Episode 96: Transcript

Episode 96: Nationalism is science fiction, with Wajahat Ali

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, social science, philosophy, ideas, just all the stuff. We even talk about like eggs and pancakes, sometimes.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:12] Pancakes. 

Annalee: [00:00:13] I know, pancakes. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and science fiction author, and I most recently published a book called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:25] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I have a few books that right now.

Annalee: [00:00:29] Yes, you do.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:29] A young adult novel called Victories Greater Than Death. A writing advice book called Never Say You Can't Survive, and a short story collection which might be out by now called Even Greater Mistakes.

Annalee: [00:00:43] A lot of science fiction takes place on other worlds or deep in the future, and yet it still contains recognizable nations and national stereotypes. Of course, there's the cringe-worthy Gungans and Star Wars who read like horrible stereotypes of Caribbeans. There's the Fremen of Dune who are clearly a reference to Bedouins. And in Star Trek, which is hundreds of years in the future, people still identify as Japanese, Irish, American, and so on, despite the fact that nations are often really ephemeral. And in fact, most modern nations have only been around for a couple of centuries. 

[00:01:18] So it's not really a mystery why this is the case. We're working out a lot of our geopolitical issues and anxieties in fiction, and we use stories to celebrate our nationhood. 

[00:01:27] So today, we're going to talk about how nationalism fits into science fiction. And we'll be joined by the pundit and author with Wajahat Ali to explore how science fiction of the 21st century deals with the War on Terror. 

[00:01:43] Also, on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about Superman and his conflicted relationship with his American identity. Which reminds me, did you know that we're supported by you, the listeners, through Patreon? That's right. If you support us on Patreon, all you got to do is pay two bucks or 100 pieces of gold pressed latinum and you will get audio extras. You'll get essays, reviews, you get access to our Discord server. It is all amazing and it can be yours just by supporting us. So, hope to see you on Patreon. That's where you make our opinions even more correct. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:02:25] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:02:53] Okay, Charlie, Jane, I want you to listen to this speech and tell me how long before you recognize what it is.

ID Clip: [00:02:59] Bill Pullman/the President: We will be united in our common interest. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the fourth of July and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're going to live on! We're going to survive.”

Charlie Jane: [00:03:54] It’s so stirring I can feel my blood just getting redder and also whiter and bluer as I listen to that. It's just… So that is obviously, of course a speech, the famous speech from Independence Day. I would almost say it's the money shot from Independence Day, although maybe the White House being destroyed is the money shot. I don't know. It's a classic—

Annalee: [00:04:13] Or the “Hell, nah.” There's also, “Hell, nah.” 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:15] The “Hell, nah,” right. There's a few things. So it is a classic of nationalist science fiction.

Annalee: [00:04:21] So okay. What strikes you about how the President is describing nationalism here? What's he asking all of these, this ragtag group of mostly white men? What is he asking them to do?

Charlie Jane: [00:04:34] Yeah, he's drawing these explicit parallels between the American Revolution, and the struggle against the aliens. And he's sort of, it's, interesting because he makes a token effort to say that this is an international effort. He says, you know, people have come from all over the world to help us fight these aliens. And then after today, Independence Day won't just, July 4th won't just be America's Declaration of Independence. It'll be the world declaring that we're going to survive. But it feels like what he's really saying is that, in this fight, we can all be Americans. That the act of like fighting for independence and freedom is this uniquely American thing. It's part of our American identity. It's our foundational myth. And we're going to allow other people to be part of that myth on a sort of conditional basis, if they join us in this fight. So it's not that we're leaving behind our national identity, it's that we're kind of, opening up our national identity a little bit, but only a little bit to let other people. The main thing is that being American is awesome.

Annalee: [00:05:36] Very true. And what's interesting is that, as you said, even though this supposed to be about the globe. This speech could be just ripped from political science textbooks on how nationalist rhetoric works. So before we get into how science fiction deals with all of these nationalist ideas, let's talk a little bit about nationalism itself.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:55] Yeah, so Annalee, please unpack that for me. What do we mean when we say nationalism, because obviously, different people use that word to mean different things?

Annalee: [00:06:03] So here today, in this episode, we're talking about the modern nation state, which really comes out of, you know, the 18th century in places like the United States, followed by Europe. And then it gets forced on a lot of other places in Asia and Africa through colonialism, which we're going to talk about later. 

[00:06:20] But truly, I think one of the very best descriptions of modern nationalism comes from a 20th century political scientist named Benedict Anderson, who wrote an incredibly influential book about the history of nation building called Imagined Communities. That came out in the 1980s and it really changed the way people thought about nationhood. And what's useful about his work for us, as science fiction nerds, is that Anderson believed that nationalism is something that exists in the realm of politics, and art. He described nation building as kind of like being like world building in a fantasy novel. And here he is, in an interview on a Dutch talk show in the early 1990s, talking about how nations are actually part fantasy.

Benedict Anderson: [00:07:08] I picked it very carefully. If you say imaginary, it means invented. It means—

Interviewer: [00:07:15] And not real.

Benedict Anderson: [00:07:15] It's like a unicorn, or something like this, something that we know clearly isn't the case. It's purely symbolic, in a sense.

[00:07:24] he importance of imagined, I think, is that it's both true, or both real and fictional at the same time. So that you can think about, say, the Dutch nation, and you can’t touch the Dutch nation. You don't know where it ends, you don't know where it begins. But it seems very real to people. And it's so real, it's not symbolic, it's actually understood to be real. There really is a Dutch nation out there. But on the other hand, the only way you can approach it is through the imagination.

Annalee: [00:07:59] So Anderson then goes on to explain that nationalism is ultimately about imagining ourselves in relationships with a whole bunch of people that we're never even going to meet. This is really making me think of that presidential speech, as he's talking about how all of these people who are fighting the aliens are connecting to one another, even though they've never met, even though some of them aren't even born yet. You know, people in Independence Day are sacrificing themselves for future people who, as I said, don't exist. They're also connecting to people who were dead. 

[00:08:33] And Anderson would say that, in fact, nations are always built out of this kind of fantasy that we can connect with people who we will never meet and who may have actually perished in some great sacrifice before we came along. So we're building a fantasy world when we build a nation, but it's a fantasy world that has real people in it.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:53] So it's sort of like the family because the family is also this sort of mythological construct, but it's a much bigger version of the family with often, you know, some white dude as the father, kind of.

Annalee: [00:09:05] Yeah, it's true. And Anderson would actually say that the difference is that a family is full of people who you actually know, whereas a nation is full of people you will never meet. So when we talk about nationalism, I just want us to hold on to Anderson's point that nations are imaginary, but they're also really real, and they have real consequences.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:27] Right. And so, obviously when we think about classic science fiction, as we talked about in the kind of John W. Campbell episode, there's a lot of classic science fiction that is very nationalistic. You look at stories like Tarzan, Conan, John Carter of Mars, it's all about like, it's about American identity and the frontier.

Annalee: [00:09:48] Yeah, the rugged individual.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:49] Mm-hmm.

Annalee: [00:09:49] And what's interesting about these kinds of stories is when you think about especially things like John Carter and Tarzan, they reflect a different side of nationalism, which is that you build these imaginary relationships with people by creating an other. And not surprisingly, this other is generally somewhere in a nation that was colonized by one of those modern nation states. Remember Tarzan is in Africa, John Carter is on a Mars that sounds a lot like Africa, or maybe kind of the eastern Mediterranean region.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:22] Right. And so these are obviously super common tropes and we keep seeing them including modern day remakes of John Carter, Tarzan and things like Aladdin, but also in a lot of our other pop culture.

Annalee: [00:10:33] Yeah, so I'm going to just test your patience by bringing up another 20th century political thinker who really understood this.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:40] Do it! 

Annalee: [00:10:43] Yes!

[00:10:44] His name was Edward Said. And he was a Palestinian whose family got kicked out of Jerusalem when he was a kid so he grew up in Egypt and the United States where he spent most of his adult life. And in the ‘70s, he wrote this book called Orientalism. Which, really, it's impossible to overstate how much it revolutionized the world of ideas, because what he did in Orientalism was show really clearly how Western nations created their imagined communities by conjuring up this fantasy of the “Oriental” world, which is very much in quotes.

[00:11:22] Said calls this orientalism and it's basically a set of stereotypes about an exotic, primitive, and ungovernable world. And it's usually set in Africa, or Asia, or somewhere kind of hand wavy in the Middle East. It's a world that needs Western nations to govern it, to give it a sense of nationhood. So it's a very colonial worldview, but it's also still very much with us in the post-colonial era. 

[00:11:49] And Orientalism is just an amazing book. And everyone should go out and read it. And one thing that I think is super memorable about it is this one moment where Said, who’s, he's really meticulously researched how myths about the so-called “Orient” creep into what are supposed to be non-fictional accounts of life in regions outside Western Europe. And he describes reading this book by a French writer who visits Syria in the early 20th century and kind of describes the world that he sees there. And Said says, he's reading the book, and he keeps hearing phrases that sound really familiar. And he realizes that this 20th century book has borrowed whole sections and ideas from another book written in the early 19th century about Ancient Egypt. So basically, it's like orientalism is a meme that starts in myths, and slowly works its way into supposedly truthful books. And the result is that you get this caricature of life outside of Europe, in which Syrians, Egyptians, basically all Arabs are the same. And they've been the same for thousands of years. And those same stereotypes appear in books by Europeans about India, too.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:06] So basically, we use these fantasies about other nations to prop up our own fantasy about our own nation.

Annalee: [00:13:13] You got it. And that's a perfect science fiction plot. You can just create evil aliens who invade our precious homeland. And that's exactly what people did.

War of the Worlds: [00:13:23] Ladies and gentlemen, I've just been handed a message that came in from Grover's Mill by telephone. Just one moment please. At least 40 people including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover's Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that a Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey.

[00:13:49] I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the counties of Mercer and Middlesex as, as far west as Princeton and east to Jamesburg under martial law. No one will be permitted to enter this area except by a special pass issued by a state or a military authorities.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:07] So that of course was the famous, perhaps infamous Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds from 1938.

Annalee: [00:14:16] And there's all these accounts of how people heard that and freaked out during the broadcast because it's designed to sound exactly like a radio newscast. I think that a lot of those accounts have been kind of exaggerated, but it is true that listeners complained to the radio station, which was owned by the company that became CBS, and they said it was just too realistic. They felt like they were being trolled. It was too much like an actual description of wartime chaos. And remember, this is at a time when World War II was really heating up and so people were on edge. 

[00:14:52] And the reason why it was so easy to mistake this science fiction story for real life story is because our national fantasies about the other are so close to being just outright fantasy.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:03] Yeah. And then of course, you get, you know, somewhat later during the Cold War, there's a ton of science fiction that basically tries to turn Soviets or other communist nations like China, into aliens or monsters. But at the same time, you have some science fiction from that era that does kind of critique nationalism. And here's a good example of that.

DtESS Clip: [00:15:25] Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.

Annalee: [00:15:43] So this is from the original The Day the Earth Stood Still and it's interesting to think about how Klaatu, who's the benevolent alien here who's talking and addressing all the nations of the earth. He's the guy who says, “Hey, you know, clean up your act superpowers.” And what he's doing is actually flipping the usual orientalist script. So now, in this story, all of humanity are the savage beasts who are dangerous and ungovernable. We come from darkest Earth. And aliens are the civilized Europeans who are here to bring law and order. And Klaatu even brings his robot, Gort, who he describes as a policeman for aliens.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:22] Yeah, and I feel like there was a strand of science fiction, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but also to some extent in the ‘50s, that kind of pushed back against this idea of nationalism and tried to kind of complicate it. And you do have, you know, Star Trek, which is explicitly about like a multinational space force, even though it's entirely led by Americans. 

[00:16:44] There's this sort of utopian vision in mid 20th century science fiction of, we can put our national differences aside. And there's this fantasy of, kind of bringing it back to Independence Day, there's this fantasy that, like, if aliens did invade, we would all put aside our national differences and become humans and unite as a single planet to fight the aliens. And of course, what you see in that clip from Independence Day is that what they're really saying is not that we'll just all become citizens of the world, but that we’ll all kind of come together under the leadership of America and become like quasi-Americans who allow America to guide us forward. 

Annalee: [00:17:21] Yeah, it's the ultimate kind of colonial message where our understanding of law and order in the west and our notion of nationhood now comes to the world. Edward Said would be fascinated by that, and probably thought it was hilarious. And on that note, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk about nationalism and orientalism in the 21st century. Author Wajahat Ali will join us to talk about science fiction in the War on Terror.

[00:17:51] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:17:57] Welcome back, you may have seen Wajahat Ali's TED Talk or seen him on MSNBC or read his work in the New York Times. He's also the author of a book coming out in January called Go Back to Where You Came From and Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American. And you can preorder that now. 

[00:18:14] Welcome, Wajahat.

Wajahat: [00:18:15] Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's very rare that I get to talk about nationalism and racism and identity and science fiction and dystopia and pop culture and flex my geek muscles, so it’s just—

Annalee: [00:18:27] I know!

Wajahat: [00:18:27]  I feel like I should pay you for inviting me to talk about this.

Annalee: [00:18:32] Well, we really appreciate getting to hear you geek out because what the audience cannot see and what we can see behind you are all of your Lego creations of various geek icons. Including right behind you is the Ghostbusters mobile, which is very exciting. 

Charlie Jane: [00:18:46] Yeah, it is glorious. Y'all are missing out. We have to like—

Annalee: [00:18:49] Yeah. There's R2-D2.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:53] We might have to tweet a picture later.

Annalee: [00:18:54] Yeah, this is good.

Wajahat: [00:18:54] Can Voltron get some respect, please. Can he get some res—

Annalee: [00:18:56] Yes, and Voltron. Yes, Voltron’s very important to the nationalist project.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:59] Hi, Voltron. No, I feel like Voltron can always get some respect.

Wajahat: [00:19:02] And Thanos is actually, the Infinity Gauntlet is actually snapping right now. That's the way we put it in snapping mode.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:08] Oh.

Annalee: [00:19:09] Oh, there. Oh, yeah, that's what that is. I was like, what? It's just a golden thing. But no, that's excellent. In case you need to in the world anytime, you've got it all ready.

Wajahat: [00:19:18] And I also, yeah, that's for the children, of course. I made it all for the kids.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:22] Of course.

Wajahat: [00:19:23] Of course.

Annalee: [00:19:23] That’s who we do everything for is the children.

Wajahat: [00:19:26] For the children.

Annalee: [00:19:25] Like wipe out all of our enemies for the children, too, which is relevant to our discussion today, which is, we want to talk to you about what happened to science fiction after 9/11. And we moved from the Cold War in science fiction to the War on Terror in science fiction because ideological wars are just perfect for science fiction. And there was like a whole wave of science fiction starting in basically the mid-oughts that started to really reflect this shift toward the War on Terror. And one place we see this is in the rise of zombies, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about zombies and the War on Terror?

Wajahat: [00:20:06] Yeah. So I mean, great science fiction, like great horror, oftentimes taps into the anxieties and fears of the current moment, and is able to convey it through pop culture, through wild, fantastical imagination, right. That's why it resonates, the really good stuff. And I think the reason why Squid Game, for example, has taken off. There's a reason for it, aside from being really well made and addictive, is because it speaks to this moment of utter desperation. Economic ruination. Income inequality. And I think for those of us who are old enough to remember the War on Terror, I was 20 years old, a senior at UC Berkeley undeclared, about to turn 21 when the two towers fell. 

[00:20:49] And I remember this country went insane, to the point where for those of you who are the young’uns, there used to be this band called The Dixie Chicks who are now known as The Chicks. And The Dixie Chicks were, remember, they had like the biggest tour at the time. They were a crossover band, country, pop, rock, the three cutest white woman on earth. And all Natalie Maines, the lead singer said was, “I’m embarrassed that George W. Bush is from Texas. Bye, y'all.” That's all she said. 

[00:21:13] And as a result of that, they literally took tractors over their CDs. Children, there was something called CDs that me and Annalee and Charlie used to listen to. They burned it. There was bonfires of CDs for The Dixie Chicks, the whitest women on earth, right? 

[00:21:27] And so my perspective was that of a Muslim man, son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, and all the way in California at UC Berkeley, we felt the hazing immediately. Literally the day the towers went down, I was part of the Muslim Student Association, I started getting hate mail. And local press descended upon us and Muslim women who wore hijab, born and raised in this country, were terrified to go to school. 

[00:21:50] So I'm just kind of painting the scene for you, right? And it took a while, I think maybe took a year or two years for the rest of this anxiety to catch up with the rest, meaning the consequences of the anxiety. Because if you remember, it was, “Rah, rah rah. Bush. Kill’em. Going to Afghanistan, who cares? Take them out.” Right? And you saw the cartoons and the pop culture and you literally saw an icing of pop culture in the sense that a Clear Channel people forget this. After 9/11 Clear Channel banned the playing of all Rage Against the Machine songs and “Imagine” by John Lennon. 

Charlie Jane: [00:22:25] Yeah.

Wajahat: [00:22:26] Seriously. Because they’re like, no, it’s not patriotic enough.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:26] No, it was insane. 

Wajahat: [00:22:28] People totally forget it. It was insane!

Annalee: [00:22:29] Yeah, it was… 

Charlie Jane: [00:22:29] There was this whole, like if irony is dead. You're not allowed to ask any questions. 

Wajahat: [00:22:33] None. It was just like. 

Charlie Jane: [00:22:34] Yeah. No questions. You could be like, “What do you want for lunch?” No questions!

Wajahat: [00:22:38] What do you want for lunch? Patriotism! What do you want?

Annalee [00:22:40] Freedom fries!

Charlie Jane: [00:22:40] Freedom fries!

Wajahat: [00:22:42] Yeah, freedom Fries. Literally, they changed french fries to freedom fries. 

Annalee: [00:22:47] Yeah. That was a brief moment.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:48] It was insane.

Wajahat: [00:22:48] People, I want to remind people, people went insane. And so your first initial response was push back, fight back against the enemy. Now, who was the enemy? This is where things are really interesting. Overnight, the enemy became this thing called Islam. So it became Islam versus the West. And I always joke what's Islam and what's the West? How come I've never dated either of them, right? But Islam became like this brown bouillabaisse of foreigners, Afghans, Iranians, like Sikhs, anyone who was scary and the other, right? 

[00:23:26] And so I think what we saw with zombies in particular is twofold. With zombies, it's like they're everywhere. They're coming. It's a horde. Savages. Beasts. They'll descend upon you and once they get their fingerprints on you or their saliva on you, you transform and become one of them. Right? Anxiety.

[00:23:45] And I think there's no, you know we sit there and think ha ha ha, just zombie movies. But literally look at the explosion. Walking Dead 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Marvel Zombies, right? And Dawn of the Dead remake which I still think is Snyder's best movie.

Annalee: [00:23:57] And Walking Dead with its myriad spin offs is dominating pop culture still, kind of.

Wajahat: [00:24:02] Still, still, right? And so what I always want to say in this particular point when it comes to zombies, if you look at Dawn of the Dead and Annalee, you and I were talking about this real quick. Go back and look at The Dawn of the Dead, look at the opening credits. Snyder does a montage, right. So, zombies and so he has like fascism, he has Nazis, he has death march. And there's a really brief glimpse of Muslims praying.

Annalee: [00:24:28] Just praying, not—

Wajahat: [00:24:28] Just praying like in a masjid, like in a mosque, a whole bunch of Muslims just going down in prayer and remember I noticed and I was probably the only person who noticed it and like a few other Muslims noticed it. And the juxtaposition of that image of a bunch of Muslims just praying for about two seconds next to blood curdling screams and Nazis and zombies. What does that tell you?

Charlie Jane: [00:24:51] Yeah…

Annalee: [00:24:52] Yeah. It's setting up this idea that the horrors that lead to this terrible world. That there's an equivalence between fascism and just like Muslim prayer. Just that's it, just—

Wajahat: [00:25:04] That's it.

Annalee: [00:25:05] The act of being Muslim.

Wajahat: [00:25:07] Or Islamofascism, became a buzz term. Clash of civilizations, the Huntington thesis, right?

Charlie Jane: [00:25:13] Right.

Wajahat: [00:25:13] People forget this.

Annalee: [00:25:16] The other thing that's so interesting about zombie movies, especially if you look at Walking Dead, which is, of course, a TV series, is that it also is about the crumbling of the nation. Because not only are these zombies bad guys who are going to eat you, just your standard monsters, but they erode America. It's actually you know, part of the fascination of Walking Dead is what will happen to America now that America is like, mostly dead, mostly zombies.

Wajahat: [00:25:45] They overrun America. And also, you want to make another analogy, and I think this is… People think this is a stretch, I don't think it is. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the book that they openly promote is called Camp of the Saints, which is a French white nationalist book of the ‘70s that is like a textbook of now white nationalists all around the world. Which is a fictional book that imagines a horde of Indian and brown immigrants that invade France and take over. Right? And so it's the horde, the savages, the crumbling of, wait for it, Western civilization, right? And you see, okay, so what's the cause of it? Well, we need stronger borders, and we need to worry about replacement. And we need to make sure that these foreign entities are not coming. And so what happened after 9/11? Patriot Act, what happened? [Unclear], the deportation, the surveillance, right? 

[00:26:42] And then so you see a shift, and I think the shift, if we're sticking with zombies, so you see 28 Days Later, which of course takes place in Britain, but just look at some of those images, right, like, overwhelmed, cities crumbling. Then you see 28 Weeks Later, the sequel, which I think is underrated and very good. And then you see the kind of, just these images seep into our minds. You see the military industrial complex being used to tackle the zombie problem and completely failing, right? And it specifically is the American military that gets stationed in Europe. But even that's not enough. And I think that was a response to seeing the US invasion, you know, Guantanamo, boots on the ground. And even that's not enough because they didn't greet us like liberators, believe it or not, they saw us as invaders. And that's when you see a shift, where now science fiction introduced that necessary pushback and critique on the War on Terror. Battlestar Galactica, for example, right?

Annalee: [00:27:38] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:38] Right, Battlestar Galactica comes to mind. There was actually a lot of science fiction in the late 2000s, which kind of like, tried and often not very successfully tried to grapple with the War on Terror and like whether the War on Terror could lead to excesses that we might like… I lost count. Like I was actually writing for io9 at the time, and I lost count of how many stories there were on television about like, does torture work? We captured a terrorist, should we torture them? And like, there was an episode of the show they rebooted V the like, the ‘80s.

Wajahat: [00:28:08] Briefly. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:08] Yeah, they briefly rebooted V. It had, it was and interesting, valiant effort.

Annalee: [00:28:13] That was a time and a place and a thing that happened. 

Wajahat: [00:28:15] Yes.

Annalee: [00:28:15] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:15] It had a lot of ideas, but it didn't entirely come together. But there was an episode of V that basically they captured one of the lizard aliens, and the whole episode is them debating whether to torture this lizard alien—

Wajahat: [00:28:24] Right, right.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:24] And it was very clearly. And of course, they do torture the alien and torture works because it always works on television. 

Wajahat: [00:28:30] Always, magically. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:31] And like, torture is great. Like, we might not like doing it, but it's great. And there's been water boarding in a bunch of things, including like, Game of Thrones had a water boarding sequence. Like I just watched an episode of Lucifer where they water board someone, and it's played for laughs and like, it's super weird.

Annalee: [00:28:48] Yeah. And it's, I mean, we see the torture happening in Battlestar, as we were just mentioning, in Battlestar Galactica. And then there's shows like 24, which are basically like, apologias for torture, and for harassment of prisoners. And I wonder, Waj, if you could talk a little bit about whether you can start to see a difference between kind of right-wing science fiction or fantasy responses and left-wing responses? We were starting to talk about how in 28 Days Later, obviously, it's an incredible critique of the military. Like, in fact, the military emerges as the true monster in that film, which is one of the things that makes it I think, really powerful. 

Wajahat: [00:29:29] Yeah, both movies, actually, right? Both movies—

Charlie Jane: [00:29:31] Right, yeah. Christopher Eccleston. Like yeah.

Wajahat: [00:29:35] He’s still terrifying.

Annalee: [00:29:35] And indeed, in the original Night of the Living Dead from the ‘60s, that is also part of the theme because the one surviving actual living human is a Black guy. And as soon as the white cops see him, they assume he’s a zombie and they shoot him. And it's, I mean, sorry, spoilers for like a movie from the ‘60s. 

Wajahat: [00:29:51] Spoiler! Spoiler!

Annalee: [00:29:51] But yeah, I mean, so it's kind of in the DNA of those kinds of stories, but yet at the same time, I feel like Walking Dead is a little bit more conservative. I feel like obviously 24 is. Are there other things that come to mind for you?

Wajahat: [00:30:05] Yeah. So what were you saw the conservative lean, right. And I think the national security narrative that dominated pop culture was specifically in these fictional type of hyper-realistic scenarios with law enforcement. So you saw 24. You saw Homeland. You saw the movie The Kingdom, American Sniper, Sleeper Cell on Showtime, and Zero Dark Thirty, right? Where literally, it was like an homage. It was like a porn for torture, right? Let us show you the beauty of torture, the first 30 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty. And so with that narrative strain, basically what you saw was, the world is complex, but we're the good guys and eventually we have to crack some skulls. But look, there's one good Muslim and the one good Muslim is part and parcel of the national security narrative. He's Jack Bauer's friend. She’s Claire Dane’s friend, CIA. It's the one good Saudi in The Kingdom, and see, we're getting more nuanced now. 

[00:31:06] And this is like actually very deliberate where you saw the shift, right? Because the way Jack Bauer and 24 and Homeland responded to the critique a lot of Muslim-Americans and liberals were like, okay, okay, we'll add the good Muslim. And so adding the good Muslim, they said, see? See? We’re showing that not all of them are bad. 

[00:31:24] The problem, though, was that the entire utility and worth of this thing called Muslim was only if he or she was helping the national security narrative, which was to crack the skulls of the zombies, which were everyone else. You see what I’m saying? Instead of it advancing the narrative. In my opinion, it regressed it, it depressed it downward. Because the only worth that you had, if you're this brown person or Muslim person, the only time you're a good Muslim is if you're helping the national security narrative of the day. 

[00:31:50] So that was Hollywood's response to the critiques that the rest of us had on the War on Terror, is that we'll show the good Muslim, and we'll show the one law enforcement who has a debate about torture and surveillance, but nonetheless goes ahead and does it because we got to save the bad guy. 

[00:32:07] Science fiction, in my opinion, and fantasy is where you start getting the really good critiques like Battlestar Galactica, right? Where you really mess with the gray area of what happens when you're an occupied people and the Cylons are occupying you and you need to resist it on New Caprica.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:22] Right, and you do suicide bombing.

Wajahat: [00:32:24] Is the suicide bomber, the hero or the bad guy? 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:28] Right.

Wajahat: [00:32:28] resistance to be celebrated or crushed. And it's really tough, right? Because this is still happening within the shadows of 9/11. It's not like we were like 10 years removed. It was like, what, four years? Maybe five years?

Annalee: [00:32:42] Yeah, it's 2004 is when [crosstalk] starts, yeah. 

Wajahat: [00:32:44] Yeah, three years, and you're seeing science fiction able to kind of tease out what happens, right? I think in a way where you saw the, District 9. People forget this, even though it takes place in South Africa and is a critique about apartheid. I mean, look at the images from District 9 now. Go back and see that movie. You have this foreign, literally this alien, oppressed by the state. They're doing experiments on them. They're using and abusing them, but they're also seen as a public charge. And they have them like in these just dilapidated situations and all these people want is freedom, but they are marginalized, right? And now look at the border in the United States. And look what Trump did with the zero tolerance policy.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:21] Right.

Wajahat: [00:33:22] And when we start District 9 in 2009. We're like, oh, that's South Africa. 

Charlie Jane: [00:33:27] Yeah.

Wajahat: [00:33:27] And now you see people using their reins as whips against Haitians.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:31] Oh man.

Annalee: [00:33:31] Yeah. I think the other thing that's interesting that makes something like Battlestar Galactica complicated is that we also see the back story on how the Cylons were actually colonized by humans. 

Wajahat: [00:33:43] There you go. 

Annalee: [00:33:43] And so we get that broader view of like, actually, yeah, okay. The humans are fighting back against the Cylons but the Cylons kind of had a point. They actually were pissed for good reason. And so I think that's another part of what makes it a more progressive narrative.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:00] The thing you said about the one good Muslim in a lot of these stories reminded me of Sayid from Lost and I was wondering what you thought of that character because he's like, obviously connected to torture and the national security establishment in his back story. 

Wajahat: [00:34:12] The thing is this. Because Lost was such a beloved show and it kind of hit the zeitgeist of pop culture at that time. When you're starved for representation, you'll take whatever you can, which is why I kind of have Apu here on purpose. Because you see, for those of you can't, well, this is podcast. But I have the Kwik-E-Mart, Lego Kwik-E-Mart. I have all the Springfield characters and I kind of have assembled it like Springfield purge and they all have weapons so I don't know who's gonna win.

[00:34:38] But like Apu, check it out see like, who's gonna win? I put my money on Groundskeeper Willie and also Martin, because he got bullied a lot. I think he might just snap. But like you know, Apu is an example of when you're so starved for representation you'll take what you can get. At the same time, it's still troubling.

[00:34:55] Sayid was a little bit more complex flesh and blood character had nuance, you know Naveen Andrews, is an excellent character. But at the same time, it's like, okay, I think that was also a response, very deliberate response by JJ Abrams, and the writers to introduce, at that time, what they could see as a, quote unquote, “positive Muslim character,” who is nuanced, and I think was appreciated as such, right? 

[00:35:18] We were just literally looking at that time for anyone to have more than a single line of dialogue, to not have an accent, to not be a terrorist. And you're like that’s a win. But I always pushed against that, and I'll say this on your podcast, you know, I started off as a playwright, and the pushback that I got from gatekeepers. My first play was just about regular American Muslim family, kitchen drama. No one's a terrorist. There's no honor killings. There's no torture, right? No one's about to become an extremist. And they said, I think one of them should become a terrorist. I think one of them should become radicalized. They wanted more of, it was like torture porn. They wanted more violence and sex. And I'm like nah. 

[00:36:01] And so that was my way of kind of pushing back. But the only way I could do it was DIY. I had to do it myself. And it's only until recently, I think, the last four or five years, that you're seeing this change. And speaking about the War on Terror, it's only with the 20th anniversary of the War on Terror. I'm talking about like last month that we finally saw, huh, let's have a focus on the Muslims and the others who were affected by the War on Terror. It took 20 years. 20 years for our narrative to come out. 

[00:36:32] Where we saw some solace was science fiction and fantasy to kind of push back and tease this out. And you kind of see it also even in superhero movies, right like Dark Knight. You see this fascist character, I guess Batman, you really think about it, like Frank Miller's wet dream come to life, grapple with the War on Terror with his like surveillance state. But then even in Dark Knight, check it out, like what do you do when you have this anarchic force of violence? Well, sometimes you gotta crack some skulls. Right? Like that's kind of, but then in the end, what he does is he self destructs the surveillance mechanism he's created and Lucius Fox, then is… Spoiler alert, in the end of Dark Knight, right, Lucius Fox says like, I can't go on with this. But to help you stop Joker, I'll allow you to surveil all the cell phones of Gotham. And as soon as it gets the Joker, then it self-destructs. I guess that was a compromise a Hollywood made.

Annalee: [00:37:27] Mm-hmm, yeah.

Wajahat: [00:37:27] Which was still troubling, if you think about it.

Annalee: [00:37:28] Yeah, it's definitely sort of pushing back against this sort of like AT&T mass surveillance stuff that was going on. And then at the same time, it's like, well, like you say, it's like, we got to use it sometimes. I mean, it's like torture, you know, you want torture. Once in a while, you need a little torture, because as we know, it always works. Just like surveillance—

Wajahat: [00:37:45] And we got to stop the Joker. Come on, the Joker’s gonna blow up two big—

Annalee: [00:37:49] And surveillance also never offers us a false positive. It never gets confused about what it's… Algorithms never confuse faces for one another. It's flawless. So, it’s, that’s part of the fantasy.

Wajahat: [00:38:02] And if you're looking at the narratives, they always find one. If you've noticed, in these fictional scenarios. They always find one bad guy. It's always justified. And that's where if you really wanted to be subversive and transgressive with these narratives, you would have had an entire episode devolve to the fact that nope, found nothing, and it caused self destruction. I think we're still waiting for those narratives. 

Annalee: [00:38:27] Yeah, for sure. And I wanted to finish up by asking you a final question, which is, what do you think is worse, capitalist dystopia or nationalist dystopia? 

Wajahat: [00:38:36] Ooh, that's a very good question. Capitalist dystopia or nationalist dystopia oftentimes become very lucrative marriage partners. They usually merge, right? That's the thing. Because oftentimes you're looking nationalism around in Europe for example, if you look at Hungary, if you're looking at Russia, if you're looking at hell, Brazil, right now. Notice that they ride to power on nationalism, they ride to power using authoritarianism 101, and then once they get in power it becomes a kleptocracy, where they take over all the economic sectors and a few folks become super wealthy. Right? Putin and his thugs, Orban and his friends. Look at Middle Eastern dictatorships. So I think it’s one of those situations where both are terrible, but I think they converge. I really do. And I think what we're witnessing right now and what we're gonna witness unfortunately, less there is a significant pushback, is that nationalism is gonna coast and wave on white resentment, white anger, white rage. The fear of the other, the immigrant, the Muslim, the Black person, LGBTQ, feminists in particular. And then once they get into power, they will use and abuse that power to reap all the capital and wealth and crush the rest.

[00:39:57] And so I think the next evolution of Squid Game will probably be they'll have the people of color fighting each other to death only.

Annalee: [00:40:03] Oh man. Yeah, well, that's actually like the fourth Purge movie. So we've brought it all the way back to The Purge, which we like to do all the time on the show,

Wajahat: [00:40:10] Always. Always. Because what speaks better about the future than Purge?

Annalee: [00:40:15] Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Waj. Where can people find your stuff online?

Wajahat: [00:40:19] I'm on the Twitters at @WajahatAli. I'm a columnist for The Daily Beast. So I crank out like one article on politics usually once a week. And I got this, my first book, coming out where I talk about all this stuff, actually. But hopefully it's entertaining and funny and honest. It’s called Go Back to Where You Came From and Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American. That's coming out in January. So you guys pick it up. If you like it, let me know.

Annalee: [00:40:42] Preorder! 

Wajahat: [00:40:42] If you don’t like it let me know. Yeah, preorder.

Charlie Jane: [00:40:43] Preorder!

Annalee: [00:40:44] Awesome. Thanks very much. Bye now. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:47] Thank you. 

Wajahat: [00:40:47] Thank you.

[00:40:45] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:40:49] Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, complete with zombies and cyborg uprisings. Remember, you can find us on Patreon and support us patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're on Twitter at @OOACpod. And thank you so much to our amazing, amazing producer Veronica Simonetti. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and if you're a patron we'll see you on Discord. Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:41:16] Bye!