The War On Terror Became America’s First “Feminist” War
Rafia Zakaria on American Neoimperialism Lies of Liberation
By Rafia Zakaria in Literary Hub Via W. W. Norton illustrations added August 19, 2021
“I’m fine,” the pale, red-haired Jessica Chastain says as she takes off her full black jumpsuit and face mask. The scene is from Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which despite the seeming banality of the dialogue, says a lot about a new flavor of feminism that has evolved in the white and Western world since 9/11 and the War on Terror.
In the film, Chastain plays a CIA “targeter” named Maya who is physically delicate but tough as nails in every other way, which in this particular conversation also means that she is up for torture. In fact, that is what she and her male CIA colleague have been doing inside a makeshift bunker that also serves as a torture chamber. “Let’s go back in there,” she tells the men after they have rested a minute from the hard toils of inflicting extreme pain on other human beings.
Here, then, is gender equality at its most perverse, a white woman trying her best to show a white man that she has as much of an appetite for cruelty as he does. And the laconic white men appear to approve. “She’s a killer,” her boss says in her wake as she disappears down a hallway. If this had been an entirely fictional film, all of it could have been discarded as the morbid fantasy of some Hollywood director.
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As it happens, Maya is based on a very real CIA sleuth, whose identity the agency has never released but to whose gritty greatness many have made pointed allusions. Maya (along with others, also mostly women, CIA sources have said) was responsible for the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
The film Zero Dark Thirty may be a souped-up, cinematically slick, and action-packed retelling of what the real Maya managed to do, but it is based on fact. For her now-feted heroism, the real Maya won the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, an honor about which she was happy to boast to all her CIA colleagues through a mass email.
I watched Zero Dark Thirty in a nearly full movie theater in Indiana. Jessica Chastain’s Maya may have been “fine” in makeshift torture bunkers, but I definitely was not. Beyond the movie theater, the shopping mall was all aglow with holiday decorations and around me, my fellow moviegoers seemed snug in the cozy darkness of the theater and smug in this elevation of white women as the ultimate weapon in crushing Brown terrorists.
Continue reading “How the US stole Feminism to justify bombing, torture, occupation and Empire”
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