Politics Violence and War
insightful
STRIPPING BARE THE BODY Politics Violence War, By Mark Danner
Mark Danner has carved out a European niche in American letters: that of the reporter who, in addition to digging up facts and getting stories, writes about the political and moral condition of his country with the intention of pushing public policy toward fundamental change. He is nothing if not ambitious, and his work straddles the subject matter and rhetoric of several disciplines: international relations, narrative journalism, opinion writing, even literary criticism. The title of his new collection of articles from two decades, “Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War,” borrows the style of countless works of poststructuralist theory. Danner has recently become an essayist with a prominent place in national debates about torture and the war on terror, and the tone of his pieces ranges from the serious to the self-serious.
Danner began as a magazine journalist, and his reportorial and narrative talents are best displayed in the first section - a three-part series, originally published in The New Yorker in 1989 (where I have been a staff writer since 2003), on the end of the rule of the Duvaliers in Haiti and the turbulent years that preceded the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. What interests Danner, in Haiti and the other brutal, brutalized countries described in this collection, isn’t people - other than the leaders interviewed, individuals are mostly absent - but the landscape of political violence. Danner’s title is meant to convey the notion that atrocities expose both the innards of a society and its power structure. Throughout these three articles, descriptive realism and political analysis are in perfect balance, and Haiti is permanently revealed.
After his work on Haiti, and his excavation of a Salvadoran army atrocity of the early 1980s (the story filled almost an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1993 and was published as a book, “The Massacre at El Mozote”), Danner turned away from eyewitness reporting. In the fourth and final section, made up of essays on the war on terror and Iraq, Danner relies on close reading of documents unearthed by investigative reporters - the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib, the Downing Street memo on planning for the invasion of Iraq - more than on his own observations.
Danner watches human struggle and misery at such a remove that he can’t resist taking issue with a young Kosovar woman who is quoted in a news article comparing her family’s expulsion from Pristina with the experiences of the Jews in World War II. “Such drawing of half-century-old parallels, of the parallel, derives in fact from a failure of memory,” Danner intones. This superior stance doesn’t flag even when Danner contradicts himself.
Most of the book is a relentless exposure of American hypocrisy, weakness and illusion across three administrations and at least five wars. Danner’s dissections of the corruption of government language are devastating: he’s a great exegete of official mendacity, with apparently endless material on hand. Since Danner the essayist doesn’t take the care to understand these societies the way that Danner the reporter did in Haiti, violence in no way strips them bare. Without individual stories or political analysis to accompany the horrifying (and numbingly repeated) descriptions, violence reveals nothing - it’s just violence.
In his introduction, Danner quotes Plato on the irresistibility of looking at dead bodies, and then he writes: “Violence horrifies us, transfixes us, draws the eye and ignites the passions; ‘overpowered by desire,’ we have no choice but to look.” But Danner’s desire doesn’t seem to come with any conflict. It’s not that he has no choice but to look - it’s that he doesn’t want to look anywhere else.
Danner published most of this work in liberal magazines, but his hero is Kennan, the author of the cold war doctrine of containment and no liberal in the contemporary sense. Danner, too, is a realist - he even wrote 30 pages against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s, a position Kennan also held. This point of view has served Danner well in his far-reaching criticisms of the foreign policy of George W. Bush, especially on Iraq, and including the president’s approval of torture: “What we can say definitively is that the decision has harmed American interests in quite demonstrable ways.”
But what about Bosnia? This is the war that leads Danner into unacknowledged tangles and reveals the disconnection at the heart of his work. He wrote the equivalent of an entire book condemning America’s failure to intervene in Bosnia. At various points, he ventures ad hoc arguments for American involvement - spheres of influence, the Atlantic alliance. You could have the book here.
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