How
atrocities committed by a rubber company in the deep colombian part
of the amazonian forest in the beginning of the twentieth century
relate to the revelations of digital surveillance by the american
government one hundred year later is not easy to perceive.
Taussig's
article is an inquiry into the power of storytelling as a tool to
create “magical reality,” thus forming the necessary conditions
to justify the perpetration of atrocities. Taussig also analyses the
possibilities of countering a narrative discourse, specifically
detailing where counterdiscourses can fail.
The guardian
was the main medium through which Snowden's revelations about the NSA
spread. This was done by means of Glenn Greenwald, one of the
journalists which Snowden most trusted (along with Laura Poitras.)
Now Greenwald has created his own organisation, Snowden is exiled in
Russia (a country which has a no cleaner file than the american one,
when it concerns internet freedom,) but the NSA revelations are far
from reaching an end. The US congress is turmoiled, and american
relationship with several countries has been damaged. The
consequences will probably affect internet governance, a subject
which doesn't attract as much attention as it should.
After more
careful consideration, relations between the Putumayo atrocities and
the NSA revelations start to emerge. The surveillance and the terror
don't share the same trigger (fight against terrorism and profit,
respectively,) but they are similar in the fact that their initial
objective was lost in a self-reinforcing mechanism contained in the
narrative that validated the questionable means by which those
objectives were to be attained. In the Putumayo case, profit could
only be obtained by the means of cheap labour; as the natives did not
have the capitalist culture and institutions that would make them
work as they were required to, they had to be forced to work; as
beginning-of-the-twentieth-century morality did not easily allow
maltreatment of human beings, even if 'uncivilised' natives, they
could only be abused if a justification to this moral breach existed;
narratives already existent about cannibalism and native ruthlessness
became more and more important to the perpetrators, justifying their
own barbaric deeds; soon the narrative forces impelled torture from
the “status of a means to that of the mode if not, finally, the
very aim of production.”
Something
very similar happened to the american war on terror, and not only in
relation to the NSA. Stories about terrorists, imminent dangers, and
religious radicalism rapidly drifted away from their basis in
reality, and started being used as a means of political persuasion
and moral justification, consciously or unconsciously – it does not
matter, – and the power of the storytelling created a culture of
terror that made torture, assassinations of innocents, and violations
of individual privacy commonplace. It is interesting to notice that
the latter, though arguably the minor problem, was probably the one
which attracted more public and international outrage. As the
guardian's article puts it, “what the revelations mean to you
(my emphasis)” is what
matters. Who cares about drones killing innocent people at a wedding
in Yemen, or the systematic torture of untried suspects at legal
no-man's-lands? Those realities are too far from the average western
person reality to really cause a concern, or enough empathy.
In
the end of his article, Taussig underlines the challenges that may
trap counterdiscourses when trying to dismantle a culture of terror.
A culture of terror is created and sustained by narratives, a form of
“magical realism.” Taussig noticed that the Putumayo report and
other counterdiscourses created an inverted version of the same
fictionalized version of reality that the narratives sustaining the
very culture they fought did. To put an end to this embroglio,
Taussig recommends not falling into the dialectics of the manicheism
characteristic of this fictionalized reality, but disrupting its
“good-and-evil” logic. To disrupt the idealized fiction that
humans employ as proxies of reality, or at least to make these
proxies better approximations of reality, it is useful to consider
the multiplicity of history as Tolstoy and Latour urge us, but also
to understand the foucauldian gears that shape society, part of the
microrelations of power being the stories humans tell each other.
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