Clash of Civilizations

Clash of Civilizations names a framework that the book turns against its apparent moral simplicity: photographs of abused Iraqi prisoners do not confirm a division between barbarism and a civilization that respects human dignity. Instead, they reveal brutality within the United States’ own public image and expose how violence can be made into spectacle.

The Thesis Under Pressure

The discussion takes up Samuel Huntington’s account of an ongoing conflict between Arab and American civilizations, then tests it against images of humiliated Iraqi prisoners. The photographs disrupt the framework’s implied contrast between a barbaric outside and a dignified American inside. In the book’s argument, what they show is not a clean boundary between opposing civilizational values, but a difference in how brutality is enacted and presented.

Violence as Spectacle

The passage distinguishes anonymous torture from torture turned into a media event. In the latter, prisoners’ bodies become an anonymous background to the torturers’ smiling faces, which appear as signs of innocence. That staging matters: the images do not merely document violence but make its perpetrators visible in a form that helps the violence circulate as spectacle. The photographs therefore offer, in the author’s interpretation, a direct glimpse of the values sustaining the American way of life, rather than evidence of an external clash between civilization and barbarism.

The Barbarism Within the Clash

The argument culminates in a reversal: every supposed clash of civilizations is also a clash of the barbarisms beneath them. By invoking Walter Benjamin’s formulation, the passage shifts attention away from a moral opposition between whole civilizations and toward violence embedded within their claims to legitimacy. The phrase thus becomes less a neutral description of cultural conflict than a frame whose apparent opposition the photographs unsettle.