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Chapter Six - The Mother of All Bombs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Jothie Rajah
Jothie Rajah
Affiliation:
American Bar Foundation
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Summary

Chapter 6 analyzes the April 2017 deployment in Afghanistan of the US military’s most powerful nonnuclear weapon, the Massive Air Ordinance Blast (MOAB). The bombing, the secrecy surrounding it, and the shock-and-awe media celebrations in the aftermath are all part of the cultivation of global audiences as spectator-consumers fascinated with the annihilatory killing technologies unleased by contemporary US militarized imperialism, which fuel necropolitical law’s discounting of life. Necropolitically, the MOAB strike illustrates “innovations in the technology of murder … [that] aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time” (Mbembe 2003: 19).

Keywords

MOABannihilatory killingshock and aweBushAfghanistanmilitary-industrial-media-entertainment-networktechnofetishismAmerican myth of the frontier
Type
Chapter
Information
Discounting Life
Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror
 , pp. 216 - 267
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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