That manifests in material violence

Despite the secrecy and security, the prisoners of Guántanamo Bay have attracted much attention. The more tragic cases of the “war on terror” are not to be found in such prison camps, rather they are to be found in the remote villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We may read about them in the unnoticed article every other week that reports of a drone attack “collaterally damaging” yet another sixty or seventy bodies in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Such deadly airstrikes have also targeted Somalian villages suspected of harboring a few terrorists.38 Rarely is the morality of killing scores of innocent people to “get a few bad guys” questioned. More recently, on 4 September 2009, a German commander in the Kunduz province of Afghanistan called in an airstrike on two fuel tankers that were stolen by the Taliban. The immobilized tankers were surrounded by approximately one hundred Afghani villagers trying to get free fuel. When an F-15 jet dropped two 500-pound bombs, the crowd was immediately incinerated.39 Since the inception of the “war on terror” such news has become a weekly standard, meanwhile citizen-subjects look the other way under the assumption that they must have been bad guys. Still no inquiry has been made into the annihilation of (what is widely argued by locals to be) a remote Pakistani school and the school children in it by a Pakistani/US helicopter raid in 2006.40 What is important to keep in mind for our theoretical purposes is that such violence is not only perpetrated by those who pull a trigger or push a button. Instead, it has a background: actions, decisions, discourses, and practices conducted at the micro level by citizen-subjects. It is these citizen-subjects that state violence is carried out in the name of, and it is their bodies and wealth that is mobilized and put in danger to fight an enemy. It is this form of subjectivity that sovereign power capitalizes on when they conduct killings in remote places.41¶ My point here is that sovereign violence needs and capitalizes on sovereign subjects in order to produce deadly effects. The killing and violence itself may be conducted and administered by bureaucrats, but it requires citizen-subjects to mobilize the will and resources necessary for the sovereign violence.42 With apologies to Edmund Burke, his popular quotation could be rephrased as: All it takes for sovereign violence to kill is the citizen-subject to either applaud or enlist. Sovereign violence capitalizes on the fascistic desire found in the docile bodies of modernity: “For us to survive, those folks far away must die.” Of course, “those folks far away” have historically often been the colonial subjects of Europe. Where today smart bombs kill civilians in remote villages, colonial attempts to discipline natives included aerial bombardments of remote villages in faraway lands. In 1920, Winston Churchill, as British secretary of war, wrote a memo on the uncontrollable villages in Northern Iraq: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.”43 Consistently, sovereign violence has been particularly brutal toward “inferior far away people.”