REMEMBERING CONFLICTS IN THE DIGITAL

Professor Fabiola Hanna is working on We Are History, a work that she described in her lecture as a life-long project (though she also said that she would be handing the project off within the next few years.) We Are History is a project that aims to reconstruct the collective history of Lebanon, following the Lebanese Civil war which spanned from 1975-1990 (though even the dates are contested).

Professor Hanna’s work on We Are History is indicative of a larger problem that much of the Middle East is currently facing due to US and Western interventions in the region, and that is a lack of identity and collective history. On her website, Professor Hanna describes We Are History as “an automatic editing machine for Lebanon’s history generated from the perspectives of thousands” (Hanna).

Professor Hanna’s work also highlights the differences in how conflicts in the Middle East are reported on by Western media and how the people in/from those regions report and remember these events. I would like to attribute many of these differences in the reporting to the fact that our media is tied directly to the military industrial complex. Movies like the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe revolve around the support of the US Military and, because of Disney’s reliance on military support, they also comply with the US military’s wishes when making Marvel movies, thus making this mega-franchise a form of military propaganda. And games like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series exacerbate this issue by placing the player into contemporary conflicts as a character integral to the narrative. In Matthew Thomas Payne’s book, Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11, he writes that the “[Modern Warfare series] locates the gamer in the virtual boots of numerous soldiers and civilians across its interconnected narratives. In playing … the gamer becomes a virtual interlocutor, narratively interfacing with stories of heroism and sacrifice” (Payne). However, the exact events that take place in the series don’t exist and never have, so critiques of the portrayals of these contemporary conflicts have been written off because they are fiction. But the popularity of these games paved the way for more games to be published within the genre, thus leading to the creation of the upcoming shooter, Six Days in Fallujah by Highwire Games. Six Days in Fallujah is a shooter that “recreates true stories of Marines, Soldiers, and Iraqi civilians during the toughest urban battle since 1968” (https://www.sixdays.com/). It is a one-sided recreation of a highly controversial battle, and the first video game made based on the Iraq war. “The Second Battle of Fallujah” is infamous for the United State’s use of white phosphorus as a weapon against civilians, an action that is classified as a war crime by the UN. The event was also covered by Forensic Architecture, “a research agency … investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations.” They “concluded that in Gaza, white phosphorus was likely used to harass and terrorise citizens in order to clear neighbourhoods, rather than as a ‘smoke screen’, as the Israeli military had claimed” (Forensic Architecture). In the since-archived 2004 Fox News article, U.S. Won't Let Men Flee Fallujah (retrieved courtesy of the Wayback Machine), Fox News reported that “Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave” (Associated Press). This should be a nail in the coffin for the US to be seen as “acting good” in Fallujah, as they turned back any men looking to be between 15 and 55 to be slaughtered. Rami Ismail (once of Vlambeer, and now public speaker, consultant, helps global gamedevs) wrote about how he viewed, as a veteran game developer and practicing Muslim, the promotional material for Six Days in Fallujah on Twitter. He breaks down a few key scenes from the promotional material in a Twitter thread found here. I chose two quotes directly addressing some of the human rights issues I brought up prior to highlight the lack of nuance or objectivity in Six Days in Fallujah:  “The trailer has anonymized Iraqi civilians blaming Iraqi civilians' staying behind in Fallujah solely on ‘Iraqi stubbornness’ with absolutely no mention of the documented and self-admitted context of the US military denying escape to military-age men.” (link) and that there is “No mention of white phosphorus or any war crimes, the US soldiers represented here are portrayed as ‘heroes’ and ‘fallen heroes’ only. There is zero mention of civilian death” (link). These intentional oversights can’t happen in a retelling of an event that completely omits the atrocities of the US while also highlighting how heroic the US military was. By displaying these very real and horrible events in a heroic light, Highwire Games is taking an active role in shifting the already-muddy narrative behind the Second Battle of Fallujah and, by extension, all US military operations in favor of the US and the US military industrial complex.

    Six Days in Fallujah is similar to Professor Hanna’s We Are History in how they both are trying to reshape a history of a conflict, but they are working towards opposite goals. Professor Hanna’s work is an attempt to reconnect a community through sculpting a common history based on what people in these communities, from both sides of the conflict, remember and lived through. Whereas Six Days in Fallujah is a disgusting and dehumanizing work that takes advantage of a people still feeling the consequences of the battle.