521 José Miguel Alía Plana Rules of engagement and governance of agramante’s camp valid, but neither is it absolutely useless: the deconstruction and the cannibalisation29 of classical warfare and its referents are necessary. Its traditional concept has faded and been replaced by crisis and conflict; a new construct created out of the ashes of the wars of our fathers. “After the hot war (the violence of conflict), after the cold war (the balance of terror), here comes the dead war- the unfrozen cold war - which leaves us to grapple with the corpse of war and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing corpse”, said Baudrillard in 1991.30 The “time of the dead war” was a “highly toxic period, which can cause powerless stupor”.31 The classic form of engaging in battle does not serve us either; we cannot totally destroy the enemy, soldier or civilian; nor do we even know for sure if such a traditional form exists. Now we have legal and illegal combatants, terrorists, insurgents, pirates, delinquents, civilian populations, narcoguerrillas, hackers, security contractors... We cannot bomb London, Berlin, Bremen or Nagasaki again, above all after the millions of casualties in the Second World War. We cannot choose a sector of society and gas it; we cannot enslave prisoners in Siberia nor massively prostitute women prisoners in military brothels in Asia; we cannot experiment therapies on prisoners and then apply them to our injured soldiers... Nor can we even think of execution following a summary court-martial for traitors, cowards or deserters; in Spain we have banished the death sentence, even in times of war. Everything is becoming reduced. The horizon of violence, formerly so distant, is now very near. The bio-political techniques that establish who must live and who must die, and the ways of making them die, are not unlimited issues, not mere questions of internal order or of state sovereignty, the ultimate manifestation of the power of the shepherd king, who selects the sacrificed lamb. Those who enunciate, the rulers, have created their written versions of reality, like humanitarian discourses, more out of necessity, environmental usefulness and survival than for ethical reasons, they manage the “Agramante’s Camp” as if it were a stadium, under the control of the UN and the International Red Cross -which is to war what FIFA is to football, a referee establishing norms and controls. We have evoked this comparison, because modern-day conflict is rather like a bloody sport, as if we were entering into a competition, with its rules and its “fair play” (the right of armed conflicts), especially after the chaos of the Second World War. This is how Baudrillard described it, after studying the political space that emerged at the end of the 20th Century, after the Second Gulf War (1991), with television, computer 29 Using the pieces of the team that are in good shape to build something new. This is not a Spanish term. 30 BAUDRILLARD, Jean. La Guerra del Golfo no ha tenido lugar. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1991, p. 9. 31 Ibid., p.10. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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