“Come on, let us shoot!”: WikiLeaks and the Cultures of Militarization

Abstract

This paper explores the controversy generated by the nonprofit WikiLeaks website’s posting of a video documenting the shooting of a group of civilians by U.S. forces situated in a helicopter gunship hovering over a Baghdad neighbourhood. Sparking press attention around the world, the brutal rawness of the black and white footage—compounded by the harrowing exchanges between the air crew recorded on the audio track—proved acutely unsettling to viewers otherwise habituated to routine (effectively sanitized) renderings of the horrors of a warzone. This paper considers the video as an instance where the cultural normalization of militarization was disrupted in ideological terms, thereby threatening to unravel officially-sanctioned relations of communicative power.