I imagine that all it takes is one phone call to pull out the already largely-symbolic Philippine “humanitarian mission” out of Iraq to save Angelo de la Cruz‘s life. That’s fifty-one people — not entire battalions of marines or mercenary-type security guards. Surely it can’t be too difficult to withdraw now, or even a month before their slated departure (August 20).

At this point, it does not matter — certainly not to his kidnappers — that the poor de la Cruz is simply a truck-driving OFW and is not involved in combat; the salient fact is that the Arroyo administration is still kowtowing to Bush’s illegal war of occupation and is still happy to send OFWs to their uncertain fates in Baghdad, hoping to reap some “postwar” petrodollars.

The real tragedy here is that this could have been avoided. Filipinos are neither invincible nor innocent of any crime — we may know the latter to be untrue, but the kidnappers, I imagine, don’t see this. All they see is Gloria tripping over her heels to join the coalition of the willing, and that is enough.

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Why was this picture taken? It’s the first question, perhaps, that comes to mind after the question “who are these people?” These are dead Filipino “insurgents” killed in the Philippine-American war; I have no more information on why or how they were killed, or who they were and who killed them. (The original is apparently at the Missouri Historical Society archives, which I hope to visit in July — the scan above was made from a photograph I purchased on eBay.)

There is little dignity or repose in this photograph; limbs are twisted together, forming a stark white contrast between the clods of earth on the left and the tangled grass on the right. A bare foot dangles over another man’s head.

But why was this picture taken? Was it for strategic reasons? Was it for later use as propaganda? What did one get out of it? Was it part of a military archive, as evidence of a particular troop’s activity for the day? Or was it meant for commercial purposes? Images like the above — either reproduced in stereoviews and in monographs — were already widely available as early as 1899. Along with photographs of such quaint Philippine sights as carabaos, local women, nipa huts and the streets of Manila, one could similarly see, with seemingly little dissonance, images of soldiers killed in trenches.

Unlike paintings, photographs could be made available to a mass audience — through reproduction from negatives, and the invention of halftone plates in 1880. By 1897 speed presses could print photographs in books, magazines, and most especially, newspapers. It was this quality of reproducibility, as Benjamin wrote, that effected a radical shift in the conception of the work of art. The artwork was no longer a unique object, but was now a commodity that could be duplicated and circulated.

The pinnacle of this commodification (at least before film) was the postcard. Gradually losing its primary use as an epistolary medium, the postcard’s image, instead of the writing space on the back, became more important. Whether it was actually sent or simply kept for a collection, the postcard was dominated by the image; in a sense, the postcard was the nearest one could come to the commerce of pure image. As David Prochaska writes, about Algeria: “These images were not made to be viewed aesthetically, but to be bought and sold, as capitalist commodities produced in a colonial context…”

The image above is not a postcard; indeed, I am not entirely sure what it was used for. (I cannot identify the coat-of-arms — fleur-de-lis on one half, lion rampant on another — but I suspect it has to do with the military unit associated with the photograph.) What makes it particularly chilling are the decorative lacy twirls that run along the border — a macabre attempt, it seems, to render the photograph suitable for framing.

Was it, perhaps, a souvenir? The tourist souvenir relies on the capacity of the photograph to provide evidence: proof that the photographer (or the photographed) was there. Look, we’re in Disneyland! Look, he’s riding the bike with no hands! Look at all the fun we’re having! A souvenir is intimately incorporated within — perhaps even proceeding from — the sphere of the personal. Possessing a photograph entails the ownership of a possessed and objectified (and perhaps eroticized as well) subject specifically meant to evoke memories of the same possessed and objectified colony. The Philippines, in effect, was also symbolically possessed through the purchase of images. The Filipino subject, decontextualized and objectified, was reduced to a replicable (and replicated), commodified image.

It is the act of symbolic possession of the subject, ensuing from actual physical possession of the photograph, which gives the commodification of the image its disturbing quality. Perhaps this accounts more for the talismanic properties of photographs: the ability to solely possess, the capacity to direct an unlimited gaze at the subject/object.

But in what capacity does the photograph above serve as a souvenir? Who framed it? Was it hung on a wall? Was it displayed prominently? Was it tucked into a scrapbook? Was it ever for sale? Who bought it? How many copies were sold? Was it looked at often? Was it placed at the bottom of a drawer? Why was the picture taken?

Why were the pictures taken? What did one get out of them? Were they souvenirs? Were they proof of all the fun they were having? Why are they giving the thumbs-up sign? Why were they e-mailing these pictures to each other? Why were the pictures installed as screensavers on the interrogation room laptops? Why are they smiling?

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Another shining example of the moronic shills that populate the Bush administration — here’s Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, having a little difficulty explaining the decapitated bodies of children as “a high-risk meeting of high-level, anti-coalition forces:”

“There may have been some kind of celebration,” Kimmitt said. “Bad people have celebrations, too. Bad people have parties, too, and it may have been what was seen as some kind of celebration … may have been just a meeting in the middle of the desert by some people conducting criminal or terrorist activities.”

And good people, I assume, sodomize bad people with chemical lights.

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The iconic image of the Philippine-American War — I’m posting it above because there’s something hinky with Jim’s java applet — is of the massacre of Bud Dajo, where 900 Muslim men, women and children were killed in a mountain crater. The photograph was subsequently published by the Boston-based Anti-Imperialist League in a pamphlet, of which 3,000 copies were made and distributed to the press. (When Moorfield Storey, the first president of the NAACP, writes, “The spirit which slaughters brown men in Jolo is the spirit which lynches black men in the South,” I’m reminded of Luc Sante’s recent op-ed piece in the New York Times where he compares the Abu Ghraib photographs — in particular, those dazzling smiles — as similar to postcards of lynchings and the happy block party underneath.)

The photograph of Bud Dajo — with American soldiers posed in victory over the corpses of the enemy — and the image of Lynndie England dragging an Iraqi prisoner with a leash around his neck both raise similar questions: why were the photographs taken at all? Was it, as the privates now allege, part of a tactical program of interrogation? Or were the images meant to be incorporated into an official (or unofficial) government archive, a shadow archive of humiliation and homicide?

(One of the crucial differences is in this process of incorporation. The increased portability — and most important, the novelty of the equivalences of the visual field of the camera and the viewer — and the ideological function of the photograph in the visual possession / colonization of the Philippines are clearly contextually different. But the images are a nice bookend to the American empire — one taken at its violent birth, the other at its similarly blood-soaked twilight.)

Barthes, following Benjamin, has famously written about the aura of the photograph and how, through the chemical process, “radiations” from the body of the photographed “ultimately touch” the viewer. But unlike Barthes’ notion of the “punctum,” the crucial, piercing part here is the sociohistorical conditions — and their uncanny similarities — upon which both photographs were produced.

In a superb series of essays, the Reverend Mykeru writes about all the hand-wringing on outrage — and rank idiots being “more outraged by the outrage” — and writes: “it’s simply amazing that people are treating these incidents as if they are something new, as if ground is being broken with brutal photographic records of a brutal war.”

Flashback to W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote that the photograph of the massacre was:

…the most illuminating thing I have ever seen. I want especially to have it framed and put upon the walls of my recitation room to impress upon the students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.

It’s what war really means, but Bush and his sheep don’t really get it.

Here’s Storey again:

When a man is lynched the community which tolerates the offence suffers more than the victim. When we honor brutality in our army we brutalize ourselves. Our colleges have failed if they have not taught a better civilization than this, our churches have failed if this is their Christianity.

These Moros were robbers, it is said. Alas, what are we? We who went as their allies and friends, who made a treaty with them to be kept while it suited our convenience and then repudiated, and who now have robbed them of their country, their freedom and finally of their lives. Have they ever injured us that we invade their little island and kill them in their homes? “They do not know how to govern themselves.” That is our excuse, and how do we govern them? We have shown them how little we regard our agreements, and when they “stir up a dangerous state of affairs” we exterminate them. Thus we teach the Filipinos what American civilization means.

And you’ll no doubt be reminded of another leader doing a “superb job” after reading Roosevelt’s letter of commendation to the commanding officer after the massacre:

I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brave feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.

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I have a confession to make: I kind of wanted to feel sorry for Lynndie England. The journalists who wrote about her could barely disguise the politely-coded references: Trailer. West Virginia. Sheep farm. Night shift on a chicken processing plant. By the time a British legislator started referring to England and her colleagues, including Sabrina Harman (“former assistant manager at a Papa John’s restaurant”), as “smirking jezebels from the Appalachians” — not to mention “The Lynndie England Song” with its references to incest and “bootshine,” posted by an “Anna” as a comment on my blog — well, I’m surprised the New York Times didn’t just up and call her “white trash.”

For every soldier set to make a professional career out of the military, there’s another, probably many more, who joined — well, just to get out of a backwater town like Fort Ashby, West Virginia. Or, like some of my students, just to be able to finish college. Or, one suspects, because Burger King wasn’t hiring that day and they just wanted to get a decent job that paid a little over minimum wage.

This should in no way be read as a defense of England’s actions; my previous posts should make that clear. But it merely underlines the U.S. Army’s reliance on the working class, regardless of race (yes, I know about those DOD statistics on military casualties) to fight a war to protect the freedom of the bellicose brood of chickenhawks in the Bush administration, i.e., people who bent over backwards to get themselves out of military service. Nothing like sending out the poor folks to do the dirty work.

England and her fellow torturers — and dammit, everyone else around them (Tony Taguba didn’t call it “systemic” for nothing) — should be punished. (I can’t see how pulling a naked prisoner by the neck with a leash could be “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” not to mention her obvious glee. You can’t stage that smile.) But the outrage concerning the photographs of the tortured should not be allowed to eclipse the fact that civilians and soldiers — Americans and Iraqis and the other members of this ragtag coalition of the willing — are dead, and that the Bush administration should be held responsible as well.

So yes, I think I feel a little ounce — just a tad — of sympathy for Lynndie England. She must, of course, face the full consequences of her actions; “I was only following orders” wasn’t acceptable at Nuremberg, and it similarly isn’t acceptable here. But I can’t help feeling that she is something of a scapegoat as well, and the real war criminals get to retire on a Texan ranch.

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