Soldiers,scapegoats,and the tragic demands of Operation First Casualty

Abstract

In 2008, the activist group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) produced Operation First Casualty, a piece of guerrilla theater staged on streets and in parks in U.S. cities, in which members performed actions that they had carried out as they patrolled Iraq and Afghanistan. In opposition to representations of war that excerpt violent events from daily life, IVAW portrays military culture as one of habitual brutality. At the same time, Operation First Casualty placed an audience of American bystanders in positions akin to those of Iraqis and Afghanis, in an attempt to engage empathy for, and enable solidarity with, the people whose countries are occupied by the US. Due to what I describe as soldiers’ function as a scapegoat figure in the national imaginary, IVAW’s insight has had little influence on public discourse. To understand the co-determinacy of the marginal status of soldiers and the social framing that gives the soldier figure such pull, I overlay theories of tragedy and political sociology in which scholars explore the ritualistic dynamics of scapegoats, collective identity, and outsiders in democratic society.

Keywords

deliberation democracy empathy identity nationalism soldiers tragedy United States Military veterans

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