The Violent Image explores use of pictures as propaganda

Neville Bolt's history lesson in using violence as a tool to influence is right in that images hold sway over the masses, but his application of his theory to the Arab Spring is flawed.

Protesters demonstrate against the Syrian government in July 2011. Regime and rebels alike have used the flag to powerful effect. AFP
Powered by automated translation

The autumn of 1870 was a dark time in Paris. The Second Empire, the last French regime to be ruled by a monarch, was coming to an end, battered by the German armies of Prussia. In France at the time, the Russian revolutionary and theorist Mikhail Bakunin was formulating his theory of fighting a guerrilla war, even as the armies of Prussia reached the gates of Paris.

“France cannot be saved,” he wrote. “She cannot be saved by the state. France can be saved only by a mass uprising of all the French people, spontaneously organised from the bottom upwards, a war of destruction, a merciless war to the death.

“All of us must now embark on stormy revolutionary seas, and from this very moment we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent and the most irresistible form of propaganda.”

Bakunin’s words influenced a generation of anarchists. In the following years, anarchists made attempts to assassinate the leaders of Russia, Germany and Italy. These acts were meant to be exemplary to other people. The attackers intended that others would wonder at the motivation and would then be exposed to anarchist ideas.

Their chief intention, however, was to goad governments into overreacting to their provocations to such a degree that the population would be shocked by the violence. This was the “propaganda of the deed”, a tactic best understood as “violent acts of terror deployed against a state ... with the objective of goading states into overreacting with excessive force”.

By responding disproportionately, governments would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people – a political “judo throw”, with the insurgent using the weight of the state against itself.  The wars and uprisings of the 21st century have brought violent images into the consciousness of millions.

Images and videos, from Afghanistan and Pakistan, from the cities of Iraq and the US, from Madrid and Cairo and Damascus, from the war on terror and from the revolutions of the Arab Spring, have been propelled into the public sphere, on to the mobile phones and into the homes of people around the world.

These images carry the power to shock but also, crucially, the ability to inform; to preach or threaten audiences with the messages behind the images. Such is the importance of violent imagery to modern insurgency that the very image and its dissemination carries a pre-eminent position in the strategy of insurgents.

In trying to explain the propaganda power of violent imagery and its usefulness to modern insurgency, Neville Bolt, an academic in the department of war studies at King’s College, London, turns to the 19th-century concept of propaganda of the deed (POTD).

He sees POTD as a tool of modern revolutionary communications. Previous such propaganda was an event used to elicit overreaction. Now, writes Bolt, it is an act of political violence that creates a media event to energises audiences.

The media event is the central part of Bolt’s redefinition of POTD. The violent image, he says, is a form of political marketing.

Bolt applies his theory widely. Irish republicanism, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Taliban in Afghanistan, attacks in India and the insurgency in Iraq; all, in his reading, are insurgencies with propaganda of the deed application. But the clear background to the book is the “war on terror”, the self-styled and nebulous term that encompassed a range of attacks and reactions around the world over the past decade.

Bolt starts by noting the oft-referenced quote from Ayman Al Zawahiri, previously Osama bin Laden’s deputy and now the head of Al Qaeda: “We are in a battle and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. We are in a media battle in the race for the hearts and minds of our ummah [community].”

By making sure that terrorist attacks are filmed and then widely disseminated, Al Qaeda – and other “insurgent” groups, such as the Taliban – take the battle of ideas into the media. The content of the attacks may be simple, the footage grainy and dark, but it is the dissemination that is so important. Bolt quotes at length from jihadi internet forums that show the attacks, “raids” in their jargon, as merely the first step in the process. “We expect you to be like beehives during the raid,” writes a forum moderator. “One person takes part in distributing ... another generates links ... one person writes an article. People must feel and notice that the forums have changed radically during this blessed raid. The raid is dependent on you.”

Thus the original attack becomes merely the spark. The real propaganda comes after. Indeed, for Bolt, such is the importance of the dispersal of the act across the media that he views the attack as the mere beginning. The entire operation might be born in an explosion of blood and bone but the central event is the media dispersal.

For Bolt, POTD requires two things: an act and a viewer. It is not enough to merely destroy a tank or blow up a building: “For POTD to become a fully fledged act of communication requires viewers.”

This is what occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan with jihadi videos. When operations targeted coalition troops and tanks, it was essential for the insurgencies that cameras were there to capture them. That was, in fact, a huge part of the operation, for it to be caught on camera. It is clear from viewing the videos that there was coordination, with videographers in place before the tank rolled over the tripwire, or the first rockets were fired. The same occurred in the more brutal, hidden war in Chechnya. It is what occurs today in Syria: when the Free Syrian Army takes members of the regime’s army prisoner, or explodes a tank, it is captured on camera and put on the internet.

Yet one problem with Bolt’s theory is that he needs it to explain too much. A revised propaganda of the deed theory has to cover a wide range of ways in which violent imagery has been used in the past decade, from the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 attacks in London to the many attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But one theory cannot bear so much weight. For one, Bolt ignores the changing nature of terrorism over the past decade. The way that media was used by Al Qaeda in 2001 is vastly different to how it was used by the middle of the decade, when Al Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan was broken and much of its leadership was on the run.

In particular, he conflates a number of expected audiences. There is a difference, for instance, between the beheading of Kenneth Bigley, a civil engineer kidnapped in Baghdad in 2004, which was filmed and was expected to be viewed by western audiences (Bigley was killed wearing an orange jumpsuit, meant to invoke the captives at Guantanamo Bay) and the videos of similar killings in Chechnya, where the expected audience is not the outside world – because no one was watching these secret wars in Asia – but other potential recruits.

On occasion, Bolt writes as if he believes the only audiences the terrorists have in mind are in the West, or, rather, that the only use of the violent image is to terrify. But in fact, there are often multiple audiences, with different messages for each.

The videos released by Al Qaeda following 9/11 and 7/7 positioned those mass murders in a narrative of retribution. “What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years,” said Osama bin Laden in a video address in October 2001. “The ummah has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years.”

Later “martyrdom” videos also emphasised this element of retribution. “This is a war and I am a soldier,” said the softly spoken Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the bombers who attacked London on July 7, 2005. “Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”

Both these messages were clearly intended for a western audience. But the videos also had a different message for a different audience: they showed jihadis and potential recruits that the war had begun – and could be won.

Indeed, in this sense the propaganda of the deed of these attacks went further than the 19th-century anarchist attacks. Here, they were meant to demonstrate incontrovertibly that the war had begun, that those who had taken it upon themselves to fight were fighting and were winning. Note how often in martyrdom videos the attackers seek to contrast their previous comfortable lives with their choice to wage jihad. “I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe,” said Sidique Khan.

Even today, in the uprising in Syria, videos uploaded by the Free Syrian Army have these dual messages for different audiences. The videos of attacks on regime forces – the burning tanks, the dead soldiers – are meant to both strike fear into the hearts of serving soldiers (“this will happen to you if you don’t defect”) and provide succour for those who might fight or who are enduring hardships (“the victory is coming soon”).

The propaganda of the deed of the 19th century only had one of these two audiences in mind: there was no chance that the governments they sought to overthrow would be frightened by their small attacks. Indeed, even if they were, there was nothing those governments could do. The 19th-century anarchists did not want a change of policy; they wanted a change of regime.

A second, related, criticism of Bolt’s theory is his focus on insurgents as purveyors of violent imagery. The “judo-throw” principle he discusses allows the violent image to be used against stronger powers.

He writes: “The visual is increasingly privileged over the written word ... this favours the impact of violent imagery on audiences, thus benefiting insurgents.”

Yet the impact of violent imagery on audiences is not limited to insurgents. It applies to power as well. The shock and awe that started the Iraq war in 2003 was filmed and aimed by the Americans at the Iraqis. The doctrine of shock and awe didn’t merely apply in the military sphere; it applied in the sphere of propaganda as well.

Having written about the ground-up insurgencies of the first decade of the 21st century, Bolt extends his analysis to the most recent such examples: the spectacular revolutions in the Arab republics.

But Bolt’s analysis of the Arab Spring is probably the weakest part of the book. He argues that propaganda of the deed sits “at the heart” of the uprisings, but fails to provide any evidence.

“Acts of self-immolation were to be the trigger for historic uprisings,” he writes about the Arab Spring, “capturing in one incident, in a single photographic frame, the grievances of successive generations”. This sounds plausible but is signally wrong. There are no such images of the Arab Spring. No certain images of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation exist and the only grainy one that appears to exist has not been widely distributed.

Bolt is on firmer ground when he discusses large public gatherings, mainly in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, but also in Yemen and Syria. These, he writes, speak to the “unshackling of suppression ... and confrontation”. Certainly, the sight of such large crowds tests “security forces’ confidence and the resolve of governments” as well as providing a belief in victory to those watching on television and online (indeed, there is a reinforcing loop of perception that works on the crowd themselves: the many gathered in Tahrir Square were watching themselves on mobile phones and television).

When protesters in cities in Yemen and Syria unfurled flags that stretched for hundreds of metres and were held up by thousands of people, it suggested a wave of support, a wave of humanity, against which no government could stand.

Yet this is not quite propaganda of the deed, as Bolt has it. He
calls these large gatherings
"performative politics", though he misunderstands their nature. They were not, as for example with the rallies against austerity measures in Greece and Spain, a vehicle to showcase the strength of support. They were a means of survival.

The public gatherings across the Arab republics had a specific meaning in a specific context. In a country where public expressions of dissent were banned, they represented a de facto crime and a severe challenge to the ruling regime, which responded with violence. The people gathered in Tahrir Square in Egypt and Change Square in Yemen and Benghazi in Libya, and in Homs and Hama and Aleppo, were not gathering together merely to send an image. They were not performing for the camera. They were gathering in numbers to stay safe.

The power of imagery mattered, and the revolutionaries certainly understood its power – in Egypt, in the fraught early days of the revolution, activists asked Al Jazeera not to stop broadcasting images of Tahrir Square at night, knowing that once the watching world vanished, the regime would feel free to carry out atrocities to clear the square.

Yet the images were not the main point. The protest was. It wasn’t important to merely look as if the number of people gathered could topple Hosni Mubarak’s regime; it was important that there were enough people there to topple it.

Bolt is right that images matter in insurgency. The Violent Image is a serious attempt to understand how terrorist propaganda functions in the digital age.

For Bolt, the essence of these images is performance. His reading of the 19th-century concept of propaganda of the deed helps explain an important facet of how modern war is conducted. For those anarchists, the spreading of their principles was the most important part of the deed. The deed was a means of accomplishing the propaganda.

In the 21st century, that proselytising element of violent imagery remains. Insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq needed images to send messages to their followers and enemies. But not all insurgent imagery is performance. Some of the most violent images have not come staged. They have come from a horrifying reality. The photographs of people throwing themselves from the burning World Trade Center in New York and the terrifying torture of Abu Ghraib reflect the horror of those days.

Indeed, among the images of the Arab Spring so far, those that have provided rallying points have come to light by accident: think of Khaled Said’s broken body captured in a blurry photograph; the horrifying video of 13-year-old Syrian Hamza Al Khateeb, tortured and mutilated by government forces; or the image of a young female protester stripped to her blue bra in Cairo by police. These were moments of violence captured by chance – not carried out for propaganda.

The propaganda of the violent image emphasises the propaganda. Yet violent imagery is at least as often born of violence. The Free Syrian Army today uses the propaganda of attacks to rally supporters – but it seeks to inflict losses on the Syrian army first and foremost.

In Syria, Bakunin’s “war of destruction, a merciless war to the death” is being waged against ordinary Syrians. The violent images propelled out of that conflict merely reflect its violent reality.

Faisal Al Yafai is a columnist for The National.