the true art and craft of war. A couple of brief excerpts:

I don’t remember having any hesitation about releasing those fire-bombs. And since that day I have never doubted that all of us are capable of the most atrocious acts—not because our intent is evil, but because it is so good. We set laudable ultimate goals, and these enable us to proceed to the most ruthless acts without scrupulously making sure they lead to those goals.

Historical perspective is sobering. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai, when the Italians bombed Addis Ababa, when Fascist planes bombed Guernica, when the Nazis bombed Warsaw, Coventry, London—the civilized world reacted with horror. Never in history had the defenseless civilian populations of cities been the object of deliberate bombing attacks. It was not just that the Axis powers’ ends were wrong. It was that the bombing of cities was a barbarous act which by its nature could have no justification. Yet during World War II, we killed 50,000 in Hamburg in one terrible night of fire-bombs, and 80,000 in Tokyo in another nightmare of terror, and then hundreds of thousands with the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Zimbardo: “Most wars are about old men persuading young men to harm and kill other young men like themselves.”

You might also replace “old” in that sentence with “rich” and replace “young” with “poor,” because as long as the US has existed, there has been a consistent story of the wealthy and landed getting out of frontline duties. Even if they do get conscripted or choose to enlist, the educated and wealthy most often shift over to being commanders instead of cannon fodder. This also tracks along racial lines within the US military, with a disproportionate representation of whites among officers, and a disproportionate representation of people of color among the enlisted.

The particular form of persuasion required to draw people into war is extraordinarily consistent. It’s precisely the mindset that took shape within only 48 hours in Zimbardo’s fake prison: “Dehumanization occurs whenever some human beings consider other human beings to be excluded from the moral order of being a human person. … A Japanese general reported that it had been easy for his soldiers to brutally massacre Chinese civilians during Japan’s pre-World War II invasion of China, ‘because we thought of them as things, not people like us.’ … Recall the description…of the Tutsis by the woman who orchestrated many of the rapes of them—they were nothing more than ‘insects,’ ‘cockroaches.’ Similarly, the Nazi genocide of the Jews began by first creating through propaganda films and posters a national perception of these fellow human beings as inferior forms of animal life, as vermin, as voracious rats.”

“Such mental conditioning is a soldier’s most potent weapon. Without it, he might never put another young man in the crosshairs of his gun sight and fire to kill him.”

In case you need reminding, here are just a few quotations from the early days of Israel’s ongoing war:

• On October 9, 2023, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said of the Palestinians: “We are fighting human animals."
• On October 11, 2023, Israel’s Ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, said of the Palestinians: “This is a people who basically act as animals."
• On October 25, 2023, in a Sky News interview, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, called Palestinians “horrible, inhuman animals.”

I was talking with a friend the other day about philosophers, and I said I was particularly interested in the ways in which the ideas and theories espoused by so many did not match up with the ways in which they lived, and why they, and we, are so attached to pronouncements we make that we fail to abide by. There seems to be no philosophy to acknowledge our relentless inconsistency and illogic, our seeming inability to live up to the ideals we claim to laud.

There is Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably the most famous American philosopher to date, who is known by many to have also been an abolitionist and an independent American thinker who lauded “self-reliance” as a central tenet, yet we see in his text English Traits that he worshiped at the altar of Anglophilia⁴, writing such sycophantic lines as, “All nobility in its beginnings was somebody’s natural superiority.” And, “...in the English race it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good cheer, and a little overloaded by his flesh.” His patently undemocratic support for the particular flavor of American anti-immigrant sentiment predominant in his day comes into full view as he takes pains to explain that by “English” he really only means men from London, and certainly not from anywhere farther north or west: “In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked... In Ireland, are the same climate and soil as in England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence, small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race.”

Another highly regarded philosopher, David Hume, among the most influential to write in the English language, was famous for making the case for empiricism, i.e. we can only know what we can observe about the world through sensory experience, and we must “reject every system … however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation.” His fascination with human nature is predicated entirely upon people’s tendency toward “popular superstitions” and a desire to root out false beliefs. Yet, he himself trots right along with the then-burgeoning race hysteria (this frame for racism is one I borrow from Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’s book Racecraft), infamously noting, “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.”

These are hardly the only examples of contradiction, and race is hardly the only arena in which one finds both logical and philosophical inconsistencies, but in Hume in particular, it shows just how susceptible even someone who believes they are above propaganda is to its power.

In Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, we learn a great deal about the ways in which war propaganda works, perhaps never more so than in the moments when she calls attention to Eichmann struggling to reconcile his own inconsistencies, such as the admission that at one point he actually aided a couple of Jews in escaping the Holocaust: “This inconsistency still made him feel somewhat uncomfortable, and when he was questioned about it during cross examination, he became openly apologetic: he had ‘confessed his sins’ to his superiors.” The ‘sin’ in this context being that he helped save Jewish lives when he had been focused so obediently on the slaughter of millions.

More than once, Arendt uses the phrase “crisis of conscience” to indicate moments when Eichmann experiences dissonance between his views of Jewish people as inhuman and a subliminal instinct to recognize them as fellow humans deserving of care. The crisis of conscience is actually more explicitly a moment of confronting the lies directly, of removing the filter that the violence he enacted required, and seeing what he was doing exactly for the horror that it was.

If all war is deception, and wars are everywhere (including in the office/boardroom), and the propaganda that fuels them is omnipresent, then it is also safe to assume that deception is deeply internalized, and we are all well-versed in this particular craft, whether we are able to consciously acknowledge it or not.

We create the logic of this craft, like all crafts, through repetition.

And, as noted earlier, craft has consequences, othering has ramifications in the physical world, not only in the mind. And the reality is that craft as a concept, not a specific practice of it, is agnostic. It can be many things. It’s why those “emotes” from World of WarCraft are so perfect—they are actually just actions, requiring narrative, context.

/knuckles

/bleed

/shiver

/liedown

If we make it, can we not unmake it?

Countless essays and articles have been written on the overuse of war metaphors in the political sphere, but rarely do they talk about the fundamental othering the metaphor engenders. A “war on drugs” is aimed at annihilating anyone associated with selling or using drugs. And yet, because of the Craft at play in that particular war, we know too well that very few of the white sellers or users of drugs are locked away or punished. The Craft in that case, as it so often does, involves color and tone. Where is the craft in that recognition? Of staying in the crisis of conscience; of seeing what we’re doing for exactly what it is?

Where is the craft of rendering everyone as human? How do we learn that?

1. For a complete list of World of WarCraft emotes, visit: https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_emotes
2. https://www.instagram.com/p/C0uFggKuTrH/?img_index=2
   
3. I learned about this book and was pointed to this chapter in particular by Robin D.G. Kelley, PhD, a professor at UCLA, during a talk and subsequent panel he participated in at a symposium at Barnard College celebrating Ella Baker, and her biographer (who also is an activist and scholar), Barbara Ransby, PhD.
   
4. I have to thank Nell Irvin Painter and her book The History of White People for bringing this fuller picture of Emerson to my attention.