As the son of survivors of the Nazi Blitz, I dedicate this essay to the people of Iran, Lebanon and Palestine.

Postmodernism is one of those concepts you never quite grasp until you experience it. Hence its uncanny effect (might this be all there is to it?).

The first time I “got” postmodernism was in 2005 when the BBC “acquired” the American version of The Office. Why the American version? The Office is a UK sitcom, written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, produced in the UK by the BBC and broadcast on UK network television from 2001–2002.

The practice of adapting or translating a book, film or TV series for a foreign-language audience is commonplace. But why was an English language version of an English language TV series being shown in a country where English is the official language and where almost everybody had seen the original? That was postmodern.

Martha Rosler’s photomontage series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967—72) is also postmodern. Not an exhibition as such, Rosler distributed her collages at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations: glossy adverts for the consumer way of life spliced together with marauding US soldiers on the battlefield. Like The Office, the “concept” was explicit: show, don’t tell: dismantle the frame and the vulgar reality is exposed.

But it’s not that simple. Commodity fetishism can hardly be exposed by means of alienation. It is alienation, or at least that’s its mechanism, separating workers from the means of production and the products of their labour. Rosler’s images certainly take us to the front line. The problem is it’s the wrong one. Rather than transporting us to the front line of social and economic reality, Rosler ushers us into the media spectacle; to the “first television war,” as Vietnam became known: a war which of course can never be encountered in the flesh, and only truly experienced from the comfort of one’s living room. Like the American version of The Office, Rosler’s House Beautiful is a parody of a parody.

And that’s precisely where today’s “war activists”—the influencers, visual artists, vloggers, indie news platforms and trolls—remain. Postmodernism’s uncanny valley is in hyperdrive, and no one who descends to its murky depths can possibly “speak truth to power”. Power (or “will to power”) has no interest in truth, and none whatsoever in speech either. It’s a death drive which enjoys whatever horrors one cares to throw at it, in total silence and indifference.

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Both the American left and the MAGA right have this much in common: both say they want an end to America’s “forever wars”. What forever wars?

“America” hasn’t fought a war since the end of the draft in 1973, which was hailed by the anti-Vietnam War movement as a major success. In Australia, which supported America’s imperial adventure with its own conscripts, the “Save our Sons” organisation was established in 1965, and the draft ended there in 1972. Did any of the anti-war campaigners imagine that converting the US Army, or its Australian allies, into mercenaries would really save anyone’s sons? As Naomi Klein records in her Shock Doctrine, by July 2007 there were more private military contractors than soldiers in Iraq: another US imperial theatre of war with a death toll of 654,965 (according to The Lancet) through to the end of 2006. A lot of sons.

(Although the US ended military operations in Iraq in December 2021, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 190,000 private military contractors, funded by the United States, remain there.)

The anti-Vietnam War movement certainly succeeded, whether by accident or design, in bringing American troops back home. The problem was they left the war in Vietnam. “America’s” forever wars are like that: wars in which the American civilian population is shielded from the spatio-temporal reality of war. The front line remains somewhere over there, safely out of harm’s way, on the other side of an ocean or two. 9/11 was of course the exception to this rule, when al-Qaeda decided that, actually, the war on the Arabian peninsula was being conducted from New York, Arlington and Washington DC, making those cities legitimate targets.

But when comparing the 3,000 people killed in those terrorist attacks to, for instance, Britain’s 67,000 civilian deaths over the course of the Second World War (around 0.2% of its total civilian population; 40,000 alone during the Blitz of 1940—41); or to the hundreds of thousands currently being mown down like flies in the residential neighbourhoods (or what’s left of them) of Palestine, Lebanon, and now Tehran, and it might be observed that the American public hasn’t been getting its fair share of war.

From Wall Street to Main Street you might get mugged, raped, shot or stabbed to death. According to FBI figures, in 2017 28% of homicide victims were killed by someone they knew. In 2023, the clearance rate for murder and manslaughter in the US was 57.8%. However, to be a civilian and on the front line of a war, prosecuted with weapons of mass destruction, which has absolutely nothing to do with you; in other words, to be a “legitimate target” in a war between states, or states and non-states, is certainly an honour reserved for people “over there”.

Consider any of the civilian front lines of the post-War War period. Take the Korean Civil War, where US armed forces certainly played their part in the estimated 3 million death toll. If there are few visible traces left today of that particular holocaust in South Korea’s “concrete utopia” then it’s because most of its cities were either completely destroyed in the war, or else have been relentlessly “modernised” ever since. Memories can be dangerous: better to bulldoze them. Bruce Cumings mentions somewhere that an estimated 80% of all standing structures were either partially or completely destroyed during the three years of “Korea’s” war, from 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953.

It goes without saying that war affects people when it blasts into their homes. Forget the “TV wars” and the wars being “livestreamed” on smartphones (“the genocide is happening on your TV”: a typical postmodern statement). The smartphone wars are not bringing anything home; they’re an uncomplicated commercial strategy for delivering audiences to advertisers. Why would anyone with a brain even try to compare smartphone images of massacres to the Israeli bombs that smash through people’s roofs, wiping out their families, reducing their homes and streets to rubble?

It might sound facetious to say that the Korean War succeeded in beating peace into the population, but today the US has 81 times more gun crime than South Korea, and 271 times more police. As someone who lived in central Seoul for 5 years, and who has travelled widely around South Korea, I can’t recall ever witnessing a violent incident, not even a violent conversation. In Korea, the real violence is state violence, reserved for the executive branch of government (America’s, not Korea’s) and the North-South military conflict, currently on pause, and which may well succeed in returning the Korean peninsula to the mass killing fields of yesteryear, given time.

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Bringing the war home. How quaint Rosler’s agitprop looks now. Of course we mustn’t forget the GI movement that began around 1968, which in the US spread through GI coffeehouses, underground presses and union organising at military bases, with the aim of disrupting and undermining military discipline. David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt (1975) provides an excellent account of this aspect of the anti-Vietnam War movement (the American War, as the Vietnamese still call it); although with the winding down of the American War in 1973, and crucially with the end of the draft that same year, the potential for any expansion of the front line to domestic US territory, of GIs reigniting the American Civil War in the name of racial and class equality, proved to be a pipe dream.

I’m not aware of anyone in the Black Panthers—some of the younger generation of militants like Stokely Carmichael, for instance—ever advocating for urban insurrection by Vietnam Vets. Of course, that’s not to say it wasn’t in the minds of many of the Vets. But that’s where it stayed. Take for instance Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal), a protest march of several peace groups comprising 200 or so activists, which during the US Labor Day weekend of 4–7 September 1970 made its way from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, engaging in “guerilla theater” and attracting hundreds of supporters en route, including future senator, US presidential candidate and war hawk John Kerry.

I seem to recall the idea of Vietnam Vets turning their guns on their superiors as one of many of the puerile fantasies of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which was active in the US from 1973-1975: the group’s kidnapping of the heiress Patty Hearst and her participation in their bank robberies was their best work of postmodern art. Otherwise we can take their Hollywood antics with a grain of salt.

A more intriguing fictional case study of the Vietnam Vet as harbinger of civil war in America can be found in Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982). It’s clear that Sylvester Stallone, the film’s star, had no idea what he was getting himself into with this film, a fact confirmed by the subsequent Rambo franchise, a vulgar and preposterous Reagan-era exercise in historical revisionism. But in First Blood, Rambo doesn’t (yet) have the combined forces of the US military behind him, and wouldn’t know the Cold War if it landed on him.

John Rambo is a nobody: a highly decorated US Marine who arrives back in America only to find himself spat on and friendless. In the film’s opening scene it’s revealed that Rambo’s last surviving army buddy died from Agent Orange poisoning. Wandering aimlessly Rambo arrives in a remote logging town and is arrested by an over-zealous police chief on a flimsy charge of vagrancy. It’s a pretext for police violence. Taken into custody, Rambo is harassed and assaulted; he reacts explosively by breaking out of the police station and fleeing into the mountains, where he proceeds to use his specialised military training to wreak havoc: first terrorising the police officers, then taking on soldiers from the Washington National Guard. Finally Rambo makes his way back to the town where he was arrested by the “king shit cop”, who he tracks down and seriously wounds, having bombed and set the town on fire.

While being a perfectly plausible take on the GI movement, and for all the film’s insurgent ideology, First Blood remains a story of personal revenge. Although the king shit cop is identified with a politically and morally bankrupt America, for Rambo the injustice he experiences is simply a question of respect. The special forces soldier demands respect for services rendered. There’s no thought spared for the real human wreckage Rambo left behind in Vietnam. Only victimhood comes home, not the victims. Which makes any wider civil or class war, any war of the oppressed against the oppressors, utterly unthinkable.

And today? Is the anti-war and anti-Zionist movement that’s been organising on US campuses comparable to the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 60s and early 70s? Not as far as I can see, in the sense that the military insurgent dimension of the latter, with its roots in the GI movement, finds nothing comparable in today’s campus protests. Moreover, with the unrestricted expansion of the military-industrial-complex and the emergence of AI-enabled security and surveillance systems, the wider prospects for emancipatory uprising in America (as opposed to riots) are not so much non-existent, as meaningless.

But let’s keep things in perspective. Why conflate the mass media ecology, the round the clock livestreams of America’s latest “happening”—Marines posing with machine guns, rioters throwing rocks from bridges at the LAPD—with a question as intellectually demanding and as vital as civil war?

Jason Barker is equal among firsts.

Featured Image: Sylvester Stallone as Rambo in Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982). Photo courtesy of Wex.

Jason Barker