<nettime> NATO The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World - essay by Marek Kohn

[Suzanne Treister <suzyRB@va.com.au>]

Dear all,

I have been working for the past 4 years on a project which has just
been published as a book, 'NATO The Military Codification System for
the Ordering of Everything in the World' by Black Dog Publishing,
London.

The book contains a fascinating essay (below) by Marek Kohn which I
hope may be of interest to some of you.

Marek Kohn is author of 'Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug
Underground', 'The Race Gallery', 'As We Know It: Coming to Terms with
an Evolved Mind', 'A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the
English Imagination' and 'Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good'.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/

***

Materiel World

'Imagine if you will that you have opened the door to your office
and you discover a leak. To contain the drip, you go to the cleaners
cupboard and borrow a shiny orange bucket to place under the drip.
You decide that this bucket is a smashing piece of kit and you think
it should be codified so that everybody in NATO can benefit from its
exceptional water catching capabilities.'(1) The same procedure will
apply for whatever you would like to share with NATO, be it a shiny
bucket or a shiny cluster bomb. One of NATO's 56 codification bureaux
will assign it a number and add it to the database of the things that
NATO is made of.

It is a reassuring suggestion, in its way. After nearly sixty
years, during most of which the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
was articulated as a system of tripwires that would unleash the
West's nuclear arsenal if triggered by a Soviet assault, a leaky
ceiling is the kind of problem that springs to the NATO bureaucrat's
mind. Invited to imagine life in this corner of the most powerful
military alliance in history, one glimpses a cosy little office
world of innocuous juvenile humour. Instead of straight-backed
functionaries clattering out staccato bursts of serial numbers and
cryptic military jargon, we have a civilian who could be lolling in
front of any screen in any office anywhere, talking in a language
anybody could understand. Military secrecy has been replaced by a
banal transparency, its opaque jargon by morning television demotic.

A similar tone is struck by the website of NAMSA,(2) the NATO
Maintenance and Supply Agency, which speaks the language not of
command but of commerce, competition and customers. Meanwhile every
other truck on the motorway is labelled 'logistics', until quite
recently an exclusively military term. A universal logic and language
of organisations is emerging: enterprises, civil bureaucracies and
the military all talk and act the same way. In the process NATO loses
not only some of its distinguishing military character, but also some
of its sense of itself as an organisation with a historical mission.
Of course that remains present in its statements of purpose and its
growing portfolio of international agreements, but the glimpses we
get of what goes on round the back suggest no depth of field, just
flat office grey. The supply chain is a business operation much like
any other, moving boxes from suppliers to customers, and broadly
indifferent to whether the boxes contain buckets or bombs.

The fact that glimpses are available itself serves to demilitarise
the military - a process of mainstreaming that has also turned
intelligence agencies into public-facing organisations, welcoming
online visitors in an effort to build their brands and compete
with commercial employers for bright young graduates. NATO writes
documents in a public idiom and casually leaves stacks of them in the
public domain. Building up a public image as if it were a commercial
organisation, asserting its contemporary presence, NATO shrugs off
the historical content that gives it meaning. It disenchants itself,
dispelling the mystery, secrecy and tension that used to surround it.

And that is where Suzanne Treister comes in. Her NATO project is
rooted in the early realisation that military and civil artefacts
may share common functions or descent. For her eleventh birthday
she was given a Marconiphone record player, identical to the one
she has painted and located within NATO Supply Classification
(NSC) 7730 - Phonographs, Radios, and Television Sets: Home Type.
Associating it with the military brand later subsumed into BAE
Systems, as noted in her caption to the Aerial Towed Decoy (NSC 1080
- Camouflage and Deception Equipment), she grew up with a sense of
the family relationships between civil and military products. In
this case the relationship is one of shared ancestry rather than
parentage: the original Marconi company threw in its brand name when
it sold its consumer division to RCA in 1929, leading to decades of
misapprehension that the same enterprise was responsible for domestic
Marconiphone radios and military Marconi ones. Civil and military
products are also, and more frequently, linked by common components:
thermionic valves, the electronic lamps that were superseded in the
1960s by transistors, could be part of the circuitry in record players
for teenagers or radar scanners for air forces.

If one notices the names or becomes aware of the inner workings, most
transport and signal-transmitting technologies look as though they
have military potential. But instead of promoting disenchantment, by
developing a mechanistic understanding of how things are put together,
this raises the spectre of mystery: suspicion that there is more to
familiar products than meets the eye; unease about the moral company
that household items or consumer desirables keep; the prickle of
paranoia - not necessarily a disagreeable sensation - about what is
really going on.

The NATO Codification System (NCS) amplifies such sensations by
demonstrating that the military's interest in civilian items is
already encyclopaedic - ashtrays, artworks, doilies, mannequins,
velocipedes - and suggesting that it is indefinitely extensible. As a
taxonomy it has its diverting eccentricities, such as the exclusion
of dental floss from 8530 - Personal Toiletry Articles and Bibles
from 7610 - Books and Pamphlets. The final category, 9999, is a
dustbin class, Miscellaneous Items, but recourse to it is limited
by the specification that it may include 'only those items which
cannot conceivably be classified in any existing classes'. Bibles
could conceivably be included in the previous class but one, 9925 -
Ecclesiastical Equipment, Furnishings, and Supplies; but they aren't.
This appears to leave the NSC with a system which makes provision for
chalices and ecclesiastical statues but not for the founding text of
the religious tradition dominant in 25 of NATO's 26 member states:
military chaplains presumably have to provide their own. Treister
works round the anomaly by depicting a Talking Bible under NSC 5835
- Sound Recording and Reproducing Equipment. This complete audio New
Testament is available in a range of languages, of which only two,
English and Spanish, are those of NATO members. With the possible
exception of Russian, the rest - Bengali, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hausa,
Mandarin, Swahili and Vietnamese - are a reminder that the long march
of missionary evangelism into Africa and Asia is still in progress.

Treister includes a number of other images referring to regions
outside the NATO area, including a Chinese frigate (NSC 1905 - Combat
Ships) and Chinese 'aircraft carriers' - actually novelty fireworks
(NSC 1370 - Pyrotechnics). Once upon a time, Western security against
China was allocated to NATO's eastern counterpart SEATO, the South
East Asia Treaty Organisation, while the turbulent belt of southern
Asia between Turkey and Pakistan was to be covered by CENTO, the
Central Treaty Organisation. Today only NATO is left, and with the end
of the Iron Curtain it has lost its territorial definition. It is now
operating in Afghanistan, and the fortunes of the city where CENTO
was founded, Baghdad, is another well-known story. Treister reflects
that one with two images of tanks (NSC 2350 - Combat, Assault, and
Tactical Vehicles), a British one standing poised in the desert, and a
Soviet-built Iraqi one collapsed like a stricken elephant. An earlier
age, and the semblance of a timeless tranquillity, is evoked by a
picture reworking an old cigarette card image of a guffa (NSC 1990 -
Miscellaneous Vessels), a traditional rowed boat said to have carried
much of Baghdad's trade along the Tigris.

NATO's codification system has also spread beyond its borders. Its
27 'sponsored' users just outnumber the alliance's 26 members. They
include Russia, which sees itself as NATO's legacy target. While
protesting loudly about the Baltic states' NATO membership, Russia
takes part in conferences about codification. In public Russia
vaunts her historic pride; back in the warehouse, she smoothes the
supply chain to take advantage of the demand created when former
Soviet-dominated states joined NATO and took their Soviet kit with
them. It becomes a matter of moving the boxes efficiently, not where
they are going. As corporations fall into using the system, the NCS
may become a worldwide industry standard.(3)

In a word, NATO and its codification system are globalising. But
without its original regional definition, marked by a line down
the middle of Europe and a bridge across the Atlantic, NATO has
seemed to drift. Although it has grown bigger and has taken up new
missions, it is ever more exposed politically to questions about
its purpose. In particular, it is vulnerable to criticisms from the
United States that, like the United Nations, it is loath to fight for
the ideals which the US identifies with its own national interests.
Today NATO is a coalition of a couple of dozen national perspectives
(the British one being effectively continuous with that of the US)
instead of the simple strategic vision crisply expressed by its first
Secretary-General, Lord Ismay: to keep the Americans in, the Russians
out, and the Germans down.(4) Since the Berlin Wall came down the
alliance has struggled to answer the question: what is NATO for?

A possible answer is to be found in the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949
that brought the organisation into existence. The heart of the treaty
is said to be Article 5, in which the parties agree that 'that an
armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America
shall be considered an attack against them all.' NATO has always
been understood as an overwhelmingly military organization, founded
upon a doctrine of collective self-defence. But Article 1 binds the
parties to undertake to resolve conflicts by peaceful means; and
Article 2 specifies means by which peaceful international relations
may be developed: 'strengthening their free institutions', 'promoting
conditions of stability and well-being', and economic integration.5
'Should the risk of aggression become less pressing than it is today,'
Lord Ismay observed a few years later, 'it may be discovered that
Article 2 is the real battlefield ... the contest between the free
countries and the Communist totalitarian countries may be won by those
who have been the most successful in solving their economic and social
problems.'(6)

NATO quickly found in science a productive way of furthering these
wider aims. Although today the programme is labelled Science for Peace
and Security, the remit is wide enough to include discussions about
food as a security issue, air pollution and cancer risk assessment,
the latter related to the sequelae of the 1986 accident at the
Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine. Among the SPS's Blue Book
series are two volumes on the conservation of historic stained glass
windows. In a society increasingly organised around the management
of risk, it is possible to imagine an indefinite expansion of NATO's
scientific themes as one issue after another is assessed as a risk and
accordingly categorised as a threat to security.

Some of the problems are of the military-industrial complex's own
making. The series of nuclear power stations that form a chain of
bastions in the middle of Treister's sequence (NSC 4470 - Nuclear
reactors) are a concentration of security concerns: electricity
supply, fuel resources, responses to climate change, nuclear
proliferation, terrorism, and indeed nuclear power plant safety.
They also represent globalisation, the modern ones among them
being the products of a small group of companies which promise
efficiencies of operation and cost through standardised production
processes. Identical Westinghouse AP1000s will be installed in
Alabama, Zheijiang, and possibly East Anglia. But through their
association with nuclear weapons (major class 11), and their symbiotic
relationships with the state, for many they still represent the wrong
kind of power.

Nevertheless, NATO's concept of itself suggests that Article 2 could
be the way to go, and the NCS can be taken as an affirmation of its
universal potential. Were procurement records for NATO's purchases of
non-military items also publicly accessible, one might surmise they
would show that NATO's use for art is as decoration for the lobbies
of diplomatic premises (9915 - Collectors' and/or Historical Items),
and that it has a similarly good explanation for the inclusion of
costume jewellery (9910) in the NCS. Treister offers jewellery by
Vivienne Westwood and works of art including Picasso's Guernica and
a Malevich Black Square, the latter's caption noting its acquisition
for the Russian state by the billionaire 'oligarch' Vladimir Potanin,
as a reminder of how power works in Russia today. Even at its most
absurd, Treister's ingenious and often playful choice of exemplars
goes to show that NATO can fit almost any artefact in the world into
its scheme of things. What could NATO be for? Treister's answer is
that it could be for anything and everything.

For her purposes, though, it needs to have its third dimension
restored. Modern global systems strive to maximise their extent across
the two dimensions of the planet's surface, while seeking to minimise
the extent to which they occupy the dimension of time. Efficiency
means minimising the time between acquiring objects and delivering
them to their destinations. In Treister's hands, the NATO codification
system is landscaped to encourage it to do the opposite of what it was
designed to do. By rendering the text with a paintbrush, she makes it
impossible for computers to read, and thereby takes it out of global
circulation. Technically, the replication of words and images is
not of high fidelity, but making the signals noisier enhances their
effect. Noise is background; background includes history; noise helps
to conjure history up. In Treister's watercolours, depths of time
become perceptible. This is their dominant theatrical effect, a sense
of temporal space through which historical narratives can be imagined,
followed and interwoven.

The trope is familiar from the Rosalind Brodsky projects, in which
Treister's fictional character travels in time between the present
century and the previous one. In 'NATO', the effect is again to
make the past simultaneously present, and in particular to turn
NATO's lifetime into a virtual form, like a constellation, within the
space of the work. Beatles memorabilia (NSC 8510 - Perfumes, toilet
preparations and powders) and an early David Bowie album (NSC 7740
- Phonograph records) are tokens of the relationship between NATO's
lifetime and the artist's own. For somebody of Treister's generation,
the relationship between the personal and the geopolitical is both
fundamental and contingent. We are aware that we are what we are
because of the shape of the world into which we were born, and that
the world could have taken radically different shapes if history's
deluges had flowed down different channels. In our formative years
it was conventionally accepted that there were three worlds - people
still sometimes speak of the Third - and widely assumed that other
worlds were possible. From today's perspective, the world seems to
have reached an inevitable condition, having resolved the historical
aberrations of the twentieth century. Treister's assembly of items
corrects that misapprehension, and allows the imagination to conjure
hints of different constellations.

Her choices are guided by an eye attuned to the aura of associations
that surround certain objects and sites. Space flight is one of
her favourite themes, a hobby also put to use in the catalogue of
stamps used as sources for her imagined spacecraft in the Brodsky
'Operation Swanlake' project. It is also a phenomenon with Cold War
roots, made possible by the development of rockets that could send
nuclear warheads from one continent to another When the Soviet Union
sent the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit in 1957,
it proved itself to be a superpower. For the next few years, during
which the division of Europe was completed by the Berlin Wall, and
the two superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in the
Cuban missile crisis, NATO faced the possibility that it might meet
its match. And it was during this period that Vostok 1 (NSC 1810 -
Space Vehicles) took the first human into space, carrying Yuri Gagarin
once around the planet. Gagarin's orbit and safe return was a new
humiliation for the United States, still struggling to catch up with
the USSR four years after Sputnik 1. This was the peak of Soviet
achievement, the one moment where it unquestionably led the world, and
a pivotal one at which to impress the new nations looking for a patron
as they emerged from colonial rule.

Gagarin's role is not noted in Treister's caption, but the craft
itself seems to have an anthropomorphic quality. This is not just
because it has a round 'head' atop a cylindrical trunk, but because
of the exhibition arch to which it points. The arrangement bears
a fortuitous resemblance to the well-known and widely reproduced
'Flammarion Woodcut', in which a man bursts through the vault of
stars at the edge of the world, entering the heavens beyond. Like
Treister's work, the Flammarion illustration conveys a strong fictive
sense of temporal depth. Although it was published in a book by
Camille Flammarion in 1888, its style suggests greater antiquity, and
its content plays to the mistaken belief that pre-modern Europeans
believed the Earth was flat. The ghost of the Flammarion picture
connects the space vehicle with Treister's 'Alchemy' project, in which
she turns newspaper front pages into alchemical drawings. Occult
magical beliefs are also represented by a camera claimed to be able
to photograph human auras (NSC 6720 - Cameras, Still Picture) and
a selection of witchy candles (NSC 6260 - Nonelectrical Lighting
Fixtures) from an online pagan boutique. These threads lead back to
the Rosalind Brodsky Hexen 2039 project, whose fantasy storyline
about a military occult project was based on the cult history of
the American military's susceptibility to magic masquerading as
science.(7)

America's fear of aerial threat began not with the advent of
intercontinental missiles, but with the deployment of long-range
Soviet bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The image of the
Nike rockets (NSC 1470 - Guided missiles), lined up as if on parade
at their launch site in the San Francisco Bay Area, symbolises how
NATO wanted to be seen those days: prepared, technologically advanced,
protective. Rockets never looked more like rockets than in those days;
graceful darts with narrow-angled fins, miniature heralds of the
machines that, science fiction enthusiasts were sure, would one day
propel men around the Solar System. The Nikes, however, could get no
more than about 75 miles out over the Pacific. Later versions carried
nuclear warheads: San Franciscans would have heard a rush of thunder,
and then seen the lead of the Bay sky turn to gold.

Although this image represents the crux of the matter - what NATO
really was for; what might have happened, but didn't - it is near the
horizon of Treister's imaginative geography. The central zone of the
project is in Europe, to the east; but there is no sense of homeland.
Two packets of cigarette papers (NSC 9920 - Smokers' Articles and
Matches) made in a Polish town early in the last century are miniature
icons of 'Zion', a fata morgana of a city shimmering above a desert.
These disposable charms were a vision of a future beyond Europe and
on a higher plane. (The medium was not entirely inappropriate, given
the similarity between cigarette paper and Bible paper. Cigarette
papers, used for smuggling messages, were known as 'bibles' among
Polish political prisoners in the 1980s.)

Unwilling or unable to settle within the continent, the project is
drawn to a marginal zone, the Baltic, where the land and the political
domains contesting it run up against the sea. A group of lighthouses
(NSC 1925 - Special Service Vessels) picket the island of RY"gen,
a longstanding German seaside resort. The older ones are the stuff
of tinted postcards, whimsical and jolly. The newer ones are brutal
and sinister: the tower at Prora, built in 1987 near the site of
an unfinished Nazi holiday complex, links the pre-war and post-war
periods of totalitarian recreation. It looks like a watchtower to
prevent holidaymakers from fleeing the first workers' and peasants'
state on German soil, rather than a beacon to keep ships safe. The
series is extended east with two lighthouses on the Polish coast: the
German captions note the old German place-names, even though the more
recent of the pair was built in Gdansk forty years after the city
ceased to be Danzig. Between the wars it was a free port, suspended by
an uneasy balance of international forces outside the mosaic of nation
states.

The morose Baltic is also the depth in which is to be found one of the
most symbolically and narratively concentrated objects in Treister's
collection. When she chose the Polish submarine Orzel to represent NSC
1905, Combat Ships and Landing Vessels, she had no idea that she had
lit upon a vessel of national myth and a skein of ravelled history
that traces an arc across the Baltic and the North Sea, from Russia
to Scotland, and across three eras, before, during and after the Cold
War. In sports, this is what is known as the luck of champions: the
kind that favours an exercise already on course for success.

Orzel, Eagle, seems an incongruous name for a submarine, especially
one whose form, as Treister's painting shows, readily suggests a
whale. But the white eagle is the Polish national symbol: there could
be no more fitting a name for a vessel with a unique distinction
in the history of Polish resistance to foreign assault. Its record
has been commemorated by the naval tradition of making the name an
inheritance. The boat in Treister's painting is the third ORP, Ship of
the Republic of Poland, to bear the name; and the Republic of Poland
it now serves is the third Polish republic to have had a submarine
Orzel flying its ensign. The first served the Second Republic, which
came into being after the First World War; the second belonged to the
pseudo-independent People's Republic that followed the Second World
War. The third, built in Leningrad and classified by NATO as a Kilo
class boat, now belongs to the post-communist Third Republic.

The first Orzel not only symbolised the Polish nation but was bought
by the Polish people, servicemen and civilians, whose contributions
covered most of the price agreed with its Dutch builders. After
two weeks of combat operations against German forces in September
1939, her commander made for the Estonian port of Tallinn, where he
intended to disembark on grounds of ill-health. When Orzel arrived,
it was impounded by the Estonian authorities, who began to remove
its armament. Another officer took command and led the crew in
a break-out, taking two Estonian guards with them. According to
Soviet reports, the guards were killed; according to the Poles,
they were dropped off in Sweden with money to cover their journey
home: 'Remember that when one returns from the underworld,' the new
commander is said to have told them, 'it doesn't do to travel anything
less than first class.'(8)

The Soviet claims were part of a forceful diplomatic and propaganda
intervention against Estonia. The Baltic republic's foreign minister
was summoned to the Kremlin, where Commissar Molotov accused Estonia
of imperilling Soviet security by allowing the Orzel to escape, and
demanded that Estonia enter into a defence treaty with the USSR.
During the talks, Molotov reinforced his point by announcing that an
unidentified submarine had sunk the Metallist, a Soviet merchant ship,
in the Gulf of Narva.(9) The submarine responsible is now identified
as Soviet, and the incident as a staged provocation, in The White
Book, an account of 'Losses Inflicted on the Estonian Nation' by the
Estonian State Commission on Policies of Repression.(10) At the time,
Soviet pressure forced Estonia to enter the Soviet military orbit, and
to allow thousands of Red Army troops onto her territory.

By October, the Orzel was the only Polish military unit still active
against German forces. The rest of the navy's fleet had been sunk,
interned in Sweden, or sent to safety in Britain. Orzel's arrival at
Rosyth in Scotland inaugurated a legend, not unlike that of Dunkirk
in British history, which came to the assistance of both Polish and
British morale during the early setbacks of the war. The boat was
lost, however, to a British mine.

Today, the third Orzel takes part in NATO Baltic exercises, as do
Estonian ships: to Russia's unease and indignation, the Baltic states
have become NATO members. Estonia's airspace is defended by the Baltic
Air Patrol, in which other NATO air forces take turns to cover for the
Baltic republics' lack of fighter aircraft. The Luftwaffe does its
bit, as does the Polish air force, which uses its Soviet-built MiGs.
Treister's imaginative transpositions across the old Cold war lines,
reflecting wryly upon what NATO used to mean and what it may mean now,
echo the transpositions of alliance, materiel and power acted out by
the Orzel submarines and the ebb and flow of military manoeuvres in
the Baltic.

In choosing a poster produced by the Solidarity trade union (NSC 3690
- Miscellaneous Printed Matter) for the first genuinely contested
elections held in the Soviet bloc, Treister offers a reminder of a
phenomenon that was readily categorised but less readily recognised
for what it was. To communists and their fellow-travellers it was
an anti-socialist organisation that was doing by subversion what
NATO could not achieve by force; it was that to many conservatives
also. From farther left, it looked like a miraculous manifestation
of workers' self-organisation - with a programme of workers'
self-management to go with it. To the devout, it was a vast
congregation arising, guided by the Pope and the Virgin Mary. To
Poles, it was the Polish nation. All these views had a significant
purchase on the truth.

It was certainly an agent of immense significance in the process that
ended the division of Europe into blocs. By 1989, however, it was not
the impassioned movement that had surged into being nine years before.
The process was completed at a remove from the people, who had largely
resigned from political activity. Treister's painting represents a
poster that urges an exhausted people to vote 'so that tomorrow they'
- the children - 'could be proud of us'. The Polish phrasing admits a
sense of uncertainty, almost foreboding, that would be unimaginable in
a modern, professionally managed election campaign. It is truer to the
spirit of the time than the clever bravado of the better-known 'High
Noon' poster, depicting Gary Cooper as the sheriff armed with a ballot
paper for the showdown with the Reds.

Treister's image takes history back to one of the crossroads moments
at which its paths are chosen. The children pose the question: what
happened to them? A little arithmetic suggests the answer: they are
working abroad, quite likely in 'the [British] Isles', or thinking
about it. And are they proud of their parents' political efforts?
Probably not: they want to be free of the past, and of Poland's
squabbling and compromised politicians. Like their contemporaries
around Europe, they can do without history.

Most of Treister's collection enjoys the space to play that arises
from NATO's distinctive historical position as a force that never
fought the war for which it was assembled. The history of classic
NATO, as a marketing department might call it, is of a possibility
that did not come to pass. NATO's classification framework, as
manipulated by Treister, is a machine for the imagination of lesser
and more esoteric possibilities; actual, fictional or arguable.

At a number of points, however, it refers to wars that NATO has
fought, all of them in the period following the collapse of the
Warsaw Pact. Several of these images are the most problematic element
of the collection, pitched in a different register from the rest
and forming a subversive cell within the work. All of them are
taken from the former Yugoslavia, in which NATO mounted two air
campaigns. The term accurately describes the nature of the actions
and indicates their limitations, which kept NATO forces off the
ground in order to minimise casualties among their personnel. It
under-acknowledges their contributions to ongoing wars, though. The
first intervention, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, turned the tide of the
war against the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb republic, allowing
forces loyal to the recognised but beleaguered Sarajevo government
to gain ground. In the second, NATO attacked the sovereign state of
Yugoslavia, and effectively provided the insurgent Kosovo Liberation
Army with an air force. NATO's wars have been militarily limited, but
politically, diplomatically and morally complicated.

They figure more simply at several points in Treister's work, serving
as a defence against the possibility that the work as a whole is
seen to evade the truth of military violence. One image, taken from
a press agency photograph, shows shoemakers (NSC 8430 - Footwear,
men's) working by candle light in Belgrade, which suffered power cuts
as a result of NATO's air raids. As an example of Treister's ability
to cast historical shadows it is particularly striking. Shoemakers
smack of the middle ages, and here was NATO taking them back in that
direction. As propaganda it serves the Yugoslav cause splendidly,
letting those historical shadows play upon honest craftsmen carrying
on under the bombs, in just the same vein as the ordinary Britons who
are seen in images of the 1940 Blitz against London. A second image
from that conflict also opposes advanced technological bombardment
and traditional ways of life, in a rendered version of a press photo
showing soldiers and villagers trying to rescue a cow (NSC 8810 - Live
animals, raised for food) from the ruins of a stable hit by a NATO
missile. A third, also based on a photo from the Reuters agency, shows
tractors burning in another bombed village. The caption reinforces the
message of NATO's brutal effects by quoting a reference to Serbian
claims of a hundred civilian deaths; and the image itself also prompts
recollections of the terrible incident in which a NATO aircraft
mistook a tractor ferrying Kosovar refugees for a Yugoslav military
vehicle.

One image does qualify the exclusive representation of NATO's combat
missions through its civilian victims. The picture of girls laying
flowers to commemorate the 1995 Markale marketplace massacre during
the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo, when 37 people were killed by
mortar fire, serves as a necessary reminder that there are more than
two terms in the equation of NATO's violence. A similar attack had
occurred a year before, but subsequent changes in the military and
diplomatic landscape allowed the August 1995 massacre to serve as
the trigger for NATO's air assault upon the separatist Bosnian Serb
forces, the decisive intervention which led to the Dayton peace
agreement.

To avoid an accumulation of memorials at the end of the sequence,
an indirect consequence of the NSC's progress from weapons (major
class 10) to coffins (9930), the picture is classified under 8730 -
Seeds and Nursery Stock - Includes: Cut Flowers. Its companion is a
botanical illustration of a military orchid - Orchis militaris in
the Linnean system of taxonomy, to which reference is obligatory in
a work which invokes the tradition of watercolour in natural history
illustration.

Between them these two paintings express the remarkable capacities
that Treister has developed, exercising licence that is sometimes
absurd but never undue, within the NATO Codification System. The
marketplace confirms that the work is, after all, as capable of
representing the complexities of actual conflict as it is able to
support complex patterns of imaginative association. The orchid is
a claim upon the vegetable portion of the natural world, all wild
animals being covered by a literal interpretation of 8820 - Live
Animals, Not Raised for Food. And the potential she has unlocked
echoes the potential evident in the real world for the NCS to organise
not just military materiel but material objects in general. In her own
idiosyncratic way, Treister has identified the one part of NATO that
looks capable of adapting to the changed conditions which may well
lead to the Alliance's demise. The NCS may well be running the world
when NATO has become nothing more than history. In taxonomic terms, it
would be a successor species.

 

1 'The Screening Process', Ministry of Defence, 
http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/WhatWeDo/EquipmentandLogistics/UKNCB/TheScreeningProcess.htm 

2 'NAMSA's Business', NAMSA, http://www.namsa.nato.int/About/business_e.htm
3 'RNZAF - Codification Bureau', 
http://www.airforce.mil.nz/operations/airforce-news/89/codification-bureau.htm 

4 Lind, Michael, 2006, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy 
and the American Way of Life, Oxford University Press, New York.
5 'NATO Official Text: The North Atlantic Treaty', 
http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm
6 Ismay, Hastings L., 1954, NATO: The First Five Years, 1949-1954, 
Bosch, Utrecht, http://www.nato.int/archives/1st5years/chapters/14.htm
7 Grayson, Richard, 'Waiting for the Gift of Sound and Vision', in 
Treister, Suzanne, Hexen 2039, Black Dog Publishing, London 2006; 
http://ensemble.va.com.au/Grayson/texts/Hexen2039.html
8 'The Polish Submarine Orzel: Legend of WWII; part 3: Patrolling in the 
Baltic Sea'', http://bartelski.pl/crolick/orporzel/story3.html
9 'Minutes of 1939 Estonian-Soviet Negotiations', 
http://www.singingrevolution.com/cgi-local/db_images/files/uploads/27-filename.pdf 

10 Kangilaski, Jaak et al., The White Book: Losses Inflicted on the 
Estonian Nation by Occupation Regimes, 1940-1991, Estonian State 
Commission on Policies of Repression, 
http://www.riigikogu.ee/public/Riigikogu/TheWhiteBook.pdf , 8.

© Marek Kohn 2008

and at: http://ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/NATO/NATOessay_Kohn.html

best wishes,

Suzy


--------------------------------
Suzanne Treister
http://www.suzannetreister.net/




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