Virtuous War Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network [Hardcover]

Virtuous War is the first book to map the emergence and judge the consequences of a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. James Der Derian takes the reader from a family history of war and genocide to new virtual battlespaces in the Mojave Desert, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and American universities. He tracks the convergence of cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, war movies, and do-good ideologies that produced a chimera of high-tech, low-risk virtuous wars.

In this newly updated edition, he reveals how a misguided faith in virtuous war to right the wrongs of the world instead paved the way for a flawed response to 9/11 and a disastrous war in Iraq. Blinded by virtue, emboldened by technological superiority, seized by a mimetic terror, the US blundered from one foreign fiasco to the next.

Taking the long view as well as getting up close to the war machine, Virtuous Warprovides a compelling alternative to the partisan politics, instant analysis and technical fixes that currently bedevil US national security policy.

List of Photographs  Preface to the new edition  Prologue  1. The Tank and the Tortoise  2. Between Wars  3. Global Swarming and the Bosnia Question  4. The Simulation Triangle  5. The Virtual Enemy  6. Virtuous War Comes Home  7. Virtuous War Goes to Hollywood  8. Kosovo and the Virtuous Thereafter  9. A Virtual Theory for the Global Accident  10. After 9/11  11. The Age of InfoTerror  12.  Virtuous War and the Desert of the Real  Acknowledgments  List of Acronyms  Notes  Index

Praise for 2nd Edition

'From Borges to Baudrillard and beyond, James Der Derian chronicles our ongoing obsession with war technology and our increasing disconnection with l½