As these lines are written in San Francisco, the Blue Angels fighter planes are roaring and booming only a few feet overhead, with many in the crowd on the ground cringing, then laughing nervously, and finally nodding casually at ‘just entertainment’. The same planes over Gaza City reveal their true business.footnote¹

The passage above from Retort’s Afflicted Powers indicates the scope of this remarkable work from the Bay Area collective, which connects bombing, terror and spectacle. The book emerges from the anti-war movement, spurred both by its remarkable popular support and the knowledge that the slaughter of civilians from the safety of the skies is not merely the last resort of power, but its regular, integral practice. The authors gloss Thomas Hobbes: ‘By terror thereof. To forme the wills of all. And whoever calls this into question proposes an end to what we know of politics as such.’footnote²

Retort’s controversial theses on war, capitalism and spectacle have invited widespread debate. Gopal Balakrishnan, in the last issue of nlr, weighed their assertion that the us, being in thrall to spectacle, is no longer able to think strategically.footnote³ In the pages of October, Hal Foster questioned Retort’s opposition to modernity, and asked whether it might lead to a defeatist notion of spectacular politics.footnote⁴ In what follows I will relate these debates to what is perhaps the central motif, and motive, of the book: an extension of Debord’s concept of the spectacle, not only to explain the conduct of the us, but to bring out what it might offer a disillusioned anti-war movement. Retort’s message for the peace movement is not an easy one. War is certainly a stimulus for political action:

Even those who go out into the streets when outright war is underway find it much more difficult—and we include ourselves in this company—to muster similar emotional energy in the face, for example, of the slow death from disease and malnutrition of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis under ‘sanctions’.footnote⁵

Yet war and the state are central to each other, and to experience warfare is also to experience the modern world in the most complete and extreme fashion: ‘War . . . is modernity incarnate’, claim Retort.footnote⁶ Frequent war is necessary to the symbiosis of business and state, stimulating the economy in difficult times, producing opportunities for looting—or ‘primitive accumulation’—and inuring the population to the spectacle of their armed forces punishing some recalcitrant state by killing and maiming its citizens. In these circumstances, ‘peace’ is merely a prelude to war, and it is achieved through pacification of the chosen enemy. Such a peace cannot be what the anti-war movement really wants:

Unless the anti-war movement comes to recognize the full dynamics of us militarism—to understand that peace, under current arrangements, is no more than war by other means—then massive mobilizations at the approach of full-dress military campaigns must inevitably be followed by demoralization and bewilderment.footnote⁷

Given the continual threat and regular actuality of terror dealt from the sky, the 9-11 attacks did no more than to return to the us a taste of the force it has wielded across the globe. Arundhati Roy, in a courageous piece published shortly after the attacks, put the matter plainly: