By Ghulam Mohammad Khan
The common masses, relegated to the role of spectators in the grand theatre of war, grasp little beyond its visceral spectacle of destruction and suffering, a tragic farce where the script is written in the opaque jargon of realpolitik and the dialogue delivered by the ventriloquists of power. As Carl von Clausewitz famously said, war is merely “the continuation of politics by other means”, yet this aphorism rings hollow when politics itself becomes a masquerade of hypocrisy, where the powerful flout the very rules they sanctimoniously impose upon the weak. Wars, as Michel Foucault might argue, are not merely clashes of armies but “the grid of intelligibility” for modern power relations, where annihilation is never total—ideological differences, like Hydra’s heads, regenerate with each decapitation. The irony is delicious: wars cannot end because they are not designed to; they are the perpetual motion machines of hegemony, lubricated by the grease of political duplicity.
The world, of course, cannot always afford these grim performances. Yet, the stage is forever set, thanks to what Slavoj Žižek terms “the sublime object of ideology,” where nations fetishise their own moral exceptionalism while orchestrating proxy battles. The powerful, like overzealous schoolmasters, preach peace through the UN’s “pious incantations” (to borrow Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse), even as they arm insurgents and draft treaties in invisible ink. Power, as Nietzsche warned, is a “monster of cold calculation,” and its contemporary avatars deploy it in strange ways, outsourcing violence like a gig economy of domination. One nation becomes another’s blunt instrument, a geopolitical fall guy, allowing the puppeteers to wash their hands like Pontius Pilate in a tailored suit. War is not the failure of diplomacy but its grotesque masterpiece; a satire written by the powerful, starring the powerless, and reviewed by no one.
Talks and negotiations, those quaint relics of diplomatic theatre, have been reduced to a pantomime in the shadow of modern techno-capitalist hegemony, a hollow ritual where, as Jürgen Habermas might lament, the “public sphere” has been supplanted by the algorithmic calculus of power. The illusion of dialogue persists, but it is a Potemkin village of discourse, incapable of transcending what Pierre Bourdieu called the “invisible mechanics of symbolic domination” wielded by so-called nation-states. Peace, that most fickle of commodities, is now contingent not on justice but on its utility to the powerful, a perverse inversion of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, where stability is no longer a universal ideal but a luxury good, auctioned to the highest bidder.
The myth of the benevolent superpower, a Hobbesian Leviathan in a tailored suit, crumbles under scrutiny. The notion that uniformity guarantees stability is as credible as a Twitter apology from a sanctioned oligarch; what it ensures, rather, is what Noam Chomsky derides as “the manufacture of consent” through spectacle and coercion. A superpower, by definition, cannot exist without the scaffolding of structural violence—what Walter Benjamin might diagnose as the “law-preserving” function of power, masquerading as order while enforcing subjugation. Its rhetoric drips with the irony of Orwellian doublespeak: it extols “development” while extracting tribute, preaches “peace” while arming insurgents, and boasts of “progress” while reducing vassal states to economic appendages.
Meanwhile, the relentless fetishisation of technology and hyper-militarisation, what Paul Virilio termed the “dromocratic” acceleration of warfare, has rendered the very concept of a superpower obsolete. In the digital age, power is no longer monopolised by states but diffused through Silicon Valley’s server farms and shadowy private militias. The economic equations shift like quicksand, and the superpower, like a gambler doubling down on bad bets, clings to supremacy through financialised coercion and algorithmic surveillance. This is no longer politics but “simulacra”, a hollow spectacle where drones replace diplomats and stock markets dictate sovereignty.
Modern nation-states, in their Faustian bargain with militarisation, have cultivated an almost libidinal obsession with weaponry, what Paul Virilio might call the “aesthetics of disappearance,” where the spectacle of destruction eclipses the human cost. The arms industry, a terrible parody of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” no longer merely serves war; it manufactures war to sustain its own vampiric economy, transforming conflict into a perverse Keynesian stimulus for the chosen few. Eisenhower’s prophetic warning about the “military-industrial complex” now reads like a user manual: weapons are not tools of defence but products, and wars are their most effective marketing campaigns.
Consider the recent India-Pakistan air skirmishes: when French Rafale jets were reportedly downed, the global response was not horror but a hunger. Arms dealers salivated at the spectacle, think tanks churned out white papers on “air superiority gaps,” and the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex) whispered to governments: you need newer, deadlier toys. Baudrillard would laugh at this hyperreal arms race, where the simulacrum of security masks the absurdity of a world addicted to its own annihilation.
The irony? This “business of death” (as Seymour Melman dubbed it) thrives on the very instability it claims to mitigate. Like a snake eating its tail, the MIC demands eternal war to justify its existence, a logic so circular it would make Hegel dizzy. Meanwhile, the global South bleeds, Silicon Valley rebrands war tech as “innovation,” and politicians, draped in the flag, recite the catechism of “national security” while signing billion-dollar contracts. The only “trickle-down” here is blood, and the invisible hand? It’s now a fist, clenched around a missile. If war is the health of the state (as Randolph Bourne argued), then the MIC is its dealer, peddling destruction on credit, and the world, like a junkie, keeps coming back for more.
War, in its contemporary iteration, has been reduced to a horrible spectacle of thanatopolitics, where, as Foucault would argue, the biopolitical management of populations gives way to their systematic annihilation under the guise of “security”. The insatiable hunger for advanced weaponry has transformed conflict into a self-perpetuating industry, where nations are not merely participants but shareholders in a global economy of death. The Iron Dome and David’s Sling, those big monuments to militarised paranoia, consume budgets with the gluttony of a Wall Street hedge fund, while Gaza’s children are priced at $0.00 on the balance sheets of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
The proposed “Golden Dome of America” isn’t just a defence system, it’s a theological apparatus, a modern-day Moloch demanding sacrificial blood to sustain its algorithmic priesthood. As Walter Benjamin warned, every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism, and today’s barbarism wears a tailored suit, delivers PowerPoints on “strategic deterrence,” and secures shareholder approval before drone strikes. The Gaza genocide, for that is what the ICJ has deemed it “plausible” to call, lays bare the hypocrisy of a world order where “rules-based international law” is enforced with bunker busters and white phosphorus. The new barbarians aren’t the ones wielding primitive rockets; they’re the ones who, in Žižek’s terms, fetishise their own humanism while reducing Palestinians to “collateral damage” in a spreadsheet.
This is the neoliberal necropolis: where war isn’t an aberration but a business model, sanctified by the bipartisan liturgy of “national security” and monetised by the Raytheons of the world, who fight wars in boardrooms long before the first missile is launched. The Gaza slaughter, with its 40,000 corpses and counting, isn’t a failure of the system; it’s the system working as designed. As Marx might warn, the MIC has become the ultimate “vampire capital,” sucking dry the veins of the Global South to feed the insatiable appetite of the Golden Dome’s shareholders. The only “deterrence” here is against empathy itself.
In today’s wars, the most terrible spectacle is not merely the massacre of hundreds, women, children, the elderly, but the orchestrated pantomime of moral justification that follows, where language is twisted into a weapon more insidious than any drone strike. As George Orwell warned in Politics and the English Language, political speech is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”, and nowhere is this more evident than in the hollow invocation of “self-defence” by nations that rain precision-guided barbarity upon schools, hospitals, and homes. The victims—children who cannot spell “geopolitics,” let alone comprehend their own obliteration—are reduced to statistical footnotes in what Noam Chomsky calls the “manufacture of consent”, a process where atrocity is laundered into policy through euphemisms like “collateral damage” and “military necessity.”
The irony is so thick it curdles: these very nations, their hands still dripping with the blood of the Global South, appoint themselves as arbiters of civilisation, lecturing the world on barbarism while their bombs rewrite the definition of “human rights” in real time. The Geneva Conventions? A suggested reading list. International law? A flexible rubric, adjustable to the whims of power. The sheer audacity of this moral contortionism would be laughable if it weren’t so lethal.
Consider the lexicon of extermination: “targeted strikes” (for levelled neighbourhoods), “neutralising threats” (for incinerating toddlers), and “right to defend” (for the privilege of impunity). This is Newspeak in its purest form—a linguistic regime where, as Orwell predicted, “war is peace” and “ignorance is strength”. The nations orchestrating these slaughters are not just violating laws; they are rewriting reality, gaslighting the global public into believing that rubble is progress and that mourning parents are “terrorist sympathisers.”
And where is the shame? Absent, dissolved in the acid bath of exceptionalism. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” has been upgraded to the glamour of impunity—a system where war criminals give TED Talks and Nobel Peace laureates oversee arms deals. The victims, meanwhile, are posthumously tried for their own deaths: Were they human shields? Were they too slow to evacuate? Did they fail to appreciate the advanced warning of their own annihilation? The blame, like the bombs, always falls downward.
Amidst this theatre of modern warfare, where generals play chess with human lives and politicians sanitise slaughter with press releases, there exists one irreducible truth: the absolute, unrelenting suffering of the poor and powerless. While the wealthy debate just war theory in climate-controlled conference rooms (channelling Carl von Clausewitz’s detached academicism), the poor bear the visceral brunt of conflict. War never starves the arms dealers in their golden high-rises, but ensures the working poor must choose between bread and medicine when oil prices skyrocket, a brutal demonstration of what David Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession” in its most naked form. The same governments that subsidise billion-dollar defence contracts feign helplessness as vegetable prices become unaffordable, as if inflation were some act of God rather than a direct consequence of their militarised economies. Judith Butler’s concept of “grievable lives” finds its perverse inverse here—these are the ungrievable poor, whose deaths from malnutrition or preventable disease never make headlines, but whose suffering props up the entire war machine. Winter becomes a death sentence for those who can’t afford heating; summer a kiln for those without shelter. The Canadian author Naomi Klein would recognise this as the logical endpoint of disaster capitalism.
This is the great unspoken contract of modern conflict: that war, like all neoliberal projects, is a wealth transfer mechanism disguised as geopolitics. The poor don’t die in trenches anymore; they perish slowly in slums, their lives stretched thin between unpayable debts and unattainable dreams, what Lauren Berlant might call “slow death” under late capitalism. Their suffering lacks the cinematic glory of battlefield heroics, making it invisible to a world addicted to what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle.” While think tanks produce elegant theories of deterrence, the hungry mother knows war’s true face: the empty pot, the unaffordable blanket, the medicine that might as well be on Mars.
Dr. G.M. Khan is Assistant Professor, HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir, India
3 July 2025
Source: countercurrents.org