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The War on Terror Espionage Thriller, and the Imperialism of Human Rights

2009; Penn State University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cls.0.0062

1528-4212

David Holloway,

Political Conflict and Governance

The War on Terror Espionage Thriller, and the Imperialism of Human Rights David Holloway (bio) This essay describes the war on terror espionage thriller as a popular literary form which legitimates human rights abuses by the West, particularly state-sanctioned torture, by depicting the West, rhetorically, as the virtuous bringer of rights. This neoconservative refit of imperialist mythologies on which the Euro-American empires of the nineteenth century were built and defended was widely heard after 9/11, not least in the reasons given by American and British elites for waging war on Iraq. The thriller was not alone in its willingness to debate the legitimacy of human rights abuse as a virtuous weapon of war. Indeed, one of the more striking trends in American cultural history after 9/11 was the speed with which torture imagery pervaded contemporary culture, from the elite paradigms of the international art world—see Richard Serra's Stop Bush (2004) or the Inconvenient Evidence exhibition staged at the International Center of Photography, New York (2004) and the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2004–5)—to popular TV drama like 24 or Lost . It is partly through such simple repetition in diverse cultural forms, even if this representation is sometimes skeptical or oppositional in tone, that shifts in the political ethics of any age become normative (that is, capable of shaping political and ethical subjectivity, or of assisting in this process, by making torture imagery banal or unsurprising, part of the routine run of things in everyday life). The espionage thriller is just one of countless molecular instances of this normative procedure at work in contemporary culture, but because of its generic welding of stories about state power to the novel's traditional interest in the moral consciousness of protagonists, the thriller has often looked like a privileged instance [End Page 20] in this post-9/11 legitimation of torture as a tool for the expansion of human rights. During the Bush era the war on terror thriller evolved as a blending of conventional literary espionage forms with the techno-fetishism and ultra-machismo of the special forces action thriller—a hybrid aesthetic that mirrored the actual militarizing of intelligence gathering overseen by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Embedded thus, in generic forms steeped in storytelling about Cold War realpolitik and Western power-projection, the war on terror thriller seemed particularly well built to accommodate and intervene in contemporary debate about the role of human rights discourse in the legitimation of torture, empire, and war. Several genre-texts are examined in the discussion that follows. In Vince Flynn's Memorial Day (2004), where Islamist terrorists attempt to detonate a nuclear device in the heart of Washington, D.C., Mitch Rapp, a freelance assassin employed by the Central Intelligence Agency as "America's first line of defense in the war on terror," tortures, maims, and executes his way from CIA premises in the United States to terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and back again.1 Another novel set mainly in Afghanistan, John Fullerton's A Hostile Place (2003), stars Thomas Morgan, a bounty hunter, as he participates in the search for Osama bin Laden after the toppling of the Taliban in 2001.2 James Barrington's Overkill (2004) features a spectacular nuclear conspiracy between al Qaeda and rogue groups in Russia to annihilate the US and large parts of Western Europe, and sees torture deployed routinely by all the main antagonists including the hero, maverick trouble-shooter Paul Richter.3 In Harold Coyle and Barrett Tillman's Pandora's Legion (2007), Carolyn Padgett Smith, a British civilian research immunologist working on bio-terrorism, travels to the mountains of northwest Pakistan with a group of American mercenaries, where she becomes an object of sexual fascination for Americans and al Qaeda terrorists alike, before helping thwart an Islamist plot to infect major Western cities with the deadly and highly contagious Marburg virus.4 The action in Henry Porter's Empire State (2003) cuts rapidly between London, the Balkans, and Egypt, building to a taut finale in the Empire State Building in New York, where MI6 agent, Isis Herrick, and a supporting cast from the British, US, and Israeli intelligence services...