Toward the tail end of Barack Obama’s first administration, liberal critics of the drone war he waged in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia became very concerned about transparency. Each time the wires reported a strike in the hinterlands against suspected militants, reporters put in calls to the Pentagon, the White House, and the CIA to try to get them to say anything at all about it: how many it had killed, the identities of the victims, how many of them could have been civilians or children, which agency had ordered the missile fired. There was no mass opposition to an officially secret war against unspecified alleged terrorists (the allegations against whom were also classified), and so the press pressed on the fact of its secrecy — as if that were the real problem, not the violence that was obscured.
In this issue, Lylla Younes reflects on that era as she reports on a contemporary drone war: Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. Those living under drones, as Younes and the Lebanese villagers she interviews do, have a crystal clear view of a subject that was once defined by its opacity. We might say the same of the activists and bystanders who document the abuses of masked federal immigration agents. Elected Democrats have called for reforms to include the clear identification of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents and for them to wear body cams (recall that the 2020 uprisings against police killings led to the same reforms, resulting in lucrative contracts for cameras and data management, while footage of wrongdoing is routinely withheld and cases are buried). In this issue, Tanvi Misra looks at a different vision of accountability, following immigration court watchers who attempt to influence the cases of immigrants facing deportation or simply accompany them through the process to let them — and the judges and prosecutors — know they are not alone. Today’s anti-ICE activists want to know abuse is happening, not for the sake of after-the-fact facts but so they can stop it, with their bodies if they must.
We find the cold comforts of transparency, too, in the release of millions more Epstein emails. Should we be happy with more evidence that we were correct, all along, that #MeToo was exactly right — that powerful men really do spend their time helping one another get lawyers to defend them against allegations of sexual assault? That the men in charge are as puerile, stupid, and brazen as the feminist scolds have always said they are? The mask-off, marauding imperialism of Trump Round Two toward Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, Iran also has the dubious merit of obviousness. The everything-everywhere-all-at-once nature of two decades of the war on terror, however, seems to have enervated the opposition to militarism: It’s hard to be anti-war if nothing quite rises to the name.
The noblest function of traditional news media is to lay things bare. Well, now we are in an era of bare-faced violence with even fewer outlets to document it, let alone suggest ways that we might exploit the obviousness, might move from being witnesses to something more.
That’s why Lux exists. This issue, our sixteenth, comes out on Lux’s fifth birthday. Our commitments have only gotten stronger. To original reporting: in this issue, Palestinian perspectives on the Gaza ceasefire; the downfall of fashion edgelords SSENSE. To cultural criticism: Jamie Hood on problematic fave Catherine Breillat; Aditya Gandhi on sexy screwball theory; Natalie Adler on the smoothing of body and mind. To leftist strategy: Sarah Leonard takes a hard look at what downwardly mobile millennials can offer the labor movement; Kristen Martin asks family abolitionists to engage with the abolition of family policing. To fun: Write books for kids! Archive your sex zines!
So pick up a couple of copies for your friends and lovers. Subscribe and donate, if you can. Help us keep paying fair rates to independent feminist journalists, artists, and photographers. We’re all in this together.