Looming over the news of the past month like the sword of Damocles is the coming 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack. It is around this anniversary that Biden timed his withdrawal, bumping back the negotiated May exit but not so far that it hit any of the meaningful 2001 dates. These dates could have included the Sept. 18 signing of the 2001 AUMF, the Oct. 7 invasion of Afghanistan by a multinational coalition, the Taliban surrender offered by Dec. 7, 2001, or even the conclusion of the Battle of Tora Bora on Dec. 17. Militaries and cultures can build reverence around specific dates, whose observations in turn take on a logic of their own.

Last week on Deep Dive, we took a look at how government responsiveness to information requests correlates to media coverage, and to what kind of story the government agency is able to tell. If the agency in question can mitigate bad press by showing a proactive response to media, it’s more inclined to share records. If, instead, the scandal suggests corruption, government agencies may instead stonewall, letting the truth remain in unpublished documents until the pressure passes.

For militaries looking to media to justify their existence, rituals around dates, anniversaries, and traditions, as well as specific approaches to war dead, can similarly shape press coverage. That’s one of the central arguments in an article by Nicole Wenger, published in the September issue of Global Studies Quarterly.

“War commemorative rituals involve a hyper focus on mourning ‘our’ dead, grieving and revering those ‘we’ have lost, and in turn, obscuring the political contexts in which these deaths have occurred,” writes Wenger. “[Contemporary] Western military affairs have been called the ‘forever wars,’ long-term military occupations that have been accompanied by cultural attitudes of the ‘military normal.’”

For one case study, Wenger turned to the hearse procession of repatriated soldiers along Highway 401 east of Toronto, Ontario. These gatherings are the subject of media coverage, from a commemorative book by a photojournalist to repeated news coverage in the press. There is official handling of the war dead: The bodies of deceased Canadian soldiers receive a military ceremony at Canadian Forces Base Trenton where they arrive. The procession from that base, to the coroner’s office in Toronto, passes under highway overpasses, where citizens gather in ritual praise and honoring of the dead.

These rituals thus act as a sort of xxxxxx in support of the war effort, by limiting coverage of the dead to the impressions shared by public mourners, flattening expressions of grief into a reaffirmation that questioning the war means dishonoring the dead.

“Through rituals, the personal affects of war are showcased and the politics are hidden,” Wenger writes. 

By narrowing the spectrum of publicly visible sorrow to that of the crowds assembled to watch a hearse motorcade, media sets bounds on the debate over the war at the exact moment its most direct consequences are brought home, under flag-draped coffins. Wegner’s work is about how society as a whole produces and reproduces these rituals. To the extent that it is a media story, it is a media story because it shows how media, consciously or passively, acquiesces to the norms of mourning war dead, set by political elites and reinforced by the public acts of some subset of citizens.

If there is unease in reading this, if talking about rituals around war dead as political acts feels disrespectful, it is because the logics of militarism in support of war are pervasive. That language, in another form, is visible throughout President Biden’s remarks on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is also, almost certainly, why the hard deadline for the US exit from Afghanistan was predetermined by another date, already synonymous with the commemoration of American dead.

Joanne Seoyoung Lee challenged the humanitarian aid community to live up to its stated ideals when it comes to delivering food aid to North Korea. Carefully acknowledging the political calculus at play between relaxing restrictions on and extending support to an authoritarian regime, Lee shows the current crisis is bad enough that the regime itself may directly appeal for help. Providing that food aid, Lee concludes, would be a way for the US to affirm “the belief in the universal value of human life, aiming to protect lives regardless of political convenience.”  

Marco Werman interviewed Welton Chang, the chief technology officer at Human Rights First, about the hazards posed to people in Afghanistan from captured US biometric devices. Paper records can be destroyed, providing some return to anonymity for people worried about reprisal violence. Biometric data, like iris scans or fingerprints, are always identifying, posing a risk to anyone whose unchangeable characteristics remain unerased in the devices. Says Chang, “you could use the data and the devices to systematically find individuals who were previously a part of security forces, the government, worked with the US as an interpreter or as a local national worker on a base. And that systematic process could lead to many people being harmed.”

Henda Fellah witnessed what might have been a coup in Tunisia. When on July 25, Tunisian President Kais Saied dismissed the government and froze parliament, he did so within the confines of the powers granted to him in the constitution. As Fellah writes, the long stagnation and ineptness of Parliament meant that its dismissal was greeted with fireworks and public celebration, by people breaking curfew to do so. Yet the nature of this abrupt break with the past can herald consolidation around a president with emergency powers, as has happened across countless countries, leading to dictatorship. In the face of all this uncertainty, Fellah placed her faith in the legitimacy of people to making their demands known in the streets.

“Reign of Terror" journalist Spencer Ackerman’s scathing look at the first 20 years of the War on Terror is out, and the reviews are in.

The good news is cable has found the architects of the forever war, the bad news is that they’re bringing them on to explain why the end of the war is bad instead of grilling them about how the US chose this war in the first place.

Twitter has plenty of mechanisms for marking a bad tweet, like a good old-fashioned dunk, but perhaps none is more of the moment than author Rick Paulas showing up to plug his new collection of short stories.

Cyberpunk villain cosplayer Elon Musk paid a dancer to dress in a unitard, told people it was a plan for a future robot, and somehow got favorable tech press coverage despite the fact that the dancer didn’t even dance the robot convincingly.

It’s rough experiencing history in real time. For a gentle break, consider the saga of Miette, weird Twitter’s favorite cat, who apparently ate a lizard and saw the universe.

For a somewhat more metal break, consider Romania’s official TikTok.

Thanks to Sam Ratner for letting me pinch-hit on these exceptionally newsy weeks. You can find me on Twitter, but now I’m going to hand Critical State back so he can pick it up pick it up pick it up.

*This week's Critical State is brought to you by guest author Kelsey Atherton.